Recherches (Jun 2023)
L’héritage politique, social et artistique de Carmen Sylva (Élisabeth de Roumanie) dans l’œuvre de la reine Marie de Roumanie
Abstract
A much more politically influential figure than her predecessor, Queen Elizabeth of Romania, Crown Princess Maria, who became Queen of Romania in 1914, owes more to the former than one might think. This study reconstructs the history of the personal relationship between the two sovereigns by means of Queen Elizabeth’s correspondence with King Carol I, published in its entirety in 2018. While Queen Elizabeth’s role in shaping and establishing the young princess as a writer is widely acknowledged, Queen Elizabeth’s influence in terms of role-playing, staging appearances, devising communication strategies, and everything related to the representation of power on the public stage, as Maria was to practice it, has been ignored. In this regard, unreserved credit was given to Maria’confessions in her memoirs, which, however, are often ambivalent, oscillating between admiration for Elizabeth and the need to establish a certain distance, to better define a personal profile. The study shows what expectations Mary faces, expectations generated by Elizabeth’s prodigious work, and how she manages to meet them so that she enjoys recognition and consolidates her authority in relation to the previous model.
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