[In the following essay, Schuler finds parallels between Anouilh's Antigone and Jean Giraudoux's La Folle de Chaillot.]

Antigone and La Folle de Chaillot, both critical successes in France and the U.S. during the 1940s, are usually viewed as expressions of Resistance against Nazism and the Occupation of France during World War II.¹ The present paper proposes, however, a different basis for comparison. Anouilh's Antigone and Giraudoux's Folle de Chaillot will be examined here for their “representations of women” rather than as political protests during the Occupation.

Occupation and protest are present in both texts; but also in both, woman, by an interaction with the earth, is the agent who combats forces destructive to an ongoing society and to the future. Françoise d'Eaubonne and Mary Daly, among others, argue that the classical and traditional concept of woman as a symbolic and inspirational “other” which men follow to meet the challenges of human survival is not only contrary to fact but a manipulative means for allowing men to rationalize an unending preoccupation with conquest, victory, and defeat. They posit a new, woman-centered strategy for human survival. Mary Daly has termed the strategy a “gyn/ecology.”² These two attitudes toward women—the traditional on the one hand and the futuristic on the other—are the current foci of feminist critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is to them that we turn for a hermeneutics on which to base a new reading of the two plays. The contemporaneous texts by Anouilh and Giraudoux offer, I suggest, fertile possibilities for the elucidation of these two opposing “representations of women” as they appear here and throughout literature.

In Anouilh's play, there are two women who have the opportunity to save the civilization, but only Antigone will undertake the self-sacrifice necessary to overturn the spiritually barren world of Créon. Consigned to earth, Hémon dies in Antigone's arms in the manner of a Jungian subconscious return to the womb. Though Hémon gives no indication that he understands Antigone's spiritual purposes, he does manifest a feeling of being totally protected. In the classical mode, Antigone nourishes Hémon by her sacrifice and thus fulfills the noblest purpose of her life.

In Giraudoux's play, “la Folle” represents the critical importance of “feminine” characteristics: these characteristics are proposed as the foundation of healthy urban existence. The Madwoman supports socialization, young love, and street musicians. Her long life as woman is a progression of her growing suitability to save civilization. Her final consignment of the entrepreneur, the prospector, and the investor to the earth is undertaken only after consultation with her sister madwomen and with the consensus of the streetpeople of Paris. In a new mode, women honor women, and ecology and the primacy of life prevail over systematic destruction and exploitation.

Anouilh's Antigone epitomizes the view of woman as something outside the reality of men. His is the classical and patriarchal view of women based on Aristotle's philosophy of domination, which characterizes women as inferior to men, less rational than men, and consequently unfit for participation in the polis.³ This exclusion of women from rational discourse has been sanctioned by its codification in myth. Mary Daly comments that Eliade has contributed to the perpetuation of this mind-set by his exclusion from the sacred sphere (and from reality) of what is done without a mythical model.⁴ Eliade calls myths “paradigmatic models” and asserts that “what men do on their own initiative, what they do without a mythical model belongs to the sphere of the profane; hence it is a vain and illusory activity, and in the last analysis, unreal.”⁵ Anouilh's choice of myth as a dramatic vehicle is an indication that his theme, too, will be identified with the traditional view of woman as developed and articulated in several thousands of years of patriarchal history. This history can be defined succinctly in terms of a society where “masculism is the prevailing social and political value set,” and of which “the driving principles are power, authority, discipline—maleness.”⁶

The patriarchal concept of women in the context of Aristotelian categories was called into permanent question by the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe. One of the primary objectives of the book was to demonstrate the inadequacies of all existing systems of thought when they addressed themselves to the woman question. De Beauvoir argued that all the systems were biased because they were limited, since from the beginning of history women had been left out. Since the publication of de Beauvoir's book (in 1949) and especially since 1968, feminists in France and the U.S. have undertaken new readings of existing systems of thought based on the argument that all were biased because they had been devised by men.⁷ The reading proposed here for the two plays will take into account strategies posited by these feminist thinkers.

It is easy to make a case for Giraudoux's notion of the feminine as anti-war. He says that “[la femme] hait la guerre plus que l'homme” and that “par une antipathie profonde, aucune femme d'aucun pays ne tient à devenir dirigeante dans les problèmes de politique pure; sans doute qu'aucune femme ne veut être la première femme qui ait un jour à déclarer la guerre.”⁸ In La Folle de Chaillot Countess Aurélie espouses the anti-war stance. It is the threat of war at the hands of oil tycoons that sets in motion their destruction by the ingenious Aurélie. It is clear that Giraudoux intends “la Folle” to represent an anti-war stance.

