Women Warriors in Romantic Drama

By Wendy C. Nielsen

Women Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830: the woman warrior. The term itself, “woman warrior,” refers to quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and on occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, the woman warrior is a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal, despite the reality of women’s participation in select scenes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The central claim of this book is the woman warrior is a way for some women writers (Olympe de Gouges, Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Mary Robinson) to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. This project focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the stage simulates the public world that female dramatists and their warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the realm of fiction, but when audiences see women fighting onstage, they confront concrete visions of impossible women. I examine dramas in the context of their performance and production histories in order to answer why so many serious dramas featuring women warriors fail to find applause, or fail to be staged at all. Dramas about women warriors seem to sometimes contribute to the argument for female citizenship when they take the form of tragedy, because the deaths of female protagonists in such plays often provoke consideration about women’s place in society.

Consequently, where we find women playing soldiers in various entertainment venues, farce and satire often seem to dominate, although this book points to some exceptions. Censorship and audience demand for comedies made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. I compare male (Edmund Eyre, Heinrich von Kleist) and female writers’ dramatizations of the woman warrior. This analysis shows that the difficult project of getting audiences to take women warriors seriously resembles women writers’ struggles to enter the ostensibly male domains of tragedy and the public sphere.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781644530832

Book preview

Women Warriors in

Romantic Drama

Women Warriors in

Romantic Drama

Wendy C. Nielsen

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2013 by Wendy C. Nielsen

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-082-5 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-083-2 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women warriors in Romantic drama / Wendy C. Nielsen.

            p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Drama—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Drama—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Women in literature. 4. Romanticism. 5. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Literature and the revolution. I. Title.

PN2593.N54 2013

809.2'9352042—dc23

2012034212

This book is dedicated to my teachers.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xi

Introduction xiii

I: Female Fighters of the French Revolution 1

II: Staging Civic Empowerment 72

Epilogue: Liberty and Marianne 135

Appendix A 141

Appendix B 147

Appendix C 151

Bibliography 169

Index 193

About the Author 195

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions made this project possible by extending their help and support, and by lending assistance and encouragement. I am thankful that so many of the scholars who work on Romantic drama have generously shared their ongoing work and ideas. All the organizers of and participants in the pre-conferences for the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, including (but not limited to) Catherine Burroughs, Frederick Burwick, Julie Carlson, Jeffrey Cox, Thomas Crochunis, Tracy Davis, Michael Gamer, Melynda Nuss, Daniel O’Quinn, and Marjean Purinton, have been inspirations. I am especially thankful for Jane Moody’s brilliant scholarship and wise advice; her recent passing is a terrible loss.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Laura Ceia, Imke Heuer, Michael Zeng, and Frederick Burwick for their assistance with translation and editing. I thank Gail Finney, Kari Lokke, and W. B. Worthen for reading and suggesting edits on the first version of this project. The reviewers, editors, and staff at the University of Delaware Press and at Rowman & Littlefield have been very generous with their time and expertise.

Substantial institutional support made this project possible. The dean, provost, president, and members of the faculty and staff at Montclair State University helped me to complete and revise this book by granting research funds and sabbatical leave. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported my participation in Stephen Behrendt’s summer seminar, Genre, Dialogue, and Community in British Romanticism, and the great minds that I met at this retreat provided much-needed insight, material, and encouragement for this book. A Humanities Graduate Research Award from the University of California, Davis funded some of the very early phases of the research that led to this book.

I wish to acknowledge the professionalism and dedication of the librarians and staff members I have worked with at the research divisions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, British Library, Huntington Library, National Library of Ireland, New York Public Library (including the Pforzheimer Collection), Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, University of California (Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Barbara), Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum, and University of Nebraska–Lincoln. I owe special thanks to Kevin Prendergast and Arthur Hudson from Montclair State University, and John Cruz from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Part of chapter 1 appeared in Comparative Drama; of chapter 2 in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; of chapter 4 in the European Romantic Review. I thank the editors and publishers of these journals for their gracious permission to reprint portions of my work here. The cover image, M. A. Charlote Cordey, comes from an engraving by Jean-Jacques Hauer (1793–94), and I thank the Bibliothèque nationale de France for allowing me to reprint it.

