Ionesco’s Forgotten Plays: Meaning and Speech Acts in “The Niece-Wife” and “Bedlam Galore”

Eugène Ionesco’s lesser-known plays feature characters who perform speech acts as a way of making sense of their world. These speech acts are flawed, but also formative of their subjective worlds because in “The Niece-Wife” (1953) and “Bedlam Galore, for Two or More” (1963), these acts give characters the power to shape their world. Given that J. L. Austin theorizes a speech act as an action that has the power to alter reality, it is clear that the speech acts performed by Ionesco’s characters empower them to make sense out of their absurd mise-en-scene and to do so in ways that challenge societal norms.