Ruling Women, Volume 2: Configuring The Female Prince In Seventeenth-century French Drama (queenship And Power)

Ruling Women is a two-volume study devoted to an analysis of the conflicting discourses concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. In this second volume, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, Conroy analyzes over 30 plays published between 1637 and 1691, examining the range of constructions of queenship that are thrown into relief. The analysis focuses on the ways in which certain texts strive to manage the cultural anxiety produced by female rule and facilitate the diminution of the uneasy cultural reality it represents, while others dramatize the exercise of political virtue by women, explode the myth of gender-differentiated sexual ethics, and suggest alternative constructions of gender relations to those upheld by the normative discourses of sexual difference. The approach is underpinned by an understanding of theatre as fundamentally political, a cultural institution implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal power relations. Innovative and stimulating, Conroyℓ́ℓs work will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century drama and history of ideas, in addition to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism Ruling Women is a two-volume study devoted to an analysis of the conflicting discourses concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. In this second volume, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, Conroy analyzes over 30 plays published between 1637 and 1691, examining the range of constructions of queenship that are thrown into relief. The analysis focuses on the ways in which certain texts strive to manage the cultural anxiety produced by female rule and facilitate the diminution of the uneasy cultural reality it represents, while others dramatize the exercise of political virtue by women, explode the myth of gender-differentiated sexual ethics, and suggest alternative constructions of gender relations to those upheld by the normative discourses of sexual difference. The approach is underpinned by an understanding of theatre as fundamentally political, a cultural institution implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal power relations. Innovative and stimulating, Conroyĺls work will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century drama and history of ideas, in addition to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism This book, the second of two volumes, explores and analyzes the dramatic representations of women in power in seventeenth-century France. Key to the analysis is an examination of the ways in which questions of virtue and sexual differentiation are negotiated and how they contribute to the construction of a nascent paradigm of equality. As we will see, the framing of certain moral and intellectual virtues, particularly prudence, as central to dramatic portrayals of government, allows a way in for the ideologists of women's authority, for whom prudence transcends sexual differentiation. On the other hand, in an argument which exploits sexual differentiation in women's favour, the claim is made that it is precisely the qualities perceived as 'female' that are invaluable in government, namely clemency, mercy, humanity - all frequently connoted collectively in the notion of douceur. What emerges in either case is a notion of government, the quintessential public role, as the ultimate site of androgyny "This book, the first of two volumes, is the first study of its kind devoted to an analysis of the debate concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a wide range of political and feminist texts, it sets out to demonstrate that the dominant discourse which upholds patriarchy at the time is frequently in conflict with alternative discourses which frame gynaecocracy as a feasible, and laudable reality, and which reconfigure (wittingly or unwittingly) the normative paradigm of male authority. Central to the argument is an analysis of how the discourse which constructs government as a male prerogative quite simply implodes when juxtaposed with the traditional political discourse of virtue ethics. The study draws on the existing work concerning queenship but innovates in its focus on the literary, feminist, and philosophical representations of female governance in France"-- Provided by publisher about volume 1 Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction....Pages 1-4 The Power and the Fury, or the Politics of Representation in Drama....Pages 5-65 The Drama of Gender Struggle: Androgyny and Female Government....Pages 67-91 Dramatizing the Female Prince: Virtue, Statecraft, and Virginal Wives....Pages 93-130 Conclusion....Pages 131-135 Back Matter....Pages 137-214