SOURCE: Amoia, Alba. “The Heroic World of Jean Anouilh.” In Twentieth-Century European Drama, edited by Brian Docherty, pp. 109-23. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Amoia provides an overview of Anouilh's heroic heroines and contrasts these female characters with their unimpressive male counterparts.]

Women are the dominant figures in the theatre of Jean Anouilh, around women rotates the axis of his world of heroism, and to women does the author ascribe the epithet, ‘flowers in the midst of garbage’.

The cast of Anouilh's preeminent female characters ranges from the uncouth and sublime ‘lark’ (Joan of Arc) to the pure and untamed ‘sauvage’; from the uncompromising Antigone to the adamant, hunchbacked ‘daisy’ (Ardèle, ou la Marguerite). Anouilh's intransigent heroines are willing to die in defence of a cherished principle; they refuse all happiness, love or romance that is not ‘pure’; and they take an ethereal view of existence in their struggle against all forms of compromise and deceit. Often guided by compassion for the victimised and downtrodden, they fit into Joan of Arc's ‘ordered world’ of the poor, the ill, the aged, and the wounded. (Becket is perhaps the one male heroic exception in Anouilh's theatre, for he inspires the love of the downtrodden masses of Canterbury by championing them against the power of the Crown, the rich, and the Normans.)

Opposite in kind to the unyielding heroines, are the men in Anouilh's plays—distorted, depersonalised, degraded roués, who make a mockery of lofty goals, seek money and power, and are motivated by selfishness and baseness. Even historical giants such as Napoleon and Louis XVIII are doing nothing more, in La Foire d'empoigne (1962), than playing a petty game of grab, catching as catch can, unmindful of their unheroic demeanour. Male heroism for Anouilh? It is encapsulated in the ironic title of his 1970 play, Les poissons rouges ou mon père, ce héros. The ‘hero's’ highest form of self-expression as a child was urinating in the goldfish bowl. It is no wonder that, grown man and established author that he now is, he comes under attack from all sides, albeit by equally contemptible and ridiculous characters: his wife, mother-in-law, children, mistress, physician, and friend. The only figure in the play worthy of esteem is the pale little servant, Adele—a stock character in Anouilh's theatre, whose place is in the ranks of the downtrodden but who remains always generous and pure. The naive Adele is relentlessly ordered about by her mistress and made the victim of street urchins' pranks, but she is the only person in the household who refuses to be caught up in the accusations and insults cascading against the sorry hero, defending him even at the cost of rough banishment to the kitchen. Humble Adele, no less than Antigone, Eurydice, Medea, or Joan of Arc, attempts to modify the role she is destined to play during her life on earth. Unlike Gaston, for example, in Le Voyageur sans bagage, who can only weep when he discovers the role he is expected to play in the Renaud household, and seeks to escape moral responsibility for his horrendous past actions, Adele does not fear to defy society, face up to reality, and shoulder her own identity. Resistants rather than Collaborators, Anouilh's heroines champion realities and truths which reveal the hollowness and falseness of the male characters' compromises. Banishment or sentencing to death seems devastating to these heroines, but they walk steadily and undramatically off stage, while the anti-hero is left to decay morally in a corner from which he cannot escape nor even desire to escape. Anouilh's plays without heroes have acquired unforgettable heroines, who are ultimately vindicated and emerge triumphant in their implacable ‘purity’.

Anouilh's ‘pièces noires’ and ‘nouvelles pièces noires’ are pessimistic, bitter, and permeated with gloom. They display most clearly his lack of faith in humanity and its institutions. His pessimism stems from the realisation that neither the so-called joys and comforts of life reserved for the happy few, nor the invitations to unsavoury adventures, promiscuity, and immorality extended to all, lead to real happiness. Concomitantly, resignation to abject poverty, rigid acceptance of one's role in life, strict morality, and punctilious observance of a code of honour, can lead only to tragedy or death. Purity and love cannot prevail on this earth, because of the intrinsic impurity of happiness. Anouilh's heroines, seeking a happiness known only to themselves, a ‘purity’ of self and an ‘absolute’ love, are faithful in their search even though they know that none is attainable in life. Heroines cannot be ‘happy’. Because they reject ‘le sale petit bonheur’ reserved for the mediocre, they are condemned to a solitude that admits of neither love nor friendship. Their task of finding or creating the ambience in which their truth can thrive is limited to the realms of illusion and of death, where real love and purity do exist.

