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This paper examines male vegetal metamorphosis in late 17th-century French fairy tales by women. By transforming princes into trees and flowers, these contes invert classical tropes, rendering masculinity passive and decorative, and staging a queer ecology of enchantment and power.

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This paper examines male vegetal metamorphosis in late seventeenth-century French fairy tales written by women (conteuses). It focuses on three examples: Prince Aimé transformed into an orange tree in d’Aulnoy’s L’Oranger et l’Abeille (1697), the prince-carnation (Œillet) in Fortunée (1697), and the cypress-princes of Murat’s Le Palais de la vengeance (1698), punished for rejecting a fairy’s advances. These stories invert the familiar trope of female transformation into trees—such as Daphne—by instead objectifying male bodies through botanical imagery.

Whereas Marina Warner has described beastly metamorphosis as “an index of alienation, and often of one’s own otherness,” vegetal transformation suggests a deeper loss of agency: the aestheticization of the subject into static, ornamental nature. Yet in these tales the outcome is rarely tragic. In L’Oranger et l’Abeille, Aimée commands the magic, transforming her lover into a tree while she becomes a bee that zealously guards his “vegetal chastity” against a rival suitor. This comic reversal—where a heroine protects her beloved from sexual peril—reworks the gendered codes of nature and desire.

These metamorphoses propose a queer ecology of enchantment, where human and non-human boundaries blur and the natural becomes a site of erotic play and power negotiation. In turning princes into plants, the conteuses articulate a feminized narrative of vegetal vulnerability, rendering masculinity passive, decorative, and narratively suspended. By foregrounding gendered objectification through nature, these tales complicate Enlightenment binaries of nature/culture, subject/object, and masculine/feminine, revealing how the “natures of narrative” are entangled with both aesthetics and politics.

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Nature’s rhythms, fairy storytellers, and writers’ craft provoke the family life of partners Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth. World travel and quotidian observation mark their creations from the Firelight Fairy Book and The Outermost House to The Cat Who Went to Heaven and Personal Geography.

Paper long abstract

In 2028 we celebrate the centennial of Henry Beston’s ode to the Great Beach of Cape Cod, his book The Outermost House. About a decade before Beston devoted a year to observing and writing about nature, he wrote two fairy-tale collections, The Firelight Fairy Book (1919) and The Starlight Wonder Book (1923). Beston selected both topics, the beach and fairy tales, in search of solace from his World War I ambulance-driving experience in France. Elizabeth Coatsworth, who married Beston in 1929, initiated her writing vocation with children’s books, including the 1931 Newbery-Medal-winning The Cat Who Went to Heaven, that begins “Once upon a time, far away in Japan.” This paper explores how and why fairy tales relate with the rhythms of tides and seasons, of farms and neighbors in the writings of this literary couple. The enchanted view and critical inquiry extend to the writings of their daughter Kate Barnes, the first poet laureate in the US state of Maine. What dreams, ambition, and perfectionism threaten to break mends along with care, words, a starry sky, and a family plot.

Please consider this paper for a Folk Narrative, Literature, and Media (FNLM) panel

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Applying Joanna Gilar’s ‘Rewilding Cinderella’ model to 'My Happy Marriage' (2019-present), this paper will explore the absence — of nature, hope, and the sakura (cherry blossom) tree — within Akumi Agitogi’s light novels, manga (2022–present), and anime series (2022–5).

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Applying Joanna Gilar’s ‘Rewilding Cinderella’ model to My Happy Marriage (2019-present), this paper will explore the absence — of nature, hope, and the sakura (cherry blossom) tree — within Akumi Agitogi’s light novels, manga (2022–present), and anime series (2022–5). Responding to this absence, this paper will argue that de(con)structing Cinderella’s relationship with nature can be just as effective, in ‘rewilding’ a narrative, as its restoration. Though this approach contradicts Gilar’s methodology, framing Agitogi’s text as analogous to a ‘de-wilding’ of ATU510a, the consequent trauma and narrative derailment engendered by the loss of the sakura tree, and its eventual symbolic recuperation, reaffirm the centrality and necessity of ecological exchange in the ‘Cinderella’ tale.

In 2021 Gilar launched the ‘Rewilding Cinderella’ project and library, gathering storytellers and artists from around the world to ‘rewild’ ATU510a. Most overtly, Gilar’s project centres the heroine’s symbiotic exchange with nature and the escape from persecution it engenders. Contrasting Gilar’s project, My Happy Marriage offers a Cinderella severed from both nature and magical donor, posing the question: ‘What happens when Cinderella’s tree is cut down?’ Echoing the Grimms’ ‘Aschenputtel’, where the mother’s grave is marked by a tear-watered hazel tree, Agitogi’s Miyo finds solace from the cruelty of her stepfamily through her mother’s sakura tree. When the tree is abruptly cut-down, Miyo is severed from both the joyful memories of her childhood and the hope of escaping her family’s persecution, rendering the expected narrative of ‘Cinderella’ inert as the tree’s felling prompts further trauma for Agitogi’s protagonist.

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This presentation, accompanied by a filmed visual sequence inspired by kamishibai, reinterprets Japanese fairy tale “Melon Princess” by shifting focus from the human-centred plot to the way the tale intertwines the lives of various kinds of plants with those of other natural and supernatural beings.

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Melons, persimmons, yams, arrowroot, buckwheat, and cogon grass, plants which have long been used for food, tools, and other purposes in Japan, appear at crucial moments in the narrative of “Melon Princess,” a Japanese fairy tale about a girl born from a melon and adopted by an old couple. Despite the centrality of plants, however, the tale has been usually related to the tale type “The Three Oranges” (ATU 408) through the motif of False Bride, an interpretation which focuses on human beings’ actions and intentions in a human society. This paper, in contrast, pays attention to the way the tale intertwines the lives of various kinds of plants with those of other natural and supernatural beings and reinterprets the tale as an origin tale in a wider sense, a tale that aims to explain in the narrative form the wonders of nature and multispecies entanglements. This shift of focus helps us become more attentive to stories of vegetal lives as agents, re-storying the world as a more just, multispecies place.

Accompanying the textual presentation and inspired in part by Japanese kamishibai (storytelling picture-cards), will be a filmed visual sequence that re-interprets plant-human entanglements in the “Melon Princess”; from a more plant-centred perspective. This new interpretation of the tale will weave together visual narrative and ecological speculation, inviting viewers on a journey into a less anthropocentric story-world that proposes more sustainable ways of living, for multispecies co-existence.