Revisiting Women, Humor, and the French Stage

Abstract

Until recent decades works by nineteenth-century French women writers existed within a critical abyss. With the exceptions of George Sand and Germaine de Stael, the vast majority of works by women from this period had been cast outside of the literary canon. Fortunately, recent decades have witnessed great strides in filling this void through the publication of modern critical editions of works, such as Sophie Cottin’s Claire d’Albe, Claire Duras’s Ourika, and Delphine de Girardin’s Chroniques parisiennes, and poetry by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Marie Krysinska, to name only a few. Collectively, this rediscovery focuses on the novel and, to a certain extent, on poetry. While efforts to resurrect these exceptional texts were long overdue, women’s contributions to the French theater during the first half of the nineteenth century remain virtually untouched by contemporary literary criticism. If the earliest years of the nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented production of novels among women writers,1 women wrote for the theater with much less frequency and success.