A ninfa do leque: uma história da coquete na literatura inglesa da Restauração à Bèlle Époque

Abstract

The purpose of the thesis is to build a genealogy of coquetry in English literature from the 1660 s, decade in which the term coquette was imported from France by the restored English monarchy, until the Belle Époque right before the First World War which would bring the end of the empires and the end of an ideological preponderance of the aristocratic culture in Europe. The coquette stereotype, its relevance and uses in the narratives are analyzed historically through its three most characteristic symbols: the fan, the mirror and the mask. I endeavor to construct an allegorical trajectory which begins with the coquette s début in the Restoration drama, goes to its fall from the stage to the novel whose dominium belonged, at least since Pamela, to the domestic woman who would instruct the readers in the new sentimental morality. Through its upheavals in tragedies or moral reforms between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the coquette comes to its decadent although remarkable farewell during the last decades of the Age of Beauty. Between the plays The Way of the World (1700) and Lady Windermere s Fan (1893), and the novels Pamela, Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair and Zuleika Dobson, I study the coquette as a dubious figure and as the representation of the Nietzschean will to power within the narratives in the transitional period between the aristocratic rhetoric founded on the one-sex model and the bourgeois rhetoric founded on the two-sex model.