SOURCE: Johnson, Warren. “Capricious Exuberance: Gender and Mediation in Musset's Comedies.” Dalhousie French Studies 33 (winter 1995): 27-34.

[In the following essay, Johnson cites the relationship between language and desire portrayed in such works as Fantasio, Les caprices de Marianne, and On ne badine pas avec l'amour.]

When Count Almaviva disguises himself as the music teacher in Le barbier de Séville, his mask allows him to penetrate a space previously interdicted. The role reversal of Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard likewise permits entry into a privileged space of observation. The mask in these two eighteenth-century precursors of Musset creates the possibility of contact between spheres that have been socially constructed as separate, whether they be physical places or social classes.

Musset's reworking of the master-servant inversion in Fantasio exemplifies his shift in emphasis from the transgression of social obstacles to a questioning of the nature and value of the individual. Whereas disguise in these plays of Beaumarchais and Marivaux implies an exercise of power by occluding identity and motives in order to control the way the Other perceives the self, such attempts to manipulate one's image in Musset are frequently doomed to failure. But equally unsuccessful are the efforts to inspire feeling by the simple assertion of existence or love. The men who prove attractive to women in several of his comédies et proverbes have a verbal exuberance that goes beyond the simple imperative declaration of desire. To be appreciated, the seductiveness of a discourse that breaks free of self-absorption to suggest the aleatory nature of the universe through its flights of fancy needs to be highlighted by comparison with the banality of another's less imaginative language. The value of this facility with language, which reflects the speaker's notion of reality as comically doubled and driven by caprice and chance, requires a counterpoint whose more strictly representational discourse will prove incapable of inspiring either desire or affection.

The repeated motif of the mask in Musset has been sometimes seen as a liberation of the self at the price of an irreconcilable splintering or alienation.¹ The frequent use of doubled characters, one critic observes, parallels this internal division of the individual.² Musset's would-be lovers frequently have recourse to doubles or intermediaries, as Cœlio in Les caprices de Marianne uses the services of Ciuta and Octave.³ Rather than focusing on the tertiary or mediating figure's role as proxy, I would like to discuss his function as an implicit point of comparison that underlines the superior attractiveness of expressive extravagance.⁴

Four of Musset's shorter plays are structured around this pivotal transfer of interest from one man to another on account of the mediating figure's verbal dexterity. In other comedies where the mediating figure does not become an object of the woman's passionate attachment, she experiences a heightened sensitivity in response to the mediator's rhetoric. I would like to focus in particular on the ways that women respond to a “capricious” or fanciful language because it allows them to negotiate around the constraints placed on their identity by figures of male authority. Finally, I will suggest how the resistance to defined roles by both men and women characters, generalized throughout the comedies, as well as desire itself depend on some form of mediation.

Personal identity in Musset derives from social interactions. As David Sices observes, for Musset the individual is defined by encounters with external reality and the subjective appraisal of others based on roles the individual plays (133).⁵ His characters find the mask sticking to their skin because the notion of personality as independent of the influence of others turns out to be an illusion. Yet whereas Lorenzaccio's awareness of himself as a hollow man impels the tragic end despite the loss of faith in his plans, in the comedies the characters' imperfect sense of the forces constituting them sounds a subtending ironic note.

The triangular situation of a young woman pursued by both an overly sincere young swain and a more enticing prospect forms the mediation in the earliest plays. Razetta of La nuit vénitienne (1830) is bested by the Prince d'Eysenach, who wishes to marry Laurette even though he realizes she does not love him. Like Elsbeth of Fantasio, the heroine of this early comedy initially feels compelled to accede to the marriage arranged for her. But she finds the Prince more charming because of his dazzling evocation, in the longest speech of the play, of the total freedom he promises her in order to satisfy her every whim:

Ne faites pas surtout un rêve sans le réaliser; qu'un caprice, qu'un faible désir n'échappe pas à ceux qui vous entourent, et dont l'existence entière est consacrée à vous obéir.

(25)

Razetta's attempts to coerce his beloved to kill the Prince by pathetically and hyperbolically threatening suicide if she fails him, exemplify the self-obsession and will to control others that will repeatedly be rejected in Musset's later works.

