Femmes Galantes, Femmes Savantes: Literary Expressions of Women's Sexuality and Mentorship in the Long Eighteenth Century
Open Access
- Author:
- Tybush, Brooke
- Graduate Program:
- French and Francophone Studies (PhD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 29, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Jennifer Boittin, Major Field Member
Benedicte Monicat, Major Field Member
Jennifer Wagner Lawlor, Outside Unit & Field Member
Tracy Rutler, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Mary McAlpin, Special Member
Adlai Murdoch, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- French
Francophone
Gender
Sexuality
Race
Eighteenth Century
Literature - Abstract:
- "Femmes Galantes, Femmes Savantes" explores instances of woman-to-woman mentorship in ars erotica – or the erotic arts – in eighteenth-century French and Francophone literature. More specifically, this project asks how these mentorships might provide a means of defying and manipulating racist/sexist/heteronormative notions about women’s sexuality. The eighteenth-century is an especially salient time for identifying different forms of women’s subjugation, as the rapidly growing notion of white bourgeois “virtuous womanhood” in France relegated women to the domestic sphere through expectations of marriage and motherhood, limiting their participation in public life. On the other hand, women of color in colonized spaces such as Saint-Domingue and Senegal faced racist and sexist stereotypes which defined Black and mixed-race women as lascivious seductresses of European men, increasing their vulnerability to white male sexual aggression that was ubiquitous in slave colonies. Ideas such as these about women’s bodies and sexuality became widespread throughout the eighteenth-century, permeating medical, literary, and philosophical publications. My project identifies how mentorships in ars erotica help female characters in fiction to resist these heteropatriarchal/racist/sexist ideas about women’s bodies and sexuality. They accomplish this through training each other in the courtesan arts – a term I use to describe the lifestyle, practices, and sexual economy of courtesans (elite prostitutes) which I consider in this project to be an erotic artform. My framing of ars erotica in this project is inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of ars erotica as a truth-seeking practice in which knowledge about pleasure is learned through experience. I also engage Tanya Augsburg’s notion of an aesthetic feminist erotic art that subverts the heteronormative male gaze, and Sanjay K. Gautam’s consideration of courtesans as performers of the erotic. Considering these three frameworks, my project’s contribution to the field is twofold. First, I propose a new theorization of a feminist ars erotica as a liberatory practice in which knowledge about pleasure and resistance to heteropatriarchal/racist/sexist oppression is shared through woman-to-woman mentorship and is expressed through courtesan performance – with “performance” being modeled through the courtesan persona, courtesan’s writing, singing, and self-adornment/fashion. Second, my project engages with a variety of genres including two libertine/erotic novels, a series of Creole courtesan songs, travel narratives, and a serial fiction. Most of these texts – with the exception of the courtesan songs – are male-authored and appeal to the white, male, heterosexual gaze on the female body. I argue that the femme galante helps to subvert this gaze as the terms Galante and galanterie take on specifically gendered connotations in the eighteenth century, often used to describe women of “ill repute” (prostitutes and courtesans). Therefore, my reading of these texts suggests a re-framing of their content through the lens of the femme galante, which centers women's stories and female intimacy through a focus on woman-to-woman mentorship in ars erotica.