Sophie Goes to the Theater:
Performances of Gender and Identity in Sophie Mereau's "Flight to the
City"
Wendy Arons
University of California, San Diego
In his 1762 novel Emile, ou de l'Education Jean Jacques Rousseau produced a highly influential image of ideal womanhood which fixed femininity as "naturally" passive, receptive, timid, modest, weak, and destined for subjugation and domination by her husband. He gave the name "Sophie" to his fictional ideal woman, and claimed that she wascompletely bound up by her biology and the nature of her "sex": "The male is only a male at times," he wrote, but "the female is a female all her life and can never forget her sex" (Emile, 132). Where Emile needed to be educated to become both a man and a citizen in society, Sophie needed to learn to be a woman, a category as immutable as it was inescapable. As a result, women had to be educated differently from men, they needed to develop their "innate" qualities so that they could properly "play their part in life" (134). For example, he claimed that girls . . . must get used to being stopped in the middle of their play and put to other tasks without protest on their part. This daily constraint will produce the docility that women need all their lives. (140).
The naturalization of gender roles and identities formulated by Rousseau was intimately connected to the growing significance of the family as the site of development of the (male) bourgeois subject. "Sophie's" realm was the private, domestic space of the bourgeois home, and she was expected to use her "natural" talents to turn the private home into the husband's peaceful shelter and refuge from the "outside" world of the marketplace. But as Rousseau's ideas about "natural" and "ideal" femininity gained currency in the eighteenth century, real bourgeois women of the era were increasingly confronted with images of femininity which contradicted their lived experience. In Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit Sylvia Bovenschen argues that . . . "there, where the man dreams, fantasizes, imagines, poeticizes, the feminine is implemented as the medium of his idea of a happier world, as set in opposition to the constraints of bourgeois routine -Werther's Lotte surrounded by playing children, a picture of happiness and peace! -, but where he takes refuge in the prosaic reality of domestic life, where he sees, or believes he sees, the routine face of the feminine, that is the site of regimentation, rules, work and constraint for the woman." The labor, drudgery, and tedium of childrearing and household management was effectively erased in the fantasy of "Sophie." And while men enjoyed the privilege of leading both a private and public life, Bovenschen notes that "the real woman remained in the private and the prosaic. The development of her cognitive abilities no longer was part of the budget, and even her sensibility was to be used only within the narrow confines of that which was unremittingly described at the time as her nature." Thus an imagined, idealized concept of femininity served to severely limit real women's spheres of physical and intellectual activity.
The fixing and naturalizing of gender roles in the late eighteenth century is also tightly linked, through Rousseau among others, to the bourgeois rejection of identity as the performance of a role in favor of the concept of identity as the expression of one's inner being. In Virtue and the Veil of Illusion Dorothea von Mcke describes Rousseau's pedagogical goal as the creation of an "authentic" male subject who eschews the theatrical performance of self, which Rousseau views as an immoral manipulation of appearances. In both Emile and in his anti-theatrical Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater of 1758 Rousseau insists on the immorality and danger of performance, which he positions as the antithesis to bourgeois values: What is the talent of the actor? It is the art of counterfeiting himself, of putting on another character than his own, of appearing different than he is, of becoming passionate in cold blood, of saying what he does not think as naturally as if he really did think it, and, finally, of forgetting his own place by dint of taking another's. (Politics and the Arts, p.79) Performance worries Rousseau because it disrupts the expected homology between the inner persona and outer persona: it threatens to negate the "truth" of the subject by "externaliz[ing] and disintegrat[ing] what should be united in the subject: intention and action, individual and role" (von Mcke, 57). In the person of the actor, the "authenticity" of the individual disappears in an endless manipulation of appearances. In contrast, the proper bourgeois subject was expected to be always true to himself: the public persona he presented was to be a perfect and honest expression of his inner being.