The rivalry between Cordiani and André del Sarto in the play of 1833 that bears the latter's name pits a sexually experienced man discovering love for the first time against the dispassionate colder eye of the artist. André confesses of himself: “Je suis un homme sans caractère” (65). It is precisely the nondescript language of this amorphous and flaccid “Mann ohne Eigenschaften” that leads to a splitting of the self and an introspective obsession with the way everything appears to be drifting away from him. By contrast, the instinctive understanding that grows between Cordiani and André's wife arises from the expression of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling in André's friend. If we see little direct contact between the male and female characters in the play, it is clear nevertheless from Cordiani's dialogue in the opening scene that the lover is capable of lyrical bursts that contrast sharply with André's world-weariness.

The situation of Bettine (1851) retains the triangular structure of a verbally adroit mediating figure who wins out over a self-absorbed lover, though here the success of the former becomes possible through the elopement of the latter with another woman. Steinberg, the bridegroom-to-be, is distracted on his wedding day by financial troubles, thus allowing the Marquis Stéfani with his knack for well-turned compliments and his enthusiasm for Rossini to win the heart of the heroine.

Of Musset's best-known comedies, Les caprices de Marianne (1833), chronologically the third of those Musset published, follows most closely the pattern of mediation established in La nuit vénitienne and André del Sarto. Cœlio's use of intermediaries in order to gain access to a supposedly prudish Marianne, first the old woman Ciuta and then his friend Octave, is unsuccessful because Octave's superior eloquence in pleading for Cœlio ignites Marianne's feelings for the go-between. In describing Cœlio's suffering at the unrequited love, Octave lyrically evokes the “pain” she has caused:

Un mal le plus cruel de tous, car c'est un mal sans espérance; le plus terrible, car c'est un mal qui se chérit lui-même, et repousse la coupe salutaire jusque dans la main de l'amitié; un mal qui fait pâlir les lèvres sous des poisons plus doux que l'ambroisie, et qui fond en une pluie de larmes le cœur le plus dur, comme la perle de Cléopâtre; un mal que tous les aromates, toute la science humaine ne sauraient soulager, et qui se nourrit du vent qui passe, du parfum d'une rose fanée, du refrain d'une chanson, et qui suce l'éternel aliment de ses souffrances dans tout ce qui l'entoure, comme une abeille son miel dans tous les buissons d'un jardin.

(77-78)

Cœlio's initial intermediary Ciuta, by contrast, only echoes his plaintive urgings and so fails to enchant Marianne who threatens to tell her husband if Cœlio persists. Toward the end of the play, when he realizes that Marianne's affections seem to be turning in Octave's favor, Cœlio recognizes that his own lack of rhetorical gifts is to blame:

Je sais agir, mais je ne puis parler. Ma langue ne sert point mon cœur, et je mourrai sans m'être fait comprendre, comme un muet dans une prison.

(92)

Ironically, though Octave's boisterous joviality pleases Marianne more than Cœlio's melancholic sighing, she has to defend herself against Octave's opinion of women, not unique in the nineteenth century, that makes them either “abjecte” (a whore) if she gives in, or a statue if she refuses. While Octave dismisses Marianne's remarks on his insensitivity to her position, his verbal panache makes her prefer him to a more sincere and respectful admirer. Unadorned expressions of love fail to communicate to her. As Marianne remarks:

Il faut croire que sa passion pour moi était quelque chose comme du chinois ou de l'arabe, puisqu'il lui fallait un interprète, et qu'elle ne pouvait s'expliquer toute seule.

(85)

It is revealing that when Octave remarks, while discussing with Cœlio various means to get at Marianne, “Si tu en aimais une autre? Viens avec moi chez Rosalinde” (76), the literal-minded lover assumes that his friend is suggesting that he change the object of his affections, rather than use the woman as a way of inciting Marianne's jealousy the way Perdican does Rosette in On ne badine pas avec l'amour. Deception, provided it is artfully concealed, and disrespect, Cœlio fails to realize, are not necessarily barriers to appealing to Musset's women, as long as the man possesses a certain grandiloquence.

