Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orléans: Portraits of a Modern Woman

Author: Goodman, Elise

Source: Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Volume 29, 2007 , pp. 125-139(15)

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Abstract:

Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d'Orléans (1652–1722) was one of the most fascinating and individualistic members of the French royal family during the waning years of the Grand Siècle. She forged her distinctive identities through portraiture, which in turn was marked by a variety of cultural and gender issues. This article treats some of the colourful pictorial personae that Elisabeth Charlotte assumed in her painted and engraved portraits. As opposed to the conventionally feminised and beautified images of most elite women of the period, the distinctive portraits of Elisabeth Charlotte are variously masculinised, transsexualised, and at times shockingly realistic, in accordance with her transgressive epistolary self-descriptions. A physically unattractive woman and a marginalized personality, Madame consciously and deliberately violated normative gender roles and eschewed conventional patterns of beauty merely by being herself 'monstrously fat' and 'hideously ugly'. Her visual portraits challenge these conventions of beauty as well. In Hyacinthe Rigaud's state portrait (1713) she is rotund, ageing, and stingingly direct; in André Bouys's likeness (c. 1700) she brandishes a pearl, a sign of her longings for celibacy; and in gravures de mode, she is a cross-dressed gender transgressor who all her life 'regretted being a woman'.

Keywords: FRENCH PORTRAITURE; GENDER; ELISABETH CHARLOTTE; DUCHESSE D'ORLEANS

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/175226907X234084

Publication date: 2007-08-01

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