For Anouilh's heroines, offerings or worldly gain are meaningless. In their search for the realisation of an ideal far beyond the horizons of the masses, the temptations of the so-called good things in life do not sway them from their perpetual task of refusing mediocrity. Antigone's retort to her family's assurances that happiness awaits her because she is young, beautiful, and engaged to be married, is: ‘You all disgust me with your happiness. With your life that has to be lived at any cost. And that daily ration of good fortune, which suffices as long as you're not too demanding.’¹ In words that echo Joan of Arc's ‘I don't want to have a happy ending … an ending that never ends’,² she rejects Creon's image of a marriage that will permit her to live happily ever after. The heroine's rejection of a love that is less than perfect is incomprehensible to the mediocre masses, for whom ‘love and marriage’ are an integral part of life. Joan of Arc's disappearance from her father's farm to keep her divine appointment provokes her mother's prodding for explanations of the long absence, and her father's ‘Ah! you're losing track of time now! I hope to God you haven't lost something else that you don't dare mention!’ (PC, p. 26). It would be inconceivable for Joan to answer ‘Saint Michael’ to parents such as these. In Antigone, the uncomprehending Nurse immediately assumes that her charge's absence from the palace in the middle of the night can only be explained by a tryst with a common boy. Again, it would be absurd for Antigone to answer that she had gone to cover the body of her dead brother. Joan might avoid her father's violent thrashings and be ‘happier’ if only she would try to appear attractive to a village boy who will marry her, thereby easing her father's mind and his blows. She recognises her parent's right to destroy her physically, but maintains her spiritual rights: ‘Beat me hard; you have the right to. But it's my right to continue to believe and to say no to you’ (PC, p. 87). After an especially hard paternal drubbing, she refuses her mother's consolatory offer of an embroidered scarf: ‘I don't want to look pretty, mommy … I don't want to get married’ (p. 32). Later in the play, her words express even more clearly her renunciation of ‘happiness’ and her desire for nonconformity: ‘I don't want things to turn out all right. … I don't want to live your time’ (PC, p. 131).

Medea has already experienced marriage—that short, happy union which is soon followed by the inevitable period of noncommunication that eventually culminates in silence and hatred. Medea's Nurse tells her mistress that ‘the earth is still full of good things: the sun on the bench at the resting-place, hot soup at noon, the coins you have earned in your hand, the drop of booze that warms your heart before you doze off’.³ Medea, nauseated by the mediocrity of the Nurse's criteria, banishes her to unheroic realms: ‘You have said too much, with your carcass, your drop of booze, and your sun shining on your rotten flesh. Get back to your dishes, your broom, your peelings, you and the rest of your [mediocre] race’ (NPN, p. 367). Turning toward Corinth, where people are celebrating boisterously, Medea says: ‘Something in me is stirring … and it says no to happiness’ (NPN, p. 359). Her own children revolt her, for she already sees them as sly, deceitful adults who are, worst of all, anxious to ‘live and be happy’. Jason predicts that there will never be other Medeas on this earth, that mothers will never name their daughters Medea, and that the Medea he knows will stand alone until the end of time. At the close of the play, as she and her children are being devoured by flames, she will proclaim: ‘I am Medea, finally and forever.’ A young woman of the lesser race who carries her head high, clenches her fists, scornfully spits on the ground, and stamps her feet in defiance, Medea is almost a stock character in Anouilh's plays. She survives through the ages in the dramatist's work as Antigone, Joan of Arc, ‘la sauvage’, Jeannette in Roméo et Jeannette, Adele (of La Grotte), and others—all of whom are atavisms of Medea.