Abbreviations

Introduction

This book explores the significance of a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between circa 1789 and 1815: the woman warrior. The term itself, woman warrior, refers to quasi-historical female soldiers, sailors, assassins, terrorists, and activists who defend their people in select scenes of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and, on occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, in drama, the woman warrior remains a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal. It is nonetheless worth investigating what women warriors represent as allegories. Especially when women playwrights imagine these figures, they have the potential to represent fantasies of empowerment and issues of social justice. The central claim of Women Warriors in Romantic Drama is that women warriors can allow writers and audiences to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. Olympe de Gouges, Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Mary Robinson imagine women fighting to the death for the independence of their nation and gender.

The way in which audiences interpret these gestures remains debatable. In their long pre-history, warrior queens such as Semiramis sometimes appear malevolent and monstrous. In fact, female figures exhibiting physical strength often resemble femmes fatales, or deadly women, such as the Harpies, the Sirens, and Medea. ¹ In fact, femmes fatales and women warriors differ in their motivations and methods. The femme fatale schemes and manipulates men in order to wield power, and kills in order to avenge herself. In contrast, the woman warrior tends to reluctantly commit murder in order to save others. Women warriors, such as Joan of Arc and Judith, Deborah, or Jael in the Bible, fight openly with honor for justice and freedom.

These Old Testament women and Joan of Arc resemble just warriors, soldiers who fight for just causes in an honorable manner. The just warrior is the heroic ideal of the soldier who represents an amalgam of Old Testament, chivalric, and civic republican traditions. ² Of course, the just warrior is usually male, but some women from the Old Testament fight against Israel’s oppressors. The Book of Judges chronicles the wartime work of Deborah, a judge who convinces Barak to make war on Kishon Sisera, the captain of the Canaanite army. A woman, Jael, secures the victory by driving a tent peg into Sisera’s skull. ³ The woman warrior in European Romantic drama also fights for ostensibly just causes. While just war (der gerechte Krieg) is not necessarily a term used by Romantic writers, the concept dates back to Augustine. ⁴ The concept of justified fighting, however, has relevance for the Romantic period. The French Revolution promulgated the ideology of justified violence, according to Walter Benjamin. ⁵ Even Napoleon used the rhetoric of a just war in order to carry out his ostensible liberation of Europe, although many inhabitants of the supposedly liberated countries (such as present-day Germany) considered him a tyrannical aggressor.

To be a warrior denotes the making of war on an epic scale. The German and French words for warrior, Krieger and guerrier, have of course feminine forms (Kriegerin and guerrière) and corresponding nouns (der Krieg, la guerre). The Romantic-era writers under examination here endeavor to construct female protagonists that rival the universal acclaim of Judith, who seems a slightly more popular dramatic subject than Deborah in the period. ⁶ In this Old Testament story, the widow Judith beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes on their wedding night in order to save her people. ⁷ Judith was an assassin, but she helped save her people when she severed Holofernes’s head, sending his entire army into panic-stricken flight. The word assassination carries a negative connotation because it seemingly differs from non-guerilla warfare in which opponents meet in open combat. Yet the word carries a religious root; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, assassins were consumers of hashish during the Crusades who were sent forth by their sheikh, the ‘Old Man of the Mountains,’ to murder the Christian leaders. ⁸ Judith also describes her mission as directed by God. When she shows Holofernes’s head to her people, she exclaims: The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman. ⁹

What is unusual about the women who participate in the French Revolution is that they suggest that women as a whole (not just extraordinary individuals) can accomplish great deeds. This universalism had significance for the discourse of natural rights, which raised the possibility of extending the privileges of citizenship to women. Not all male soldiers necessarily attained the status of citizens, but the French Revolution successfully revived the discourse of the citizen-soldier, the warrior who protects and represents the polity. ¹⁰ This study elucidates the roles that European and British dramas, dramatists, and actresses play in this discussion about citizenship and national defense.

