Feminist Analysis of Gender and Primogeniture in French Neoclassical Tragedy

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 rights of citizenship. Women authors include Bernard, Genlis, Olympe de Gouges and Germaine de Staël, among others. Arguing that emerging feminism is a function of historicism that defines female identity through parallel constructs between regency and theatre, Neoclassicism and modernity, authors of an emerging body of French feminist writings ineluctably reconcile sadist and pacifist incongruities between gendered roles in tragedy.