Visual Myths of Female Identity in Eighteenth- Century France

Abstract

Eighteenth-century France experienced a major shift in the position of women, with new value placed on domestic virtue. Analysis of seven representative eighteenth-century French paintings and prints suggests how cultural myths of female identity variously served to uphold and subvert the political, social, and economic status quo. The female gender continues to be reduced to the status of the Other, but now the female Other is increasingly portrayed in a domesticated and privatized way, rather than through gutted classical myths. Non-aristocratic concepts penetrated aristocratic culture through visual art. Spinning and reading become signs which identify middle class females with private domesticity. While feudal folktales and traditional gender inversion images remain popular, representations of poor women produced for privileged audiences begin to change in important ways. For example, the plates of Diderot's Encyclopédie suggest that wage labor outside the home is neither boring nor deforming; the large tractable force of cheap labor demanded by modernity's dreams of rationalist efficiency, new technology, and the industrial age appear in the Enryclopédie plates.