As Above So Below: Women in the Worldview and Studio Practice of Charles Perrault

This dissertation is a work of interpretation that offers a completely new way of reading Charles Perrault. It presents him as an iconographer whose fine arts projects situate women within a coherent worldview, and it reconstructs Perrault's working
methods as a designer. The study is divided into two parts: Part I establishes that it is reasonable to consider Perrault to be a designer who communicates using aesthetic strategies and via the fusion of word and image. Part II examines how Perrault situates women within his comprehensive vision for fine art, politics, and metaphysics by drawing upon the skills he developed in his design practice. In each of three chapters, one large-scale project based upon either
poetry or painting is compared to Perrault's best-known defense of women, L'Apologie des femmes (1694). The comparisons engage with critics who have come to conflicting conclusions about Perrault's views of women, and they reveal the progression of Perrault's ideas over the course of his career. The projects chosen for these
comparisons share a common unifying allegorical image that is expressed either poetically or visually: that of an ornamental garden. They demonstrate how Perrault mobilizes allegory and typology as aesthetic means of argumentation.This specifically aesthetic strategy employed for the debate concerning women is one that contrasts with
other contemporary writers (like Boileau and L'Héritier) and that has been neglected by scholars of Perrault and of the Querelle des femmes who focus upon the obvious topics of argument in various texts. Altogether, the thesis demonstrates that studying Perrault's
interdisciplinary design practice grants a more nearly accurate understanding of Perrault's stance on women's intrinsic value and their societal roles.