Anouilh, prior to his satiric and off-handed treatment of the question in La Culotte (1978), does not articulate an overt stance vis-à-vis woman. His typical hero is nonetheless apt to be a woman and that woman, most frequently, “une jeune fille.” One critic posits that the seeming fragility of the young woman provides Anouilh with the means of throwing into relief the grossness to which she is opposed. Her delicacy covers a hardness which is hardly “feminine,” sweetness and femininity being reserved to those in his plays who represent powerlessness or impurity—virtuous hardness being opposed, in Anouilh's ethic, to what an unjust world offers in the way of the pliable and accommodating. Whether she be called Eurydice, Médée, Jeanne d'Arc or Antigone, the heroine of Anouilh will be “petite,” “noire,” “mal peignée.”⁹

Antigone offers her sister the opportunity to share in the preservation of their dead brother's right to an assured passage to eternal life. Ismène (“la blonde, la belle, l'heureuse Ismène,” p. 9), whose physical attributes as described by Anouilh have the effect of identifying her with woman as the Aristotelian subordinate and inferior of man, sympathizes with Antigone's cause but refuses at a critical juncture to participate actively on the basis of attitudes and reasons which she, at various points early in the action, articulates. Anouilh's characterization of Ismène is pivotal in his decision to create in the person of Antigone the epitome and summary of opposition to Créon's order. (Conversely, Sophocles, in the original play, attributes to Ismene, Haemon, and Tiresias—as well as to Antigone—arguments of opposition to Creon.) Anouilh's Ismène delineates the following rationale for passive inactivity: (1) the irrationality of opposition to the patriarchy (“Tu [Antigone] es folle,” p. 18); (2) incapacity to act (“Nous ne pouvons pas,” p. 18); (3) the futility of opposition (“Il est plus fort que nous, Antigone. Il est le roi,” p. 20); (4) fear of death (“Il nous ferait mourir,” p. 18); (5) the inappropriateness of women's opposition to the status quo and, simultaneously, of women's theorizing in opposition to the male universal (“C'est bon pour les hommes de croire aux idées et de mourir pour elles. Toi tu es une fille,” p. 22); (6) concern for Antigone's safety, and sisterly love (“Reste avec nous, ne va pas làbas cette nuit, je t'en supplie,” p. 33, and … “Je ne veux pas vivre si tu meurs, je ne veux pas rester sans toi!” p. 68). Anouilh capitalizes on the dramatic effect inherent in Ismène's relationship with Antigone by transforming her into Antigone's supporter and having her return just before Antigone's demise, ready to die with her; Antigone, however, refuses her the right to do so. Anouilh thus achieves an innately destructive double effect: he sends Antigone (a woman who—justifiably—opposes the male order) to her death; he returns Ismène (a woman who—understandably—accepts the male order) to life within an order that is inherently inimical to her.

This dual destruction and denigration of women has the effect of reaffirming the inherent rightness of the patriarchal state. To the men in Antigone's environment the conservation of the state depends on their ability to lead by defeating the enemy within, which is the feminine instinct against war. Etéocle and Polynice, as well as Créon, annihilate a potential feminine consciousness in that they demonstrate no internal hesitation to wage war; Hémon's identification with Antigone underscores his unsuitability to live in a patriarchal society dominated by the expediency of war.

Anouilh clearly categorizes and polarizes masculine and feminine psychologies. Ismène will not use her feminine instincts for conservation of the society but she also will not wage war: these are the only choices of action that she is allowed in the play. She does not question the rightness of Antigone's thinking, but she feels that a woman is helpless in the face of brute force. In challenging the male order, however, Antigone epitomizes the male concept of the enemy within.¹⁰

Anouilh arouses keen interest in the decision and actions of his “conservative” heroine and, in fact, produces in the reader profound respect for her decision, finally, to sacrifice her life in defense of her stance, even though he denies Antigone the conscious formulation of her own motivation. Antigone describes her interment of her brother as “absurde” (p. 51) and her motivation as “Pour personne. Pour moi” (p. 52). She can defend her action only in personal terms: “Moi, je ne suis pas obligée de faire ce que je ne voudrais pas!” (p. 56). Her ultimate condemnation to death comes about almost casually and hinges on her rejection of Créon's advice to settle for “la consolation dérisoire de vieillir” (p. 64). Finally, in her farewell letter to Hémon, Antigone says, “… Je ne sais plus pourquoi je meurs” (p. 80). (In L'Alouette, Anouilh again denies his heroine the articulation of her essential being: he has Jeanne refuse to recant without apparently knowing the reasons for her own actions.)