But women occupied a paradoxical position in relationship to this theorization of "authenticity" of the self. On the one hand, "Sophie"'s identity was defined by her accommodation to and performance of a predefined "natural" role, irregardless of the extent to which it accorded with her experience or inclination. As I mentioned above, Rousseau expected her to learn how to "play her part in life." So the anti-theatrical definition of "authentic" subjectivity seems not to apply to women in precisely the same way that it applied to men. Yet on the other hand, the ideal "Sophie" was also defined as an essentialized, fixed human subject, whose role and character were a result of "nature" and who could not be other than what she "was". Thus "Sophie's" authenticity was guaranteed by her performance of a role which she, by definition, could not not perform. One particular Sophie of the eighteenth century, however, felt herself especially poorly cast (if I may continue the theatrical metaphor) and used her writing to reconceptualize subjectivity and imagine roles for women unconstrained by Rousseaudian ideas about women's "natural" inclinations, abilities, etc. Inspired by the demands of French feminists for equal rights for women during the French Revolution, Sophie Mereau saw external social freedom as a precondition for the inner freedom of individuals in general and for independence and self-realization for women in particular. In her delightful short story, "Flight to the City," Mereau constructs a first person narrator who lacks deep subjectivity and defies bourgeois norms of authenticity in a purposeful and deliberate attempt to evade and defy both literary and social demands for a certainty and fixity of identity for which women paid a particularly steep price: the price of freedom and independence. She postulates an astonishing external and internal freedom for her character, and specifically mobilizes the theatrical performance of role and identity in a way that questions and highlights the unstable status of "natural" or "true" identities, and thus strikes at the roots of unfreedom for women of the era.
A brief plot summary will suffice to orient those who are unfamiliar with this text. In "Flight to the City," a young woman tells the story of her adventures. She is the daughter of indifferent parents: her father is obsessed with both his newly purchased nobility and an amateur theater he has erected on his property; her mother spends her time cultivating the air of a learned woman. In the course of acting in her father's theatrical productions, the narrator falls in love with her neighbor Albino. But catastrophe threatens: her father, in his drive towards establishing himself as an aristocrat, arranges for her to marry a grotesque and disgusting local nobleman. She and Albino flee to B. -- Berlin. Once in Berlin, they briefly lead a happy and carefree life together, and hook up with a young man named Felix, who seems to take them under his wing. But he betrays them: he invents a ruse to separate them and then establishes himself in Albino's place. Felix and the narrator travel to D. (Dresden), where they launch their theatrical careers. But Felix soon becomes tyrannical, and so the narrator breaks with him, joins a new troupe, finds a new lover, and continues on her journies with them. She and her new, nameless lover establish a harmonious and egalitarian relationship, and they live together in freedom and happiness until his sudden death. Alone again, she continues her acting career until she is spotted on stage one evening by Albino, who in the meantime has become rich speculating on merchant ships. She and Albino are joyfully reunited, and the story ends as they return to their hometown and trade the adventurous life of the theater for the stability and peace of bourgeois domesticity.
Dagmar von Gersdorff observes that there is nothing like this story in the contemporary literature, and indeed, the narrator's picaresque journey is highly unusual . But what makes it unusual is not the series of adventures, nor the number of love affairs the heroine has - both of these are features of the Bildungsroman (for example,Wilhelm Meister). What makes this story unique is the fact that it is a woman who makes this journey and "is permitted to get to know life and men without being punished for it." What enables this journey - what gives Mereau and her narrator this extraordinary freedom - is her wholehearted embrace of - and exploitation of - the performative possibilities of life.
Sophie Mereau's "I" begins both her narrative and her journey in the theater, the site of the genesis of her love affair with Albino. She describes their love as, quite literally, an effect of cumulative theatrical performances: I was barely fifteen years old when I first performed all the lead roles to great acclaim in this temple consecrated to the arts. A young man from the neighborhood, whom I will call Albino, played the First Lover, and as such he told me so often that he loved me that he himself finally felt it and I believed it. Our imagination was kindled ever higher, and soon we were only playing ourselves in the most fervent roles. (Mereau, "Flight to the City," 381) . There is a self-conscious irony in her admission that the repetition of a romantic scene causes their love; that, in effect, they become "real" lovers by playing the role of lovers. But despite the fact that their love originates as and in performance, she sees it as a "truth" which operates both in opposition to and in enhancement of theatrical deception: The audience's most ardent applause gave our talents the praise which was actually due to our hearts: they thought that the deception had been heightened to truth, while we were actually giving them truth as deception. (Mereau, 381) The relationship between deception and truth, and between the theater and life is thus parodically destabilized at the very outset of Mereau's story. The playacting of love on the stage produces a real love between the two actors which, when inserted back into the context of a stage performance, is perceived once again as an illusion - "heightened to truth."
