Performing Maternal Suffering on the Operatic Stage: The Case of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust

Abstract

Performing Maternal Suffering on the Operatic StageThe Case of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust Molly C. Doran (bio) Among the numerous adaptations of Goethe's Faust, Gounod's opera stands out for how it highlights the complex emotional journey of the story's heroine, Marguerite. The demanding role combines challenging music with a traumatic story line that, when taken seriously, invites meaningful, psychologically driven treatment on the stage.1 Throughout the plot, Marguerite faces circumstances that set her apart from many of her counterparts in other nineteenth-century operas: she experiences social ostracization after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and she ultimately kills her infant in an act of extreme desperation and possible insanity. Much of the opera's music and libretto, however, aestheticize and idealize Marguerite's trauma while effectively silencing the maternity-related aspects of her suffering. Furthermore, traditional staging decisions depict neither Marguerite's pregnancy nor her act of infanticide. By omitting visual reminders of Marguerite's pregnancy and violent experience with motherhood, I suggest that directors from the nineteenth century onward have effectively sanitized her maternal trauma. And in excising the aria "Il ne revient pas" (act 4, scene 1), in which Marguerite expresses her pain and isolation after Faust abandons her, they have suppressed her voice and perspective. Conversely, various twenty-first-century productions of Faust have moved in the opposite direction, foregrounding stark depictions of Marguerite's pregnancy and infanticide. While some of these productions present Marguerite's maternity and consequent trauma in an empathetic manner that highlights both her troubled [End Page 74] psyche specifically and women's traumatic histories more broadly, others rely on her painful motherhood for shock value and, to quote Micaela Baranello, "trade on women's bodies for symbolic currency."2 I argue that although many stagings of Faust have eschewed direct representations of Marguerite's maternal suffering, there is scope for operatic productions to explore and bear witness to both individual and collective trauma in relation to the female experience. I examine how the traditional avoidance of Marguerite's traumatic motherhood fails to acknowledge the realities of abandoned mothers in Gounod's own time, when debates about infanticide, abortion, and women's morality held central importance in French legal and political discourses. This still-relevant history provides a rich context for approaching stagings of Marguerite's narrative. In viewing Faust as a work that expresses collective or cultural trauma—in addition to Marguerite's individual maternal trauma—I also expand on theories developed in trauma studies by scholars such as Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Elizabeth Butler Breese.3 Cultural trauma, according to these scholars, comes to exist when a "collective" becomes conscious of an enormous harm enacted on them that has persistently altered their communal identity. The collective then responds to, processes, and maintains the memory of that harm through a variety of means, including storytelling and music.4 Although Faust does not necessarily meet all of Alexander's criteria for "cultural trauma processes," I nonetheless find it useful to consider the opera's potential for expressing the transformation of individual trauma into the collective trauma that women have long experienced around maternity. I contend that contemporary performances of Faust have the potential to become—to borrow from Butler Breese—sites where that trauma is reconstructed and expressed.5 By considering maternity through the lens of trauma theory, I join a burgeoning line of humanities scholars who are challenging traditional conceptions of motherhood. To quote Laura Lazzari and Nathalie Ségeral, "voices of traumatic or non-traditional motherhood experiences are only beginning to be heard."6 [End Page 75] As Lazzari and Ségeral's groundbreaking volume demonstrates, applying trauma studies to motherhood allows for the inclusion of marginalized maternal narratives across contemporary literature, film, and the arts. In the world of clinical research on maternity, too, the effects of trauma on women's experiences with maternity and motherhood is an increasingly popular topic.7 Faust serves as a rich operatic case study for considering historical and contemporary understandings of women's reproductive trauma, and its performance raises ethical questions about opera's representation of maternity. Infanticide and Female Madness in Nineteenth-Century France Marguerite...