The treatment of the earth in Anouilh's Antigone is conventional and classical. The earth is Mother Earth; it is the holy abode of the dead. It is the safe return to the womb of unending life, and protection. What Antigone has sought for her brothers, she wins for herself as well as for Hémon; the remaining society is cursed and denied this safe refuge.

Anouilh uses the occasion to present an extraordinary woman (as compared with the ordinary Ismène) and that woman's assessment of the tyrant, and her view of the essential importance of love and marriage to her own self-fulfillment as woman and to the preservation of the environment. On her way to the cave, Antigone says: “O tombeau! O lit nuptial! O ma demeure souterraine …” (p. 77).

Antigone's role is to provide a haven for the souls of men. Hémon follows her to the grave; it is his protection from annihilation. For him, Antigone's condemnation to death signals most importantly the end of his childhood and the end to a child's admiration for the father as all-powerful: “Ah! je t'en supplie, père, que je t'admire, que je t'admire encore! je suis trop seul et le monde est trop nu si je ne peux plus t'admirer” (p. 72). He now recognizes the inevitability of death and the need for Antigone to comfort him in that last aspect of life's journey. Antigone fulfills the duties and purposes of the classical goddess: she provides herself as the sacrifice.¹¹

Anouilh's Antigone exhausts her salutary powers in the resolution of the play's conflict. There is no further service which remains within Antigone's capability. Antigone has powers specifically limited to the act of ultimate self-sacrifice. When Ismène says “Il est plus fort que nous, Antigone. Il est le roi. Et ils pensent tous comme lui dans la ville. Ils sont des milliers and des milliers autour de nous, groillant dans toutes les rues de Thèbes” (p. 20), she is fortifying the fact that their only possible course of action is the act of self-immolation. Antigone's death returns integrity to the state. Créon is left to rule the empty palace and to await his own death.

Aurélie in La Folle de Chaillot is introduced as a woman of great spiritual clout. She is symbolic to the people in the sense that she is the epitome of positive healthy thinking. Contrary to the Président's desire that, in a world “vraiment moderne,” human beings be indistinguishable one from the other, Aurélie is the triumphant expression of irrepressible individuality. Her actions are not symbolic gestures; they are efficacious procedures. Her plan to rid Paris of the destructive presence of the entrepreneur, the prospector, and the investor is a positive action that will promote the general welfare of the population. This is the most dramatically intense illustration of the distinction between the two women of the plays under consideration. Giraudoux intends that the Countess hear the problems of the Ragpicker and the others and that she then set upon the means for their positive resolution. Her instructions are comprehensive and are executed in minute detail. Her associates, Joséphine and Gabrielle, consider her the most competent and the Chief of Staff of the operation.

One of the most significant of Giraudoux's gyn/ecological theories is to be found in the Countess' treatment of the return to the earth. In the worldview of the Countess, the return to the bowels of the earth is the inevitable punishment for the anti-ecological. The despoilers, in being cast back into the earth, are being deprived of the evolutionary gains that have been made in the modern scientific civilization.

In the action of the play, the Countess sees life as interaction in the city, in the urban environment. She is free of the traditional and classical regard for the return to the earth as access to salvation. The Countess believes that evildoers who despoil the civilization are to be cast out of it and back into the earth's darkness. The literary value as well as the psychological importance of the return to the physical, primitive origins is effectively debunked in the work. Woman is no longer Earth Mother, and the affairs of civilization can no longer be conducted by profit-motivated men whose understanding of the true program of civilization is so limited. In La Française et la France, Giraudoux describes woman's task in the modern world as two-fold: “une rénovation administrative du monde” and “une amélioration universelle de la morale ou de la vie sociale” (p. 198). There is a remarkable similarity between Giraudoux's mandate to French women (or to all women) in 1934 and recent statements by Françoise d'Eaubonne, who maintains that the fate of the human species and of the planet is at stake, and that no male-led “revolution” will counteract the horrors of overpopulation and destruction of natural resources.¹² D'Eaubonne coins the expression “éco-féminisme” to convey the importance in her ecological construct of a shift away from the historic egocentric, authoritarian, and destructive-of-women worldview associated with patriarchy. The Countess puts the same idea succinctly after having disposed of destructive elements: “Et voilà, l'affaire est finie. Vous voyez comme elle était simple. Il suffit d'une femme de sens pour que la folie du monde sur elle casse ses dents” (p. 191).

