Women’s tragedy in the romantic age: questioning english, italian and spanish theatre and drama from a feminist perspective

Abstract

This thesis aims at rediscovering women Romantic playwrights in English, Italian and Spanish literature, and their tragedies, analysed through a feminist critical approach. Starting from a comparative study of the Romantic Age and Romantic women’s writings in Great Britain, Italy and Spain, an overview of female writers’ role and contribution to the development of Romantic literature will be presented. This fundamental examination of the Romantic socio-cultural context will be followed by an in-depth analysis of the Romantic theatrical environment in the three different countries, deepening the issue of women’s roles as dramatists, actresses, managers, theorists and critics. More specifically, the relationship between women playwrights and the stage will be tackled, investigating how these women managed to appropriate the “high” genre of tragedy. A focus on the changes that tragedy underwent during the Romantic Age will be offered, so to explore in detail in which ways women challenged, coped with or took possession of both the old and the new canons of the genre. The core of the thesis will include an overview of English, Italian and Spanish women dramatists and a brief analysis of some of their most popular tragedies. The tragedies analysed have been chosen according to themes in common, in order to demonstrate if and how these women used the pen and the stage to address specific issues and to affirm their own agency and subjectivity, subverting or negotiating the norms imposed by patriarchal society. Among female playwrights’ dramatic production, three tragedies have been selected, one for each literature, in order to be presented and thoroughly investigated through a close reading which takes into account a variety of aspects: historical context, gender representation, issues of otherness and language. The respective three dramatists will also be examined in order to contextualise their tragedies and the themes they tackled within their biographical circumstances and previous literary production. By doing so, it will be possible to highlight the reasons that led them to enter the male domain of tragedy, the “high” genre par excellence, regarded as strictly masculine. This investigation will help us understand if the choice of writing tragedy was made as a conscious and voluntary act of empowerment aimed at asserting themselves in the public realm, at denouncing their forced submission and at recounting their own story through their own voices. It will also be underlined how and why these female playwrights who lived approximately in the same historical period and were influenced by the same cultural movement—although in different countries—employed tragedy to address similar or different issues, and which consequences they faced. This analysis will be conducted through a feminist critical methodology, that includes historical, literary, philosophical and political theories developed in the last decades, adjusted and contextualised so that they could be a useful tool in the Romantic literary context.