Les héroïnes littéraires sous l’Ancien Régime, entre femme vraie de la nature et vraie nature de la femme

Résumé

Female heroes in Ancien Regime literature: Between women true by nature and the true nature of women

Women have always been the object of a dual perception, included in a male-dominated world or excluded from it according to social and religious considerations. This paper analyses the exclusion/inclusion of women in 17^th and 18^th century literature in France. The image of female condition in works of the end of 17^th century and the end of 18^th century is analysed in both theatre as a “public” genre written for a collective reception and novel as an “intimate” genre written for individual reading. We can see a social exclusion of women in the 17^th century, when they were considered as passionate beings forced to be tamed for the sake of their social duty. In the 18^th century, they tend to be included in male world thanks to their own intelligence and natural way of being against sophisticated social behaviours. Yet, despite this victory due to a change in mentalities, women still remain in the shade of men: if classic writers imposed on women the duty to respect transcendental order, Enlightenment writers simply but thoroughly imposed them to respect natural order.