| This thesis examines representations of the evolving relationship of habitat and female inhabitant in postwar French literature and film. Composed of six chapters, it analyzes the active interplay between female protagonists and their domestic space. I argue that by the early 1960s, the house loses its traditional role as prime site of identity construction for female inhabitants, who began to appropriate exterior venues as the figurative equivalent of home. Consequently, the interplay between habitat and female inhabitant no longer functions directly, but instead as a triad of house, exterior venues and subject.;Each chapter promotes an argument for a semi-public sphere as an intermediary challenging the private/public dichotomy. I maintain that this notion of the semi-public calls for a rethinking of housing and consumer and leisure sites as parts of the same social sphere, resulting from an evolution of public and private rather than any particular transformation of physical space. My version of the semi-public sphere has its roots in the mid-nineteenth century when the bourgeois Parisian apartment-house distinguished itself from the newly established department stores and acceptable venues of public gathering such as public transportation, parks, tearooms and shopping districts. The birth of this social sphere surfaced once urban middle-class women started to circulate on a daily basis within exterior venues acceptable to customs of the time. The linking of the introduction of the grands magasins or department stores (1850s--60s) and the phenomenon of a flaneuse, as female counterpart to the nineteenth-century flaneur or dandy, comprises the origins of the semi-public sphere.;The dissertation examines film and literary texts alongside the presse feminine, tendencies in architecture and housing policy, and governmental policy regarding the condition des femmes. Principal analyses focus on films by Jacques Tati, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, and literary texts by Michel Butor, Christiane Rochefort and Annie Ernaux. |
