Information about the author:

Abstract:

The prose tales of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, a French writer of the Romantic era, represent an interesting stage in the evolution of the author’s fairy tale genre for children. Unlike magical fairy tales, there are no sorcerers, magical creatures or objects. On the one hand, these stories are reminiscent of moral parables and carry a certain lesson and morality, which was characteristic of the tales of the Enlightenment and the fable genre. On the other hand, they embodied the attention of the romantic era to the genre of autobiography. M. Desbordes-Valmore writes stories for her children that appear in the pages as heroes on a par with the writer herself: she portrays herself as a very young girl. These stories are based on events of their lives or memories of her childhood. The author uses real names and nicknames in her prose, but not directly, only using a variety of transfers. The dolls in M. Desbordes-Valmore’s fairy tale are primarily beautiful objects, but also “women in miniature”, a link in the chain of projections of “mother–daughter; daughter–doll” relationships. Some features of the descriptions and the accuracy of psychological observations allow us to say that in contrast with Balzac, Desbordes-Valmore avoids the fantastic. Desbordes-Valmore compares her tales with “old dolls pulled out of the wardrobe”. The image of the doll is important for her poetics, it can be found in shocking and intriguing titles (“Monster Dolls”, “Physiology of Dolls”), but contrary to the reader’s expectations, dolls do not come to life, and the only transformations and wonders revealed by M. Desbordes-Valmore are changes in the child’s soul and perception of the world.