A new type of drama emerged from these attempts to envision gender identity in a radical fashion. Gouges, Westphalen, and Günderrode create hybrids of tragedy and comedy, bourgeois drama and classical tragedy, and dramatic sketch, respectively. My focus on theater history complements previous work done on women warriors in other genres. Marina Warner’s book Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985) examines images of women warriors in art, history, and literature (fiction, prose, and poetry) from antiquity to the present, and some recent studies trace Romantic-era women’s relation to violence in mostly non-dramatic fiction. ¹¹ This book focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the woman warrior is a role, an alter ego that dramatists invent. Moreover, the stage simulates the public world that female dramatists and their warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the realm of fiction, and therefore women warriors remain figments of the imagination in such genres. However, when audiences see women fighting onstage, they confront concrete visions of women who accomplish the nearly impossible: fighting hand-to-hand combat with men as equals.

The French Revolution opened up the question of universal rights across the globe. The Revolution empowered people with the hope for increased mobility in society, and some women shared this idealism. For some conservative thinkers, female fighters symbolized the predicament of women who gained the rights of men: no longer true women, they became hybrid monsters. Female dramatists, however, often depict female soldiers as fighting for the oppressed and against injustice. Hence, they emerge as just warriors because they have noble agendas. Censorship and audience demand for comedies made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. Nonetheless, comparisons with some male writers suggest that they, too, struggled to produce plays about transgressive women. Analysis of plays by Olympe de Gouges, Edmund Eyre, Christine Westphalen, Heinrich von Kleist, and Karoline von Günderrode shows that the difficult project of finding audiences for dramas about women warriors often resembles the struggle to craft a successful dramatic career. These dramatists conceived of women warriors during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815). This period brought great change to the political landscape of Britain and Europe, and these transitions opened up opportunities to change perceptions of women’s roles inside and outside of the home.

THE DRAMA OF WOMEN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The following section outlines some of the major events of the French Revolution in order to contextualize the emergence of the woman warrior during that period. What it means to act like a woman came to define the values and significance of the Revolution. Women sometimes appeared in revolutionary iconography, as well as propaganda for and against republicanism in France and abroad. Initially, the chaos of the French Revolution seemed to give women opportunities to engage in multiple venues of public life. Women participated in revolts like the storming of the Bastille, an event that came to embody the beginning of the Revolution. ¹² During the October Days (Oct. 5–6, 1789), approximately 6,000 Parisian men and women captured weaponry at the Hôtel de Ville and marched on Versailles, gathering other market-women along the sixteen-mile walk. ¹³ The presence of this mixed-gender army cowed King Louis XVI and his wife into obeying the crowd’s order to return to Paris. Scholars dispute the presence of women at this protest, but their reputed involvement signifies women’s importance in framing the Revolution as a mass uprising. ¹⁴ This event appeared onstage as a play, The Meeting of the 10th of August, or the Inauguration of the Republic (La Réunion du dix août ou l’inauguration de la République française, 1794), by Gabriel Bouquier and Pierre-Louis Moline. ¹⁵ At first Republicans publicized scenes such as these because they appeared to emasculate the ousted aristocracy. Propaganda for the Revolution utilized the female form in other instances too. The allegorical figure of Liberty appeared in female form, and in prints and broadsheets la Liberté resembled a warrior because she often carried a pike and a cockade, as illustrated by Madelyn Gutwirth’s groundbreaking study, Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (1992).

Outside of France, the ostensibly unnatural power of women underscored the perversity of overturning the Old Order: according to tradition, women belonged in the home. This context explains the poem The Song of the Bell (Das Lied von der Glocke, 1799), by the German writer Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). The Song of the Bell describes women’s involvement in the Revolution as a descent into monstrosity, depicted as former wives and mothers transforming into hyenas: With panther teeth / they dismember the still-quivering hearts of their enemies (Hyänen . . . Noch zuckend, mit des Panthers Zähnen / Zerreißen sie des Feindes Herz). ¹⁶ Schiller’s imagery is symptomatic of a sentiment felt by many German and British readers and writers at the time. The French Revolution seemed to produce a generation of femmes-hommes (women-men), hideous hybrids who, by violating conventional gender roles, belonged to neither sex wholly and, therefore, appeared inhuman.

