ARTicles vol.4 i.4d: Class Act

La Dispute, the Marivaux comedy that Anne Bogart staged three years ago at the A.R.T., concerned a fanciful experiment intended to discover whether men or women were more unfaithful in love. We are now returning to Marivaux and another comedy of social engineering, though beneath its frothy exterior, Island of Slaves handles more serious themes than the battlefield of the heart. First produced in 1725, some twenty years before La Dispute and close to the start of Marivaux’s career, the play offered a challenge to the strict social hierarchies of eighteenth-century Paris. Though it clothes its politics in the buffoonery of the commedia del’arte, Island of Slaves proposes nothing less than an experiment in democracy.

The plutocrats of prerevolutionary Paris maintained that their dominance was God-given and immutable. According to the historian David Garioch, “throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, Paris was a society in which people knew their place. Hierarchy remained strong and most individuals expected to remain in the social group into which they had been born. The nobility … wholeheartedly agreed that birth should determine rights. They rejected utterly the notion of equality before the law.” Just a decade before Marivaux’s birth in 1688, the social commentator Fénélon noted that in Paris “servants are regarded almost like horses; people believe them to be of a separate race and suppose that they were made for the convenience of their masters.”

Like all hierarchical societies, the strict pecking order of the ancien régime relied on a vast underclass to sustain itself. Almost one-fifth of the adult population of Paris were servants — Louis XIV maintained more than 4,000 of them at Versailles. Even the middle-class merchants kept an assortment of household staff, though nothing compared to the domestic armies that waited on the aristocracy. According to one contemporary account, “the staff of a grand seigneur should comprise thirty to thirty-six men-servants, ranging from the steward, secretary, and equerry down to the six lackeys, two pages, four grooms, and two postilions. … The lord’s wife should have her own retinue of fourteen.”

In the early eighteenth century, servants were paid irregularly, if at all. In lieu of cash, masters provided their staff with lodging, food, clothing, and religious instruction. A literary subgenre flourished of handbooks offering advice on the management of servants; particular attention was paid to the moral and spiritual aspect of good governance, which was often cited as an important justification for keeping staff. In one such guide Jacques-Joseph Duguet reminded masters, “God only gives you servants that they may find help and refuge in your charity, an example in your piety, enlightenment in your teachings, and in your zeal and dedication a powerful exhortation to salvation.” In another handbook, The Master’s Duty, the author advised that a master “must consider it inevitable that every one of his servants has a fault, and must charitably endeavor to correct it.”

The aristocrats of Paris dressed their servants in extravagant livery and paraded them in public to demonstrate their wealth. The servants’ gilded uniforms, together with the nicknames their masters bestowed on them, helped to depersonalize the workers – a strategy that diminished the chance of rebellion and insubordination. As the historian Cissie Fairchilds has noted, servants were frequently reduced “from people to things, to objets d’art forming part of the decorative background of their masters’ lives. Servants were simply there, like the furniture; employers took their presence for granted, and refused to recognize or acknowledge their existence as individuals.” In addition to such humiliations and working conditions tantamount to slavery, female servants routinely suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their masters.

The explosion of radical social philosophy known as The Enlightenment had announced itself in England in 1690 when John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government. Locke’s critique of inequality, slavery, and absolute monarchy were soon the talk of the Paris salons — the artistic and social gatherings held in the drawing rooms of prominent matrons and attended by the beaux esprits of the day. By 1710 when Pierre Marivaux arrived in Paris, the salons were home to a new generation of political philosophers. The young writer was invited to frequent two of the most celebrated drawing rooms in Paris, those of Mme. de Lambert and Mme. de Tencin, where he became acquainted with such luminaries as the mathematician Bernard de Fontenelle and the political philosopher and novelist the Baron of Montesquieu, whose Persian Letters, a thinly veiled critique of the excesses of French society, were a model for Marivaux’s own letters.

Marivaux viewed Parisian society with the critical eye of an outsider. Although he had been born in the city he had spent most of his childhood in the provinces — his father, a middle-ranking official in the Royal Mint, was transferred out of town — and Marivaux only returned to the capital in 1710, at the age of twenty-two. As soon as he arrived in Paris, Marivaux embarked on a literary career. He had composed a short verse comedy the year before, but it was never professionally produced, and Marivaux postponed further attempts at playwriting for several years, instead developing his craft through a prodigious series of novels, parodies, and satirical essays.

Seven years after his arrival in the capital, Marivaux published a suite of letters in the journal Mercure de France. Addressed to an anonymous lady in a provincial town, the Letters on the Inhabitants of Paris paint a dazzling portrait of the excesses and glories of society life in “the center of all virtue and vice.” The letters combine a deep, even awestruck affection for his subjects with a withering social satire, as Marivaux dissects the foibles of the working classes and the expanding bourgeoisie; Paris was a mercantile city, and the Parisians’ culture of consumption rivaled even our own. Marivaux’s sharpest barbs, though, were saved for les femmes de qualité, the ladies of the aristocracy, whose affectations he mocked with relentless glee. “Her outfits, her walk, her gestures, the tone of her voice, are all intended to create the appearance of beauty,” he wrote, “but it is a beauty in which nature had no hand. Not the body’s innate beauty that requires no planning … but an artificial, constructed beauty, born from the vanity of the lady’s parents, developed in the society of other women, and perfected by hard study. This ridiculous beauty of otherwise reasonable people … this is Pride’s greatest concoction.”

