"Expirer au feminin offers new perspectives on the complex relationship between neo-classical writers, their works, and the theoretical mandates imposed upon them. In this work, the author argues that a writer's conflicted attitude towards aesthetic conformity infiltrated the work itself. This conflict can be seen in the confrontation between a male hero eager to comply with ideological protocols and a dissenting heroine in violation of established regulations. It is to be expected, perhaps, that in the political context of seventeenth-century France, a heroine's refusal to embrace orthodox opinions would result inevitably in her death, dissolution, or excision from the text. What is unanticipated, however, is that writers would so often slant the readers' sympathy in the direction of the rebellious heroine and against the obedient hero." "Expirer au feminin analyzes how the heroine's ostensibly expedient death serves to further complicate the very situation it was intended to neutralize. Rendered essential by her presence, but quintessential by her absence, the heroine in these canonical texts embodies the non-permissible vision, the unspeakable other, the essence of alteration or alternation or alienation that is often seen as the antithesis of neo-classical textuality. In the re-readings proposed, the heroine's rebelliousness reveals one of the most salient, yet least noted, characteristic of neo-classical textuality: it does not, will not, cannot conform. Beneath a surface of sameness and adherence, it proffers an unruly dismantling of codes, an untidy challenge to prescription, a poetically intoned ode to desobeissance."--BOOK JACKET.