De opkomst van de heldin. Vrouwelijk herschrijven en cultureel bewustzijn in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw
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2021-06-23
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nl
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The second half of the eighteenth century saw a rise in Dutch women writers who independently published their literary works and started to practise genres like the epic and the tragedy that stood in high esteem. Renaissance and classicist conventions required them to imitate (imitatio) and improve (aemulatio) classical narratives by adapting existing biblical and historical stories to the format of classical texts. Women writers often selected biblical and historical narratives in which women played an important role or they adapted stories in such a way that women became significant characters. This process is similar to the (post)modern strategy of “women’s rewriting”: the act of rewriting important cultural texts through the female perspective. By defining early modern women’s rewriting as a technique of cultural memory and placing it on a continuum of re-vision/demythologizing (destabilizing a text’s position in cultural memory) and mythical retelling/remythologizing (enforcing a text’s position in cultural memory), I elaborate on the existing research on rewriting in the early modern period from the perspectives of rewriting and cultural memory studies, broaden the scope of rewriting studies from merely literary rewritings to rewritings of historical sources, and provide a comprehensive and detailed analysis of two important exponents of early modern Dutch women’s rewritings: Anna van der Horst’s biblical epics De gevallen van Ruth (1764) and Debora (1769) and Lucretia van Merken’s historical tragedies Maria van Bourgondiën (1774), Sebille van Anjou (1786), Louize d’Arlac (1786) and Gelonide (1786). The rewritings all have a different position on the continuum from demythologizing to remythologizing: while Debora, Maria van Bourgondiën and Sebille van Anjou are closer to demythologizing, De gevallen van Ruth and Louize d’Arlac are closer to remythologizing. The case of Gelonide demonstrates that a certain amount of source material needs to be identifiable to properly characterize women’s rewriting as either demythologizing or remythologizing.
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Faculteit der Letteren