This casual crossover of performance into real life (and vice versa) is a recurrent trope in the narrative. Later in the story, after Felix has separated her from Albino, the narrator allows herself to be seduced by Felix through a similar act of performance: "When I entered my room, the man who had enchanted me so much on the stage jumped toward me with a mask over his face, gesturing to me playfully. . . . Automatically, I assumed the role of his beloved, we surrendered to the whims of the moment and improvised a number of amusing scenes, which had probably never been performed in such a lively manner on stage (Mereau, 389) . The wall between performance and reality is rendered literally immaterial in this text. The narrator carries the "enchantment" of Felix's theatrical performance, which had made her "heart beat faster," out of the playhouse and into her room, where their friendship is transformed into sexual intimacy through playacting.
The nonchalant tone with which she reports this scene demonstrates Sophie Mereau('s narrator)'s lack of anxiety about the moral dimensions of acting and deception, what in German is called Verstellung. Unlike other domestic fictions of the era, like Richardson's Clarissa or La Roche's Sophie Sternheim, which were deeply concerned with the perils of a deceptive performance of identity, "Flight to the City" takes the performed self at face value and mobilizes performance as a means of liberating the (female) self from societal constraints on behavior and morality. To this end, Mereau literalizes and exploits two contemporary conceptions about the power of the theater. First, both scenes of seduction through-performance represent an ironic reconfiguration of eighteenth-century theories on acting as a means of behavior modification. Where many theorists, including Kant, Lessing, and Schiller, wished to press Verstellung into the service of morality, Sophie Mereau uses Verstellung as a way of simultaneously giving her heroine a little moral "breathing room" and opening up the limited range of potential roles available to her as a woman. The heroine's decision to become an actress is, in fact, consciously framed in these terms. Felix's glowing description of the actor's life - "We live in all times, run about in all walks of life, from beggar to king, and that is why we stay forever young" - has irresistible appeal to the narrator, who responds, "All right! . . . I shall follow your call! One day queen, the next shepherdess, the next a heroine, and in all forms beautiful, beloved, and exalted -- who would not gladly choose this way of life?" (Mereau, 389) .
Second, these scenes of seduction are also comic turns on the stereotype of theater as a dangerous and immoral site for young women. Both the life in the theater and the theatrical spectacle itself were suspected of having deleterious effects on young women's morality. Actresses' notorious reputation for easy virtue was based in part on the theory that playing love scenes on stage made them more susceptible to seduction back stage; and comedies were thought to put "romantic" notions into a girl's head and soften her ability to resist attempts on her virtue. The narrator experiences both of these effects of the theater: her offstage love for Albino derives directly from their onstage romances, and her "enchantment" with Felix's performance predisposes her to a post-show tryst. But instead of having disastrous consequences, her encounter with the theater brings her a life of happiness, fulfillment and adventure.
In addition, in opposition to Rousseau's ideas about the actor, there is no evidence in "Flight to the City" of a belief that acting has either a negative or positive impact on the inner life - indeed, the lack of reflection on the characters' inner lives and motives is one of the most striking features of the text. Mereau's characters have no deep sense of self and identity. The story's commitment to the play of performance across the boundary separating the theater from life stands as a parodic reproach to the obsession with locating identity in self-reflexivity and self-examination found in novels like Sophie Sternheim or Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In a radical subversion of contemporary conventions of identity, the text matter-of-factly proposes that identity is both produced and read solely through the performance of self.
Thus, not only does performance impact the narrator's reality, but her "real life" is also repeatedly misread as Verstellung. For example, in a moment of grief over her separation from Albino, she begins to "bemoan [her] fate with bitter tears" in Felix's presence. He reads her sadness not as an expression of real emotion, however, but as a sign of her potential talent: "Truly, my dear, nature destined you to be an actress" (Mereau, 388) . She is at once surprised and comforted by this remark. Both Felix's assumption that her tears were a manifestation of her performance ability and her odd response demonstrate a lack of concern about the extent to which outward behavior faithfully reflects the inner self; although her tears appear to have been motivated by real emotion, her tacit acceptance of Felix's compliment (and her later choice to pursue an acting career) work to undermine that appearance. "Destined. . . to be an actress," the narrator's elusive subjectivity can only be located in the play of the performances -- the Verstellungen and Vorstellungen -- which make up her journey.
