Women Dramatists, Humor, and the French Stage

1802 to 1855

J. Johnston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137456717
• eBook ISBN: 9781137452900
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: History

Filling a critical void, this book examines French women dramatists of the nineteenth-century who staged works prior to the lifting of censorship laws in 1864. Though none staged overtly feminist drama, Sophie de Bawr, Sophie Gay, Virginie Ancelot, and Delphine Girardin questioned patriarchal dominance and reconstructed ideals of womanhood.

1. Revisiting Women, Humor, and the French Stage

Until recent decades works by nineteenth-century French women writers existed within a critical abyss. With the exceptions of George Sand and Germaine de Staël, the vast majority of works by women from this period had been cast outside of the literary canon. Fortunately, recent decades have witnessed great strides in filling this void through the publication of modern critical editions of works, such as Sophie Cottin’s Claire d’Albe, Claire Duras’s Ourika, and Delphine de Girardin’s Chroniques parisiennes, and poetry by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Marie Krysinska, to name only a few. Collectively, this rediscovery focuses on the novel and, to a certain extent, on poetry. While efforts to resurrect these exceptional texts were long overdue, women’s contributions to the French theater during the first half of the nineteenth century remain virtually untouched by contemporary literary criticism. If the earliest years of the nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented production of novels among women writers,¹ women wrote for the theater with much less frequency and success.

Perhaps better than any other single writer of her day, Sophie de Bawr (1773–1860) understood the problematic situation encountered by women who wished to write for the Parisian stage. On one hand, the theater offered dramatic authors the opportunity for financial gain in a timely manner. This was a crucial factor for women writers like Bawr who, during the unstable post-Revolutionary climate, found themselves obligated to write for their own financial survival or for that of an entire family. On the other hand, the public nature of the theater rendered it a questionable venue for any upstanding citoyenne. The ideal republican woman avoided the public eye to stay at home and care for husband and children, as a foray into public life threatened morality and risked corruption. Considering this context, Bawr, author of the immensely successful play La Suite d’un bal masqué (1813), after a career of theatrical hits declared:

Je me crois donc, plus que personne, en droit de conseiller aux femmes de ne point écrire pour le théâtre; c’est là surtout, que pour veiller soi-même à ses intérêts, on a besoin de tenue, de courage et de persévérance; qu’il faut savoir supporter, sans en tourmenter sa vie, la multitude d’entraves, les mille petites contrariétés qui se renouvellent sans cesse, en un mot qu’il faut être homme. (Bawr Mes Souvenirs 255)

[I believe myself, therefore, more than anyone, within my rights to advise women not to write for the theater; it is there above all that to look after one’s own interests, one needs proper behavior, courage and perseverance; one must know how to put up with, without tormenting one’s life, the multitude of hindrances, the thousands of little aggravations that occur over and over without end, in a word one must be a man.]²

Bawr’s assertion attests to the fact that theater remained all but off-limits to women. Nonethess, Bawr along with Sophie Gay (1776–1852), Virginie Ancelot (1792–1875), and Delphine Gay de Girardin (1804–1855) staged successful plays at Paris’s top venues (Théâtre Français and Odéon) or at other respected theaters (Ambigu-Comique, Vaudeville, Gymnase) prior to the lifting of censorship laws in 1864. Between 1802 and 1855, all four of these dramatists were heavily involved in the literary scene of their day and hosted their own salons, venues essential for any male author wishing to see his works published and accepted among the public. While their theatrical works do not always demonstrate a direct engagement with the politics of the day, these writers were aware of and influenced by the tumultuous events that characterized their time. All four of these playwrights rescripted the republican family, much to the advantage of women. Although these writers did not challenge masculine authority outright, their plots and characters undermined the foundations of male dominance. Throughout their theatrical works a use of humor effectively underscored social inequities regarding the treatment of women. Indeed Bawr, Gay, Ancelot, and Girardin very often owed the success of their plays to their wit and humor, which both pleased audiences and allowed the writers to display their own unconventional views on womanhood without being overt.

Although the strategy of using humor to both to sell tickets and criticize the inferior status of women effectively allowed these women to bring their works to the Paris stage, their nuanced attacks have cost them dearly in terms of literary and historical recognition. Women playwrights of early nineteenth-century France are all but forgotten by today’s scholars. Alison Finch in Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France refers to “[t]he invisible women of French theatre” in the title of her chapter on women dramatists. The apt phrase underscores the fact that while women did indeed write for the theater, their works have almost wholly disappeared from critical view.

