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Paper short abstract

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.

Paper long abstract

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.