War Languages:Feminists as warrior women

Vesa Matteo Piludu

University of Helsinki

Department of Art Research

Novellist - Activist

In 19th Century France, two types of women writers stood out: the novelist who intertwined her political view within the story, and the political activist who outrightly fought women's oppression in society and the household

Negative ”warrior woman”: the feminist

In 1848, Edouard de Beaumont created a series of images called Les Vesuviennes, which depicted the Parisian women as "women warriors" or feminists

Beaumont used a type of role reversal to shock the viewer

Beaumont'sBanquet Femino-Socialiste

women's freedom was associated with the destruction of family

Irony: a pregnant women is, according to Beaumont, protesting against the family

La Femme Libre ?

Octave Tasaert's Le Roman, 1852

A proper 19th century woman ?

Octave Tasaert's Le Roman, 1852

it expressed the faults of the modern woman

Rather than tending to her maternal and spousal duties …

the woman "mindlessly sponge absorbing dangerous lessons from novels."

Bergman-Carton, Janis. The Woman of Ideas in French Art, 1830-1848. Yale University Press, New Haven 1995. Page 111.

fire and the darkness all around her only reinforces the sinful motif

Fire: hell, passion

Madame de Stael: Exiled for a novel

Madame de Stael wrote the book Delphine.

A story of one woman fighting the social codes of France in an attempt to gain individual freedom.

Amongst other topics, the book addressed divorce and social unacceptance of spinsterhood.

Napolean reacted to her book and her political views by exiling Stael from France

George Sand , novellist

I solemnly vow … that I shall raise woman from her abject position, both through my self and my writing,

God will help me!...let female slavery also have its Spartacus.

That shall I be, or perish in the attempt."

George Sand in a letter to Frederic Girerd, 1837

Congres Masculino-Foemino-LiteraireAuthor unknown

The woman on the right is probably George Sand

She was notorious for wearing men's clothing

common assumptions: women writers were rude, vulgar and masculine women

1836: Gazette des Femmes

the Gazette was written by an elite upper class of both male and female bourgeois

Nadar's Pictorial Biography of George Sand(Barry, Joseph. Infamous Woman: the life of George Sand Doubleday & Co, New York 1977)

Flora Tristan: author and date ?

active in the feminist movement in the mid 1830s, arguing for divorce and against gender constraints

she saw herself as "the woman messiah”

Flora Tristan was never actually arrested

she was indeed under the surveillance of the police for the last few years of her life

Christ-like stance