A01=Marcie Ray
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Author_Marcie Ray
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVG
Category=AVL
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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feminist analysis
French Baroque opera
French society
French theater
gender dynamics
Gender politics
gender portrayal
gender representation
gender roles
gender studies
independent women
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
societal norms
societal roles
softlaunch
women's roles
women's status
Product details
- ISBN 9781580469883
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 May 2020
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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 Platée, ou Junon jalouseand André Campra's Aréthuse, ou la Vengeance de l'Amour to representative works from the Comédie Française, the Comédie 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.
Marcie Ray is Associate Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University.