While the Countess does complete her duties and retire from the scene, she does not die. And she does not sacrifice self. In the Countess' return to her own peaceful quarters, there is a sense of temporary respite; Aurélie expects to be called upon again when needed: “La prochaine fois, n'attendez paz, chiffonnier. Dès que menacera une autre invasion de vos monstres, alertez-moi de suite” (p. 179). It should be noted here that Antigone's discourse on the road to death has the classical ring of the traditional prelude to the descent into Hades; the orientation of the Countess is to ongoing life.

While Antigone alone must undertake the salvation of the state in her capacity as a tragic heroine, the Countess freely calls on other women who willingly work as a cooperative group. In Antigone, Ismène reflects the classical and patriarchal position that women may not act as a body of power. The call for women to assent to a constructive teamwork is an extremely advanced and revolutionary notion, and one that Giraudoux had earlier advanced in La Française et la France, where he equates the concerted and decisive intervention of women's groups during the creation of the League of Nations with the dawn of a new era in human affairs: “Si les femmes n'ont pas assisté en tant que personnes à la création du monde, puisque Eve est née après Adam, ni à sa recréation par la machine, elles étaient de plain-pied pour la première fois avec lui pour cette nouvelle reconstruction …” (p. 201).

Remembering that Antigone and La Folle de Chaillot are contemporaneous dramatic creations, we recognize also that there is greater cultural acceptance of Antigone's mandate to act alone than there is of the Countess' teamwork approach. In order to justify women in a team effort not directed toward the service of a male enterprise, Giraudoux must make the Countess and her friends types of good witches. It has been noted that Antigone is described as mad; Giraudoux (as he does in many instances in his theater) likewise attaches the epithet “folle” to his heroine, who—as has been noted by a biographer—was inspired by a woman seen by Giraudoux in the same streets of Paris where he sets the play.¹³ The word is put in proper perspective early in Act I, when Aurélie's bizarre apparition in the café offends the Président:

LE Président:
Garçon, faites circuler cette femme!
LE Garçon:
Je m'en garderai, Monsieur. Elle est ici chez elle.
LE Président:
C'est la gérante du café?
LE Garçon:
C'est la Folle de Chaillot, Monsieur.
LE Président:
Une Folle?
LE Garçon:
Pourquoi une folle? Pourquoi serait-elle folle?
LE Président:
C'est vous qui le dites, idiot!
LE Garçon:
Moi? Je dis comme on l'appelle. Pourquoi folle?
Je ne vous permets pas de l'insulter. C'est la Folle de
Chaillot.

[p. 102]

Giraudoux had spoken earlier in La Française et la France of “extravagance” and “les grandes extravagantes” in saying: “Le talent ou l'imagination chez la femme l'amène rapidement à l'extravagance” (p. 181) and he elaborates:

… la diplomatie féminine mondiale doit, autant qu'à ses grandes sages, à celles qu'un de mes confrères appelle irrévérencieusement les grandes folles. Que ce soit par Mme de Staël, par Catherine II, par Mrs. Macpherson, ou par Isadora Duncan, des habitudes intellectuelles, physiques, morales ont souvent été données au monde entier par l'élan et l'ignorance de toute pudeur ou de tout ridicule avec lesquels certaines femmes, sous la pression de leur talent, se sont précipitées vers la conquête du monde.