The scenario of desire being deflected onto the intermediary appears en abyme in the account that Hermia, Cœlio's mother, gives to her son of how she came to fall in love with his father. The seductiveness of the father's discourse when he came pleading the case for another led to her preferring the emissary to the man he represented, who subsequently committed suicide upon learning what had happened. The pleading itself, Hermia explains, killed off the slight affection inspired in her by months of assiduous declarations (81).

The title of the play, to a reader unfamiliar with Musset's theatre, would suggest that Marianne, like the women in the comedies discussed above, is flighty and her irresponsibility directly the cause of Cœlio's death. However, caprice, like the frequent adjective fantasque, the noun fantaisie, and the suggestive name Fantasio, carries a quite different connotation in the world of the armchair spectacles. Musset's women tend to see in the assiduous attentions of their admirers a form of entrapment into the impossible role of Madonna, if they are to avoid the equally uncomfortable labels of whore or statue. The restrictions imposed by these extremes are more objectionable, because more insidious, than an open insensitivity. Even a character as unsympathetic to the feminist cause as Octave appears preferable because his verbal embellishments leave her free to indulge in a fantasy that redefines Octave as her true object of desire, just as Cœlio's mother fell in love with her suitor's intermediary. Personal identity, a product of social interactions, depends on language. The most appealing male figures are those whose imaginative language allows women to construct masculine desire according to their own wishes. Caprice and fantasy in Musset designate the resistance to socially defined roles, whether they be cherished doll, long-suffering wife (Un caprice), or one who pays his debts (Fantasio).

As with Fantasio (1834), in Le chandelier (1835) the seductiveness of the mediating figure's discourse leads not to a romantic relationship but rather to a sort of maternal affection, though in this play the positive and negative characteristics are intermixed within the same person. Fortunio, who, as his name suggests, blunders onto his mediating role, is sought out to act as cover or “candlestick” (a term whose delicate scabrousness encapsulates the fantaisiste speech that proves seductive). The dragoon Clavaroche, who explains the term to his mistress Jacqueline, has the skill of a practiced beau parleur. His soliloquy in II.i, significantly spoken in front of a mirror, reveals that he views his toying with married women as a diverting game that he refuses to take too seriously. Fortunio, in contrast, has a naïve ardor that pleases Jacqueline (“Puis-je être bon à quelque chose? Veuillez parler avec confiance. Quoique bien jeune je mourrais de bon cœur pour vous rendre service” [343]). Yet he verges on committing the same mistake of being too direct in expressing his puerile gallantry that thwarted Cœlio in Les caprices de Marianne. Nevertheless, his impact on Jacqueline is significant, turning her from a brazen hussy in confronting her eternally ridiculous husband to a woman with a softened heart content with a ménage à trois. When she tells Fortunio, “Sais-tu que je t'aime, enfant que tu es …” (374), she is responding to his self-sacrificing if gushing devotion that manages to touch even so hard a heart as hers. Though the opposition between verbal skill and sincerity is internalized in the character of Fortunio and his rival also has a knack for language, the contrast remains clear between a discourse driven by self-centeredness and one that expresses verbal expenditure for its own sake.

Elsbeth, who finds a kindred soul in the most eloquent of Musset's capricious figures, Fantasio, is herself described as “fantasque” by both Hartman (106) and Marinoni (114). She delighted in the wit of the late buffoon Saint-Jean, even though the jester made fun of her romantic ideas. Conversely, like Marianne and other Musset heroines, she rejects the Prince of Mantua when he, in disguise as his valet, expresses too directly his utter devotion.

Fantasio's attractiveness, at least as a verbal sparring partner for Elsbeth, derives from his desire to escape from himself, his socially defined role as “bourgeois de Munich” (134) who would satisfy his creditors. He exclaims toward the beginning of the play: “Si je pouvais seulement sortir de ma peau pendant une heure ou deux!” (108). The mask of the buffoon, with its consequent discursive liberation, allows for the creation of an alterity that satisfies both Fantasio and the Bavarian princess beyond its practical utility as disguise. The closing scene, where he refuses the twenty thousand crowns as a price of his remaining outside of the banal system of monetary exchange, indicates clearly that he prefers the capricious world of chance to economic security and the marginalized position his disguise offers to being firmly ensconced in a social identity.

