Marie Antoinette

In 1933 the Austrian writer , Stefan Zweig , put forward a new proposition "Marie-Antoinette was neither the great saint of . [the Bourbon Restoration] nor yet the great whore of the Revolution , but a mediocre , an average woman not exceptionally able nor yet exceptionally foolish . devoid of any vigorous wish to do good and of the remotest inclination to do evil the average woman of yesterday , today , tomorrow " Although these words sound sexist today , the original German title Marie-Antoinette : Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters , makes it clear that Zweig was more concerned with charting transformations in

the Queen 's character and perceptions of that character than perpetuating negative female stereotypes . That Marie-Antoinette 's character had undergone any sort of transformation during her eighteen-year reign would have been a new idea to French readers of the Third Republic royalist and republican alike . While the former group was determined to use the grim facts of the Queen 's imprisonment and execution as evidence of the cruel and inhuman nature of republican government , the latter had always found it useful to play up her excesses in to affirm the decadence of monarchy as an institution . For all his determination to find truth "somewhere near the middle " of these opposed points of view Zweig effectively constructed a new myth for Marie-Antoinette--that of a well-meaning but incompetent monarch unprepared for one of the most tumultuous periods in French political history . Indeed , so popular was this myth that its resonance can be felt to this day , most notably in editorials accompanying the two hundredth anniversary of the start of the French Revolution in 1989

Chantal Sophia added a crucial dimension to these bicentennial discussions in The Wicked Queen : The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette , a translation of the French original published in 1989 , which deals with the history of verbal and visual representation of the Queen . The question of Marie-Antoinette 's personal character intentions and historical responsibility is set aside rather , the demonization of the consort 's public persona as revealed in clandestinely circulated pamphlets is at issue . Why should we concern ourselves with these printed fantasies about the Queen 's sexual life and tirades against her political influence ? The Introduction is quite clear : freed from the ideological investments of early twentieth-century pamphlet scholars , Henri d 'Almeras and Hector Fleishmann , whose respective analyses served as platforms for perpetuating royalist and misogynist viewpoints , these rare and inaccessible documents add more pieces to the puzzle of the psychology , methods , and goals of the French revolutionaries

Sophia declares her theoretical inspiration to be Roland Barthes Mythologies (Paris , 1957 , a compendium of essays which brought Structuralist theories of the production of meaning in language to the analysis of cultural practice . Barthes showed that because a visual sign (an image ) like a verbal sign (a word ) can have multiple meanings , what becomes invested in the sign is not ultimate reality , but a certain idea of reality . Both the irony and danger of myth is that it supports a specific ideology (with regard...