For many critics, the demise of Saint-Cyr stemmed from the transformation of the institution into a convent six years after its opening. This seemingly conservative shift has been used as "proof" that Maintenon abandoned a progressive and feminist pedagogy. A study of Maintenon's writings intended for Saint-Cyr suggests that, though she wavered between theory and practice, she never gave up her utopian and feminist impulses. This dissertation argues that, in the end, despite numerous social constraints, Maintenon found ways to maintain her principles by adopting practices suitable to the context. Chapter I is a study of Saint-Cyr's genesis and Maintenon's goal in creating this institution. Chapters II and III analyze the educational system at Saint-Cyr, its curriculum and methodology. Chapter IV is a study of the theater as practiced at Saint-Cyr, with particular attention to the girls' performances of Racine's Esther, the ensuing scandal and the changes implemented by Maintenon. Chapter V analyzes Maintenon's letters, Conversations, Instructions and Proverbes with respect to the question of the condition of women, arguing that Maintenon possessed a deep desire to free the girls and to give them a better life. Chapter VI analyzes Maintenon's image in modern fiction, specifically, Yves Dangerfield's La Maison d'Esther (1991) and Patricia Mazuy's film Saint-Cyr (2000). In this chapter, I consider to what extent such an image is based on Maintenon's writings, to what extent it is constructed and, finally, how her character is still important for today's public.

This project documents and analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. The prophet becomes the wicked witch. This dissertation explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation. Chapter Two surveys representations of magic in the texts of four authors within the Arthurian canon: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Layamon. These writers gender magic similarly (representing prophecy and certain forms of transformative magic as masculine and healing as feminine) and use gendered figures to mitigate the threat of masculine power posed by the feudal patriarchy present in England and France in the twelfth century. Chapter Three explores representations of two magical characters who appear in a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romances associated with Gawain: the churlish knight and the loathly lady. The authors of these romances privilege gender conventions radically different from those in earlier models and conjure a figure neglected by the earlier writers, the wicked witch. In particular, representations of the witch as a wicked step-mother reflect the anxiety created by expanding space for women (especially mothers) in previously exclusively male arenas of English society. In Chapter Four, I follow the romance tradition into early modern England, studying the work of Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare. For these authors, the wicked witch (alternately represented as temptress or crone) is connected specifically to maternity; the severe anxiety about maternity in these texts is representative of widespread concern about mothers and motherhood in sixteenth-century England. Chapter Five traces the legislative policy governing prosecution of witches in England and offers suggestions about the relationship between legal climates and literary representations of magic. Though prosecution of witchcraft is now extremely rare in the U.S., filmmakers still rely on medieval and Renaissance models to inform their representations of witches. Once she arrived, the witch never left.

This dissertation examines the importance of urban space in the works of feminist writers from France, Quebec, the Maghreb and Francophone West Africa. Each author writes women as subjects of their own experience in the city, identifies the representations of power and gender in urban landscapes, restores a feminist voice to the polis and supports women's claim to enfranchisement in urban space. My analysis is based upon the fundamental premise that urban space reflects power dynamics and is, like gender, a social and political construction borne of a dominant patriarchal ideology. The urban type of the female flaneuse, or ambulant heroine, is prevalent in several of the texts. These are women whose personal trajectories through the metropolis serve as a common referant to define their identity. Exploitation, disciplinary surveillance and disillusion characterize (1) Claire Etcherelli's urban dystopia in Elise ou la vraie vie. (2) Annie Ernaux's observations of life in the periphery of Paris in the Journal du dehors are centered on the market economy of the city and women's status as commodity. The deviant behavior of (3) Andree Chedid's virtually homeless, elderly heroine in La cite fertile thinly veils a provocative inquiry into the notion of urban identity. (4) Christine de Pizan and the Quebecoise writer, (5) Nicole Brossard both employ the metaphor of construction--architectural and textual--and share utopian visions of women's writing as the site for feminist praxis and cultural transformation. (6) Nina Bouraoui's cloistered Algerian heroine in La Voyeuse interdite and the women in (7) Assia Djebar's novels dare to defy and transgress the boundaries which exclude women from the urban realm in the Maghreb. (8) Calixthe Beyala's novels depict young African women struggling with issues of identity and survival in metropolises dominated by a repressive, patriarchal mentality. Throughout the texts, the city appears in multiple guises: as a text, a body, a marketplace, and a prison. For these authors, writing on the city constitutes a feminist act asserting women's right to claim a voice in that space. These works situate the city as a locus of cultural and political critique, whose spatial configurations reflect the social constructions of gender.

