Two common mistakes when reading Charles Perrault’s Contes is first to think that he only wrote them for children and second, that he adapted without any modification popular tales that were orally transmitted. His work however is more complex; he invented a genre that could suit children as much as cultivated adults, a genre depending on its ambiguity. Literary fairy tales borrow heavily from the oral folk tales of the peasant tradition (as well from myth, Romance, and literary sources like Apuleius’s Golden Ass and Boccaccio’s Decameron), but these motifs are crafted and reworked through a single author’s imagination
Georges Dinkel argues that ‘Perrault’s naivety is a cloak for deeper implications’, in order to argue his view, it would be interesting to have a look at the historical context within which Perrault wrote his tales, the realism of his work and the morals of the Contes.

The context in which Perrault wrote his Contes was of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Modern, which he initiated. The preface of 1695 describes and emphasizes his position as a Modern; it can be read as a manifest. It shows how serious Perrault was about the tale; a genre very modern that the good writer could make national and moral. In this preface he declares that the Contes’ particularity is to use a national imaginary that owes nothing to the mythology of the Antiquity. The sustainers of the Ancients mocked the tales as they believed them to be no more than tales told by nannies to children. This apparent naivety however is only a cloak to make the tales more accessible to children so that the morals can be easily understood. In the article ‘Les Contes des Fées: The Literary Fairy Tales of France’ by Terry Windling, she quotes the critic Jack Zipes,
Numerous critics have regarded Perrault’s tales as written directly for children, but they overlook the fact that no children’s literature per se existed at that