Mocking Andromeda in Julia Constance Fletcher’s The Fantasticks (1900)
The early 2000s, Catherine Delyfer observes, saw unprecedented scholarly interest in the fin-de-siècle’s ‘more conflicted women artists, essayists, poets, and novelists, whose works often broach New Woman themes but from an aloof, highly literary angle, foregrounding aesthetic issues and complex gen...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2022-10-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/11924 |
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| Summary: | The early 2000s, Catherine Delyfer observes, saw unprecedented scholarly interest in the fin-de-siècle’s ‘more conflicted women artists, essayists, poets, and novelists, whose works often broach New Woman themes but from an aloof, highly literary angle, foregrounding aesthetic issues and complex gendered perspectives’ (Delyfer 14). This characterization perfectly describes the writer Julia Constance Fletcher (1853-1938). Her writing constitutes such production, consistently arguing that social custom inhibits women’s choices or makes it more difficult for them to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. Contrary to Victorian stereotypes of the New Woman, Fletcher often made her feminist arguments with humour. A particularly aloof and arch intervention in fin-de-siècle gender politics is Fletcher’s stage comedy The Fantasticks (1900). An adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1894 comedy Les Romanesques, The Fantasticks has attracted hardly any scholarly attention. However, when read alongside Fletcher’s earlier published writings, it appears to apply risky humor to decidedly feminist ends. Specifically, The Fantasticks deploys a comic situation to mock what Fletcher elsewhere in her corpus identifies as the Andromeda myth: the pervasive cultural narrative wherein a woman seems to need a man to rescue her and is expected to marry her rescuer. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |