Gender, architecture, and self-construction in the works of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (1627-1693)

Self-construction---that process by which individuals deploy strategies to affirm subjectivities that both reproduce and/or reinforce constructs of gender, class, and ethnicity, and that, at times, can resist, challenge, and/or renegotiate them---is most often manifested in bodily and discursive expressions. However, little work has examined it through artistic constructions such as architectural artifacts. In architecture, self-construction can best be examined, first, by analyzing, in discourses of representational architecture and spatial distribution, the ways in which meanings ascribed to forms and spaces relate to constructs of gender and class in a specific period, and, then, by examining how the actual forms and spaces of a certain building have been built according to these constructs or not.;This dissertation works out such an approach by examining early modern treatises of architecture and actual architectural projects commissioned by early modern women in France. I focus on projects undertaken by Mlle de Montpensier (1627-1693), first-cousin to Louis XIV and the wealthiest unmarried woman of Europe in that period. Although mostly remembered by historians for her participation in the civil war of the Fronde, Montpensier was the author of a memoir, several novels, and a series of letters in which she proposed an alternative form of life without marriage. She also commissioned the construction of three chateaux: Saint-Fargeau, in the center of France; Eu, in Normandy; and Choisy-le-roy, a town near Paris.;This dissertation lies at the intersection of two disciplines, architecture and literature. As I examine Montpensier's castles as though they were texts, and her texts as if they were architectural artifacts, I argue that Montpensier enlisted her chateaux and her writings as tools to assert a number of complementary and conflicting notions of female autonomy and power, an ambivalent but evolving position in relation to marriage, and, at the same time, constructs of rank that ultimately were more central to her self-construction than the period's discourses of gender.