also his stories are never as good

star-anise:

Today Google is honouring Charles Perrault.

Since i had to be reminded, here’s a friendly reminder that I HATE CHARLES PERRAULT AND EVERYTHING HE STANDS FOR.

Which is, basically, being a guy and sauntering in at the tail end of more than a century of aristocratic women developing a rich aesthetic and literary culture that uses fairy tales to talk in a coded fashion about politics and gender…

Rewriting a lot of those tales to be sexist as fucking fuck… (Seriously, the moral he appends to Bluebeard is “Curiosity has ruined many a marriage”)

Attributing the tales to an old peasant woman telling stories to children and failing to acknowledge the incredibly educated and refined women* he stole those tales from…

AND THEN BEING PRESENTED AS THE FIGUREHEAD OF THE ENTIRE MOVEMENT.

*Not because the tales would be less awesome if they were authentic peasant stories, which some collected stories are–but Mother Goose effectively obliterates the actual authors Perrault was working from, the precieuses, as role models for female writers.