Fantasio's remark about Elsbeth's arranged marriage, “que le hasard est capricieux!” (124), encapsulates his world view that endears him to her. Verbal caprice responds to the constraints of a world that limits freedom, either through financial obligations or social dictates. Fantasio mocks the upbringing imposed on young women that makes them sound like little more than canaries stuffed with a hurdy-gurdy (127-28). The playfulness of his language is a reflection of his notion of reality and a compensation for its inadequacies:

Un calembour console de bien des chagrins; et jouer avec les mots est un moyen comme un autre de jouer avec les pensées, les actions et les êtres. Tout est calembour ici-bas …

(121)

Our perceptions are colored by the lenses of our prejudices, without our being able to understand their distorting effects. Since access to reality, including the nature of the self, is problematic if not impossible, since we are constantly subject to pressures to conform to others' ideas of ourselves, verbal ebullience is a way of freeing ourselves and embracing the aleatory through producing a form of it. Fantasio, in liberating Elsbeth from the choice of accepting the Prince of Mantua or being responsible for war, promises to take up arms so that “si vous entrez jamais à Mantoue, ce sera comme une véritable reine” (135) and not simply as the consort of a figure of male authority.

Camille of On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1834) likewise instinctively resists the marriage arranged for her and Perdican. In her language and behavior, she resembles her capricious sisters elsewhere in Musset. Moments after telling Perdican that she does not want to marry either him or anyone else, she refers to him in her conversation with Dame Pluche as her fiancé (268). Her affectionate behavior when she meets Perdican at the rendez-vous she has requested, belies her earlier refusal of him. “Je suis d'humeur changeante,” she admits (273). Her coldness despite these expressions of interest in him leads Perdican to accuse her of having a mask of devotion imposed on her by the nuns to whom she intends to return (280).

The ultimate failure of their relationship is due not so much to Perdican's lack of verbal skill as to the defective mediation of his too-transparent (and thus obviously manipulative) ruse to inspire her jealousy by feigning to court Rosette. Like other Musset heroines, Camille searches for liberation from the constraining circumstances imposed on her, and so the resentment at Perdican's trickery overshadows her feelings of mimetic desire. Inasmuch as Perdican attempts to coerce her interest in him, he falls victim to the same mistake as those male characters who assume that it is sufficient to declare their desire for it to be reciprocated.⁶ But the near success of his stratagem underlines the importance of mediation, for were it not for Rosette's somewhat enigmatic death, their reconciliation would presumably have been consummated.

Camille's perception of Perdican's insincerity in wooing her foster sister recalls the dramatic ironies recurrent throughout Musset's theatre. Perdican's mask of attraction toward Rosette parallels the scenes of deception and misunderstanding touched on before. But these ironies inspired by deliberate manipulation tend to give way to an unexpected, hence ironic, reversal. The best-laid plans come unraveled, revealing once again the uncontrollable, contingent order underlying and subverting human intention. The comedy of Musset's comédies et proverbes is based on the sense of a world ultimately out of control and a human impulse to free oneself from restrictions, an “imp of the perverse” liable to counteract every deliberate scheme. The unanticipated turns arising out of the mediated circumstances of the plays are products of this tendency, especially in the women characters, to resist the intentionality of those who wish them to conform to certain images. For such minds, a subjectivity that expresses its liberation from the will to power over others through verbal exuberance inevitably proves the more desirable.

To say that identity depends on social interactions, one of my starting points in this discussion, is to recognize that not only desire but being itself is mediated. But for it to prove attractive, this mediation must either be, or at least appear to be, a spontaneous effect of chance juxtapositions. Exuberant language creates a verbal mask that is necessary for the self to be recognized at all. This language itself becomes a form of mediation that creates the meeting ground on which male desire can successfully negotiate the female resistance to control and restraint. Like all value, the attractiveness of the verbal sublime and grotesque⁷ depends on difference and contrast, which implies the necessity of mediation for the distinctions to be appreciated. Desirability arises from the intersection of differences at a given moment in time, and thus Musset's cherished image of the couple blended together and eternally sufficient unto themselves⁸ reveals its essential incompatibility with the more sober-minded recognition of the aleatory. The masking of exuberant language reveals in fact the essential emptiness of the self in those figures who understand instinctively the illusory nature of the statements “I am” and “I want.” Those who persist in clinging to their tattered sense of individuality are doomed to be unmasked, ironized as self-deluded and naïvely unaware of the nature of the world as governed by happenstance. Unlike the rigid fantoches and the banally sincere, the living characters in Musset are in dynamic flux, creations of values projected onto them by the Other, a mechanism dependent on exchange and comparison. The juxtaposition of the woodenly ingenuous with the authenticity of the verbally adroit clarifies to what extent these often someber plays can be called comedies.

