Women’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750)

Deliberating the Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women playwrights used their heroines as a vehicle through which to question traditional views on women. Author Theresa Kennedy argues that only the ’deliberative heroine,’ based on Enlightenment ideals-such as women’s ability to rationalize and the complex interplay between reason and sentiment-truly liberates female characters from a history of traditional roles.