Mancuso Presents at 19th Century French Studies Conference
On November 11, Eleonora Mancuso presented a paper entitled “Blocked Passages and Paralysis: Women in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and La Curée” at the Nineteenth Century French Studies Conference in Baltimore. Using a Disability Studies lens, her paper investigates how the Parisian passages, dreamlike spaces of modern consumption, are instead prison-like sites where women suffer from a lack of accessibility and belonging because of their gender in a narrative that metaphorically disables them. The aim of the paper is to reevaluate and reframe nineteenth-century literature as the product of the epoch of normative and gendered human selection. Mancuso is a student in our doctoral program in French Language & Literature.