The Poetics of Female Resistance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

The present paper is an attempt to study the female quest for freedom in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night from a French feminist perspective. Indeed, Mary Tyrone resorts to body language as a form of resistance against gender and cultural confinement. French feminism will be deployed to understand female non-verbal subversive strategies. Luce Irigaray argues that language is male-dominated and male discourse misrepresents women. Accordingly, body language can be interpreted as a silent form of female resistance against patriarchal hegemony. It is the case of Mary who is irritated because of the male gaze and she uses madness as a silent language of resistance against female and ethnic stereotypes. Mary is a rebellious woman who defies her three men for being indifferent about her dilemma of disillusionment with the institution of marriage. She is treated as a wife, a mother or a daughter and she is often assigned the role of ‘the Angel in the House.’ French feminism will be used to understand the way O’Neill reshapes female identity and he calls for not linking female identity to the social roles. The aim is to study the non-verbal communication, the behavioural, kinetic, gestural and psychological profile of Mary. The paper will also focus on the hardships Mary faces and the ways she reconstructs female identity. The paper draws on the French feminist arguments about female madness as a form of resistance and it criticizes the conventional claim about madness as s form of weakness.

The Poetics of Female Resistance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

The present paper is an attempt to study the female quest for freedom in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night from a French feminist perspective. Indeed, Mary Tyrone resorts to body language as a form of resistance against gender and cultural confinement. French feminism will be deployed to understand female non-verbal subversive strategies. Luce Irigaray argues that language is male-dominated and male discourse misrepresents women. Accordingly, body language can be interpreted as a silent form of female resistance against patriarchal hegemony. It is the case of Mary who is irritated because of the male gaze and she uses madness as a silent language of resistance against female and ethnic stereotypes. Mary is a rebellious woman who defies her three men for being indifferent about her dilemma of disillusionment with the institution of marriage. She is treated as a wife, a mother or a daughter and she is often assigned the role of ‘the Angel in the House.’ French feminism will be used to understand the way O’Neill reshapes female identity and he calls for not linking female identity to the social roles. The aim is to study the non-verbal communication, the behavioural, kinetic, gestural and psychological profile of Mary. The paper will also focus on the hardships Mary faces and the ways she reconstructs female identity. The paper draws on the French feminist arguments about female madness as a form of resistance and it criticizes the conventional claim about madness as s form of weakness.

Book Reviews

Lisa Greenwald, Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women's Liberation Movement (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Eric T. Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Kathleen Keller, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

Book Reviews

Lisa Greenwald, Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).Eric T. Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).Kathleen Keller, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

Continental Philosophy of Music

This chapter begins by questioning the distinction between “analytic” (anglophone mainstream) and “continental” (mainland European) philosophy. It then traces ideas and movements of thought that have figured prominently in continental philosophy of music. These have their source in German post-Kantian idealism and its descendants, the latter taking different forms in Germany and France. Among them, mostly coming via literary theory, are the musical applications of Marxism, phenomenology, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, Deleuzean anti-metaphysics, and Alain Badiou’s mathematically based dialectic of being and event. The chapter surveys ongoing debates within the field, as between proponents of musical analysis and those, like deconstructionists or New Musicologists, who challenge their approach on jointly theoretical and ideological grounds, often concerning tonality and/or “organic form.” The chapter goes on to suggest future critical-creative directions for continentally oriented philosophy of music.

Commodification and Objectification of Women in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: New French Feminism’s Critique

New French feminism asserts that the structured deprivation of women has its core in language. A society governed by the Symbolic order views women through patriarchal lenses and considers them as verbal constructs. Such representations reflect the cultural views of society. This paper uses the psychoanalytic and language theories of new French feminism to explore the depictions of women in The awakening and The golden notebook to identify the representations that subjugate, exclude, and repress them from selfhood. The analysis is more of a textual interaction than sociological, with emphasis on the use of patriarchal language in creating the woman. While The awakening and The golden notebook seem to confirm the representations of the woman as an object, a deficient binary opposite of the male and nothing more than a caregiver and sex provider, this study foregrounds the underlying voices of the texts sceptical of the representations. Both texts question these representations implying that the arbitrariness of language highlights the dichotomy of ascribing fixed and negative identities to the female; hence, patriarchal language is defective.

La Fronde’s feminist chronicles. Feminist Associative movementis in the turn-of-the century Paris = Las crónicas feministas de La Fronde. Asociacionismo femenino en un París intersecular

Resumen: La Fronde (1897-1905), fundada por Marguerite Durand (1864-1936), fue un proyecto donde sólo participaban mujeres que, con salarios análogos a sus equivalentes masculinos, se encargaban de su redacción, administración y distribución. Las temáticas que se trataban confluían en la mejora de las condiciones del colectivo femenino en la sociedad francesa y la sección “Chronique féministe” abordaba todas aquellas cuestiones relacionadas con la denuncia de las injusticias sufridas por las mujeres, la lucha por sus derechos y los proyectos de consecución de un estado de ciudadanía plena. Estas crónicas nos permiten, además, conocer qué asociaciones existían en ese París intersecular, así como el posicionamiento del diario feminista frente a éstas y otras habidas en el extranjero.Palabras clave: La Fronde, feminismo francés, asociacionismo de mujeres, crónicas periodísticas.Abstract: La Fronde (1897-1905) was founded by Marguerite Durand (1864-1936) as a women-only project in which women were paid the same wage as men, and were in charge of writing, managing and distributing it. The topics covered touched on the improvement of women's conditions in French society and the section “Chronique féministe” covered all topics related to reporting injustices suffered by women, fighting for their rights and helping women achieve full citizens' status. Moreover, those chronicles enable us to understand what associations existed at the turn of the century in Paris, as well as the positioning of the feminist daily towards them and others from abroad.Keywords: La Fronde, French Feminism, women’s associations, journalistic chronicle.