Transylvania seniors journey to Paris to highlight neglected French writer

Two Transylvania University seniors visited Paris this previous summer season to immerse themselves within the story of a protofeminist playwright executed in the course of the Reign of Terror.

Caroline Host and Harper Knox took benefit of a faculty analysis grant to review Olympe de Gouges, writer of the 1791 “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen.”

Under the mentorship of professor Simonetta Cochis, their initiatives will culminate in a play and paper presentation. Host is engaged on a efficiency concerning the occasions main as much as de Gouges’ beheading in the course of the revolution, and Knox is writing a senior thesis on “The Birth of the Citoyenne — Olympe de Gouges and the Legacy of the Feminine Enlightenment.”

The thought started in Cochis’ French I class when Host, lengthy fascinated by that nation’s revolution, talked about wanting to jot down a play concerning the period. “Madame Cochis is the entire reason we were able to go,” stated Host, who’s majoring in writing, rhetoric and communication together with English. After Host recruited Knox — a fellow French Revolution fanatic — the pair crafted complementary analysis proposals round de Gouges.

Host’s mission, “Playwriting in Paris: Characterizing the Life and Legacy of Olympe de Gouges during the Reign of Terror,” will embody a 15-minute, one-act monologue. The play portrays de Gouges’ closing evening in jail as she awaits phrase on her declare of being pregnant — a real-life plea that did not delay her execution.

The turning level for Host got here contained in the Conciergerie, the Revolutionary jail the place de Gouges was held. Standing within the very cell as soon as occupied by Marie Antoinette and later by de Gouges “forced me to think so much about the situation that Olympe was in,” she stated.

Host’s monologue will obtain a staged studying co-directed with senior theater main Stephanie Underwood and carried out by a Transylvania actress. Details will probably be introduced quickly.

Both Host’s and Knox’s initiatives are serving to deliver the underrecognized historic determine to gentle.

Knox famous the shortage of point out of de Gouges on the Musée Carnavalet historical past museum. Despite whole sections dedicated to the Enlightenment and Revolution, “there really was no mention of her at all.”

That absence displays how de Gouges is nearly all the time confined to “feminist history” relatively than remembered as a revolutionary or Enlightenment theorist in her personal proper, Knox continued. She plans to quickly current a thesis analyzing why de Gouges stays largely absent from mainstream French Revolution historiography.

Beyond analysis, the scholars walked the streets de Gouges knew, visited the location of her execution (immediately a busy plaza close to the Arc de Triomphe) and positioned the only historic marker in Paris that mentions her.

Both highlighted the journey’s transformative nature. “It’s one of those experiences that you’re going to be thinking about probably for the rest of your life,” stated Knox, a historical past main who works on the Mary Todd Lincoln House in Lexington. “I feel like I’ve come away a different person.”

Host agreed: “Because of Transylvania, it made it such an accessible trip for us.”

The David and Betty Jones grant coated almost all bills — airfare, housing, meals, museum admissions and analysis supplies — demonstrating the college’s dedication to faculty-mentored undergraduate analysis overseas.

“That’s the key part of the Transy experience,” Knox stated. “You do get to experience so much more than just the classroom.”