Marivaux’s chief complaint against these femmes de qualité was that their lives were pure façade. Their entire conduct was calibrated for maximum impact in the ultimate Parisian sport — the game of love. All high-class women were, he implied, essentially flirts, and “une femme qui n’est plus coquette, c’est une femme qui a cessé d’être” (“A woman who no longer flirts no longer exists”). Their days were spent only in the dress shop, their nights in the ballroom and the boudoir; “Tout est jeu pour elles, jusqu’à leur reputation” (“All is a game for them, even their reputation”).

For Marivaux, Parisian society was quite literally a performance. He characterized the femmes de qualité as “commédiennes” (“actresses”) and the bourgeoisie and merchants who imitated the dress-styles and mannerisms of the aristocracy he described as “actors begging for applause.” Their clothes were costumes, their carriages, mansions, and liveried servants were props and sets, they wore masks and disguises to parties — in short, they lived entirely as part of a great theatrical pageant.

In the current critical terminology we would say that Marivaux’s view of the social classes was “performative,” which is to say, from the humblest servants to the landed gentry, all Parisians were engaged in complex role-playing that defined their social standing. The implications of this assessment are profound; if status is defined by props, costumes, and learned behavior, then with the right training and a good outfit, shouldn’t anyone be able to pass as an aristocrat? It was to prove a fine subject for a playwright, and a controversial notion in eighteenth-century France.

Marivaux wrote many comedies that satirized the behavior of the aristocracy, but few do so as overtly as Island of Slaves. Like The Tempest or Robinson Crusoe (which Defoe had published only six years earlier) the play opens with a shipwreck. Two aristocrats and their servants are marooned on a remote island, which, they quickly discover, is not deserted. Many years earlier, a group of runaway slaves had made the island their home and established a fully egalitarian republic where there would be no masters, no slaves. The party from the Old World is met by Trivelin, a government representative, who explains the island’s history and informs them that they are to be retrained in the laws of the republic. Masters and slaves must break their old habits of dominance and servility, and the aristocrats will be taught a “lesson in humanity.”

The retraining process, which Trivelin conducts with medical precision, takes the form of a series of comic set pieces in which the slaves first reveal their feelings for their masters, then, adopting their clothes and names, imitate their habits and speech. The performative qualities of class that Marivaux described in his letters have, in other words, found their perfect representation on stage. The erstwhile slaves are performing their masters’ former roles — and as they do so, are they not actually becoming masters? There is some suggestion in the play that the performance of power is as corrupting as power itself; as in La Dispute, the social experiment threatens to unravel in violence and despair before a form of truce is imposed in the final moments.

The layers of performance and reality in Island of Slaves must have been particularly acute in the French theatre, where aristocrats were able to buy seats on the stage itself alongside the actors. Marivaux protected himself from possible repercussions by setting the play in a remote time and place; the characters are nominally Greek, and are voyaging from ancient Athens rather than contemporary Paris. The inversion of master and servant was also a theatrical device that would have been familiar to the audience. The so-called “clever servant” is a figure first introduced in Roman comedy, and transmitted through medieval drama and the Italian folk theatre of the commedia dell’arte, with its zanni (servants) — Arlechinno, Trivelino, Pulcinella, and so on — who spent their theatrical lives outwitting their masters. Marivaux originally wrote Island of Slaves for a commedia troupe resident in Paris, the Théâtre Italien, for whom he served as principal playwright for many years. The Italian players were skilled improvisers capable of performing more than sixty new plays in a single season. Each of the actors was associated with one stock role — Arlequin, the male servant in Island of Slaves, was first played by Thomas-Antoine Vicenti, the company’s resident Arlechinno — and the performers would have embellished Marivaux’s concise texts with endless physical business and slapstick.

For all the historical precedence of the “clever servant,” Marivaux injected the convention with a strong shot of contemporary social and political reference, and Island of Slaves remains by any standards a powerful call for equality and justice. Beaumarchais drew heavily from the play when creating the rebellious Figaro in The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro — a comedy apocryphally credited with inspiring the French Revolution — and the eminent nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve described Island of Slaves as “une bergerie révolutionnaire” (“a revolutionary pastoral“).

Revolutionary or not, Island of Slaves enjoyed great success when the Italians first performed it. The reviewer for the Mercure de France reported that “the public received it with warm applause. Monsieur Marivaux, the author, is accustomed to such success, and everything that his pen touches acquires a new glory.” Versailles, however, was predictably less enthusiastic; after a command performance before Louis XV, one contemporary critics reports that “the play did not please the court.” The aristocratic audience was particularly irritated by a divertissement at the end of the performance in which a chorus of slaves “rejoiced at having broken their chains.”

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director.

References and further reading:

• Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants & Their Masters in Old Regime France. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
•  David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris. (California University Press, 2002)
•  Sarah Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The uses of loyalty. (Princeton University Press, 1983)
• Kenneth McKee, The Theatre of Marivaux. (New York University Press, 1958)
• Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment. (Harvard University Press, 1998)

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