[pp. 181-182]

It is the capacity for whimsy that enables the Countess to be the effective gyn/ecologist. This whimsy is sanity, and the ability to see the world as it is. Men bereft of whimsy assume that it is not an authentic quality. It becomes associated with woman's “irrationality,” fancy, frivolous changeability, and penchant for the outlandish. Woman's whimsy is seen, at best, as the nature of the good witch and, at worst, as the bizarre behavior of a demented diabolism. In classical terms, these are the distinctions between the mermaids and the sirens and between the Muses and the Furies. In Hélène Cixous's words: “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.”¹⁴

Anouilh's view of woman is classical in the sense that, for him, woman is a reflector and extension of man. Her whimsy (which we have seen Giraudoux classify positively as “extravagance”) impairs her ability for positive, objective action. For Anouilh, Antigone is a self-sacrificing example. Créon is the person who will or will not learn from her example; it is he who must correct society. Anouilh provides us with a classical goddess in an otherwise modern play touted for its hard-hitting realism, especially as conveyed in the modern idiom employed by the speakers of the play.

At first glance, the Countess and Antigone seem to be representatives of a unified France in a historically documented moment of dilemma shared by all the French. Certainly the critics, the popular press, and the public saw the plays as kindred in spirit. Anthologies in the late forties and early fifties included both plays, and there has been a longstanding association between the two in the U.S., for example, where both were presented in translation on the Broadway stage within a short time after their original production in Paris; both were later included in the “Best Plays” of their respective seasons. Both have been perennial choices by school, college, and amateur and professional theater groups in the U.S.

Close reading, however, reveals opposing representations of women that place the themes ultimately at opposite poles. The plays both concern themselves with their heroines' abilities to participate in the conservation of the civilization. In Antigone, women can only serve as symbol and example for man, who is the agent for constructive operation of the society. In La Folle de Chaillot, only woman can solve the problems of the civilization because only she has the understanding of and interaction with reality that are the qualities necessary to modern leaders in a thriving and forward-looking urban civilization.

Notes

1. Antigone opened in Paris February 4, 1944, and was presented for the first time in New York (in English) February 18, 1946. It appeared in Burns Mantle's Best Plays of 1945-46. La Folle de Chaillot, completed in 1943, was staged for the first time by Jouvet December 19, 1945. The English language version premiered in New York December 17, 1948. It is listed in Best Plays of 1948-49 and won the Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play in 1949. Texts cited in the present paper are, for Jean Anouilh's Antigone, the Table Ronde edition published in 1947; for Jean Giraudoux's La Folle de Chaillot, Tome Quatrième of his Théâtre, the Bernard Grasset edition published in 1959, pp. 80-181.

2. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 9-11 and passim.

3. For an exploration of the philosophical significance of sexual difference in Aristotle's philosophy, see Robin Schott's “Aristotle on Women,” in Kinesis, XII, 2 (1982), pp. 69-84. I am grateful to the author, a colleague in philosophy at the University of Louisville, for sharing her research and her conclusions with me.

4. Gyn/Ecology, p. 44.

5. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p. 96, as quoted in Daly, p. 44.

6. Sheila Ruth, “Sexism, Patriarchy, and Feminism,” in Women and Men: The Consequences of Power (Cincinnati: Univ. of Cincinnati, Office of Women's Studies, 1977), p. 56.

7. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 8. Marks and de Courtivron present, within a historical context, the creative and critical literary theories of twentieth-century French women.

8. Jean Giraudoux, La Française et la France (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), pp. 174 and 208. The texts cited in this paper were written and delivered at l'Université des Annales in 1934. Subsequent references are indicated in the present text by title and page number.

9. Anouilh's preoccupation with the dramatic possibilities inherent in the “jeune fille” has been alluded to in a number of critical studies. David Grossvogel, in his introduction to Antigone (Cambridge, Mass.: Integral Editions, 1959), pp. 9-10, provides especially valuable insights, which I gratefully acknowledge.

10. See Daly, pp. 354-365, for a discussion of woman as the object of patriarchal war.

11. Codification of the genealogy of the gods was first undertaken in the eighth century by Hesiod in Theogony. The attributes of the gods, their exploits, and their interaction with human beings are summarized in Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, trans. Richard Aldington and Delano Ames (London: Batchworth Press, 1959). Antigone belongs to the Royal House of Thebes through her father, Oedipus. Her genealogy and descent from Poseidon are illustrated in Michael Grant and John Hazel, Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1973), p. 439.

12. Françoise d'Eaubonne, Le Féminisme ou la mort (Paris: Femmes en Mouvement, 1974), pp. 213-252.

13. André Beucler, Les Instants de Giraudoux et autres souvenirs (Paris: Milieu du Monde, 1948), p. 14.

14. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, p. 255. This is a revised version of “Le rire de la méduse,” which appeared in L'arc (1975), pp. 39-54.