Nowhere in Anouilh's plays does a heroine seek to satisfy a maternal instinct. Children are never portrayed as a delight or a comfort, but rather as tiring, vociferous mini-adults. In one play, La Répétition (1950), Anouilh is unsparing: his characters find deaf-mute children perhaps tolerable, but rose bushes preferable. The caricatural figure of the typical male child, Toto, who reappears in numerous plays, is a mixture of mime, prankster, and liar, who plays grotesque games of love to parody his parents. The female child is usually portrayed in her earliest teens, pregnant, pretentious, and possessed of some ridiculous name such as Camomilla.

Jason had formerly been the ideal for whom Medea had sacrificed all. After their marriage his love was lost and that love now repels her. When he tries to save her from the many enemies she has made because of him, she protests: ‘What are you trying to save? This worn-out skin, this carcass Medea, good for nothing except to drag around in its boredom and its hatred? A little bread and a house somewhere, and she'll grow old in silence until nobody mentions her name any more, right?’ (NPN, p. 359). The acceptance of ‘happiness’ means submersion in the eternal oblivion of conformity, which is the equivalent of vegetation. Electra, in Anouilh's Oreste (1945), describing Aegisthus's and Clytemnestra's marriage as a slow process of watching the approach of old age, the onset of coldness, lack of desire, and ultimately hatred, exclaims sardonically: ‘Oh, the indissoluble sanctity of marriage!’⁴ Electra pursues her vengeance by becoming a child of hate and destruction. She purposely makes herself ugly and dirty, tears her dresses, and rubs her skin against the lepers huddled at the walls of the palace of Argos. She has taken all mirrors out of her room because she knows and fears the self-created monster of destruction that will call Aegisthus and Clytemnestra out of the palace to die.

It is in his ‘jarring’ plays (‘pièces grinçantes’) that Anouilh expounds most discordantly upon the subjects of life and love, marriage and children. The plays end on a displeasing, disconcerting note, expressing total cynicism that love can exist between a man and a woman. Even the marriages of the wealthy, although based on the solid foundation of money, are not happy. The nefarious influence of money on love, which the poor heroines fear, is lived out each day by the rich: a routine of boredom, hostility, hatred, deception, hypocrisies and extravagances of all kinds. Anouilh's heroines, refusing orchids, champagne and furs, will request baser beverages and seek instead the warmth of a supportive hand in their revolt against society's hypocrisy. No truly happy couple is portrayed in any of the plays, and whatever pleasure might have existed in the premarital state is soon destroyed by marriage. Anouilh describes marriage as a chemical experiment in which ‘a mixture at first bubbles and sparkles; then happiness volatilises, leaving in the retort nothing but a big grey lump of [marital] obligations.’⁵ The stock figure of General Saint-Pé (in Ardèle, La Valse des toréadors, and L'Hurluberlu), as well as Antoine de Saint-Flour in Les poissons rouges, are symbolic of the pathetic, disillusioned, humiliated, and unheroic married man.

Anouilh's heroines are true to themselves, isolated in their contemporary world, persistent in their sincerity and fidelity, lacerated by the conflict between their ideal and the hypocrisy that underlies sordid reality. In the ‘pièces noires’, the antagonism between the ‘pure’ heroine and perverted society results in either actual or symbolic death, while, in the ‘pièces roses’ and ‘brillantes’, escape from the convulsed world takes the form of either the creation of an illusion that triumphs over reality, or a refuge in one's multiple personalities. The author is deeply concerned with this idea of the multiplicity and mutability of the human personality, and with the realisation that the human being cannot be reduced to a unity that will afford him inner peace and contentment. He is aware of the relativity of human sentiments and emotions to social, sociological and economic conditions, and of the disturbing feelings of disunity that result from the conflict between them. Perhaps the most forceful example the author has given us of a heroine for whom changing human opinions have no significance is Joan of Arc: in the face of the relative truths of her parents, the people of France, and her executioners, she remains a symbol of absolute truth.

