| One of the lasting legacies of the Third Republic is its sweeping secularizing mission. My dissertation examines the figure of the devoutly Catholic woman -- or devote -- in this context, from the beginnings of the Third Republic to the 1905 separation of church and state. Applying an interdisciplinary approach using novels of Balzac, the Goncourt brothers, Zola, and popular novelists, visual representations, medical treatises, essays, funeral remembrances, personal letters, and other sources, I explore representations of the devote as they reflected social, political, and gendered anxieties about the tenacity of republican institutions, the role of women in private and public, the reach of Catholic ideas to French citizens, and the differences between men and women during the period.;The devote was variously described as falsely pious, naive, hyper-sexed, a conniving prude, a model housewife or anorexic, neglectful mother. The devote -- real or imagined -- challenged power relationships in the domestic sphere and made strange bedfellows of some anticlerical and Catholic critics alike, while female religiosity intersected with taxonomies of new pathologies, particularly hysteria. Throughout this period, an anxiety about ascertaining female sincerity made it seemingly impossible to reconcile spiritual life with reason, although some Catholics attempted to do so. Focusing on the case of the devout Comtesse d'Adhemar, who, in her writings during final decades of the nineteenth century sought to reconcile Catholicism with the democratic order, I explore how the devote could be at once progressive (using the tools of modernity and proclaiming a better sort for women, including expanded political rights) and traditional (remaining faithful to a submissive, domestic role, committed to essentialist ideas of female "nature"). Whether as caricature or historical case study, the devote challenges our bifurcated view of religious and gendered questions and is a point of entry into a more complex examination of fin-de-siecle society. |
