Coquettes, wives, and widows : gender politics in French baroque opera and theater
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Coquettes, wives, and widows : gender politics in French baroque opera and theater
(Eastman studies in music, 172)
University of Rochester Press, 2020
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-178) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French theatrical works created an uneasy dialogue with the often-blistering depictions of marriage in contemporary writings by literary women. For over a century, composers and librettists attempted to silence such anti-traditionalist views through dramas that ridicule, banish, or, even more violently, silence and subjugate female characters who resist marriage. These dramas portray independent-minded women as agents ofchaos who deploy their sexuality to destabilize class demarcations, or to destroy families and at times the monarchy itself.
Coquettes, Wives, and Widows: Gender Politics in French Baroque Opera and Theater shows how dramatists wrested narratives away from women and weaponized those narratives in a defense of the status quo. It examines a wide range of works of different types: from Jean-Philippe Rameau's Platee, ou Junon jalouseand Andre Campra's Arethuse, ou la Vengeance de l'Amour to representative works from the Comedie Francaise, the Comedie Italienne, and the fairgound theaters. Each theater offered denigrating portraits of independent womenas dissolute, obstinate, and extremist.
The operas and other theatrical works explored in Coquettes, Wives, and Widows reveal who (in the view of many at the time) should exercise authority to make choices aboutwomen's lives. They also give evidence of widespread fears about how society might change if it were to grant women themselves that responsibility.
Table of Contents
Introduction
From Platee's Frog-like Flirt to Pompadour's Yellow Skin: Correcting the Coquette
Disciplining Widows
The Price of Independence: Women Seeking Separations
"Everywhere Our Hearts are in Danger": Cupid's Triumph and the Decline of the Indifferent Mistress
Epilogue
Appendix
by "Nielsen BookData"