The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre (review)

It is still relatively rare for 19^th-century French theatre and drama to be considered appropriate or rewarding material for 20^th-century methods of theoretical analysis. In her book, Susan McCready stages an encounter between the ideas of scholars such as Victor Turner, René Girard, Georges Bataille, and Elaine Scarry and key plays by Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, Alexandre Dumas, père, and Victor Hugo. Her central contention is that these works, when performed, function as rituals "that give body to the abstract ideas that are announced in the dramatic text" (2). Given the instability of meanings generated by any performance, on stage or off, these performances must be repeated over and over in order to allay recurring doubts as to the validity of the system of values being affirmed - values that may be shared or questioned by the audience.

McCready's introduction offers a concise overview of the critical approaches that inform her own analyses, notably the work of social anthropologists and theatre semioticians. She pays special attention to Scarry's concept of "analogical verification" as a means for understanding the relationship between abstract values and the material effects of those values when embodied and enacted in specific situations. McCready also includes a very brief summary of social conditions and major historical events from the French Revolution through the July Monarchy that affected the development of Romantic drama, and provides a cursory review of the debates over the forms and function of theatre during this period. She specifies, however, that her intention is not to produce a socio-historical study of early nineteenth-century France as seen through its theatre but rather to use French Romantic theatre as a case study to con-tribute to an understanding of how performance in general functions as a mediator of social values.

The book is organized into three chapters - "Proof," "Resistance," and "Sacrifice" - each of which is subdivided into three sections, perhaps in a move to give structural reinforcement to the argument for the force of rituals. The first chapter considers plays that are categorized by McCready as successful performances that reaffirm dominant values, as failed performances that lead to the questioning of supposedly shared values, or as performances that substantiate the values of a selected few rather than the community as a whole. Two plays by Musset, Un Caprice and La Quenouille de Barbérine , are used to exemplify works of the first category. In these plays, social stability is maintained through the normalization of the characters who attempted to transgress dominant values. The second type of performance takes the form of the pretenses undertaken by Le Duc and La Duchesse to confer a false legitimacy on the duchess's bastard child in Vigny's Quitte pour la peur and the multiple roles played in life and in art by the eponymous character in Dumas' Kean ou Désordre et genie. In McCready's words, "In both plays, the characters find a way of negotiating, through the falseness of performance, the falseness and arbitrariness of the world" (36). In contrast, rather than compromise, the protagonists of Dumas' Antony and Vigny's Chatterton, propose a new order by means of individual performances that valorize true love and pure art. In all of these plays, characters use theatrical techniques to "arrive at some kind of substantiation of abstract claims shared by the stage world and the real world" (113 ).

The second chapter concentrates on three plays by Victor Hugo - Hernani, Ruy Blas , and Le Roi s'amuse - to examine in greater depth how communities are constituted through performance and what role the individual plays in this process. As McCready notes, the plots of the three plays share a common trajectory that moves away from a more evolved juridical order towards an older law of vengeance. She sets out to discover whether the conflicts between those situated outside the social order and those charged with maintaining that order result...