Such atavistic commentaries seem to imply that revolutionary authorities endorse women joining the fray. In fact, the Jacobins never officially sanctioned the participation of women in establishing the new republic. Some female insurrectionists aided in the inception of the Revolution. However, legislators prohibited women from taking on official roles thereafter. The major events of 1789 to 1794—the birth of the republic, the execution of the royal family, the purge of the Girondists during the Terror—overshadow a brief moment in time when groups of women banded together. Pauline Léon presented a petition signed by 319 women of the Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes (Société fraternelle des Minimes) to the Legislative Assembly requesting permission to organize a female national guard; she was refused because Jacobins cherished women’s domesticity. ¹⁷ Several other examples exist, such as the actress Claire Lacombe, who assisted with the assault on the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. ¹⁸ This day marked the end of the Old Regime and the beginning of the first Terror. So politics often determine whether historians consider figures like Lacombe warriors, a term that implies fighting for a just cause, or members of murderous mobs.

In fact, scholars sometimes characterize revolutionary women as mentally unstable, and this tendency overshadows serious discussion of their significance. Théroigne de Méricourt (Anne-Joseph Terwagne, 1762–1817) is in some ways the prototypical woman warrior of the Revolution. She paraded the streets of Paris dressed as an Amazon and was an advocate for women’s right to join the army. ¹⁹ Méricourt also founded the Club of the Friends of the Law (Club des Amis de la loi) in 1790, and participated in the capture of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. Then she defended moderate Republicans against regicide (Girondists), and in retaliation, another group, the Revolutionary Republican Women, stripped her naked and whipped her in public in May 1793. ²⁰ This traumatic event precipitated a mental breakdown in Méricourt, who spent her final years in an asylum.

For modern writers, Méricourt has come to symbolize the madness of the Revolution. British historian Simon Schama concludes his book Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) with a sketch of Méricourt in an asylum—a person of almost sublime transparency and presocial innocence—ascribing her madness to the the compulsions of revolutionary Idealism. ²¹ Along with Madelyn Gutwirth, I find Schama’s assessment of Méricourt unreflecting in its sexual chauvinism. ²² Historically, when society criminalizes and pathologizes transgressive women, their protests become less relevant to public discourse about human rights. ²³ Méricourt’s independence opened her up to opportunists and slander. An anonymous contemporary published a pornographic text in her name, pointing to the currency, but also prurient associations invoked by references to Méricourt’s name. ²⁴ Undoubtedly, Méricourt symbolized the extreme upheaval brought about by events in France for outsiders, especially Britons, because she seemed to suggest that the Revolution allowed women to act and dress like men, even if her experiences in no way typified women’s activity during the 1790s. Only later generations seemed to appreciate Méricourt as an individual. She became the subject of a six-act play, Paul Hervieu’s Théroigne de Méricourt, performed December 23, 1902, at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater (Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt) in Paris.

In some ways, however, Méricourt’s fate illustrates the trajectory of the short-lived proto-feminist movement. The Jacobins outlawed and ridiculed women’s attempts to engage in the Revolution. A decree on April 30, 1793, allowed women to serve in the army only as sutlers (vivandières), or camp cooks and laundresses. Six months later, Robespierre’s government outlawed all women’s clubs, a move that deterred many activists. The republican woman could only call herself a female citizen or citoyenne through her father or husband. The work of Joan B. Landes informs my discussion of public women, a term that refers to women who engage in activities normally reserved for men in the eighteenth century. As Landes first showed in Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988), women’s demands to be involved as active, rather than passive, citizens, represented a short-lived proto-feminist movement that ultimately failed. ²⁵ In her second book on this subject, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (2001), Landes provides visual evidence to support her claim that the female embodiment of the nation is a profoundly ironic symbol, a public representation of a polity that sanctioned different roles for men and women. ²⁶ In Monuments and Maidens, Marina Warner comes to a similar conclusion: that ordinary women share little in common with the abstract figure of Liberty. ²⁷ Republicans resisted extending the privileges of citizenship to women, even though their images sometimes adorned patriotic statues, engravings, and pictures, a finding corroborated by Gutwirth. ²⁸ Women can, of course, attain power in other realms. Scholarship on women in Britain has uncovered the many ways in which women carved agency for themselves in matters of property and politics. ²⁹ The salon, too, allowed British, German, and French women to claim a sphere of influence. This study, however, focuses on the impact that the woman warrior has on the discourse of female empowerment. For the woman warrior is an ostensibly meritocratic figure, an ideal of what women as a whole might accomplish if they exhibit the strength of mind and body to defend their country. In this way, the woman warrior illustrates the obstacles facing women who want to fight for their country, but also the ideal that sacrifice and noble action define civic virtue, and hence membership of the polity.