Anouilh's distinction between the heroic and the mediocre is often explained in terms of the ‘poor’ and the ‘rich’ races. Of the two, it is the poor race that can father heroines—not the wealthy nor the nobility. The lower class produces remarkably courageous women, while the upper class spends its unheroic life taking futility seriously. By the very rottenness of family life among the wealthy, with its inaneness, its ménages à trois, or à quatre, its hypocrisy, and its debauchery, the growth of heroism in the ‘rich’ race is stunted. Within the poor race, Anouilh distinguishes between the happy and the unhappy, the mediocre and the heroic. He describes the former as ‘an exploding, fertile race, a flabby mass of dough that eats its sausage, bears children, uses its tools, counts its sous, year after year, in spite of epidemics and wars, until old age catches up with it; people living life, everyday people, people it's hard to imagine as dead’. The latter he describes as ‘the noble ones, the heroes. Those whom you can easily imagine stretched out dead, pale, with a bullet hole in the head—the cream of the crop’.⁶ The ‘flabby masses of dough’ take the form of the Rouen mob awaiting the spectacle of the burning of Joan of Arc, or the spitting, stenching Thebes mob described in Antigone, with its thousand arms and its thousand faces, but only one indistinguishable expression of mockery and laughter.

The heroines look disdainfully on the mediocrity of those who inhabit the realms of superficiality, conformity, and weakness; this majority is analogous to the ‘rich’ race in that it masks truths and is afraid to face absolutes. Rather than daring to dream the impossible dream of something better, the mediocre take refuge in their petty maladies, their banalities, and their stomachs. The heroines, instead, seek answers to metaphysical questions and are eternally dissatisfied with themselves. Their conscience and concept of order, clearly conceived and stated, form the sharp dividing line between the rigorous demands of heroic honour and the mediocre satisfactions of the masses. Anouilh's heroines love honour not for honour's sake, but for the sake of an idea of honour which they have created for themselves. Whereas honour, for the author's anti-heroes, is something to be remembered or forgotten at will, to be bought and sold, soiled and washed, the heroine's idea of honour can be neither improvised nor defiled by compromise. The concept of an honour to be defended unto death is basic to the plays in which a heroine champions nonconformity, purity, and refusal to compromise. A truly sorry figure is King Charles of France, in L'Alouette, who has neither wealth, nor courage, nor anyone to defend his person, much less his title. For this pusillanimous king, the concept of honour is nonexistent, and it is Joan who will illustrate what the pursuit of honour is all about. Joan's duty is to remain loyal to her intransigent race and to her search for purity, regardless of how absurd or how grotesque her role may be. The sole commandment for Anouilh's ‘insolent breed’ of heroines is to do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and to do it wholeheartedly and completely, even though it is unpleasant and difficult. Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, pleads with Joan to recant during her trial for heresy: ‘Joan, try to understand that there is something absurd about your refusal’ (PC, p. 112). Likewise, Antigone persistently tells Creon that she must return to her brother's grave to replace the earth that the guards have removed. Creon replies: ‘You'll return to make such an absurd gesture again? … Even if you should succeed in covering the grave again, you know very well that we'll uncover the cadaver. So what are you accomplishing except dirtying your fingernails with blood and getting yourself hanged?’ Antigone answers: ‘Nothing but that, I know. But at least I can do that. And everyone must do whatever he can’ (NPN, p. 76). The ‘insolent ones’ are confident that God or the gods favour them and will grant them sufficient time in which to accomplish, with appropriate dignity, their absurd duty. Antigone will have time to perform the funeral rites for her dead brother with her tiny, rusty spade before she is hanged. Anouilh's heroines find lies repugnant, deception indecent, compromise inelegant. They insist on being aesthetically ‘pure’, on playing their role down to the last detail. The heroine is willing to adopt the commandment to do what has to be done, even though it may be absurd because she has been unable to find a solid truth in society on which she can base her definition of self and of her actions. The roots of her tragedy lie in the disjointed relations between herself and others: Antigone cannot accept Creon as her true authority; Medea could be happy in a world without Jason (who symbolises compromise), but she knows that the world contains both Jason and herself and, therefore, the seeds of conflict. She will have to oppose him unarmed in a losing battle, because he is of the ‘rich’ race. She cries out to him: ‘Race of Abel, race of the just, race of the rich, how calmly you speak. It must be good to have the gods on your side, and the police, too’ (NPN, p. 389). The serenity of the mediocre race is denied to the frenzied heroines who obstreperously reject the maxim that physical, political, or military might makes right. Antigone's position, vis-à-vis the king, who demands compromise, is identical to that of Medea. Antigone loves both life and her fiancé Haemon, but will nevertheless persist in performing the burial rites for her brother in the full knowledge that death will be her groom.

