Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France. By Jeffrey M. Leichman

Abstract

As has long been recognized, the eighteenth century in France was a highly theatrical age, and one fascinated and troubled in equal measure by its own theatricality. Jeffrey M. Leichman’s book explores these tensions through the specific figure of the actor — and in particular through the intersections (real, perceived, and potential) between acting in a literal, professional sense and more metaphorical manifestations of acting as self-fashioning in the real, offstage world. This is not, then, a historical study of actors or acting, but rather a rich and thorough intellectual–historical exploration of acting as a paradigm — and a very troubling one at that — in Enlightenment thought on selfhood and subjectivity. Leichman’s corpus is both broad enough to offer a good picture of the field, and yet focused enough to do justice to the various texts and writers he explores; his study also weaves deftly between theoretical writings such as Rousseau’s Lettre à D’Alembert and actual plays, like Beaumarchais’s La Mère coupable. Although Leichman’s primary concern is with the Enlightenment, his first chapter sets the theoretical scene in the previous century. Indeed, this chapter provides one of the most astute summaries of tensions between the seventeenth-century Church and the theatre that I have read, particularly when it explores the ways in which writers such as Michel Le Faucheur addressed the uncanny similarities between the actor and the preacher. The second chapter helps to rehabilitate the comédies larmoyantes of Nivelle de La Chaussée, which dramatize two concerns that will prove crucial for the period: ‘the jeu social, or the self-theatricalization required for taking a place on the stage of the public sphere, and the obsession with transcending class boundaries that underpins and motivates this activity’ (p. 46). Indeed, social class — and the increasing shift towards performance and behaviour rather than birth or wealth as determining social status — turns out to be, along with gender, one of this study’s two recurrent themes. The next two chapters focus on Rousseau and Diderot in turn, reading their key drama-theoretical texts against a range of their other writings (such as Narcisse, the Discours sur l’inégalité, Le Neveu de Rameau, and Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?). Chapter 5 explores the odd blend of utopianism and brutality underlying Rétif de La Bretonne’s curious compendium La Mimographe (1770), whose hero proposes a state-sanctioned ritual humiliation of actors, and of actresses in particular, believing that ‘only an authentic and thoroughgoing debasement of the actress, in her physical and social self’ can save men and male virtue from destructive female sexuality (p. 143). Finally, the last chapter explores Beaumarchais’s La Mère coupable as dramatizing a new relationship towards acting and hypocrisy in a new, supposedly egalitarian world. All in all, this is an excellent and persuasive study. Although the basic paradigms may in themselves be broadly familiar to any dix-huitiémiste, they are explored here with a rigour and a subtlety, and with a careful balance of close reading and informed contextualization, that make this a very important addition to recent scholarship on self- and subjecthood.