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The generation of women writers of the late-seventeenth-century France took part in the growing criticism against the monarchy of Louis XIV by using the popular medium of fairy tales to illustrate their often satirical and subversive viewpoints on the subject. Far from validating the glory of their king and the wisdom of his relentless political conflicts, some of the women soldiers' tales that compose the corpus1 express the disenchantment of a growing population of courtiers left out of Louis's decision-making process. According to the pamphlets illegally published during the decade concerned, the Sun King was increasingly represented as running away from his responsibilities as a battle chief or as an old impotent man. For Peter Burke and Lisa Brocklebank, in the unofficial discourses of monarchic representation, war becomes a metaphor for sex and vice versa (Burke 136–37; Brocklebank trickster-hero 128). The focus of this article is on the ideology of masculinity under Louis XIV—particularly as it emerged in the pageantry of war—and the way women writers responded to it with fairy tales. How are war and masculinity illuminated by gender-bending in the tales, and how does the sociohistorical context of cross-dressing in the tales respond to the crisis around men and war?
In order to illustrate this, I will analyze and compare two of these tales about women soldiers and exemplify the different treatments their authors give female power, cross-dressing, war, and masculinity in the society of their times. On the one hand, with "Marmoisan, or the Innocent Deception" ("Marmoisan, ou l'innoncente tromperie: nouvelle héroïque et satirique," 1695), Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier chooses to prove the indispensable superior value of women in a man's world—a battlefield—while Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy, with her "Belle-Belle or the Fortunate Knight" ("Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné," 1698), proceeds with a theatricalization of war and of royal function. After outlining the tales and providing their textual sources and the context in which they were written, I concentrate on three topics: first, the role of the female usurpers of power in the tales; then the role of the cross-dressers in their sociohistorical context as they relate to the representation of the seventeenth-century Amazon or function as the female embodiment of the early modern diplomat; and finally the emasculation of male power in...