What is it about?
Relations between woman body and State of France in Restoration
Featured Image
Why is it important?
It's a new work about représentations of menopause in literature.
Perspectives
In La Vieille Fille, Balzac relates sexuality and the reproductive capacities of the main characters to the situation in France in 1816. The fable is allegorical: Rose Cormon portrays a France that is still fertile, provided that she finds a partner who is also fertile and sexually strong enough. Balzac also refers to the hopes for a legitimate monarchical renaissance in France; as a result, for the reader in 1836 who knows what happened to the monarchy, the novel is both serious and comical. Balzac uses the medical knowledge of his time about menopause and combines it with older beliefs in a craft that is both fun and attentive to the female being
eleonore reverzy
Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Que s’est-il passé en 1816? Lecture de La Vieille Fille de Balzac: Essai de gynéco-histoire, Nineteenth Century French Studies, January 2019, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/ncf.2019.0013.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
