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Paper short abstract

This paper will explore how late 17th-century French fairy tale writers engaged with a controversial and pressing socio-intellectual question of the time: the degree to which a person’s thoughts could affect the material nature of their bodies, and potentially the nature of the world around them.

Paper long abstract

The idea that a person’s imagination played a key role in determining the quality of their physical health was a concept that dominated western culture from Antiquity until the mid 1600s when Descartes advanced the theory of substance dualism. Dualism maintained that mind and body are not joined in a single entity, but rather are completely, ontologically distinct. Considered radical at first, the idea quickly achieved hegemony to the point that those who refused to subscribe to it risked censorship, imprisonment, and even capital punishment because the idea that a person could affect the material environment through thought alone indirectly threatened the authority of both church and state. If people could manifest sickness or health, and even alter the nature of the world around them in accordance with their thoughts, then what incentive would one have to succumb to the authority of a priest or a king, let alone God? While late seventeenth-century novels and plays responded to dualism by featuring characters who either lack imagination or whose imaginations lead them to appear ridiculous, fairy tale writers took a different tact, exploring complex philosophical questions about the imagination’s tangible effects and the degree to which the imagination could (and should) remain under an individual’s control. This paper will explore how the fairy tales that the countess de Murat penned toward the end of her life reprise Renaissance humanist beliefs about the power of the imagination and experiment with what society might look like if holistic attitudes were the norm.