Wife-abuse in Eighteenth-century France

Wife-abuse in Eighteenth-century France PDF Author: Mary Seidman Trouille
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Recent archival research has focussed on the material conditions of marriage in eighteenth-century France, providing new insight into the social and judicial contexts of marital violence. Mary Trouille builds on these findings to write the first book on spousal abuse during this period. Through close examination of a wide range of texts, Trouille shows how lawyers and novelists adopted each other's rhetorical strategies to present competing versions of the truth. Male voices - those of husbands, lawyers, editors, and moralists - are analysed in accounts of separation cases presented in Des Essarts's influential Causes célèbres, in moral and legal treatises, and in legal briefs by well-known lawyers of the period. Female voices, both real and imagined, are explored through court testimony and novels based on actual events by Sade, Genlis, and Rétif de la Bretonne. By bringing the traditionally private matter of spousal abuse into the public arena, these texts had a significant impact on public opinion and served as an impetus for legal reform in the early years of the French Revolution. Trouille's interdisciplinary study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of attitudes towards women in eighteenth-century society, and provides a historical context for debates about domestic violence that are very much alive today.

Wife-abuse in Eighteenth-century France

Wife-abuse in Eighteenth-century France PDF Author: Mary Seidman Trouille
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book

Book Description
Recent archival research has focussed on the material conditions of marriage in eighteenth-century France, providing new insight into the social and judicial contexts of marital violence. Mary Trouille builds on these findings to write the first book on spousal abuse during this period. Through close examination of a wide range of texts, Trouille shows how lawyers and novelists adopted each other's rhetorical strategies to present competing versions of the truth. Male voices - those of husbands, lawyers, editors, and moralists - are analysed in accounts of separation cases presented in Des Essarts's influential Causes célèbres, in moral and legal treatises, and in legal briefs by well-known lawyers of the period. Female voices, both real and imagined, are explored through court testimony and novels based on actual events by Sade, Genlis, and Rétif de la Bretonne. By bringing the traditionally private matter of spousal abuse into the public arena, these texts had a significant impact on public opinion and served as an impetus for legal reform in the early years of the French Revolution. Trouille's interdisciplinary study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of attitudes towards women in eighteenth-century society, and provides a historical context for debates about domestic violence that are very much alive today.

Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France

Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France PDF Author: Chris Roulston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317090675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, when the definition of marriage was shifting from one based on an hierarchical model to one based on notions of love and mutuality, marital life came under a more intense cultural scrutiny. This led to paradoxical forms of representation of marriage as simultaneously ideal and unlivable. Chris Roulston analyzes how, as representations of married life increased, they challenged the traditional courtship model, offering narratives based on repetition rather than progression. Beginning with English and French marital advice literature, which appropriated novelistic conventions at the same time that it cautioned readers about the dangers of novel reading, she looks at representations of ideal marriages in Pamela II and The New Heloise. Moving on from these ideal domestic spaces, bourgeois marriage is then problematized by the discourse of empire in Sir George Ellison and Letters of Mistress Henley, by troublesome wives in works by Richardson and Samuel de Constant, and by abusive husbands in works by Haywood, Edgeworth, Genlis and Restif de la Bretonne. Finally, the alternative marriage narrative, in which the adultery motif is incorporated into the marriage itself, redefines the function of heteronormativity. In exploring the theoretical issues that arise during this transitional period for married life and the marriage plot, Roulston expands the debates around the evolution of the modern couple.

Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France

Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France PDF Author: Suzanne Desan
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047720
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description


The Violent Abuse of Women in 17th and 18th Century Britain

The Violent Abuse of Women in 17th and 18th Century Britain PDF Author: Geoffrey Pimm
Publisher: Pen & Sword History
ISBN: 9781526739544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the gateway between the medieval world and the modern, centuries when the western societies moved from an age governed principally by religion and superstition to an age directed principally by reason and understanding. Although the worlds of science and philosophy took giant strides away from the medieval view of the world, attitudes to women did not change from those that had pertained for centuries. Girls were largely barred from education - only around 14% of women could read and write by 1700 - and the few educated women were not permitted to enter the professions. As a result women, especially if single, were employed in menial jobs or were forced into a life of petty crime. Many survived by entering the 'oldest profession in the world'. The social turbulence of the first half of the seventeenth century afforded women new opportunities and new religious freedoms and women were attracted into the many new sects where they were afforded a voice in preaching and teaching. In a time of unprecedented and unbridled political discussion, many better educated women saw no reason why they should not enter the debate and began to voice their opinions alongside those of men, publishing their own books and pamphlets. These new and unprecedented liberties thus gained by women were perceived as a threat by the leaders of society, and thus arose an unlikely masculine alliance against the new feminine assertions, across all sections of society from Puritan preachers to court judges, from husbands to court rakes. This reaction often found expression in the violent and brutal treatment of women who were seen to have stepped out of line, whether legally, socially or domestically. Often beaten and abused at home by husbands exercising their legal right, they were whipped, branded, exiled and burnt alive by the courts, from which their sex had no recourse to protection, justice or restitution. Many of the most brutal forms of punishment were reserved exclusively for women, and even where the same, they were more savagely applied than would be the case for similar crimes committed by men. This work records the many kinds of violent physical and verbal abuse perpetrated against women in Britain and her colonies, both domestically and under the law, during two centuries when huge strides in human knowledge and civilisation were being made in every other sphere of human activity, but social and legal attitudes to women and their punishment remained firmly embedded in the medieval.

Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture PDF Author: Ana de Freitas Boe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317122054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The resurgence of marriage as a transnational institution, same-sex or otherwise, draws upon as much as it departs from enlightenment ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality which this collection aims to investigate, interrogate, and conceptualize anew. Coming to terms with heteronormativity is imperative for appreciating the literature and culture of the eighteenth century writ large, as well as the myriad imaginaries of sex and sexuality that the period bequeaths to the present. This collection foregrounds British, European, and, to a lesser extent, transatlantic heteronormativities in order to pose vital if vexing questions about the degree of continuity subsisting between heteronormativities of the past and present, questions compounded by the aura of transhistoricity lying at the heart of heteronormativity as an ideology. Contributors attend to the fissures and failures of heteronormativity even as they stress the resilience of its hegemony: reconfiguring our sense of how gender and sexuality came to be mapped onto space; how public and private spheres were carved up, or gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and finally how literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices have served to buttress or contest the legacy of heteronormativity.

Revolutionary Love in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France

Revolutionary Love in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: Allan H. Pasco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351903284
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
In this innovative study, the author carves out a new field, a sociology of literature in which he offers insightful commentary about the nexus of literature and society. Calling on history, sociology, and psychology as well as literature as points of reference, Allan Pasco examines the conceptual shift in the ideal of love in eighteenth-century France. Pasco explores the radical, though gradual, changes that occurred during the Enlightenment with respect to how the emotion of love was viewed. Earlier, love had been subordinate to the demands of family, king, and deity; passion was dangerous, and to be avoided. But over time, individual happiness became the "greatest good," and passion the measure of love. Authors as diverse as Marivaux, Marmontel, Rousseau, Baculard d'Arnaud, Pigault-Lebrun and Madame de Staël make it clear that the ideal of rapturous love did not live up to its billing: it did not last, and it brought destructive fantasies, an epidemic of disease, the "scourge" of divorce, and considerable anguish. Still, as Pasco points out, passion became and remained the ideal, and the Romantics were left to plumb its nature.

