Perhaps what is most startling about the world that Marivaux’s characters inhabit is how bare of social context and how devoid of family it is. In the first and the second Surprise of Love, the central female protagonist is a young widow. No mother, father, or siblings have any role in the plot. Widows were especially interesting and useful figures in early modern French literature because of their idiosyncratic status. Among all women, only widows had the legal, and often financial, capacity for self-determination in ancien régime France. They could live on their own, make their own decisions, and spend their own money. Indeed, only widows could rightly be said to have their own money. Married women had the status of legal minors: they could neither sign contracts nor dispose of their money. Widows were clearly literary favorites; they were sought after in marriage plots because their late husband’s money came along with them and because they were self-determining. Indeed, the marquise in the second Surprise of Love is so free of family interference that her maid, Lisette, takes it upon herself to arrange the marquise’s remarriage. She knows that the chevalier would make a good husband for her mistress, and, of equal importance, she herself wishes to marry the chevalier’s valet; so she manipulates the chevalier (himself suffering from a failed love affair) into realizing that he loves the marquise by displaying a rival, the count, before him: “I am attached to my mistress, more than I could ever say. And I am desolate to see that she does not want to be consoled, that she cries and sighs. … Look, here is the Count; he loves her. You know him; he is one of your friends. Madame the marquise doesn’t find him repugnant. It would be a marriage that would be good for her; I am working to make it happen. Do your part to help us” (act 1, scene 10).
All of Marivaux’s female characters appear to be self-determining, regardless of their marital status. In The False Lady’s Maid, the main female protagonist, whom we know only as the chevalier, is a young, rich, unmarried girl. She travels the countryside disguised as a man, hires her own servants, and makes new acquaintances, all in order to decide for herself whether a young man who has been proposed as a potential husband for her is suitable: she learns conclusively that he is not. He is an unscrupulous, cruel, fortune hunter who idiotically reveals his intentions to the cross-dressed protagonist. Marivaux does not feel the need to explain how his rich young lady can manage such independence: she simply does. Her family is absent from the stage; a brother-in-law has proposed the marriage with the dishonorable Lélio, but he does not appear to have either the means or the inclination to force such a marriage. Neither mother nor father is mentioned; we presume they have died. In any case, she is on her own with only her newly hired servant Trivelin for companion and only herself for guide. Critics offer differing accounts of Marivaux’s social views: is he an egalitarian avant la lettre? Is he a conservative who believes deeply in the need for social hierarchy and social order? One thing is certain: gender hierarchy is utterly absent from his plays. Women are in every way the equals of men.
Even in The Game of Love and Chance (1730), Marivaux’s most conventional comedy (today his best-known and best-loved play), the heroine, Silvia, is unusually independent and autonomous. She lives in the paternal home, she has a brother, and her father has selected as her future husband the son of a dear friend. All this sounds typical. But what distinguishes this comedy from those of other playwrights is that Silvia’s father leaves the decision to marry entirely in her hands. Her decision will be made based on her own observation of the intended, on the facts that she uncovers. And so, like so many other heroines of Marivaux, she disguises herself. She trades places with her maidservant, Lisette, so that she can observe her intended, Dorante, from a safe, neutral position. Husbands often lead double lives, Silvia reasons. Outside the home, in the world of social relations, they may be witty, attentive, kind, and pleasant company, while at home they may show another, a truer, self that is morose, critical, or even tyrannical. But her suitor would have no motive to adopt a false demeanor before a servant, Silvia believes. Taking on the role of servant is a way to see what lurks beneath social masks. Of course Silvia does not know that Dorante has had the very same idea; he arrives at her house in the guise of his own valet.
Exchanging roles with her maid and disguising her class position is meant to offer Silvia freedom to learn the truth, just as the heroine of The False Lady’s Maid was able to uncover the nasty reality about her intended by gender and class cross-dressing. Of course it does not quite work out this way, since Dorante has taken the same course of action; indeed, the fact that they have come up with the same plan demonstrates their likeness and suitability for one another. But they do not know this: Instead, the two upper-class characters find themselves mysteriously and inexplicably drawn to what they believe to be lower-class love objects. This predicament causes Silvia and Dorante to question their understanding of social rank as a fixed, real indicator of personal worth. At the play’s outset, Silvia’s brother Mario, who knows that both protagonists will be disguised as servants speculates: “Maybe Dorante will take a liking to my sister even as a maid; let’s see if their hearts reveal to each of them what the other is really worth.” Silvia believes that her true social station will somehow, inevitably, make itself felt. She has no concerns that, despite her maid’s attire, Dorante’s valet will make advances—exactly the scenario that occurs in each of Marivaux’s comedies. “I do not fear his love-lorn sighs,” announces Silvia, “there is something in my physiognomy that will inspire more respect than love in that jackanapes” (act 1, scene 5).
