This essay focuses on Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1756) and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” (1797) as examples of the ways in which these French women writers’ contributions to literary fairy tales have been marginalized in English-speaking popular cultures. Although these writers were extremely popular in English translation during the eighteenth century, their gender, nationality, writing styles, and association with children’s literature led to their increasing marginalization during the nineteenth century, a process which has continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This marginalization is unfortunate, because it tends to obscure the ways in which Beaumont’s and d’Aulnoy’s tales furthered and were embedded within contemporary discourses about the education of young women. It also obscures these tales’ production within close-knit circles of female writers and readers: the Bluestocking circles within which Beaumont moved and d’Aulnoy’s seventeenth-century salon culture. The ways in which Beaumont’s Beauty values her books and learns to govern her emotions is very much in line with progressive ideals of women’s education in England during the 1750s; she may appear a rather passive heroine to modern eyes, but her love of books and her rational approach to relationships are values many Bluestockings espoused in opposition to contemporary stereotypes of frivolous, irrational, and essentially uneducable women; Beaumont’s tale presents these values to adolescents. The heroine of d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat,” for her part, functions as an idealized image of the late seventeenth-century saloniere: an apparently insignificant, small, and childlike female character who in fact wields great social and imaginative power. The Cat appears to be nothing more than a pampered house pet but is actually a powerful sorceress whose creativity and command of hospitality and storytelling enable her to resolve the Prince’s dilemmas and gain his love.

中文翻译：

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两次“美女与野兽”故事中的女性写作与女性扫盲

本文着重于珍妮·玛丽·勒普林斯·德·博蒙特的《美女与野兽》（1756年）和玛丽·凯瑟琳·德奥诺伊的《白猫》（1797年），作为这些法国女作家对文学童话的贡献的例子。故事在英语流行文化中被边缘化。尽管这些作家在18世纪的英语翻译中非常受欢迎，但他们的性别，国籍，写作风格以及与儿童文学的联系导致他们在19世纪的边缘化程度不断提高，这一过程在20世纪和21世纪一直持续着。这种边缘化是不幸的，因为它倾向于掩盖博蒙特和奥洛尼的故事发展的方式，并将其嵌入当代关于年轻女性教育的论述中。这也掩盖了这些故事在女性作家和读者的紧密联系中的产生：博蒙特迁入的Bluestocking圈子和d'Aulnoy的17世纪沙龙文化。博蒙特的《美女》重视她的书本并学会控制自己的情感的方式，与1750年代英格兰女子教育的渐进理想非常吻合。在现代人眼中，她似乎是一个相当被动的女英雄，但她对书籍的热爱和对关系的理性对待是许多蓝丝袜所崇尚的价值观，以反对当代轻浮，无理和本质上无法教育的女性的刻板印象；博蒙特的故事向青少年展示了这些价值观。d'Aulnoy的“白猫”中的女主人公起着17世纪晚期沙龙的理想化形象：一个看似微不足道的，小而稚气的女性角色，实际上具有强大的社交和想象力。猫似乎只不过是一个宠爱的家庭宠物，实际上是个强大的女巫，她的创造力，热情好客和讲故事的能力使她能够解决王子的困境并获得他的爱。