Of Beauties, Beasts, and Rousseau: Tracing the Birth of the Domestic Mother in Enlightenment France

Abstract

Coming out of the salon culture of the eighteenth century, women in France had a reasonable amount of autonomy. By the end of the Enlightenment, however, their prescribed role in society was strictly to be wives and mothers, tending to the cares of their households. This thesis seeks to explore the nature of this transition from one notion of femininity to another as well as to determine its causes, using two versions of La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) from 1740 and 1756 in conjunction with Rousseau’s Lettre sur les spectacles and Emile to trace the movement.