Sophie Mereau's Authorial Masquerades and the Subversion of Romantic Poesie

Hermeneutic understanding purports to penetrate a spiritual depth imbedded within texts. Historically when a subject's engagement with a text has not attained hermeneutic insight that encounter has been characterized as a mere performance, an unsuccessful attempt to empathize with a content or character not wholly one's own. In the following paper, I wish to investigate how masquerade disrupts an aesthetics that predicates meaning on its own ability to invoke a reality behind the surface of representation. The early fiction and late translations of Sophie Mereau demonstrate that literary masquerade served as a strategy for women writers to counter the gendered ontology implicit in early Romantic aesthetics. (DP)