An Anthropology of Gender and Death in Corneille's Tragedies
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER AND DEATH IN CORNEILLE’S TRAGEDIES by MICHELLE LESLIE BROWN (Under the Direction of Francis Assaf) ABSTRACT This study presents an analysis of the relationship between gender and death in Corneille’s tragedies. He uses death to show spectators gender-specific types of behavior to either imitate or reject according to the patriarchal code of ethics. A character who does not conform to his or her gender role as dictated by seventeenth-century society will ultimately be killed, be forced to commit suicide or cause the death of others. Likewise, when murderous tyrants refrain from killing, they are transformed into legitimate rulers. Corneille’s representation of the dominance of masculine values does not vary greatly from that of his contemporaries or his predecessors. However, unlike the other dramatists, he portrays women in much stronger roles than they usually do and generally places much more emphasis on the impact of politics on the decisions that his heroes and heroines must make. He is also innovative in his use of conflict between politics, love, family obligations, personal desires, and even loyalty to Christian duty. Characters must decide how they are to prioritize these values, and their choices should reflect their conformity to their gender role and, for men, their political position, and for females, their marital status. While men and women should both prioritize Christian duty above all else, since only men were in control of politics and the defense of the state, they should value civic duty before filial duty, and both of these before love. Since women have no legal right to political power, they are expected to value domestic interests above political ones. Women who are married should be devoted to their husbands before their own parents, and loyalty to the State follows. Unmarried women must prioritize familial duty before romantic love, and this often means that they will have to sacrifice love for their father’s political interests. Therefore, their personal interests come last. INDEX WORDS: Pierre Corneille, Anthropology and literaure, Tragedy, Seventeenth- century literature, Gender and death, Death in tragedy, Representation of death, Masculine and feminine ethics, Gender and patriarchal society, Politics and death, Vengeance and death, Representation of the king, Masculine and feminine ambition, Love and death in tragedy, Christian tragedy, Mythological plays, Sociology and literature, Greek and Roman tragedy, Sixteenth-century tragedy AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER AND DEATH IN CORNEILLE’S TRAGEDIES by MICHELLE LESLIE BROWN B. A., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992 M.A., The University of Georgia, 1995 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2005 © 2005 Michelle Leslie Brown All Rights Reserved AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER AND DEATH IN CORNEILLE’S TRAGEDIES by MICHELLE LESLIE BROWN Major Professor: Francis Assaf Committee: Jan Pendergrass Timothy Raser Catherine Jones Nina Hellerstein Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2005 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to Dr. Francis Assaf and to Gene Clampitt, my husband. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my major professor, Dr. Francis Assaf, for his guidance in writing this work, his encouragement, and his patience. I would have never been able to finish my dissertation without his direction and am extremely grateful to him for his support throughout my years at The University of Georgia. I also want to thank my wonderful husband, Gene Clampitt, for all of his support and his willingness to take sole care of our adorable but energetic daughter, Anna, when I needed to work. Lastly, I want to thank my parents for their constant encouragement and suggestions, especially at the times when I felt overwhelmed, and also for letting Gene and Anna stay with them when I needed to be alone to write. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 PART I ANTHROPOLOGY, GENDER AND DEATH IN NON-CORNELIAN LITERATURE....10 CHAPTER 1 The Significance of Anthropological and Sociological Studies of the Literature of the Seventeenth Century...........................................11 CHAPTER 2 Death and Gender in Pre-Cornelian Tragedy.............................................40 CHAPTER 3 Death and Gender in Non-Cornelian Tragedies of the Baroque Period, or Those of Corneille’s Contemporaries............................................76 PART II GENDER AND DEATH IN CORNEILLE’S TRAGEDIES..........................................112 CHAPTER 4 Politics.....................................................................................................113 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Ambition and Vengeance.........................................................152 vi CHAPTER 6 Love.........................................................................................................192 CHAPTER 7 Christian and Mythological Tragedies.....................................................234 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................277 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................295 vii INTRODUCTION This study presents an analysis of the relationship between gender and death in Pierre Corneille’s tragedies. I will demonstrate how he uses death to provide his spectators with models of behavior to either imitate or reject according to the patriarchal code of ethics. Through these models, Corneille illustrates the existence of not one universal system of values that all men and women should adhere to, but two distinct value systems that are gender specific. Both males and females are put in situations where they are forced to choose between two ideals that they value, including civic duty, love, family obligations, personal desires, and loyalty to God. Nevertheless, they must decide how to prioritize their values, and their choices should reflect their conformity to their gender role. An individual whose value system does not coincide with that prescribed by seventeenth-century society for his or her gender is generally killed or forced to commit suicide, or even provokes the death of others. I have chosen this topic as a continuation of my thesis, La mort chrétienne dans la tragédie du dix-septième siècle as it also dealt with the subject of death in seventeenth- century tragedy. Also, two of the three plays that I had used in it, Polyeucte and Théodore , were by Corneille, whom I greatly admire. When studying Corneille, however, one must be aware of the tremendous quantity of research that has already been done on his tragedies, since he is one of the seventeenth century’s best-known playwrights. I wanted to perform an original study of his work and not simply repeat what other scholars have already said; therefore, I chose to examine the relationship between gender and death in his tragedies to discern gender-specific behavioral patterns that impact his representation of tragic death. While scholars have studied both death and gender in Corneille’s plays, most tend to treat each of these themes separately, with Mitchell Greenberg’s Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry being perhaps the only other work which examines the relationship between the two in great detail. And although Greenberg’s book is very insightful, it does not treat death and gender in all of Corneille’s tragedies, and Greenberg does not use his findings to draw conclusions concerning seventeenth-century social and political protocol for women and men. In order to draw accurate conclusions concerning Corneille’s treatment of masculine and feminine death, it is necessary to examine the relationship between death and gender in all of his tragedies. I will discuss not only the different ways in which males and females die, but also the reasons why they die, the consequences of masculine and feminine death within each tragedy, and the effects that male and female death have on the spectator. However, because Corneille shows certain characters’ deaths as more relevant to the principal drama of his plays than others, such as Polyeucte’s death compared to Néarque’s, I will analyze them in greater detail. In addition, I will also discuss specific situations in which the lack of death, which I am referring to as non-death , is significant. Some of Corneille’s tragedies, such as Cinna , suggest that death is inevitable, yet a change in events causes it not to occur. It is important to uncover the reasons why the author chooses to save characters’ lives when their death was imminent, especially since the turn of events also reverses the tone that had been set throughout the beginning of the play. Similarly, in Sophonisbe , Corneille places characters in a situation in which it would be more honorable for them to commit suicide rather than to continue to live and be dishonored. Because Sophonisbe ’s Syphax and Massinisse are criticized for not committing suicide, their 2 non-death merits discussion as well. Finally, in Théodore , the heroine wants to be martyred,