The Self-Fashionings of Olympe de Gouges, 1784-1789
2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ecs.2001.0019
ISSN1086-315X
Autores Tópico(s)Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought
ResumoIn the 1990s, scholars of eighteenth-century literature investigated topics formerly not associated with the Enlightenment: new authors (particularly women); new concerns (such as gender, race, and personal identity); and new modes of writing (especially life narratives). In this same decade, historians of ancien régime and revolutionary France developed an abiding interest in the construction of social identities, particularly gender, through language. These two tendencies converged, among others, in studies of Olympe de Gouges, whom dix-huitiémistes rediscovered, primarily through her 1791 pamphlet, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, 1 and secondarily through her theater, notably the 1792 edition of her play, L'Esclavage des Noirs (The Slavery of the Blacks). 2 The 1990s generated extensive study of Gouges's published writings, through which we have come to know her as "radical" and "revolutionary," as the "first French feminist," and as a "militant abolitionist." She has been frequently invoked to support two related arguments about gender and political culture--that the Revolution produced women whose "feminism [was] more militant" than that of early-modern women writers and, at the same time, that the Revolution "disdained" and "excluded" these women from political and intellectual life. 3 These depictions, however, are based entirely on Gouges's published works of the early revolutionary years and on the assumption that these works reflect a coherent, feminist world view. Consequently, the tendency has been "to emphasize woman's natural rights in Gouges's view of the world" in all discussions of her life or works. 4 [End Page 383]
Referência(s)