Play’s the Thing

Abstract

The works analyzed in the previous chapters of this book all walk a fine line between accepting reigning ideas about what constitutes “ideal femininity” and using notions of theatricality and performance to challenge those ideas. In this, all to a certain extent adopt and work within the categories and oppositions set up by eighteenth-century discourse—they attempt to craft an image of ideal femininity that both accords with social definitions and at the same time carves out some space for female public activity, self-definition, and self-fulfillment. The two short stories by Sophie Mereau that I consider in this chapter take a radically different approach: they mobilize theatricality and performance as a means of jettisoning the limitations placed on women by dominant discourse, and, in so doing, parodically—and fundamentally—undermine eighteenth-century notions of proper identity and gender role.