Prior to examining the four exceptional authors in question and their unjustly forgotten contributions to French art, culture, and history, it is essential to understand the French theater industry at the time. During the first half of the nineteenth century, French women playwrights encountered obstacles beyond those experienced by women novelists. If the theater industry’s constant fluctuation regarding the conflicting aesthetics of Classicism versus Romanticism and popular theater versus “high” theater offered challenges to men who sought to stage their works, women encountered additional obstacles. Despite the Revolution’s proclamations of liberté, égalité, fraternité, Napoléon’s Civil Code of 1804 reaffirmed women’s secondary status under French law.³ As we have noted, the theater offered writers the opportunity to turn a healthy profit, yet association with the theater remained a scandalous undertaking for women. Actresses suffered the most, garnering unsavory reputations, but the industry as a whole was seen as an inappropriate milieu for women of decent society, and this judgment extended to playwrights. In some ways, during the first half of the nineteenth century, women who sought a career in the theater industry encountered even greater obstacles than their predecessors. In the eighteenth century, Raucourt, Montansier, and other women successfully managed theaters. However, in December 1824, by royal decree, women were specifically forbidden to own theaters in France. As F. W. J. Hemmings argues, official explanations of the act as an effort to preserve propriety and the myth of the “weaker sex” and threats to public morality, fail to offer any satisfying reasoning as to why women who were able to turn a profit a century prior were now banned from doing so (Theatre and State 162). Given this unwelcoming climate, it is not surprising that women, in general, did not often brave writing for the theater.

If women’s contribution to the theater in the nineteenth century remains untouched by literary criticism, French women’s use of humor suffers a similar condemnation to oblivion. That century saw the publication of several important texts regarding the nature of humor and laughter from sociological, literary, and psychological frameworks, yet women’s works remain absent in any of these considerations. Charles Baudelaire’s De l’essence de rire (1855), Henri Bergson’s Le Rire (1900), and Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) all factor into this study; however, their concepts based on humor as utilized by men often fail to offer a satisfying description of the essence of laughter evoked in the plays of Bawr, Gay, Ancelot, and Girardin. In fact, there exists very little published material on French women writers’ tradition of humor. Alison Finch refers to this critical gap in nineteenth-century French literary analysis as “the most singular omission to date in most critics’ reassessment” (5). Thus, the intersection of humor and theater—intellectual products incongruous with the image of a proper lady—represents a crucial subject for us to probe. The humor displayed in plays by the four authors in this study appears to be harmless, crowd-pleasing fun on the surface, but in-depth examination of this comedy reveals disquiet regarding a French social system that subjugated women.

In undertaking a discussion of women, theater, and humor, the last quality warrants our foremost attention as it presents a critical conundrum. In a period remembered for Romanticism and Realism, discussions of humor often take a backseat to loftier veins of analysis. Nonetheless critics have examined humor within the works of the century’s greatest male writers such as Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert. George Pistorius, in examining moments of humor in Stendhal’s novel Lamiel, concedes that comic characters rarely appeared in novels from the first half of the nineteenth century (219). Hollis A. Woods, in his doctoral dissertation, explored aspects of humor in the works of Balzac. However, Woods also underscores that Balzac constantly fuses his humor to a more serious overarching style and purpose, noting that “Balzac’s style on the whole is a serious one” (329). Particularly with novels of the period, comic moments may arise within a serious text, but the purpose of the majority of novels at the time remained solemn.⁴

When daring to write comedies, Bawr, Gay, Ancelot, and Girardin abandoned the serious for the frivolous, but nonetheless expressed pleas for equality and used their wit to demonstrate that they were on par with their male counterparts. Indeed George Meredith in his 1877 discussion of comedy implies that it is imperative that women develop their sense of humor to be truly men’s equal:

[W]here women are on the road to an equal footing with men, in attainments and in liberty—in what they have won for themselves, and what has been granted them by a fair civilization—there, and only waiting to be transplanted from life to the stage, or the novel or the poem, pure comedy flourishes, and is, as it would help them to be, the sweetest of diversions, the wisest of delightful companions. (32)

Meredith’s assessment suggests that at the end of the nineteenth century, women had failed to achieve equal footing in terms of ability to display humor. Although Meredith recognizes that women can be humorous, he insinuates that women had failed to establish their own public tradition of humor. Indeed, as we have stated, critical material on French women’s humor is sparse. However, as Regina Barreca correctly notes, “It is the inability of the critical tradition to deal with comedy by women rather than the inability of women to produce comedy that accounts for the absence of critical material on the subject” (Last Laughs 20).

