Genséric by Antoinette Deshoulières: listening again to forgotten tragic voices

Abstract

Antoinette Deshoulières’s classical tragedy Genséric, written and performed in 1680, has recently emerged from obscurity thanks to the scholarship of Perry Gethner (1993) and, subsequently, Aurore Evain, Perry Gethner, and Henriette Goldwyn (2006). Embracing Perry Gethner’s view that Deshoulières, by presenting a tragedy of particularly bleak pessimism, opened up a third tragic path, we propose a new hypothesis to explain the play’s failure: a re-examination through the lens of gender under the Ancien Régime. In our view, Genséric appears to be a tragedy of disenchantment experienced by the author herself and by women of the late seventeenth century. We argue that Deshoulières gives voice to a tragic sensibility that was previously unheard, a distinctly feminine one rooted in rejected “noes”, akin to the modern tragic voice that would later articulate the failure of language in centuries to come. Our work follows in the footsteps of Éliane Viennot and the SIEFAR (Société Internationale pour l’Étude des Femmes sous l’Ancien Régime), drawing specifically on the research of Linda Timmermans, Jennifer Tamas, and Jean-Marie Domenach.