Today's Paper Doll Is: White Cat
This isn't a return to regular updates. I still have plenty of paper doll outfits I haven't scanned or uploaded yet, but it's going to take hours of sorting and note-taking to identify them.
This is from a recently-unearthed ballerina paper doll by an artist I sadly cannot identify.
For my non-ballet people: it's common in classical ballet for the third act to consist of "divertissements," which are dances that don't advance the plot, they're just for funsies. In "Sleeping Beauty," Act III is the prince and princess's wedding, and their guests are characters from other fairy tales, some still well known, others less so, like "The Blue Bird." I don't know if the White Cat is from some obscure preexisting story or if she's just there so Puss in Boots has someone to dance with. In any case, their music is one of the themes from the ballet that Disney used heavily in their version of "Sleeping Beauty." It appears at spooky or suspenseful moments, for which it works very well. I think it's kind of funny that what it was originally meant to represent is "cats doing cat things."
I came back to Tumblr just to update this post. The story "The White Cat" does exist and it's by Madame d'Aulnoy (Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy), the same author as "The Blue Bird."
I read a version of it recently in "Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance" by Jane Harrington, which I came across at my local library. It's a recent book on the 17th-century conteuses, a group of upper-class French women who wrote fairy tales, often based on prompts they gave each other at their salon meetings. D'Aulnoy is the most famous of them, but there were many others, such as Charlotte-Rose de la Force, Catherine Bernard, and Catherine Durand. Harrington makes it sound like they were the very first people to write literary fairy tales (Giambattista Basile was earlier.) However, it's true that they historically haven't received the recognition they should compared to male fairy-tale writers/collectors like Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm. A very cool group of writers worth knowing about.
Video summarizing "The White Cat"



















