Ulterior Motive?

Ulterior Motive?

Madame d’Aulnoy’s stories were anything but ordinary. Her stories rarely end in marriage, but generally have a “happily-ever-after.” This opinion of marriage is likely to have come from her experience with it.

At the age of sixteen, d’Aulnoy was married off to the forty-six-year-old François de La Motte. La Motte was the estate manager to the Duke of Vendôme. Some believe La Motte and the Duke were lovers as well. The marriage between La Motte and d’Aulnoy failed. After the birth of the couple’s second child, La Motte was framed and arrested for high treason and imprisoned in Bastille for several months in a plot designed by three Normans and d’Aulnoy’s mother. The Norman men were eventually discovered and put to death, but d’Aulnoy’s life crumbled before her. D’Aulnoy’s mother emigrated from France; she is thought to have immigrated to Spain and England. Furthermore La Motte separated from d’Aulnoy and estranged her from his will.

In one of d’Aulnoy’s first novels, Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas, she alludes to her opinion of marriage. She believed that marriage was “an empty signifier, a mask of false virtue” (Stedman 15).

Another example of d’Aulnoy’s opinion comes from Histoire de Jean de Bourbon, Prince de Carency. The novel’s plot is similar to many other romantic novels; the hero and heroine must fight for their love. The difference is that this novel has no happy ending. At the long awaited wedding of hero and heroine, a rival lover swoops in and stabs the bride in a fit of jealous rage.

In d’Aulnoy’s “The Blue Bird,” the heroes must fight for their love but are constantly thwarted. The prince is turned into a blue bird for turning down one princess for another. The princess he chose was then locked in a tower. She and the bird sang together and fell more deeply in love. Soon the prince was wounded and could not fly to the princess in the tower. The prince is then allowed to be a man to recover, and if he does not change his mind about the first princess and give up his love, he will be turned back. While the prince is a man the princess tries to find him and marry him but is thwarted once again. Eventually the prince and princess were reunited (Wikipedia). In this story love may prevail, but there is no mention of the marriage of the lovers. This is yet another example of d’Aulnoy’s disdain of marriage.

D’Aulnoy obviously believed in the power of love, but not in the power of marriage. Her failed marriage affected the contents of her writings and left those reading them with her opinions written in ink.

Above is a short film based on "The Blue Bird" by Madame d'Aulnoy