A feminist analysis of gender and primogeniture in French neoclassical tragedy : the literary politics behind the French Revolution / Sharon Joy Worley ; with a foreword by Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval
Olympe de Gouges and Marie-Joseph Chenier : gender and feminism in tandem with the parabola of revolutionary politics and French theatre -- Brutus : the Republican reversal of patrician privilege and the sublimation of feminist political power -- Setting the feminist stage : Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis's and Marmontel's versions of Belisarius and the historicism of revolutionary politics and drama in the future of Empire -- Gender and primogeniture in Racine's Andromaque : the politics of power, women and the state -- Racine's Phedre as the criminalized femme fatale : political representation and the disjunctive female spectator -- Iphigenie : sacrifice as the consummation of dynasty and the inversion of female autonomy
Summary
In the tradition of Virginia Woolf's "In Search of a Room of One's Own," this study traces the origins of French feminism to Neoclassical theatre and the court of Louis XIV. Through feminist revisionist histories of French literature, the Neoclassical plots and female archetypes from Racine's Phedre and Andromache, Voltaire's Brutus (Catherine Bernard) and Marmontel's Belisarius (Stephanie Genlis) were transposed by women writers and patrons onto actresses and the queens, empresses and mistresses of the French ruling dynasties from Louis XIV- to Napoleon at a time when women were denied the ri