Several women engaged in military life during this period, although their narratives remain rather symbolic and apocryphal. After 1830, the female Liberty is sometimes called Marianne, but for the most part she remains nameless, because her abstraction and impersonality allow her to endure. ³⁰ Female soldiers, however, had names and identities. A few female residents in northern France engaged in counterrevolutionary activities. In 1790 the women of Aunay founded the Legion of Amazons (Légion des Amazones) and fought against the republican armies in the Vendée until 1794, in an insurrection that cost 500,000 lives overall. ³¹ A peasant, Renée Bordereau, fought in men’s clothes and became known as the Vendean Joan of Arc, and Françoise Després worked as a messenger, provisioner, and troop leader. ³² The most famous woman from northern France was Charlotte Corday, the assassin of republican leader Jean-Paul Marat. The woman warrior comes into being in dramatic adaptations of episodes such as these, but it is not always clear what side she is fighting on: royalist or republican. Until recently historians claimed that Frenchwomen worked against the First Republic. ³³ The association of women with the counterrevolution has recently received closer reexamination, revealing that some Frenchwomen outside of Paris resisted the Revolution because it sought to demolish the one sphere where they had some social status, the Church. ³⁴

Many Frenchmen, in fact, frowned on what they saw as women meddling in male politics both before and after the fall of the monarchy. In Paris, the Jacobins opposed any revolution in gender roles. Women who took on public roles were likened to beasts; they lost their femininity and with it their very humanity. ³⁵ In Lynn Hunt’s useful analysis, Republicans framed the narrative of the Revolution as a family romance, in which the corrupt father/king fell from power, but a virtuous, republican family took his place. After all, the court of Louis XVI gained fame for its mock peasant village, where Marie Antoinette ostensibly reigned. The French press vilified the Austrian-born queen in pornography and accused her of molesting the dauphin. ³⁶ Marie Antoinette embodied women’s supposed manipulative and secretive tendencies. Even those who supported the idea of constitutional monarchy seemed to think that, at the very least, the queen needed reeducation. Marie Antoinette’s centrality to so many dramatic scenes of the Revolution helps to explain, in part, why women appear to be on the side of the counterrevolutionaries.

After 1789, playhouses felt increasingly freer to expose the drama of the royal family. In fact, theater history makes the argument for democratic change in France. The initial censorship and triumphant performance of controversial dramas in the 1780s paralleled the growing disdain for rule by monarchy. Marvin Carlson’s book on the subject, The Theatre of the French Revolution (1966), notes the major events of these years. The lieutenant general of police, Jean-Pierre Lenoir, hesitated to approve the comedy by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99), The Follies of a Day; or, The Marriage of Figaro (La folle journée; ou, le mariage de Figaro, 1781), because it portrayed the dangers of absolutism and aristocratic libertinism. ³⁷ The Follies of a Day eventually appeared onstage on April 27, 1784, but Beaumarchais experienced the kind of persecution his drama portrayed; the king arrested and imprisoned Beaumarchais after he responded to personal attacks on him in the newspaper. Such secret warrants (lettres de cachet) ordering imprisonment without recourse to the law made many contemporaries sympathetic to the causes of the Revolution. The liberalization of the French theater kept pace with the steps leading to the birth of the republic. For example, after the fall of the Bastille, Marie-Joseph Chénier’s tragedy Charles IX, or, The School for Kings (Charles IX, ou, l’école des rois) was staged after a long suppression in November 1789, and the despotism of the ancien régime, or Old Order, seemed to be at an end. ³⁸ The state-sponsored Comédie Française had long since followed suit, rechristening itself into the more patriotic-sounding Théâtre de la Nation. In January 1791 the National Assembly lifted restrictions such as monopoly rights on theaters, giving rise to an explosion of new dramatic pieces written by heretofore-unknown dramatists such as Olympe de Gouges, the subject of chapter 2. The French Revolution overturned other traditional barriers for performance. Unlicensed theaters no longer had to place a screen between the audience and the actors, who were now free to speak instead of relying on pantomime and song. ³⁹ This background explains, in part, the milieu in which women paraded the streets of Paris in military dress. Women warriors participated in a world of ever-changing roles, a world in which the king became a common citizen overnight. Theater helped to publicize these events in France and abroad.

