Gender and the nation: Madame de Staël or Italy

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, female liberty and Italian liberty become synonymous. Madame de Staël's 1807 novel, Corinne ou l'Italie, stands out as perhaps the earliest, and most evocative, equation between the feminine and Italy, their common political repression and liberation. In this article, I argue that even in Corinne, female liberty and national liberty are fundamentally at odds. Corinne makes explicit the tension between the idea of female liberty, and a national ideal of the self-abnegating or “social” qualities of “woman”, and the masculinity of nineteenth-century bourgeois notions of national emancipation and national identity.