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Dissertation Information for Patricia Ann Tilburg

NAME:
- Patricia Ann Tilburg

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- Debora L. Silverman

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Lynn A. Hunt
- Emily Apter

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Reimagining the Republican ideal: Work, art, and the body in Colette's Belle Epoque

Abstract: This dissertation explores the cultural implications of the French Third Republic's educational system through the prism of one woman's life and work, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954). As a product of the sweeping instructional revolution that secularized and modernized French education at the end of the nineteenth century, Colette provides a means of uncovering and describing the "mental equipment" with which a generation of schoolchildren approached adult questions of work, physical health, and artistic production. I argue that in combining a glorification of hard work and traditional gender roles with a radical call to cultivate the active life of the mind and body, the Third Republican morale laïque taught children to develop their physical and interior selves in important new ways. I analyze the textbooks, pedagogical methods, and circles of republican sociability in the 1870s and '80s, particularly in Colette's rural village, and demonstrate how dynamic pedagogical innovations and a rich associative life transformed official rhetoric into a powerful cultural initiative.

Colette's Belle Époque literary and music-hall careers exemplify the way that the republican morale laïque could and did order students' adult experiences. The sexual and social liberation of Colette's adult life was far from the republican ideal envisioned by 1880s pedagogues. In many ways, however, Colette epitomized the republican curriculum's most fundamental values. In her life, pantomime performance, and literature, Colette reformulated the complex figurations of métier , physical fitness, and moral rectitude she had learned in the école laïque . She drew on the potent cultural resources of her republican childhood to offer a new model of French femininity, one that found honor not in religious devotion or motherhood, but in paid manual craft. By exploring the broader realms of literature, theater, and culture physique in which she moved, I show that Colette's pursuit of a just accord between artistic expression, honest labor, and domestic order reflected the Belle Époque's own negotiation of these issues. Far from an eccentric anomaly, Colette embodied the intellectual and moral contradictions of a charged moment of cultural change in France, and exemplified the subversive possibilities of the republican laic moral structure.

MPACT Scores for Patricia Ann Tilburg

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calculated 2008-08-18 13:20:34

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Students under Patricia Ann Tilburg

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None