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Abstract
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot Gallon, dame de Villeneuve (1695?-1755) and her works have been all but forgotten today even though Madame de Villeneuve wrote the original version of "La Belle et la Bete," a tale which has become since the prototype of the eighteenth-century French fairy tale. Aside from vindicating the author of "La Belle et la Bete," this research presents a case history of a woman writer who assisted in the birth of the novel as marketable product.
Chapter One contains the biography of Madame de Villeneuve and focuses on her relationship with Crebillon pere, her companion and friend; it demonstrates further that, in her literary endeavor, Madame de Villeneuve aimed at commercial success. Chapter Two examines the reception of Madame de Villeneuve's works and shows that one of her novels, La Jardiniere de Vincennes, ranks among the best sellers of the mid-eighteenth century.
Chapters Three, Four, and Five are devoted to a close textual analysis of the nouvelle, the fairy tales, and the novels that comprise Madame de Villeneuve's literary legacy. With regard to both form and content, the texts occupy an intermediary position between tradition and innovation: their structure develops with a gradual shift from episodic to linear narration; their message is fundamentally moralistic, and their representational mode is realistic.
As a writer and a woman, Madame de Villeneuve conveys her awareness of the social injustice produced by the aristocratic patriarchal ideology. Her brand of feminism, however, is decidedly undogmatic because she propounds pragmatism not only as an ultimate value but also as an effective means to bring about social change. Avoiding the trap of sensibilite that swept the century, Madame de Villeneuve presented an ideologically cohesive and consciously structured narrative universe which relies on the reflection of social reality and not on the dissection of love.
