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  • Bodies of TheologyRacine's Esther and Athalie as Embodied Theology
  • Timothy Pyles (bio)

The 1991 publication of David Maskell's groundbreaking study Racine: A Theatrical Reading greatly contributed to the reevaluation of Racine's plays as performance texts, marking a major shift away from the previously prevalent view that Racine's plays were best understood as, essentially, closet dramas, the theatricality of which was at best incidental.1 Nevertheless, the idea that Racine's was a theatre principally of words, of disembodied poetry, has persisted. Mitchell Greenberg has claimed that, while bodies are indispensably and inevitably a part of theatre, bodies in Racine's tragedies have, in essence, been banished; that real, corporeal bodies have been replaced by the disembodied voice, by an affective description of bodies meant to control the corporeal body by means of the discursive. As Greenberg puts it, "'Bienséance [lit. 'good sense,' the decorous style and appropriate content expected of French neo-Classical drama] … when coupled with those other rules of French neo-Classical protocols, the 'three unities,' can be seen as doing to the theatrical body precisely what Foucault suggested the general epistemic shift of the seventeenth century did to those suddenly socially undesirable others—the mad, the heterodox, the feminine. The body is circumscribed, limits are imposed on it (limits to its visibility), it is objectified as foreign to a certain aesthetic (but also sexual and political) ideal, and then it is banished. The body in French Classical drama is expelled from the stage."2 Sylvaine Guyot responded to the ongoing tendency to downplay the importance of corporeal bodies in Racine's work in her 2016 article for Modern Language Quarterly, "Opacity of Theater: Reading Racine with and against Louis Marin," in which she positions her work as an attack on "the long critical tradition that has reduced Jean Racine's dramaturgy to the poetic effects of its language" and, instead, [End Page 24] as "emphasizing the crucial role played by the bodily medium in Racinian theater."3 Guyot's article is focused on Racine's plays Bérénice, Mithridate, and Phèdra, and is a continuation of arguments she began in her 2014 book, Racine et le corps tragique, which similarly argued against disembodied readings of Racine and for a renewed emphasis on the body.4 Maskell's work is focused on reconstructing the staging of Racine's plays as they would have appeared to an audience, and is therefore most interested in how the plays would have looked, including settings, costumes, the use of props, etc. Guyot's work focuses on the body more specifically, but does so again from the perspective of the outside interpreter—her work interrogates how the body in Racinian theatre changes and complicates a spectator's interpretation of the play.

In this article it is my intent to contribute to this ongoing reevaluation of Racine's work, and specifically the reevaluation of the importance of bodies in Racine. Despite a renewed focus on Racine's plays in performance, an important gap exists in the current discussion of Racine. That gap is an exploration of the ways in which the embodiment of the plays by the actors creates meaning not only for the spectators, but also for the actors themselves. In this article I address this issue by examining Racine's two late biblical plays, Esther and Athalie.

Esther and Athalie provide a unique opportunity to examine embodiment in Racinian theatre. Both were written to be performed by the young female students of the school at Saint-Cyr. Saint-Cyr was a school for young women of the nobility whose families had fallen into poverty and could therefore not afford to educate their daughters. It was established by Louis XIV's second wife, Madame de Maintenon, and was located not far from Versailles. Girls began their studies at Saint-Cyr at the age often and continued until the age of twenty, whereupon they had the option either to marry, with a small dowry provided by the school, or to become a nun. A few students are known to have stayed on at Saint-Cyr and become teachers. During their time at Saint-Cyr, the...

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