Gender/politics and the beautiful parricide : Beatrice Cenci as a nineteenth-century icon /
This study interrogates the nineteenth century's sustained fascination with the figure of Beatrice Cenci, a late-Renaissance Italian noblewoman executed for the murder of her allegedly incestuous father. Beatrice's story reached Anglo-American audiences via Percy Shelley's 1819 Gothic...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
2000.
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| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=731930481&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | This study interrogates the nineteenth century's sustained fascination with the figure of Beatrice Cenci, a late-Renaissance Italian noblewoman executed for the murder of her allegedly incestuous father. Beatrice's story reached Anglo-American audiences via Percy Shelley's 1819 Gothic drama, The Cenci, which incited phenomenal interest in la belle parricide and in a supposed portrait of her that quickly became one of Rome's most famous tourist attractions. The subsequent proliferation of "Beatrice" texts in literature and the visual arts perpetuated a trans-Atlantic "Cenci-mania" that extended into the early twentieth century. The central aim of this project is to trace the uneven ascent and decline of the Beatrice icon and to locate the various cultural factors that produced a persistent and widespread interest in an ambiguous female figure identified with the intra-familial crimes of incest and patricide. Literary and pictorial representations of Beatrice not only served as sensitive indices to ideology, but also participated in the convicted emergence of an increasingly democratic ethos. This survey of "Beatrice" art and literature foregrounds historical contexts and charts the changing sociopolitical values that shaped depictions of Beatrice over the course of nearly three centuries. The two opening chapters offer a revisionist account of the Cenci family history and analyze seventeenth and eighteenth century texts that used the Cenci narrative to address the volatile political controversy over absolutist rule. The two middle chapters examine a range of nineteenth-century treatments of Beatrice and highlight predominant race, class, and gender issues that came into play when the image of an aristocratic Italian Catholic woman was appropriated to mediate bourgeois tensions surrounding "unspeakable" patriarchal and filial transgressions. The final chapter delineates the ways in which the erratic deterioration of the Beatrice icon was facilitated by late nineteenth-century cultural transformations including the 1870 unification of Italy, the expansion of women's rights, and the advent of a post-Romantic aesthetic. This project encompasses an array of canonical and non-canonical writers and artists but gives special attention to the "Beatrice" figure in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edith Wharton. |
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| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: English". |
| Physical Description: | v, 308 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-297). |