Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Fairy Tales of French Salons

About this event

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Fairy Tales of French Salons,” with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

It’s easy to think of fairy tales as light-hearted, simple, even frivolous tales for children. But that’s only a small part of the story.

Fairy tales can be serious business. They can function as subtle messages that convey warnings under the noses of the powerful—or even poke fun at them. That’s especially true of many fairy tales written by women.

Such was the case in the fairy-tale salons of seventeenth-century Paris, where ladies (and some gentlemen) gathered to tell each other stories definitely not intended for children.

Designed to be a space where people could break free of strict aristocratic confines in the service of art, the salons let creators discuss anything so long as it was couched in the form of a fairy tale. The stories that resulted tackled everything from the possibility of actual love in a marriage, to the importance of education, to the enormous social inequalities faced by the women of that era.

Join Brittany Warman, a folklorist whose many great past talks have earned her a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans, for a look at the beautiful and bizarre fairy tales that emerged from the literary salons of France during his period.

We’ll swim with a great green wyrm, a terrifying sea serpent. You’ll travel with a woman who dresses as a man in order to save her family, and you’ll converse with a witty princess forced to wear the skin of a bear.

These fairy-tale salons were the first of many great literary groups, from the Bloomsbury circle in London to the meetings of the Beat writers of San Francisco. This discussion of them might end up feeling like a similar gathering of the curious and subversive. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A 19th-century illustration of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tale "The Blue Bird." (Artist unknown/ Wikimedia Commons.)

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