Rejecting all concepts of compromise and conformity, Anouilh's heroines starkly delineate and label their every action or sentiment of honour; nowhere do they see a grey area offering refuge, nor any opportunity to avoid justification of their acts. While the heroic figures refuse to accept the definition of happiness proffered by the mediocre, the mediocre, in turn, can understand neither what it is that the heroines are seeking, nor why, in their mental anorexia, they choose to absent themselves physically and spiritually from the routine of life's banquet.

The lifespan of the mediocre race is nothing but an endless and ugly vegetation. So powerful is the heroine's scorn for life's ‘sale espoir’ that, just as Joan of Arc is about to recant and Antigone is about to accede to her uncle's reasoning, the allusions to ‘happiness’ by Warwick and Creon, respectively, are enough for the women once again to prefer death to an act of compromise. The ‘happiness’ formula automatically antagonises the heroine; the picture of the ‘petit bonheur’ of the masses as a life of compromise and mediocrity, contrary to her demands for a state of perpetual happiness, shocks Antigone into reasserting her defiance. She thereupon taunts her uncle, the king, until he is forced to call in the guards. Only then does Creon understand her revolt. Polynices was merely a pretext; Antigone's raison d'être is to be put to death—to be a heroine. It is not difficult for Antigone to renounce even Haemon, because the idea that he will grow older and make compromises is unbearable: ‘I love a young and hard Haemon, a Haemon demanding and faithful, like me. … But if the wear and tear of your life, your happiness, must change him in any way … then I no longer love Haemon’ (NPN, p. 187). Antigone is reminiscent of Ibsen's uncompromising Brand, for whom ‘the enemy’ is personified as the spirit of compromise, the spirit of the juste milieu. Death, then, becomes a refuge and deliverance from this damnable existence. The vicarious experience of ‘living’ makes the heroines even more determined, at the crucial and decisive moment, to refuse to understand, to refuse to be ‘reasonable’. ‘Moi, je ne veux pas comprendre’, is Antigone's rejoinder throughout the play, and it is echoed in other plays by heroines who refuse to be ‘reasonable’ by conforming to society's norms. Refusal to ‘live’, to ‘grow up and understand’, is a dominant theme in Anouilh's theatre, but the desire to remain childlike is not a form of desire for regression; it is, rather, a reasoned and deliberate decision not to conform when an ideal or a concept of honour is threatened.

Persons in power attempt unsuccessfully to dissuade extremists from their nonconformity by demonstrating the absurdity of their ideal. Creon tries to destroy Antigone's illusions by smearing the image in her mind of her brother Polynices and revealing that it may even be Eteocles' body that she has buried instead. Her sister Ismene tries to dissuade her from covering the body, arguing that he was not a good brother. Antigone, however, stands firm: ‘What do I care for your politics, your necessities, your miserable stories. I can still say “no” … and I am sole judge’ (NPN, p. 177). The concept of an absurd duty to be fulfilled can be judged only by a superior race of ‘imbeciles’. Cauchon, in an attempt to destroy the will of the imprisoned Joan, tells her that all of her good soldiers have abandoned her and, weary of war, have fled Rouen. Even La Hire, her closest companion in battle, has hired himself out as a mercenary, she is told; but higher voices than Cauchon's also speak to Joan and those are the only ones she hears. Count Tigre, in La Répétition, is defamed by a debauched nobleman who attempts to disabuse the heroine, Lucile. Obstinately refusing to leave the château, for she cherishes the Count and her own illusions about him, Lucile persists in believing in the superiority of her ideal Tigre, despite most convincing evidence of his incorrigible flightiness.

