Corneilles Horace and Davids Oath of the Horatii

This book views Jacques-Louis Davids pre-Revolutionary Oath of the Horatii as the realization of political and cultural gender struggle and goes back to antiquity and to Pierre Corneilles seventeenth-century play Horace to trace major antecedents of Davids work. The play begins with Livys account of gender strife in the Roman family of the Horatians. As Horace returns from battle against Alba, he is bitterly reproached by his sister Camille for slaying her Alban fianc. Outraged, Horace kills her and is subsequently tried by the Roman state and freed. Corneilles 1640 version of the tale, Horace, appeared during the regency of Queen Anne of Austria, a time that favored the emergence of proto-feminist literature. Written in this atmosphere, Camille plays a powerful role: she thunderously denounces war and state power. Alas, this pro-woman ambiance did not last. As eighteenth-century Frances sense of moral crisis rose, gender relations became more embattled. The greater presence of women in society evoked a reaction toward gender separation, as medical theorists circumscribed womens nature within sexual and maternal roles. As hysteria and the vapors became common female afflictions, Enlightenment philosophes puzzled over the paradox of womens condition. The conflict over effeminate rococo and masculine neo-classical art illustrates these tensions. Davids milieu embraced a severer Roman, less feminocentric aesthetic. His preparatory sketches for The Oath exhibit hesitation as to how to frame his version of the story, but his final work diminishes womens stature, not only in the myth, but for the revolutionary generations conceptualization of the republic. The works huge impact reinforced a gender history in which womens place in the modern state was decisively relegated to its margins.