And the play does seem to bear out Silvia’s prediction: the master and the mistress, despite the fact that they each believe the other to be a servant, and therefore that their union would constitute a mésalliance of the greatest order, fall in love. Dorante’s buffoonish valet shows no interest in Silvia (disguised as Lisette) but heads straight toward Lisette (the “real servant”). The ramifications for an understanding of class, identity, and individual value appear so radical to the two master characters that Dorante attempts to naturalize his love for a woman he believes to be of the servant class: perhaps she is secretly an illegitimate child of a nobleman, he suggests. The two servants, each thinking the other a master and therefore a great catch, feel no need to delve into the matter further.
The play at once seems to suggest the fluidity and flexibility of class identity—servants and masters change places as easily as they exchange clothing—and to reaffirm the solidity and inescapability of class position. Class cross-dressing allows the two upper-class characters to speak to each more openly than they would have been able to had they been in their rightful social roles; the ritualistic, shell-like language of polite society can be bypassed. Indeed, Dorante and Silvia immediately employ the familiar pronoun tu, the pronoun of lovers, with each other, an impossibility were they not in disguise. Yet, the play seems ultimately to be conservative: it closes with the recognition of the rightful ordering of lovers and of society. Does the fact that Dorante believes throughout the play, at least until the denouement, that a servant girl is worthy of his love, and that likewise, Silvia thinks that a valet is infinitely more worthy than his master, offer reader and spectator a chance to question social hierarchy? Does the play offer an interlude in which something like equality is thinkable?
Marivaux directly addresses the questions of class and gender equality in two nonromantic comedies: Slave Island (1725), which has recently been revived and performed in important new productions in English as well as in French, and The Colony (1750). These are both what we might think of as speculative, utopian comedies; they both try to imagine what it would be like to start a brand new society from the beginning. How or why would some command and some obey? Why and how would some be subjected to others? Is hierarchy natural or inevitable?
In Slave Island, two men, a master and servant, and two women, a mistress and maid, find themselves on an island after a shipwreck. It turns out to be Slave Island, an egalitarian society run by the descendants of
escaped slaves. Any slave who lands there is immediately freed, and his or her master is forced to serve the former slave for a term of three years. Masters and slaves exchange clothes and names, just as in The Game of Love and Chance. But here there is no love story, or rather if there is, the problem the play poses resembles a screwball comedy of remarriage: how can the master-slave couple be put back together once there has been an open avowal that the masters are no better, indeed are much worse morally, than their servants? The play relentlessly reveals the masters to be vicious, physically brutal, utterly self-absorbed, and intellectual vapid. The servants, on the other hand, are represented as, above all, “human,” that is, capable of entering into the feelings others and inclined to pity those who suffer. The master-slave hierarchy has no basis other than sheer power: no belief system, no ideology (religious, monarchist, or other) legitimates the servants’ subjection or the masters’ mastery. Ironically, these master-servant relations are utterly unlike those based on mutual devotion that appear in the romantic comedies. So how can the relationship be reestablished in light of this now open knowledge?
The play seems to offer a conservative answer; emotion compensates for freedom. The master-slave relationship will be reestablished simply out of the goodness of the slave’s heart. The two servants accept their subaltern position of their own free will because they hate to see their (former) masters suffer. They consent to their own subordination. What cements the four at the end of the play is ostensibly a bond of sentiment, of shared feeling that the masters recognize and are shamed into adopting. But despite the supposed reconciliation at the end, it is clear that nothing really has changed. Moreover, spectators and readers witness the rejection of every explanation offered for social hierarchy. Crying at the end cannot erase what came before. We are left with a harrowing vision of society: social inequality must persist simply because some must command and some must obey. No morality justifies the system of social relations; necessity simply requires it.
In Marivaux’s plays, the obstacles to love and to marriage are not objective, external ones. They are not tyrannical fathers or guardians and certainly not lack of money. They are nearly always internal, psychological, emotional barriers. And this fact contributes to what feels like Marivaux’s modernity. In each of his plays we find characters examining and discovering their own feelings—ones they usually did not know they had. And the risks they run are not the typical risks of early modern theater and fiction: to be forced into a hateful marriage or to be forced into a convent. The risks are purely emotional. They are the risks inherent in love: vulnerability, the loss of self, the loss of the perfect autonomy that seems to distinguish Marivaux’s unmarried characters as they begin to discover that they do in fact depend on another, not for money or protection, but for happiness. Marivaux’s plays have long been distinguished for the subtlety of their language, especially for their language of emotions. Indeed, compared with Molière or Beaumarchais, Marivaux offers little action. The action is talking, and talking—whether to oneself or another—is a path toward the discovery of the self.
If the terrain of Marivaux’s comedies is the heart and the psyche, Beaumarchais’s great plays take us back to the traditional comic ground of families, tricksters, and the obstacles that power puts in the way of love. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99) is himself one of the great characters of the eighteenth century. Born in Paris to a family of watchmakers, he belonged to the artisanal class that would produce great writers and thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His own family was a happy and talented one; his beloved sisters were gifted musicians. Beaumarchais was a genius as a watchmaker; he invented a mechanism that improved watches’ accuracy while allowing them to become more compact. His invention won the approval of the Académie des sciences and, more important for his future, came to the attention of the court at Versailles. It is a sign of Beaumarchais’s ingenuity, charm, and brilliance that he soon landed himself the position of harp instructor to Louis XV’s daughters. From there to writer was but a small step. Given this kind of mobility and adaptability, it should not be surprising to learn that later in life he worked as a royal spy and, later still, as a revolutionary overseeing the demolition of the Bastille.
