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Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers
Robert Doran
Vulnerability and Beaumarchais The Marriage of Figaro
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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the paradoxical role of the character of Figaro in Beaumarchais classic play The Marriage of Figaro. Figaro was a hero for the emergent bourgeoisie in late seventeenth-century France. His famous soliloquy near the end of the play addresses many of the concerns of a frustrated middle class who chafed under the unearned privileges of the aristocracy. Figaro vaunted the individualistic values of personal merit, announcing the French Revolution.
Never had a comedy appeared so threatening to the social orderbut never had the social order of Europe appeared so vulnerable. Louis XVI, sensing the explosive potential of the play, is reported to have said: The Bastille would have to be destroyed in order that the performance of this play not be dangerously irresponsible, and for several years refused to allow the play to be performed. The play was performed in 1784, just five years before the Bastille was in fact destroyed, marking the beginning of the French Revolution. The famous revolutionary Danton is supposed to have said: Figaro killed the nobility.
Figaro is thus a bourgeois hero, but he is also a vulnerable hero, since he is a servant, a status which severely limits his range of action. What emerges is a kind of tangled hierarchy (a concept developed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy) in which Figaro is simultaneously superior and inferior. The mimetic desire of the noble characters has the effect of making them the servant of their servants, thereby allowing Figaro to triumph while remaining subordinate. In this context I will make reference to René Girards analysis of Racines plays (Racine, Poet of Glory), in which he observes a very similar dialectic of desire.
Thus this paper examines both the vulnerability of the hero, Figaro, as well as the vulnerability of the social order whose destruction Figaro is credited with having prefigured.
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Robert Doran is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Middlebury College. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, where he worked with René Girard. He is the editor of a volume of essays by René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, which is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2008. He is also the editor of a special issue of SubStance entitled Cultural Theory after 9/11: Terror, Religion, Politics. With Sabine Doran he is the co-organizer of the 2008 COV&R meeting in Riverside, California.