EXPIRER AU FÉMININ
Narratives of Female Dissolution
in French Classical Texts
by
Mary Jo Muratore
(University of Missouri-Columbia, USA)
Expirer
au féminin offers new perspectives on the complex relationship between neo-classical
writers, their works, and the theoretical mandates imposed upon them. In this work, the author argues that a
writer’s conflicted attitude towards aesthetic conformity infiltrated the work
itself. This conflict can be seen in the
confrontation between a male hero eager to comply with ideological protocols and a
dissenting heroine in violation of established regulations.
It is to be expected, perhaps, that in the political context of seventeenth-century
France, a heroine’s refusal to embrace orthodox opinions would result inevitably in
her death, dissolution, or excision from the text. What
is unanticipated, however, is that writers would so often slant the readers’ sympathy
in the direction of the rebellious heroine and against the obedient hero.
Expirer
au féminin analyzes how the heroine’s ostensibly expedient death serves to
further complicate the very situation it was intended to neutralize. Rendered essential by
her presence, but quintessential by her absence, the heroine in these canonical texts
embodies the non-permissible vision, the unspeakable other, the essence of alteration or
alternation or alienation that is often seen as the antithesis of neo-classical
textuality. In the re-readings proposed, the heroine’s rebelliousness reveals one of
the most salient, yet least noted, characteristic of neo-classical textuality: it does not, will not, cannot conform. Beneath a surface of sameness and adherence, it
proffers an unruly dismantling of codes, an untidy challenge to prescription, a poetically
intoned ode to désobéissance.
Mary Jo Muratore
is Professor of French and Middlebush Chair of Romance Languages at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. Her primary focus of research is seventeenth-century French literature,
French dramatic theory, and metatextuality. Previous books include The Evolution of the Cornelian Heroine (Studia
Humanitatis, 1982); Cornelian Theater: The
Metadramatic Dimension (Summa, 1990); and Mimesis
and Metatextuality in the French Neo-Classical text (Droz, 1994). She is currently
working on a book length project provisionally entitled "Icons of the Outsider in Literature."
2003
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