Dr. Jennifer Tamas is an Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University. She earned her Licence, Maîtrise, and Doctorat at Université Paris IV Sorbonne and holds a PhD from Stanford University. Dr. Tamas’s research interests include Feminist theory, Theater and Performance Theory, the Eloquence of Silence, the Rhetoric of Human Rights, and Ghosts and Mourning and Motherhood and Childhood in Old Regime France.

At this event, Dr. Tamas will introduce the research behind her new book, “Au NON des femmes. Libérer nos classiques du regard masculin” (Paris, Seuil, 2023). In this monograph, Tamas investigates how the “male gaze” prevailed in establishing the French classics and their reception. By selecting authors deemed essential to our literary heritage (patrimoine culturel) and by erasing the works of women writers, the patriarchal gaze also undervalued female agency in well-known works of fiction such as Andromaque, La Princesse de Clèves or Little Red Riding Hood. Her close reading of early modern memoirs, fairy tales, novels, and plays reveals that many female refusals (be they historical or fictional) remain obscured.

At this lecture, open to all Pitt faculty, students, and staff, Tamas will engage in a close reading and analysis of Madame de Villeneuve’s version of Beauty and the Beast (1740) to reveal the modes of female resistance and consent present in this “first modern version” of the literary fairy tale. Tamas’s reading of Beauty and the Beast as a case study will introduce the broader contributions of her book, which sheds light women’s resistance at a time when galanterie was at once a means of seduction and an ideal shaped by both men and women. If nowadays galanterie is under attack and if the #MeToo movement has brought questions of female agency and consent to the fore, this book retraces an “archive of refusal” as a possible source of inspiration to invigorate feminist discourse and change our reception of the French canon. Surprisingly, heroines of the Grand Siècle can empower us with accounts of their struggle and help us reclaim an undervalued literary matrimoine.