Cosmopolite

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Protagonists

Since the nineteenth century the Parisienne has been the figure of universal femininity: her national particularity was always already international or global at its conception. As part of the Parisienne mythology, cosmopolitanism has the sense of anyone and anywhere. The potential for any woman anywhere to become la Parisienne is not, however, absolute: a stay in Paris is generally considered necessary to complete the transformation, but even this is not sufficient guarantee. This chapter examines the treatment of the cosmopolitan Parisienne in films set outside Paris: Julien Duvivier’sPépé le Moko (1937), Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969) and Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954). As cosmopolitan Parisiennes, the female protagonists of these films share mobility (both geographically and socially) and a metonymic function – that is, they each in some way stand in for Paris.

Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms

2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dunagan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Development ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
And Gender

Katherine Dunagan Osborne, "Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms" (pp. 465––493) This essay removes George Eliot's heroines from heterosexual dyads to focus on the roles that things play in women's autonomous moral and sexual development. Because Eliot's female protagonists can adapt heirlooms for their own private and emotional purposes, they can replace traditional inheritance based on bloodlines with a non-familial, emotional inheritance, thus illustrating the subtlety of Eliot's family and gender politics. This reading of Eliot contextualizes specific heirlooms in Middlemarch (1871––72) and Daniel Deronda (1876)——including miniature portraits, emeralds, turquoises, and diamonds——to reveal the surprising politics embedded in Eliot's heirlooms that her nineteenth-century readers would certainly have recognized.

Femme fatale

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
American Film ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
French Version ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
French Film ◽  
French Culture ◽  
The City

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This chapter considers la Parisienne as femme fatale in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève(1939) and Le quai des brumes(1938), and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960). These films can be considered examples of French film noir and their female protagonists read as femme fatales. However, the femme fatale of French film noir is different from the femme fatale of American film noir; she comes from a different cultural tradition and is informed by a different cultural figure. This chapter argues that the development of the femme fatale as a cinematicarchetype passed through a cultural tradition not usually associated with the noir genre: nineteenth-century French culture and the tradition of the filles d’Eve embodied in the type la Parisienne. The French version of this archetype grew out of the popular nineteenth-century trope of the association of woman with the city and death. Indeed, there is an aesthetic and narrative overdetermination of the femme fatale by the figure of la Parisienne, particularly through iconographical motifs associated with the type, like fashion, ambiguity, sexuality and danger

scholarly journals Franciscan Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century Belgium : Gender, Identity and Material Recovery

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-139
Author(s):  
Kristien Suenens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Material Recovery ◽  
Secular Clergy

Abstract This article examines the revival of female Franciscan religious communities in the nineteenth-century as a platform for analyzing the mechanisms and networks behind the restoration and renewal of female convent life in Belgium. The analysis is conducted from a threefold perspective: the specific role of male and female protagonists, the struggle with old and new identities, and the material backgrounds of the revival. The diverse landscape of old and new, contemplative and apostolic, and urban and rural Franciscan convents and congregations offers an interesting platform for research. The interaction between secular clergy, lay and religious women and the male Friars Minor is examined within the context of changing political regimes, social changes, religious revival and diocesan centralization. Mechanisms of material recovery and the (re-)constructions of gendered, canonical and religious identities are used as a framework for evaluating the importance of old and new models and examining to what extent this nineteenth-century history was a genuine Franciscan revival.

scholarly journals Young Adult Crisis Heterotopias and Feminist Revisions in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes Series

Humanities ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Sonya Sawyer Fritz ◽  
Sara K. Day
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

In this article, we investigate neo-Victorian YA fiction’s efforts to mirror twenty-first-century feminist ideals in nineteenth-century spaces through examining the role of heterotopia in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019). We first consider how the novels’ steampunk elements figure in Gleason’s feminist framing of neo-Victorian London, particularly in terms of common heterotopias—primarily the garden and the museum—that the protagonists briefly navigate over the course of the series. Second, we explore how the series’ three female protagonists each occupy spaces that function as pseudo—“heterotopias of crisis”—that is, while each of them claims space within which to subvert expectations of women, these spaces and the activities they support are themselves fundamentally insular and yield no socio-cultural critique. Finally, we consider how the spaces created and occupied by the books’ villain, known as the Ankh, serve as heterotopias. We find that the fact that the only truly heterotopic spaces in the novels belong to the villain, whose transgressive deviance the series frames as a bridge too far, illustrates how disappointingly limited neo-Victorian YA can be in its ability to offer subversive mirrors to twenty-first-century feminism.

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