Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Eraby Madelyn Gutwirth
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. No reviews no reviews | add a review
In this extraordinarily rich book, Madelyn Gutwirth examines over one hundred prints and paintings, dozens of texts, and the work of a great many cultural critics in order to consider how gender politics were played out during a highly volatile era. Finding evidence of a crisis in gender relations during the eighteenth century, she traces its evolution in the politics of rococo art, demographic trends, plans for the control of prostitution, maternal nursing and wet-nursing practices, folklore, the salon, and in the theater of Diderot and the polemics of Rousseau. Gutwirth shows how a hostile gender ideology consigned women to a solely mothering role before the political revolution began, and how women who struggled to participate in the nascent First French Republic found themselves hobbled by the representational practices of the revolutionaries, especially their use of allegory. The artificiality and anachronism of the Revolution's representation of women were ratified by the Napoleonic Code. Once depicted as erotic goddesses by the rococo, then as goddesses of liberty (Marianne), the dominant figuration of women around 1800 would become the dying waif. As modern republics began their struggle toward legitimacy, women's posture within them had been reduced, by representation, to feeble marginality. Gutwirth combines perspectives from literature, history, sociology, demography, psychology, and art history and criticism in her delineation of this crisis. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNone
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)944.04History and Geography Europe France and region France Revolution 1789-1804LC ClassificationRatingAverage: No ratings.Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |