Keywords:
Daumier, Caricature, Women and sport, Play in art, Lithograph
Abstract:
In his nearly 4,000 caricatures published between 1830 and 1870, appearing in the first illustrated satirical journals, Honoré Daumier provides a critical lens for viewing this chaotic time in French society. Most Daumier scholars concentrate on his overtly political attacks during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic or on his misogynistic lampooning of the growing women’s suffrage movement. In this article, we focus on a frequent (and overlooked) theme that runs through his oeuvre, the act of play, to discover new facets of those explorations. In our close readings of caricatures featuring popular games like billiards and dominoes, and sports like swimming, we find a consistent socio-political critique of bourgeois attitudes and practices coupled with a disdain for female participation as citizens. Moreover, we show how Daumier exploits the perceived playfulness of the medium in his multi-layered depictions of play, a self-reflexive gesture that illustrates the rich paradoxes of caricature.
About the author
Catherine J. L. Theobald (Brandeis University)
Catherine J. Lewis Theobald, Ph.D., is the Chair of Romance Studies and an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her research examines early modern and nineteenth-century European texts through the lens of word-image studies, concentrating on the ideas of portraiture, visuality, and illustration. In journals such as French Forum, Women in French Studies, and Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, she argues that the literary portrait, despite its reputation as a salon game, has an evolving presence in the nascent French novel. Many of her publications also address questions of identity, desire, and signification in illustrated novels of letters by authors like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frances Burney, and Françoise de Graffigny. Two recent articles in the journals Lumen and 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era explore print culture and propaganda surrounding technological marvels like the Montgolfier balloons and early European canal systems.
Alyssa N. Knudsen (University of Massachusetts)
Alyssa Knudsen is a second year Masters student in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her Master's thesis, provisionally titled 'Fantasy and Fetish: Representing l’indicible in Children’s Holocaust Literature,' examines how adults represent childhood in Holocaust fiction as a means to move past aporia. Alyssa holds a B.A. in both French and Politics from Brandeis University, where her honours thesis on political apologies and cultural memory in twentieth century France won the Dorothy Blumenfeld Moyer Memorial Award for Languages and the Ana S. Aronson Memorial Award for French. She also presented her research at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference in 2025.
Related articles
Finding similar articles