Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Philip Lewis

Critical Essay by Philip Lewis

SOURCE: “The Cartesian Turn: Perrault against Descartes,” in Seeing through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 9-41.

In the following essay, Lewis analyzes Perrault's writings with respect to Cartesian ideas about visualization and self-sensation, arguing that Perrault simultaneously—and ingeniously—resisted and appropriated René Decartes' insights.

In 1661, more than thirty years before the Mother Goose Tales began to appear, Charles Perrault published a short story entitled “Le Miroir, ou la métamorphose d’Orante.”¹ Appearing at a moment when the writing of portraits and self-portraits was a fashionable pastime, this tale recounts the life of Orante, a brilliantly skillful and unstintingly accurate, if overly frank, practitioner of the verbal portrait. Orante makes a strong, provocative impression on the people he describes—an impression that depends on how they look. He inspires the love of a dazzling young woman named Caliste, who revels in...
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