Sleeping Heroes, Speaking Heroines: Performing Gender Roles in the Tragicomedies of Françoise Pascal

Abstract

Almost forgotten today, Françoise Pascal was the most prolific female dramatist of seventeenth-century France. Writing plays which, by placing contemporary novels on the stage, found themselves at the intersection of prose and the theatre, the past and its seventeenth-century representation, she confounded expectations for male and female writers. This article examines the theatrical worlds created by Pascal, and the ways in which gender is constructed in those worlds. On the one hand, Pascal’s selection of material marks her as a female dramatist drawing on intertexts which were written in the vernacular, and considered to have a largely female readership. On the other, by choosing to write for the stage, Pascal demonstrated her determination to be accepted in a literary field which was dominated by men. I draw on this contrast to underline the ways in which Pascal’s writings show her awareness of gender roles and the limits of those roles. By comparing male-authored intertexts of Pascal’s tragicomedies with the plays themselves, I highlight the transformations that the subjects undergo in preparation for the stage, and the impact of those metamorphoses upon the society represented on stage. Focusing on particular character types, and particularly on the young couple at the heart of Endymion, Agathonphile, martyr, and Sésostris, I examine how behaviours and attitudes are gender-marked, and investigate the contribution of these carefully constructed and nuanced gender roles to the creation of an alternate reality on Pascal’s stage.