‘Ce que femme veut Dieu le veut’ ou ce qu’on dit sur les femmes

Abstract

Proverbs belong to the cultural patrimony of a community and provide evidence with respect to people’s societal vécu and their representation of the world. This article deals with the representations of women in French proverbs in order to reveal the hypostases that are most frequently associated with them: young ladies awaiting marriage, devoted wives, cheating and manipulative women, obstinate women, greedy women, etc. In doing so, this article investigates the images symbolically used in order to construct these representations and to encode the metaphorical meaning that the proverbs transmit.