Comparative Literature / Interdisciplinary Humanities

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Fanny Marchaisse (Northwestern University)

Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (University of Central Florida)

This panel explores how fairy and folkloric narratives represent older women—especially mothers, crones, and older fairies—as complex agents of (re)generation, control, and care. Often sidelined in favor of youthful heroines and romantic ideals, these figures nonetheless anchor tales through affective labor, moral authority, and symbolic power. Whether embittered, monstrous, or withdrawn, they shape the tale’s logic of transformation, inheritance, and survival.

Examples include:
– The old mother fairy in Le Prince Lutin (d’Aulnoy), disillusioned by love and mistrustful of men, who isolates her daughter for protection—only to be reconvinced of love’s potential by the lovers’ sincerity.
– The ogre mother-in-law in La Belle au bois dormant (Perrault), whose desire to consume Belle and her children reflects fears around female generational competition.
– The absentee mother in La Belle et la Bête (de Villeneuve), who reappears to bestow noble lineage on her daughter, offering legitimacy without intimacy.

These women complicate the fairy tale’s ideals of femininity, regeneration, and care. They are vessels of memory, trauma, and judgment—and often gatekeepers of transformation. This panel welcomes papers informed by feminist theory, age studies, queer temporality, or affect theory.

How do fairy and folkloric tales imagine the politics of (re)generation—biological, narrative, and symbolic—through the figure of the older woman? This panel invites papers that consider how tales navigate themes of aging, maternal power, cyclical time, and narrative memory through crones, fairies, midwives, or monstrous mothers.