Although Anouilh's heroines will accept death, if necessary, in order to fulfil their concept of duty, they nevertheless love life and cling to it humbly and sentimentally. Unabashedly seeking ways to lessen their fear, they are not at all like Corneille's classical feminine protagonists, who would die without openly expressing their innermost feelings. The Prologue in Antigone tells us that, as the heroine sits silently on the stage, she thinks about the fact that she is going to die, that she is young and would have liked to live, but that there is no changing the role that she must play. Later in the play, the following exchange takes place between Antigone and her sister: ‘(Ismene:) I don't want to die. (Antigone:) I too would have liked not to die … (Ismene:) I'm not very courageous, you know. (Antigone:) Neither am I. But what difference does it make?’ (NPN, pp. 140,143). An almost identical scene is to be found in Medea: ‘(Nurse:) I am old, I don't want to die. (Medea:) I too … would have liked to live’ (NPN, pp. 366-7). Joan, when asked by Cauchon whether she is afraid to die, admits that she is but that it makes no difference. Invariably, the heroines must bear their emotions and fears alone. They stand firm in the knowledge that they have been abandoned by all and that, in the end, society will destroy them. Antigone, after Ismene's renunciation of her part in the burial of Polynices, realises that it is up to her alone to defy Creon's edict. Creon, as the author of that edict, is also alone, but he can never reach the stature of the heroine, who has made no compromise with life. Electra had learned hatred and revenge all by herself and she, too, is the sole judge of her actions. Her mother's infidelity, and the assassination of her father, have given her an inflexible concept of duty and honour which will drive her unflinchingly to vengeance. Solitary, inaccessible heroines, abandoned by gods and by men, they all, like Joan, ‘continue … with that curious mixture of humility and insolence, of grandeur and common sense, even up to the stake; … it is this solitude, in this silence of an absent God, in this deprivation and this bestial misery, that … [they are] great and alone’ (PC, p. 56). Like Joan, they are ‘little skylark[s] immobile against the sun, being shot at’ (PC, p. 83)—an image that greatly disturbs those who have power but not glory. The Inquisitor in L'Alouette, for example, explains that the smaller, the frailer, the more tender, the purer the enemy, the more formidable he/she is. When Creon is told that it was a young girl who defied his orders, he muses over the dialogue that he anticipates between himself and the pale, intransigent rebel, knowing well that haughty contempt awaits him.

Describing George Bernard Shaw's Joan of Arc, Harold Clurman has written:

She has to be stopped, done away with, because like all fanatically persistent moralists, she is a pest, a threat, unbearable to the ordinary. … Though she wins in history, she must lose in her person. She herself recognizes this, but cannot and does not wish to curb her force and fail her fate.⁷

Only when the fragile little ‘enemies’ of the Church or State are removed from the scene does stability again reign, but only temporarily, until the next heroine is conjured up. After each new heroine falls under the Inquisition or the gallows, silent calm descends upon the State, until the next gunshots are heard being fired at a skylark.

Anouilh gives the name of the shameless, dissolute and notorious wife of Ahab, King of Israel, to the anti-heroine of his play, Jézabel (1932), whose immorality and atrocious behaviour deny her son, Marc, the happiness he seeks. Opposed to Jézabel is Jacqueline, a paragon of purity, innocence and serenity, whom Marc loves and would like to bring into his home—but this is precluded by the fat, lazy, alcoholic, promiscuous, murderous woman that is his mother and for whom he feels responsible. In desperation, and clinging to the squalor that links him to his mother, Marc roughly expels Jacqueline from his life, refusing to understand her love, her gentleness, her pity, and the invitation to happiness that she extends to him. Once his beloved has left, however, Marc dashes out of his home, stricken with madness and suffering. The glimpse of purity provided by Jacqueline prevents him from remaining any longer with Jézabel. The reader must believe that Marc will overtake Jacqueline and achieve the purification that can be wrought through the heroine.