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En este trabajo pretendemos mostrar como Clarin critica extensamente, y de forma poco comun, los valores en declive de una sociedad espanola tradicional. En lugar de envilecer a la sociedad e introducirse directamente en las bajezas de la misma, el autor elabora una imagen idealizada y ficticia de la mujer real de finales del siglo XIX. No rebaja a los vetustenses para acercar al lector a sus perversidades y vicios, sino que Clarin nos presenta a su personaje femenino en un pedestal, como si de un alma o espiritu superior se tratase, en medio de la opresion y corrupcion social reinantes. Asi pues Ana Ozores aparece como instrumento principal para plantear la critica de la sociedad; critica que se siente mordaz al topamos con lo inusitado, al introducirnos en la psicologia de una mujer que representa la excepcion a la norma social de la epoca. En La Regenta observamos la influencia del temprano liberalismo de un autor con simpatias hacia un personaje, cuya condicion de mujer determina que sea aplastado por las instituciones sociales de finales del siglo XIX.

The Hercules myth has had a long and distinguished literary history, to which this study will add another footnote. In these pages following we shall pursue the figure of Hercules from Greece to Rome to the Middle Ages and thence throughout the Renaissance world---our journey will be somewhat hasty, in the first chapters, but once within the chronological limits of 1400--1600 the text shall linger on the Herculean vistas of Renaissance Italy, France, and England. The goals of this study will be three-fold: First, to establish the traditional interpretative contexts within which Hercules was seen in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; secondly, to trace the appearances of Hercules in the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and thereby to note to what extent these interpretative contexts were applied; and lastly to suggest, in light of the evidence gathered, a tentative clarification of what the Renaissance attitudes were toward pagan mythology and why the chronological limits 1400--1600 are appropriate to designate the core of the "Renaissance." We shall here be primarily concerned with the Hercules myth as it appears in Renaissance non-dramatic poetry and prose.

This dissertation explores the grounding of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the intellectual and artistic movements of the modernist period, and reads masculine anxiety in the modernist novel in terms of Lacan's work on psychosis, masochism, and narcissism. The thrust of my dissertation is twofold. The first half aims at a reinterpretation of Jacques Lacan's work in light of his early intellectual engagements with Freud, G. G. de Clerambault, and Heidegger, and as such establishes the basis for Lacan's early work in the traditions of Freudian dream analysis, experimental French psychiatry, and existential phenomenology. The second half, starting with a discussion of Lacan's third seminar, The Psychoses, and D. P. Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, examines Henry James's enigmatic 1901 novella The Sacred Fount as a meditation on the uniquely masculine anxiety over negotiating same-sex intellectual relationships, manifested as psychosis. The subsequent chapters on Proust, Sacher-Masoch, and Joyce, read with the later Lacan of Seminars XX and available sections of XXIII, explore and flesh out possible Lacanian readings of masochism and narcissism with regard to paternal (or pseudo-paternal) relationships. The major theme of my dissertation is that of vexed intellectual relationships between men separated by generational difference. Situating Lacan's discourse in the context of the modernist period, I illustrate how Lacan's intellectual apprenticeships and encounters (real and imagined) play out in his mature work, beginning with the first seminars of the 1950s. With numerous polymathic allusions, jokes, and non sequiturs, Lacan attempts a "return" and a self-conscious rewriting of Freud from the perspective of a rank outsider, pre-emptively exiled from the Freudian school for having been born too late, in the wrong country, and medically trained outside of the psychoanalytic tradition. By the same token, texts such as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Ulysses depict the psychic contortions of sidestepping Oedipal conflict through elaborate delusions and blunt disavowals of the father's potency. In sum, the trajectory of modernist intellectual life, especially psychoanalysis, turns on tendentious and broken relationships between teachers and students, as technical and artistic disciplines struggled to keep pace with cultural upheavals of the period.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of French and Italian Studies, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4724. Adviser: Andrea Ciccarelli. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 22, 2008).