The Structure of Illusion in Genet's The Balcony

The Structure of Illusion in Genet's The Balcony CAROL ROSEN Although in fact a brothel is more likely to resemble a nondescript roominghouse than an ornate pleasure dome, popular literature favors fancy rather than reality. And the brothel, an institution of tabooed sexuality, is an especially inviting premise, promising to substantiate forbidden dreams. So in fiction, heroes have been regularly seduced into submission and then metamorphosed into creatures of degenerate lust by vile temptresses (who occasionally sport hearts of gold). The Circean nighttown episode of Ulysses may be seen as the apotheosis of this fictive standard, for in Joyce's novel the brothel suggests a modem sexual mythology. On the stage, too, the brothel and its residents have been depicted more often as glazed stereotypes than as real subjects. Traditionally, the "fallen woman" has been a pathetic stereotype, a sensuous heroine hopelessly drawn - and drawing men with her - into the romantic quicksand of sin. Only the melodramatically repentant of this kind, typified for Victorian audiences by Pinero's suicidal second Mrs. Tanqueray and typified for depression era audiences by O'Neill's plucky Anna Christie, may be saved. The brazen of this kind, on the other hand, typified by Lulu, the malleable whore of Frank Wedekind's dramatic trilogy, by Esmeralda, the enterprising Gypsy's daughter of Tennessee Williams's dream-play, Camino Real, and by the "tarts" and earthy whores - notably The Great God Brown's Cybele - fleshed out repeatedly in O'Neill's melancholy plays, endure only as protean extensions of male fantasies. With the notable exception of Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, then, a play considered scandalous in its own time (considered scandalous, incidentally, not because its title character is a fallen woman, but because unlike the conventionally repentant stage courtesan of the nineteenth century, Shaw's Mrs. Warren, a new fallen woman, recognizes both the horrors and the hypocrisy of respectable society), the subject of prostitution tends to conjure up a perfumed purgatory even in the avant-garde theater. Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 513 514 CAROL ROSEN Jean Genet's The Balcony (flrst published in 1956), however, singularly transcends such sensationalism. In this play, Genet reconstructs on-stage the kind of institution to which Shaw's Mrs. Warren could not even discreetly allude in the theater fifty years earlier. Further, the brothel serves Genet as an image of the revolution raging outside his House of Illusion. It is at once: (I) a naturalistic reconstruction of a brothel, (2) a structural analogue for society, (3) a symbolic reflection of grand illusions and larger-than-life desires, and, most significantly, (4) a metaphysical construct in a discussion play about the value of mimetic ritual, the transcendence possible in play, and the magical efficacy of the theater itself. Genet's plays have all been described as taking place in "private hells (each a paradise to him) in which the Usual Order is interrupted." For Genet: In these special places - prisons, barracks, the Mass - the real Game is played. ... And yet these secret socielies, these places of "difference," have an attraction: They are aterrain for art, microcosms of the wider outside world to which a Genet can apply special rules. They are places of secret languages; of shorthands by which like recognizes like; of accepted hierarchies. They are places from which the Alien is excluded; they are abstract, impersonal.I The colossal whorehouse of The Balcony is ·just" such a place. Here, the customer is given a private vision of an other world of release and escape, and the audience is given the cruelest reflection imaginable - in the Anaudian sense of cruelty - of an underworld of sordid spectacle. Genet's The Balcony turns an elaborate whorehouse into an apocalyptic image of the society it mocks, and the play derives its theatrical power from its setting in one of Genet's "private hells," in Mme. hma's House of Illusions. Genet's Mme. hma plays upon us the way Euripides' Dionysus toys with Pentheus. The first four scenes of The Balcony are performed in quick succession on a revolving platform beneath a single chandelier. Each studio is equipped with a trick mirror which seems to reflect an unmade bed...