The Mechanical Song Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative

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Synopsis

Examining the privileged relation of women to the singing voice in nineteenth-century literary works, the author argues for an emerging identification between women and artifice in the period. Beginning with texts by Rousseau and Proust that show a link between nostalgia for the maternal voice and the writer's self, the book then turns to the psychoanalytic literature on the role of the voice in the formation of the psyche. In the process, it analyses feminist polemics on the maternal voice to show how voice and rhythm together form the matrices of the subject. The voice of the soprano occupied a special place in nineteenth-century operatic history, replacing the castrato voice as a sexless, angelic, ethereal source of pleasure for the opera-goer. The author shows how these qualities are identified with women's voices in literary texts by Sand, Balzac, du Maurier and Nerval.

Book details

Author:
Felicia Miller-Frank
ISBN:
9780804780759
Related ISBNs:
9780804723817
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Pages:
N/A
Reading age:
Not specified
Includes images:
No
Date of addition:
2022-05-26
Usage restrictions:
Copyright
Copyright date:
1995
Copyright by:
the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University 
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Categories:
Language Arts, Literature and Fiction