Terrorizing Marie Antoinette

Abstract

In order to understand Marie Antoinette's peculiar situation during the French Revolution and the negative political representations of her, we might consider the more recent case of Hillary Clinton. Amazingly, despite the two hundred years that separate these two figures, they illustrate that political conceptions of women are still subject to the same collective fears and anxieties. The hatred trained upon Hillary Clinton during the last presidential election was reproduced in the very same language as the discourse of infamy that sent Queen Marie Antoinette to the guillotine on 16 October 1793. In fact, the fear of women in power, of woman's empowerment, might be designated the Marie Antoinette syndrome. This syndrome entails three characteristics: (1) the demonization and cloning of the woman's influence; (2) the accessibility of the woman's genitalia as the very organ of influence; and (3) a seizing of the woman's body by way of sexual appropriation. My intention in comparing the two women is to demonstrate how ineluctably the body is invested in the political domain, how the entire symbolic system of politics is articulated by using the body-here, the bodies of two women at the site of power, women destined to exhibit a variety of political signs. Interpreting the reception of these signs is a way of probing more deeply the political culture in which these characters evolve. In each of the two cases under discussion, the woman's influence on her husband is judged nefarious and dangerous. When the right-wing press (whose criticisms of candidate Bill Clinton's wife gave the impression of a concerted attack upon recent political gains by women) stopped