Heroines out of frame: tenacity and social violence in Cornélie, mère des Gracques and Les Amazones by Marie-Anne Barbier and Anne-Marie Du Boccage

Cornélie, mère des Gracques (1703) by Marie-Anne Barbier and Les Amazones (1749) by Anne-Marie Du Boccage stage heroines who exceed the institutional and symbolic frames in which classical French tragedy seeks to contain them. This article examines how the two playwrights construct two interdependent modalities of feminine action. The first is tenacity, a sustained fusion of resistance and resilience in which endurance becomes a form of political opposition. The second is social violence, which these heroines endure and then redirect against the order that inflicted it. Working from the verse of both tragedies and from their paratexts (Barbier’s preface and dedicatory epistle to the Princesse Palatine, and Du Boccage’s epistle ‘Aux Femmes’), the analysis reads Cornélie, Ménalippe, Orithie and Antiope against the period dramaturgy of Corneille’s Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique and d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre, and alongside the scholarship of James C. Scott, Johan Galtung and Anna Rosensweig. Particular attention is given to the distribution of the solitary scene across the two tragedies, which distinguishes a heroine’s deliberation from her pathos and marks the distance travelled in the forty-six years between the two premieres. This article offers the first sustained comparative reading of these two playwrights.