Ingénue Saxancour; or, The Wife Separated from Her Husband

Ingénue Saxancour; or, The Wife Separated from Her Husband PDF Author: Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1781881820
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Set in Paris in the 1780s, Rétif de la Bretonne's novel Ingénue Saxancour is a thinly veiled account of his daughter's disastrous marriage to an abusive husband. From the time of her marriage in January 1780, until she left her husband in July 1785, Agnès Rétif suffered continually from severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Published in 1789, Rétif's novel scandalized the public with its graphic descriptions of his son-in-law's sexual perversity and brutal violence. Rétif's novel remains shocking even two centuries later and continues to raise disturbing questions about power relations within abusive relationships. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the accusations leveled against Rétif himself concerning his motives for writing and publishing this account: Was he, as some charged, a shameless exhibitionist willing to reveal his family's darkest secrets merely to attract attention and broaden his readership? Was he an unscrupulous opportunist willing to capitalize on his daughter's misfortunes and risk her reputation simply to pay his debts? Or was he, as he himself claimed, trying to warn young women about the dangers of marrying men of dubious backgrounds against their parents' wishes? Rétif was all this and more: a reform-minded pioneer far in advance of his time with his graphic portrayal of spousal abuse, his call for greater public awareness of this perennial problem, and his crusade for liberal divorce laws that would allow women to escape from abusive relationships and to remarry. This is the first English translation of Ingénue Saxancour ever published and offers a wealth of background material on the novel and the real-life events that inspired it. It serves as a companion piece to the annotated French edition edited by Professor Trouille and published by the MHRA in 2014.

A Certain Emancipation of Women

A Certain Emancipation of Women PDF Author: Tracey Rizzo
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9781575910871
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
"Best-selling court cases in eighteenth-century France provide ample evidence of a certain emancipation of women. Certain in the sense of tentative, qualified: women won their cases in surprising numbers yet were represented by their lawyers via limiting stereotypes. Certain also in the sense of sure: lawyers and editors contributed to a liberatory moment, particularly in the two decades leading up to the radical phase of the French Revolution, in which late eighteenth-century constructions of female citizenship offered virtuous women, regardless of rank or even race, "strategic possibilities" for establishing modern identities - defined as self-creating, autonomous, and capable of moral judgment and reason." "Few scholars have attempted to demonstrate the means by which representations both reflect and transform the lives of historical actors. This study offers a rare opportunity to glimpse that intersection as the causes celebres contain representations and lived experience, fact and fiction." "Lawyers and editors called for the liberation of women from tyrannical fathers, abusive husbands, public opinion, and even oppressive laws, like that maintaining the stigma of illegitimacy, in the dozens of seductions, separations, rapes, and infanticides on which this study is based."--Jacket.

Coquettes, Wives, and Widows

Coquettes, Wives, and Widows PDF Author: Marcie Ray
Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music
ISBN: 1580469884
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.

Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland PDF Author: Deborah Simonton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134774923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The eighteenth century looms large in the Scottish imagination. It is a century that saw the doubling of the population, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth, the political Union of 1707, the Jacobite Rebellions and the Enlightenment - events that were intrinsic to the creation of the modern nation and to putting Scotland on the international map. The impact of the era on modern Scotland can be seen in the numerous buildings named after the luminaries of the period - Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson - the endorsement of Robert Burns as the national poet/hero, the preservation of the Culloden battlefield as a tourist attraction, and the physical geographies of its major towns. Yet, while it is a century that remains central to modern constructions of national identity, it is a period associated with men. Until recently, the history of women in eighteenth-century Scotland, with perhaps the honourable exception of Flora McDonald, remained unwritten. Over the last decade however, research on women and gender in Scotland has flourished and we have an increasingly full picture of women's lives at all social levels across the century. As a result, this is an appropriate moment to reflect on what we know about Scottish women during the eighteenth century, to ask how their history affects the traditional narratives of the period, and to reflect on the implications for a national history of Scotland and Scottish identity. Divided into three sections, covering women's intimate, intellectual and public lives, this interdisciplinary volume offers articles on women's work, criminal activity, clothing, family, education, writing, travel and more. Applying tools from history, art anthropology, cultural studies, and English literature, it draws on a wide-range of sources, from the written to the visual, to highlight the diversity of women's experiences and to challenge current male-centric historiographies.