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12 - Diderot and Olympe de Gouges convert the tyrant and transform the family

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2011

Carol L. Sherman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
James Fowler
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
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Summary

One of the changes wrought by the bourgeois drama made its denouement emanate from a shift in the powerful character's mind rather than from reducing his authority through humiliation or legal manoeuvres. (Molière's Tartuffe, for example, is confounded both by members of his household, who set a trap to reveal his lascivious intentions, and by the King, who orders him imprisoned for financial misdeeds.) In Le Fils naturel (The Illegitimate Son), Diderot's five-act drame of 1757, Dorval, on the other hand, comes to virtue by observing it in others and through his own sense of right action, and thus he gives up Rosalie, his friend's betrothed. In Le Père de famille (The Father/The Family Man), another five-act drame (composed in 1758), the father moves toward clemency both under the influence of his children's wishes and against his brother-in-law's brutality, and so he permits his son's marriage to Sophie, who is thought to be socially inferior. Thirty years after these plays and ten years after Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? (Is He Good? Is He Bad?), a four-act drame of circa 1781, Olympe de Gouges wrote in the same genre and dramatised conversions to a kind of virtue that is even more broadly conceived. She often portrays tyrants caught in a family crisis the stakes of which are more complex than the traditional mariage à faire (marriage to be arranged).

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New Essays on Diderot , pp. 175 - 186
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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