La Sauvage (1934) is in many ways similar to Jézabel. Thérèse Tarde, whose sordid life is evoked in relentless detail, is loved by the wealthy Florent, who offers her (as did Jacqueline to Marc) marriage, happiness, and forgetfulness of things past. Thérèse refuses the happiness Florent offers, convinced that suffering must be her vocation and her only hope for redemption, echoing Baudelaire's ‘Je sais que la douleur est la noblesse unique’. The heroine is faced with the option of ‘le sale petit bonheur’ that money offers, and she derisively rejects it. Revolt stirs within her; she cries out that she simply does not want to understand certain things, that she will not be domesticated, and that she will not be tricked into looking only at the pleasant things in life. Thérèse envisions all the people of her sordid past as though banded together to receive her in their midst and thus prevent her from making any compromise with the rich. She can reach no comprehension of Florent and his ‘race’; she can, however, understand that it is only through extreme violence or in supreme gestures that the ‘poor’ come a bit closer to the ‘happiness’ that is heroism or, vice versa, the heroism that constitutes true happiness.

Similarly, the heroine of Roméo et Jeannette (1945), reminiscent of the central character in Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis, is determined to undergo a baptism of filth and squalor in order to recover her true self. By shamelessly exposing her immorality to her Romeo, she believes she will find the path of self-renewal. Jeannette, in the end, will drown herself in her symbolic white gown, taking the lead in the final tragedy in which the man she loves follows suit, both choosing sacrificial death for the sake of the ‘pure’ love denied to the mediocre.

La Grotte (1961) is one of the plays in which the stock character of the young servant, Adele, appears. Downstairs in the ‘grotto’ (the kitchen), she is trying desperately and with much physical pain to abort, after having been raped and become pregnant, by imbibing bitter brews. She is further martyrised by the Cook, who has discovered that her illegitimate son (the Seminarist) loves Adele; by the Seminarist, who insists that Adele remain ‘pure’; by the despicable valet, who tries to ‘sell’ her to a café owner in Oran; and, finally, by the Author himself—a character in the play—who deafens her by shouting that her mentality is all wrong! Adele is miraculously ‘a being who still remains pure and innocent in the filth in which she wallows’.⁸ Up to a certain point in the play, Adele is a self-negating, timid creature, who submits whenever anyone raises a voice to her—a pathetic peasant girl without the mettle of Joan of Arc. But in the dramatic scene in which she finally rejects with scorn both the downstairs and the upstairs worlds that surround her, she shows herself to be of the ilk of a true Anouilh heroine. Her scathing contempt is directed against her father, who had made her a victim of his drunken desires; the coachman, who had seduced her in the filth of the stable; the Cook, who prepares concoctions to induce abortion and serves them with violent blows; the Count and the Countess ‘upstairs’; the nuns who used to punish her in winter by forcing her to sit outdoors on a pail of cold water and ask for God's pardon; the Seminarist, whom she loves; and God, whom she does not love. Adele represents the innocence and purity of ‘la sauvage’ in the midst of corruption and abasement. The Author in the play says: ‘It is for her, too—to render homage that she never would have received in her misery—that I wanted to write this play, and I wanted it to be a beautiful play’ (La Grotte, p. 51).

If, in the ‘pièces noires’, society triumphs over the absolute ideal and compels the heroines to tragic escape, in the ‘pièces roses’, Anouilh's characters flee black reality through fantasy, illusion, and changing personality. It is as if the author felt that the world, with its fiendish problems, lacked and needed the sense of humour that he attempted to provide in ‘rosy’ situations, dexterously managed and manipulated by women, who give their audiences a sense of confidence and optimism. With sparkling humour, the English Lady Hurf (in Le Bal des voleurs, 1932), an old ‘belle’, bored in her sumptuous villa, plays out a comedy of errors, for her only escape from loneliness is into the realm of the illusion created on the evening of the thieves' ball. The aura of fantasy enveloping Lady Hurf and her entourage is carried over to Isabelle, in Le Rendezvous de Senlis (1937), in which Georges Delachaume, ashamed of the hypocrisy and avarice of his parents and harassed by the hysteria and jealousy of his wife, creates a world of dreams and fantasies into which he leads the naive young provincial girl, Isabelle, who symbolises detachment and purity, and with whose simplicity, happiness, radiance, and grandmothers, Georges falls fancifully in love.

