"What honor for the feminine sex": A cultural study of Joan of Arc and the representation of gender, religion, and nationalism in French nineteenth-century painting, prints, and sculpture. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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"What honor for the feminine sex": A cultural study of Joan of Arc and the representation of gender, religion, and nationalism in French nineteenth-century painting, prints, and sculpture. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9510671
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identifier
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9510671
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Creator
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Heimann, Nora Mary.
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Contributor
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Co-Advisers: Patricia Mainardi | Linda Nochlin
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Literature, Romance | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation provides the first cultural, political, and art historical study of the image of Joan of Arc in early nineteenth-century French art, literature, drama, and music. It analyzes the political and social implications of a virtually ubiquitous cultural phenomenon in relation to the changing political regimes, religious movements, and sexual politics of the age.;Vast and vibrant in its afterlife, Jeanne d'Arc's representation reveals the forceful impress of politics--both sexual and otherwise--upon the scope and nature of her image's historic formation. By identifying the political forces of the varying regimes and social movements that retrieved her image for their own use (as well as the personal motivations that inspired artists to take up this subject), this study addresses the multiple functions that Jeanne d'Arc's image played, and the broadly varied nature of her portrayals in French art and society.;This study also explores how relentlessly Jeanne d'Arc's image was sexualized. Artists as varied as E.-E.-F. Gois and J.-A.-D. Ingres gave her such normalizing female attributes as long hair and a long dress, despite the Maid of Orleans's well-established masculine coiffure and historic refusal to give up her cross-dressed apparel upon pain of death in 1431. Poets, playwrights, and authors as diverse and influential as Voltaire and Schiller gave focal attention not to the Maid's remarkable martial and political achievements, but rather to her sexual life. Similarly, historians, politicians, and clerics held Joan of Arc forth as an example of purity and womanly "virtue.".;The feminizing sexualization of Jeanne d'Arc's representation was a fundamentally political act. As such, the sexualization of her portrayal is not treated as a concern distinct from the political forces that caused the reformation of her image in the 1800s, but rather as a function of those agencies that worked to contain the dynamic, exceptional image of Jeanne d'Arc in order to make her a more efficient and compliant symbol. Thus, this study recounts how one woman's body has been called to serve the body politic as an illusory mirror of its own most profound desires.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
