World Literature Today, spring issue 1985, USA
World literature in review - French
Pierrette Fleutiaux, Métamorphoses de la reine, Gallimard 1984

Pierrette Fleutiaux chose the fairy-tale format for Métamorphoses de la reine, because it best conveys the traumas she experienced during a difficult period of her life. She needed to regress to her childhood years, to the warmth and understanding offered by the "feeling" level of her personality. In this manner she was able to compensate for the evidently arid workaday situation in which she found herself.
To go back to a personal and collective past, offered by the fairy tales, not only helped her emotionally, but redirected her artistic talents.
Métamorphoses de la reine is a modern retelling and recasting of the "Contes de Perrault", those marvellous seventeenth-century fairy tales on which generations of children were brought up - despite the frequent horrors perpetrated by witches, giants, and other incredible creatures.
Fleutiaux makes us privy to her own subjective vision, her amplifications and transformations: we learn, among many other things, that Little Red Riding Hood ate the world and not vice-versa. Despite Fleutiaux's transvaluations, magic and mystery are ever-present: so too is the drama that grips her aggressive and passive creatures, as each plays his or her primitive passions. Symbolic for the most part and, paradoxically, realistic to the core, her cast of characters reveals a complex and fascinating inner climate.
La femme de l'ogre, told with pith and point - and a great deal of humor - focuses on an ogre's wife. She is preparing the evening meal, consisting of raw meat which she doesn't yet know she doesn't like. She takes a small leg, sears it over the fire, eats it, then takes another. Suddenly she rushes out of the house to vomit it all up, runs to the well to wash the detritus from her body, then imbibes larges draughts of water to cleanse her intestines - every part of her inner being. Her purification ritual completed, she returns to her home, feeds her seven little ogrelettes, puts them to bed, and returns to set the table for her husband-ogre. He prepares for the night after making certain his children are asleep in their cradle-scales and checking on their weight, satisfied with the knowledge that each ate the right amount of meat. Then the wife returns to her kitchen, takes some potatoes and other vegetables from hiding places, and puts them on the stove to cook. "L'eau chante à petits bouillons, envoyant dans la pièce de légères vapeurs parfumées, et il lui semble que toutes choses se mettent en place autour d'elle, en un grand nid lâche et moelleux où elles se blottit. " The tale continues in this fanciful but not always delightful vein to its unexpected finale.
Morbidity and pathos emerge in this and the other legends Fleutiaux recounts: manifestations of a deeply troubled self in search of renewal. Métamorphoses de la reine is highly recommended for its originality, its psychological insights, its humor, and the purity of its classical style.

Bettina L. Knapp
Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York)

(Correction by the writer: In the tale Petit Pantalon rouge, the girl does not eat the wolf!)

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