Another of Anouilh's purely poetic fantasies is Léocadia (1939), in which the humble milliner, Amanda, succeeds miraculously in substituting for the dead dramatic actress Léocadia in the heart of the inconsolable Prince Albert Troubiscol. Amanda's magic is that she can render the repulsive attractive, the complicated simple, the unreal real, and the hypocritical sincere, just by being her honest and modest self.

Likewise, in the pleasantly jumbled fairy tale L'Invitation au château (1947), it is the poor, insignificant dancer, Isabelle, playing the role of a dazzling socialite, who is the heroine in the château and in the comedy. This young girl's indomitable pride bids her to refuse money: as useful as it is, it cannot replace her values, which are friendship and love. Similarly, Lucile, in La Répétition, emerges as the character possessed of the purest and most noble sentiments. Governess of the twelve orphans being raised in a wing of the château, the generous, self-giving Lucile holds herself apart from the sordid liaisons being played out in the aristocratic household. She has faith in higher values of romantic purity and true love. This ‘pièce brillante’ is delicately and scintillatingly fashioned around the tragic theme of the destruction of that love and Lucile's exile from the château, combined with the rosy theme of the jaded Count's love for the humble governess—a love that goes beyond time and circumstance, beyond good and evil.

Ardèle is the hunchbacked old maid, whose love for the hunchbacked tutor in the Saint-Pé household is genuine and sublime. A symbol of pure love, Ardèle is kept locked in her bedroom, whence she undertakes a protest hunger strike, remains invisible throughout the play, and is ultimately destroyed, for the night that her door is accidentally left unlocked, her lover slips into her room and the two commit suicide. Ardèle is the daisy whose petals wither and fall on too close contact with the grotesque loveless love scenes of the other couples in the play. What Anouilh has said about Joan of Arc applies also to Ardèle ou la Marguerite:

‘You cannot explain Joan any more than you can explain the tiniest flower growing by the wayside. There it is—just a little living flower that has always known, ever since it was a microscopic seed, how many petals it would have and how big they would grow, exactly how blue its blue would be and how its delicate scent would be compounded.⁹

Anouilh's heroines are exceptional women united in a troubling, tragic destiny. In the story of their lives there is a dramatic constant—an enigmatic discomfort which modern psychiatry defines as ‘mental anorexia’. Ardèle's refusal of food until the soul in her hump is recognised by those who will not see, Antigone's persistent defiance and refusal to obey edicts, indicate their indomitable perseverance in their search for self-annihilation. Anouilh's heroines are rebellious women with a will to self-sacrifice, in protest or on principle. Through the famous examples in his plays, Anouilh brings rich imagination to descriptions of adolescents, or mature and intelligent women, who refuse the food of life, choose to renounce ‘happiness’ and die, thereby giving expression to their hunger for something else—perhaps a hunger for ‘nothingness’.

If the theatre of Jean Anouilh is destined to survive in future panoramas of French literature, his fame will unequivocally rest on those plays whose heroes are heroines.

Notes

1. Jean Anouilh, Nouvelles pièces noires (Paris: La Table ronde, 1958) p. 188. Subsequent page references are given in text as: ‘(NPN, p.)’.

2. Jean Anouilh, Pièces costumées (Paris: La Table ronde, 1960) p. 131. Subsequent page references are given in text as: ‘(PC, p.)’.

3. Anouilh, Nouvelles pièces noires, p. 366.

4. Jean Anouilh, Oreste (fragments), in Robert de Luppé, Jean Anouilh, suive de fragments de la pièce de Jean Anouilh: Oreste (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1959) p. 115.

5. Jean Anouilh, Pièces brillantes, (Paris: La Table ronde, 1951) p. 493.

6. Jean Anouilh, Pièces noires (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1945) p. 360.

7. Harold Clurman, The Naked Image: Observations on the Modern Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1966) p. 142.

8. Jean Anouilh, La Grotte (Paris: La Table ronde, 1961) p. 141. Subsequent page references are given in text.

9. In the programme of the French production of L'Alouette; quoted in Christopher Fry's translation, The Lark (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) p. ii.