Notes

1. Bernard Masson claims that Musset's theatre always tells the same story of a young man in quest of himself, of his interior unity, of his rootedness in the universe, and of his communication with others. Masking, according to Masson, is necessary to advance in a world of appearances and in order to be sincere with oneself. But Lucienne Serrano points out how Fantasio's mask of a buffoon, even though it gives him freedom, leads to an interior split, and this split links him to Lorenzaccio.

2. The motif of the double has attracted the interest of several critics. Robert Mauzi sees it generalized in Musset either as a pathological symptom or lyrical or tragic theme. Bernadette Bricout notes how the double is used as a sort of protective mask. Disguise, she argues, is a public face that allows others to label the self, a process at once reductive and reassuring because it protects the inner self and gives a measure of power by allowing the masked individual to observe from a position of security. We can see, however, from the hair-raising fate of the Prince of Mantua in Fantasio that masking can just as easily lead to a subversion of the Other's esteem.

3. J. Beauverd has catalogued these intermediaries of love and notes that the amorous plans fail or death results from “une atteinte à la personnalité du médiateur” (11-12, his emphasis).

4. In stressing the element of chance, I want to move away from Rachel Wright's emphasis on the positive mentoring role of the male figures to show how women acquire much greater awareness of their power through their interactions with certain men.

5. Before Sices, Henri Lefebvre also observed that there is no inaccessible interiority in Musset, but rather each person “finds” his thoughts in talking with another.

6. James Hamilton's analysis of the movement from aleatory game to premeditated “ricochet” in the play highlights this conflict between chance and intention.

7. I am of course using grotesque in the positive sense given to it by Hugo in the Préface to Cromwell (1827). The grotesque—that is, the exuberance combined with the sublime that characterizes the modern and the real, according to Hugo—marks the language of Musset's positive figures. The Romantic grotesque, a reprise of the delight in embellishment of the pre-classical baroque, valorizes the irregular, the unanticipated, the excessive. It contrasts precisely with the controlled marivaudage that constitutes a regulated social game.

8. Jean-Pierre Richard in his indispensable pages on Musset in Études sur le romantisme discusses how this vision of union in love is often torn apart by doubt.

References

Beauverd, J. 1978. “L'entremise d'amour dans l'œuvre de Musset: action et disparition d'une structure.” Journées d'études sur Alfred de Musset. Clermont-Ferrand: Faculté des lettres, Société des études romantiques. 3-28.

Bricout, Bernadette. 1977. “Le visage des masques dans le théâtre de Musset.” Europe 583-84:69-82.

Hamilton, James F. 1985. “From Ricochets to Jeu in Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour: A Game Analysis.” French Review 58:820-26.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1955. Alfred de Musset, dramaturge. Paris: L'Arche.

Masson, Bernard. 1962. “Le masque, le double et la personne dans quelques comédies et proverbes.” Revue des sciences humaines, n.s. 108 (oct.-déc.):551-71.

Mauzi, Robert. 1966. “Les fantoches d'Alfred de Musset.” Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 66:257-82.

Musset, Alfred de. 1990. Théâtre complet. Éd. Simon Jeune. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard.

Richard, Jean-Pierre. 1970. Études sur le romantisme. Paris: Seuil.

Serrano, Lucienne. 1977. Jeu de masques: essai sur le travesti dérisoire dans la littérature. Paris: Nizet.

Sices, David. 1974. Theatre of Solitude: The Drama of Alfred de Musset. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Wright, Rachel L. 1992. “Male Reflectors in the Drama of Alfred de Musset.” French Review 65:393-401.