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Behind the Scenes of Chapter 4: Constructing Eve Through Embodied Research
Chapter 4 of my current project, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault , centers on an overlooked gem in Perrault’s oeuvre: his poetic retelling of Genesis, titled Adam ou la création de l'homme (1697). Though best known for his fairy tales, Perrault was a consummate designer—of images, spaces, books, and ideological worlds. His production methods often underscored a major theme he was trying to express through his multi-media work. I wondered if the choice to

La Chambre Bleue
Jan 272 min read


What Is a Device—and Why Would a Fairy Tale Need One?
Device for Louis XIV. Courses de testes et de bagues. 1670. In seventeenth-century France, a device was not a gadget. It was a way of thinking. A device was a compact symbolic construction made of three parts:a symbolic image , a short inscription or motto , and an idea formed in the mind by the relationship between the two. Devices appeared everywhere in elite visual culture—on medals, coins, tapestries, buildings, carriages, and even clothing. They were worn or displayed

La Chambre Bleue
Jan 212 min read


Why Glass? Why Wax? Cinderella, Luxury Materials, and the Moral Weight of Objects
In February, I’ll be giving a talk titled Designing Women: The Unillustrated Moralities of Perrault’s Fairy Tales at the Stirling Maxwell Centre in Glasgow. The central question of the talk is a deliberately provocative one: What if Perrault’s fairy-tale moralities function semiotically like devices did—like symbolic portraits that read as two sides of a coin and point to a greater truth? This question invites us to read Perrault not simply as a storyteller or moralist, but a

La Chambre Bleue
Jan 124 min read


I Didn’t Understand Chapter 2 Until I Wore the Gown
Illustration for Cendrillon by Charles Perrault. Unknown illustrator, 1697. Honnêteté, Women, and Knowing Through Appearance There is a moment in research when an argument stops being purely conceptual and becomes embodied. For me, Chapter 2 of my work on Perrault did not fully resolve until I stood at Versailles—moving through its spaces, studying its surfaces, and thinking seriously about what it meant, in the seventeenth century, to appear . In Cinderella, the heroine is a

La Chambre Bleue
Jan 34 min read


Constructing Eve—Rethinking Fairy Tale Heroines through the Printing Press
What if the fairy tale heroine wasn’t just born from imagination—but from the printing press? In my new project, Constructing Eve , I return to a neglected 1697 poem by Charles Perrault— Adam ou la création de l’homme —to excavate how the figure of Eve was materially crafted at the intersection of theology, technology, and gendered design. Preparatory drawing by N. Coypel for Charles Perrault. Adam ou la création de l'homme. Though Perrault is best known as the father of th

La Chambre Bleue
Dec 12, 20252 min read


The Room that Spoke: Charles Perrault's Cabinet des Beaux Arts
In 1690, Charles Perrault published a book so unusual that it demanded more than a reader—it required a visitor. Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts is not simply a text. It is a three-dimensional intellectual interior. Designed as the artistic heart of a private home, the Cabinet offers itself as a total environment—one that fuses word and image, allegory and architecture, intimacy and ideology. "Doorway to Le Cabinet." Pierre Lepautre, engraver. In Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts. 1690. [

La Chambre Bleue
Dec 8, 20252 min read


A Material World | A Fairy Tale Defense of Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault
In May 2024 I gave a talk as part of the Warburg Institute's Material World Series . In this presentation, I discuss the art form that was foundational to Perrault's studio practice. Starting with the symbolic portrait of Princess Elizabeth Charlotte D'Orleans in the dedication letter for his Tales of Mother Goose , I also examine the iconographic programmes for two other projects: the Labyrinthe de Versailles and Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts. Both works are set in an Edenic spa

La Chambre Bleue
Dec 1, 20251 min read


The Child as Rose: A Device of Noble Lineage and Character
Unknown artist. Charles Perrault. Contes de ma mère l'oye. 1695. Morgan Library & Musuem. For Digital Childhoods, the official blog for the Society for the History of Children and Youth, I wrote about how symbolic portraiture could act as a way to compliment and reinforce gendered performance for children in 17th century France, expanding it beyond the binary within the boundaries of class. You can read the post here .

La Chambre Bleue
Dec 1, 20251 min read


Upcoming Book Insights: What to Expect from Designing Women
What if we viewed 17th-century aesthetics not as static ornament but as dynamic sites of gendered meaning? My upcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault , begins with this question. Chapter One uncovers how design—visual, poetic, and rhetorical—shaped ideas of sex, power, and perfection in the court culture of Louis XIV. Perrault, long celebrated as the father of the literary fairy tale, emerges here in a different light: as a court designer whose poe

La Chambre Bleue
Nov 28, 20253 min read
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