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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Even to sympathetic theatrical observers, ‘feminism’ in France at the turn of the century was often regarded as merely incidental to the larger concerns of the ‘social’ drama; and dramatic debate tended to focus on the issue of a woman's assertion of ‘freedom’ versus her presumably ‘natural’ functions as wife and mother. In this article, Elaine Aston illuminates such attitudes, utilizing both the texts of contemporary plays and discussion in journals current at the time. But she also detects early theatrical evidence of a slow shift towards a questioning of prevailing assumptions – and a belief (which today strikes her as enviable) in the power of theatre to effect social change.
1. A monthly review of art and literature, directed by Henri Stoel – a continuation of the former Documents sur le Naturisme.
2. ‘Le féminisme au théâtre: no spécial’, octobre 1901.
3. Marya-Chéliga was herself a playwright. L'Ornière, a three act play, had been performed in January 1896 at the Théâtre Mondain.
4. ‘Le Théâtre feministe’, La Revue d' Art Dramatique, October 1901, p. 654. (Where substantial, quotations from the French texts are given in English translations of my own.)
5. Ibid., p. 651.
6. Ibid., December 1894, p. 325.
7. In an introduction to Lesueur's later play, Le Masque d'amour (first played at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, 10 Oct. 1905, and published in L'Illustration Théâtrale, no. 18, 4 November 1905), it is suggested that Hors du mariage was to be revived at the Odéon. Le Masque d'amour itself had a very mixed reception, and there was much surprise at an established ‘poétesse et savante’ producing a play for entertainment rather than instruction – a melodrama of complex and at times unbelievable sequences.
8. ‘Hors du mariage’, The Era, 3 July 1897, p. 12.
9. Ibid.
10. Marya-Chéliga, p. 653.
11. The translators of the playtext, le vicomte de Colleville and Fritz de Zepelin, also intended Préludes for publication in the second volume of Théâtre moderne en Danemark.
12. Préludes, Act II, Scene v, in La Revue d' Art Dramatique, June 1897, p. 592.
13. Ibid., Act II, Scene vi, p. 595.
14. An opinion expressed in the introduction to Act I of Préludes, Revue d' Art Dramatique, May 1897, p. 490–1.
15. For a report of the congress see ‘Women and the Drama’, The Era, 1 July 1899, p. 12.
16. For example, see the review of Hors du mariage in The Theatre, August 1897, p. 103–4.
17. La Revue d' Art Dramatique, October 1901, p. 661.
18. Ibid., p. 664.
19. Ibid., p. 667.
20. Brieux treats the problems of women and the workplace at greater length in La Femme seule, also translated by Mrs. Bernard Shaw as Woman on Her Own.
21. See des Granges, Charles-Marc, ‘La Femme française d'après la comédie contemporaine’, Le Correspondant, CCXIV (1904), p. 63–94Google Scholar.
22. La Vassale, Act IV, Scene ii (Paris: Ollendorff, 1897), p. 180.
23. I also find this a surprising choice, given that in the questionnaire on feminism mentioned at the outset, Vandérem was one of those who condemned women as physically and intellectually inferior to men.
24. Harlor, p. 683–4.
25. Ibid., p. 682.
26. Revue d' Art Dramatique, December 1898, p. 464.