What is it about?
In Mozart's 1789 opera Così fan tutte, the two heroines (sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi) face sexual harassment and assault from their romantic interests, the soldiers Guglielmo and Ferrando. Because the opera is labelled as a comedy, these instances of assault are often not taken seriously and played for laughs, even in 21st-century performances. This article adds historical context by looking at dominant 18th-century views on sexual assault and consent, while also putting these male-centric views in conversation with the counter-cultural, proto-feminist writings of Mary Wollstonecraft.
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This page is a summary of: "Thus Do All Women": Comedy, Sentimentality, Ambiguity, and a Così fan tutte for the #MeToo Era, Women and Music A Journal of Gender and Culture, January 2022, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/wam.2022.0002.
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