While a growing number of scholars such as Barreca, Judith Lowder Newton, Emily Toth, Nancy Walker, and Judy Little have illuminated the intricacies of women’s humor in the works of British and American authors,⁵ little has been written regarding French women and their use of comedy, wit, and humor. French women writers such as Delphine de Girardin and Sophie Gay garnered professional success with their witty, nontheatrical writings at a time when the trait of humorist hardly aligned with the notion of a femme comme il faut. Perhaps the expression of humor represented a threat, a wielding of power to which women were not entitled. As Annie Rivara accurately assessed, “le rire n’est . . . guère decent chez une femme” [laughter is hardly decent in a woman] and argues that women who laugh within eighteenth-century French novels are either seen as frivolous or as sexually independent and therefore dangerous (1297). In addition to the danger associated with women’s humorous expression, it has been argued that popular humor is not always feminine humor. Warren Johnson has observed that women of nineteenth-century France, particularly late in the century, seemed alienated from comedy of the body and scatological humor, which typified cabarets such as the Chat Noir (52–53). Johnson also references “the striking absence of a female brand of comedy during (the nineteen century), even of the more refined sort practiced across the Channel by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant” (47). He observes that women writers such as George Sand tended to produce novels that took a more serious approach to women’s suffering within a corrupt social order and he does not address women’s theatrical works. Moreover, the scope of Johnson’s study does not encompass popular theater during the first half of the century, a period when audiences sought comedic entertainment and where we can indeed discern a tradition of feminine humor and of women dramatists finding their comedic voice within. The authors considered in this study faced obstacles as they sought to demonstrate that women were capable of producing very funny plays. However, few comedies by women writers prior to the twentieth century remain in print—a fact that supports Nancy Walker’s assertion that the tradition of women’s humor “has been largely omitted from the official canon . . . been allowed to go out of print, to disappear from all but the dusty reaches of library shelves” (A Very Serious Thing 120).

Misogynist attitudes of literary historians writing not long after our writers’ deaths contributed to their works’ disappearance. Writing in 1929, Jean Larnac offered his rationale for a lack of French comedies by women:

si on peut citer un certain nombre d’auteurs féminins qui aient construit des tragédies, des drames ou des pièces à thèse, on n’en peut découvrir aucun qui se soit vraiment essayé dans la comédie. Imagine-t-on un Molière, un Labiche même, sous l’apparence d’une femme? L’idée semble absurde. Une femme sait rire de ses semblables (encore son rire se greffe-t-il sur un sentiment de jalousie, d’envie ou de colère, au lieu de se fonder sur l’illogisme des évènements); elle ne sait pas faire rire. (63)

[If one can cite a certain number of female authors who constructed tragedies, dramas or problem plays, one cannot find a single one who truly tried her hand at comedy. Can one imagine a Molière, even a Labiche in the guise of a woman? The idea seems absurd. A woman knows how to laugh at her kind (still her laughter is linked to a feeling of jealousy, envy or rage, instead of being based on the illogical nature of events); she does not know how to make one laugh.]

Larnac further argues that writing comedy is against women’s nature, pointing to a dearth of women writers of theatrical comedy throughout literary history. Although many of Larnac’s observations on women’s inability to write comedy are based solely on misogynist stereotype, comedies by French women have indeed been largely ignored by current literary scholarship. Regina Barreca in a discussion of Henri Bergson pinpoints the issue at hand. Bergson insists that laughter is that of a group, that laughing along with the group indicates one’s inclusion into the set. Yet Barreca poses the questions, “What happens, however, when a group is excluded from the mainstream? Will this group ignore the mainstream’s values and develop values of its own?” (They Used to Call Me Snow White 112). It is precisely this dynamic I propose to explore in this study.

Significantly, when we examine nineteenth-century France, a time dominated by revolutions, empires, monarchies, republics, and wars, events largely defined by men’s actions, women tend to fade into the shadows. Naturally, the humor of women, which often dealt with tribulations familiar to them such as marriage, finances, and reputation, holds little interest in such an exploration limited to grandiose historical events. In addition, an expression of humor often indicates ridicule or an attempt to express anger in a socially acceptable manner. A society based on men controlling women, a society that insists that women’s most important role was that of “good mother,” would be reluctant to acknowledge such expressions among women who were meant to be docile. Barreca explains the gendered bias against women’s humorous expression:

when a man demonstrates his anger through humor, he is showing self-control, because he could be acting destructively instead of just speaking destructively. When a woman demonstrates her anger through humor, however, she is seen as losing self-control, because she isn’t meant to have any angry feelings in the first place. (They Used to Call Me Snow White 94)

At stake is power itself. If women bring to light the fact that something is laughable—something linked to masculinity and the established rule of the day—humor takes on a subversive tone, as Barreca illuminates:

It is risky to admit to one’s self that a situation might be funny or absurd, because to do that means taking into account the idea of change. When you see the humor in a situation it implies that you can also then imagine how the situation could be altered. (They Used to Call Me Snow White 19–20)

Comedy in the form of theatrical productions offered the women dramatists in this study the opportunity to stage their works as long as they conformed to the reigning tastes of their day. The choice of so-called frivolous comedy supplied fertile ground for these women to sow the seeds of discontent and to question patriarchal injustices tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Revisiting Women, Humor, and the French Stage
• 2.  Sophie de Bawr: Successful Resistance, Resisting Success
• 3.  The Shifting Stages of Sophie Gay’s Theater Career
• 4.  Virginie Ancelot’s Comedy for Women
• 5.  Delphine Gay de Girardin: The Muse Takes Center Stage
• 6.  Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index