But we remember Beaumarchais today because we identify him with his great character, the equally mobile and talented Figaro. Beaumarchais began his career writing for the stage with two dramas, but he became an enormous success with his first comedy The Barber of Seville (1775). The play may be best known to many of us now through Rossini’s wonderfully infectious opera, for which it formed the basis, but in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, The Barber of Seville made Beaumarchais a literary celebrity and a rich man. The eponymous barber Figaro is a former servant of the extremely rich and powerful Count Almaviva. Figaro and the count bump into each other in Seville, where Almaviva is languishing in his love for Rosine, a young girl who lives with her autocratic old guardian who plans to marry her himself. The count wants Rosine to love him for his merits and not for his rank and wealth; he also wants to get her away from Bartholo, her watchful, oppressive guardian. Figaro devises a plan that will allow Almaviva to accomplish both his aims by disguising him as a soldier and sneaking him into Bartholo’s house. Figaro’s role is traditional in some respects, innovative in others: his actions seek to help his master by promoting the love and happiness of the upper-class character; this much seems fairly standard. Yet, Figaro stands out for his independence of spirit, his desire to pursue his own ambitions for career and money, and for his ingenuity. When the play opens, Figaro is an independent operator in Seville. Figaro directs the count, not the reverse; Figaro concocts the plan that the count follows. Figaro is intelligent, and his intelligence is made manifest by his sophisticated, often ironic, and always swift tongue.
The Barber of Seville was so successful and earned so much money for the troupe of the Comédie-Française, that the actors begged for a sequel. Beaumarchais obliged, and with what would turn out to be the second play of the Figaro trilogy, The Marriage of Figaro, or the Mad Day, he stepped into literary and political history. Beaumarchais finished the play by 1778, and passed his manuscript along to the actors at the Comédie. The actors, as a group, decided which plays they would accept into their repertory, and since only the Comédie-Française had official royal permission to perform tragedy and high comedy, every author with any ambition submitted his or her work to the troupe. The actors wanted to perform Figaro; audiences wanted to see Figaro, yet Beaumarchais struggled for six years to see his play brought to the stage. The battle ultimately ended in a victory for Beaumarchais and for Figaro and a defeat for the king of France, Louis XVI.
First came the struggles with the censors, whose approval was required before any play could go into production in the eighteenth century. Royal censors saw immediately that the work was too inflammatory to be allowed on the stage. Beaumarchais rewrote, cut, and resubmitted. A different censor was called upon to make a decision: he approved the play with only a few more changes. Now the royal court, always desirous of novelty and amusement, got wind of the show. The play was very funny; Beaumarchais had been reading scenes aloud in private houses, and everyone wanted to see it—Marie-Antoinette as much as anyone. Then the play was read to the king. He did not think it was funny. “This play mocks all that ought to be respected!” the king exclaimed, “the Bastille would have to be destroyed for this play to be performed!”
The king was perhaps no great genius, but he saw what his wife and many of the bored nobles in his court missed. Figaro was an attack on the central values of the ancien régime. It denied that those who occupied lofty positions were superior to ordinary people; it attacked the very idea of ascribed status. Monarchical French society was a closed caste system based on the idea that aristocratic “blood” was different from that of the common people. Some even believed that the aristocracy was descended from the conquering Franks and that commoners were descendants of
the vanquished Gauls. On this account, they were two separate peoples living a thousand-year-old cold war. Figaro was having none of it. The great nobles were neither great nor good men, he asserted unhesitatingly. They had no intrinsic superiority. As Figaro puts it in his famous monologue, the noble Count Almaviva, who rules his territories with absolute authority, simply “took the trouble to be born, and nothing else! As for the rest—a rather ordinary man!”
Not only did The Marriage of Figaro attack the nobility (as a political and social institution); it openly criticized so many aspects of the ancien régime that it is hard to keep count. Only the Church was spared. The play also explicitly attacked censorship. It not only allegorized its own history; it also alluded to the ramping up of censorship more broadly in the second half of the eighteenth century (Figaro writes plays and economic treatises only to see them officially burned by the government and to find himself thrown in the Bastille). It raises the problem of male sexual hypocrisy and the lack of economic opportunity for women, and in Marceline’s subplot, it forces men to confront their own injustice (“My God, she’s right,” the men confess when faced with Marceline’s unassailable logic in act 3). It directly takes up the notion of meritocracy, which under the slogan “careers open to talent,” was a burning issue in the years leading up to the French Revolution, as careers in the army, for example, were increasingly restricted to those who could prove several generations of noble ancestry. Figaro himself seemed to incarnate the revolutionary, bourgeois idea that positions and responsibilities should be awarded to those with the talents and skills to carry them out, rather than on the basis of birth. Count Almaviva is not very intelligent; he seems slow and dull in comparison with Figaro, whose mind and tongue are nimble and razor sharp. Figaro and his friends invent plot after plot to thwart the count. The count invents nothing; he merely reacts.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 44