In France, events from the Revolution quickly became dramatic productions, such as the series of plays documenting Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, subject of chapter 1. Performances took place outside the playhouse as well. Citizen-soldiers marched in fêtes publiques, public festivals modeled after ones suggested for republican life by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Letter to M. d’Alembert (1758), and celebrating the Supreme Being, Reason, and Liberty during these events took the place of religious feasts. ⁴⁰ In addition to these elaborate pageants, a stage was erected on the site of the dismantled Bastille. Revolutionaries seemed to believe that they could create a new world by exchanging old scenery for new, and even time became subject to the new order with the institution of a ten-month calendar. Ultimately, the Revolution took on and created so many dramatic characteristics that distinctions between political and theatrical stages seemed to dissolve, a point made by Paul Friedland in Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (2002). Perhaps some key events of the French Revolution—the fall of the Bastille, the march on Versailles, the execution of the king and queen—are remembered so well because they reduce to dramatic sketches. Painting from the era, notably that of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), shares this characteristic too. ⁴¹ Elsewhere, however, stages of terror occupied the attention of large crowds. The guillotine mirrored the shift from traveling troupe to national playhouse, beginning as a mobile spectacle and eventually occupying a fixed location (in today’s Paris, Place de la Concorde). Dorinda Outram finds that scenes from the execution block offer a neoclassical mode of performance: Roman Stoicism. This admiration for stoic sacrifice appears in dramas about women warriors as well. After all, the new French Republic needed heroes and heroines that embodied the values espoused by classical Rome in order to legitimate its claim of being the latest (and last) empire in Europe.

The purpose of this study is determine why women, in particular women warriors, symbolized the controversial values of the French Revolution for some British and German dramatists. For the most part, German-speaking principalities lacked the urban centers that made theatergoing a universal experience in France and Britain. Then the Revolution disrupted the development of national theater in German-speaking territories, where small court theaters dominated. The national German stage in Berlin, for example, was in its infancy when the Revolution began. Napoleon preferred classical French theater, and when his troops occupied a city, they also occupied its theaters. In Vienna in 1809, he demanded that the ensemble from the Burgtheater perform Jean Racine’s (1639–99) tragedy Phedra (Phèdre, 1677) for him at the Schönbrunn Castle Theater (Schönbrunner Schloßtheater). ⁴² Not surprisingly, this foreign occupation encouraged the yearning for a native theatrical tradition. Dramas about women warriors belong to this search for folk heroes.

Yet on the German stage, too, women often symbolized the divisive politics of the Revolution. In August von Kotzebue’s one-act comedy The Female Jacobin Club (Der weibliche Jakobiner-Klubb, 1793), Madame Duport forces her children to live for the republic; she renames her son, Louis, François, after Mirabeau, and tries to dissuade her daughter from marrying an aristocrat. At the end of this satirical piece, Monsieur Duport and his friends disrupt the power of the female Jacobin club, which Kotzebue depicts as more interested in fashion than true democratic principles. ⁴³ The 900 French emigrants who watched this comedy in Worms in October 1791 left the theater shouting, Long live the king! (Vive la Roi!). ⁴⁴ Theater history also occurred in the closet, because German dramatists often wrote for reading audiences. For example, the anonymous one-act tragedy Orlean’s Trip to Hell (Orleans Höllenfahrt, 1793) brings together the king, the queen, Rousseau, Marat, and Charlotte Corday, who debate the values of the Revolution in the underworld. The piece resembles narrative more than drama and was never staged.

Censorship remains the most important legacy of the French Revolution in British and German theater. In Britain, the examiner of plays had control over theatrical repertoire