Daughters of Eve : a cultural history of French theater women from the Old Regime to the fin de siècle
Female stage performers haunted French public life in the century before and after the Revolution. This study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. From the moment they became an unofficial caste of mistresses to France's elite during the reign of Louis XIV, their image fluctuated between emasculating men and delighting them. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, society columns, theater criticism, government reports, autobiographies, public rituals, and a huge corpus of fiction, Lenard Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next. Tolerated when civil society functioned and demonized when it faltered, they finally passed from notoriety to celebrity with the stabilization of parliamentary life after 1880. Only then could female fans admire them openly, and could the state officially recognize their contributions to national life. Daughters of Eve is a look at how a culture creates social perceptions and reshuffles collective identities in response to political change
Print Book, English, 2001
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001
Biography
x, 300 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780674005969, 0674005961
46884146
Setting the scene
Theater women and aristocratic libertinism, 1715-1789
Defining the modern gender order, 1760-1815
Magdalenes of postaristocratic France, 1815-1848
The erotic culture of the stage
The struggle against pornocracy, 1848-1880
Imagining republican actresses, 1880-1914
Performing a self
From notorious women to intimate strangers
ets.umdl.umich.edu Available to Stanford-affiliated users at
hdl.handle.net Electronic access restricted; authentication may be required: