Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen

by Goodman,Dena; Goodman,Dena

• ISBN13: 9780415933957
• ISBN10: 0415933951
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2003-03-07
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Marie-Antoinette is one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in all of French history. Married to the heir to the French throne at age fourteen, Marie-Antoinette was at the center of public attention during the final tumultuous years of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. For a variety of reasons explored in this volume - all of which revolved around her gender - Marie-Antoinette came to represent the monarchy as it came under increasing attack. As both a woman and queen, she became a privileged site of the political contestation and criticism that characterized the end of the eighteenth century in France. Rather than retell the story of her life, the contributors to this volume reveal how crucial political and cultural contests were enacted "on the body of the queen" and on the complex identity of Marie-Antoinette. They explore the difficulties of Marie-Antoinette's position as a woman, a foreigner, and a queen in the final decades of the eighteenth century and help us to understandthe waves of pornography and accusations of lesbianism, incest, and treason launched against her. Taken together, these essays suggest that it is precisely because Marie-Antoinette represented the contradictions in the social, political and gender systems of her era that, through her, we can both learn about the French past and shed new light on questions of gender, sexuality, and female power that continue to trouble us today.

Table of Contents

Credits	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction Not Another Biography of Marie-Antoinette!	1	(15)
Dena Goodman
A Select Chronology of Marie-Antoinette's Life	16	(2)
Biographical Sketches of Principal Figures in the Life of Marie-Antoinette	18	(7)
Hapsburg Letters: The Disciplinary Dynamics of Epistolary Narrative in the Correspondence of Maria Theresa and Marie-Antoinette	25	(20)
Larry Wolff
The Portrait of the Queen	45	(28)
Mary D. Sheriff
The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785-1786): The Case of the Missing Queen	73	(26)
Sarah Maza
The Heroine of the Crime: Marie-Antoinette in Pamphlets	99	(18)
Chantal Thomas
The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution	117	(22)
Lynn Hunt
Pass as a Woman, Act Like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution	139	(32)
Elizabeth Colwill
Ambiguous Identities: Marie-Antoinette and the House of Lorraine from the Affair of the Minuet to Lambesc's Charge	171	(28)
Thomas E. Kaiser
Marie-Antoinette Obsession	199	(40)
Terry Castle
``We're Just Little People, Louis'': Marie-Antoinette on Film	239	(14)
Laura Mason
Terrorizing Marie-Antoinette	253	(20)
Pierre Saint-Amand
Afterword Eating Cake: The (Ab)uses of Marie-Antoinette	273	(18)
Susan S. Lanser
Notes on Contributors	291	(4)
Index	295