Gender and Religious life in French Revolutionary Drama by Annelle Curulla

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender and Religious life in French Revolutionary Drama by Annelle Curulla Cecilia Feilla GENDER AND RELIGIOUS LIFE IN FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY DRAMA. By Annelle Curulla. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018; pp. 216. Among the sweeping theatre reforms of the French Revolution was the historic lifting of the age-old ban on the depiction of religious characters, attire, rituals, and settings onstage. The effect on the repertory was immediate, as a host of new productions brought the world of the cloister onto the French stage for the first time (ironically, just as the revolutionary government was passing legislation to ban monastic vows and close convents and monasteries). In her meticulously researched and clearly written study of this phenomenon, Annelle Curulla finds in the stage representation of the religious a trope for thinking through the larger changes occurring during the French Revolution. She argues that religious representations were not mere novelties that fascinated audiences, but rather productive sites for dialogue about secularization and for innovation in costume, setting, and subject matter. Curulla narrows her scope to monastic plays (or pièces monacales in French), which she reads alongside multiple contexts—political, social, cultural, literary, gendered, and theatrical—in order to elucidate how stories of monks and nuns allowed playwrights to address broader questions of identity and community as they were being radically transformed. Curulla rightly notes that the religious dimension in theatre of the Revolution has been largely overlooked. While some scholars (Bérard, Brooks, Estève, and Marchand, for example) have broached the subject through specific plays, authors, or genres, Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama is the first comprehensive study of the approximately two dozen extant plays "set in convents and monasteries" performed in Paris during the Revolution (10). For this reason and others, it is a welcome and important contribution to the field. Cogently argued, the book refutes some of the most persistent fallacies about the revolutionary stage, such as that all the pièces monacales were anticlerical propaganda. Highlighting the diversity of the monastic trope, Curulla offers contextualized readings of both well-known dramas (by Chénier, Monvel, and others) and lesser-known comedies, including Les Dragons et les Bénédictines and Les Visitandines. She is careful to make clear that stage depictions should be read not as realistic representations but rather as allegories that spoke to sociopolitical concerns of the time. Chapter 1 examines the popular (if largely mythic) figure of the unwilling nun forced to take religious vows by an unjust patriarch and corrupt clerics. Focusing on La Harpe's [End Page 259] sentimental drama Mélanie, ou la Religieuse about a novice who takes her life rather than take the veil, Curulla traces the play's fate from 1770 to 1803 to show how changing circumstances and the author's rewritings transformed its meaning. What began as a bold Enlightenment critique of the Church became a source of emotionally affecting performances in 1790, until the author disavowed it in 1803 after returning to Catholicism at the end of his life (though performances of the play continued). Although Mélanie is often cited by scholars of revolutionary theatre, Curulla's careful reading of the various scripts, contexts, and performances brings new insight, especially to the play's afterlife beyond 1794. In particular, she notes the juxtaposition of the chaste and hidden nuns in the play with the highly sexualized and visible actresses who played them, arguing that theatrical nuns were troubling gender prescriptions in the theatre as women's place in the new sociopolitical order was being publicly debated. Chapter 2 turns to several comedies in which nuns and monks leave the cloister to marry. Focusing especially on costume, Curulla reveals these stories of defrocked clerics to be vehicles for expressing new political and sexual identities in relation to changing concepts of citizenship. However, the popularity of these plays raised new fears: whereas initially the fear was that negative depictions of the religious onstage would diminish their status, by the Terror, the new fear was that sympathetic depictions of the clergy would improve their status with the public. Chapter 3 focuses on the conflation of...