Still later in the story, in a scene reminiscent of the effect her love for Albino had on her ability to effectively play his lover on stage, the narrator describes how her real emotional state is mistaken by the audience for talent: I first performed the role of the maiden from Marienburg. My heart pounded fiercely when I threw a glance at the assembled crowd. But my fearful timidity itself brought me an advantage because it gave my acting a girllike shyness and my expression an uncommon warmth. (Mereau, 392) . The "truth" of her performance here derives from "real" emotions - her feelings of fear and shyness - which, although they would seem to be at odds with a successful performance, serve paradoxically to heighten it. The "real" inner self is not expressed through performance, but exploited to enhance it. A few lines later however, she produces the mirror image of this Verstellung by cynically deploying her theatrical talents in real life as a mask for her inner feelings. After the show, she consciously displays the proper deference to her admirers to achieve her desired ends: ". . . after the play was over, I found myself surrounded by a crowd. . . I was unaccustomed to such fragrant offerings and unpracticed in the divine art of pleasing everyone, but innate tact soon let me find the way. Meaningful glances, flattering replies, polite nonsense absentmindedly spoken, a loud laugh honoring an inanity -- were sufficient to make everyone perfectly satisfied with me." Although her language implies that this is a deceptive performance, we are given few clues about the narrator's "real" feelings and attitudes, and there is a decided lack of engagement with the moral implications of what appears to be a consciously "false" representation of the self. In fact, concerns about the "morality" of Verstellung are entirely absent from Sophie Mereau('s narrator)'s tale: she doesn't worry about whether or not an action is good or evil, but whether or not it brings her pleasure.
Our intrepid actress has, in other words, adopted the code of the rake. Like the evil Derby of Sternheim or the wretched Lovelace of Clarissa, she is self-consciously deceptive and deploys Verstellung in the single-minded pursuit of pleasure. But unlike Derby or Lovelace, she doesn't use deceit to harm another person or to purchase her pleasure at anyone else's expense. Although other German writers of the eighteenth century would negatively characterize the woman who adopted this code as a femme fatale (for example, Lady Marwood in Mi' Sara Sampson or the Countess Orsina in Emilia Galotti ), in what Katharina von Hammerstein calls the "Mereaudian thought system" independence and a desire to control her own destiny and love life are positive attributes of the female protagonist. Thus Mereau's heroine is the rake stripped of evil designs, the femme who is anything but fatale, and her "rakishness" combines a charming innocence and naivet with a striking sophistication about the liberatory and empowering potential of Verstellung for a woman. When Felix shows himself to be a tyrannical companion, for example, she decides to break with him, explaining, I . . . held pleasure and freedom to be the sole requisites of life. They had led me into the arms of love and consoled me when love was gone. . . . For some time I concealed my aversion for Felix, but since he did not change his conduct, I decided to take revenge. On the occasion of a new argument which arose becuase of some gifts I had received, I broke with him forever "(Mereau, 393) . Sophie Mereau('s narrator) is only interested in playing the roles which allow her to lead the life she desires. Tragedy is not in her repertoire.
Her commitment to playing comedy becomes clear in the parodic ending to the story. The heroine is unexpectedly reunited with Albino, who has literally "had his ship come in" and can purchase their way back into their parents' graces. They decide to get married and forsake the life of abandonment and adventure they have both led. But their marriage and reentrance into bourgeois domesticity seems no more "real" or fixed than any other scene in the story - in fact, the narrator implies with her use of a theatrical metaphor to describe the event that it is merely one more (comic) role to play: Thus ended unexpectedly in comedy what had started out as sure tragedy. Nothing seemed funnier to us than to remember how we had once left our country as heroes, full of pathos, and now returned, imperceptibly transformed into married bourgeois. Yet, we gladly traded the flighty stage for the secure walls of domesticity (Mereau, 399). Mereau imagines a marital bliss here that eluded her in her own life: she herself experienced marriage and domesticity as a form of stifling captivity, not as an extension of a life of freedom and happiness. In Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften, the unhappily married Count also describes married life with a pointed theatrical metaphor: In a comedy we see marriage as an ultimate goal, reached only after surmounting obstacles which fill several acts; and, at the moment when this goal is achieved, the curtain falls and a momentary satisfaction warms our hearts. But it is quite different in life. The play goes on behind the scenes, and, when the curtain rises again, we would rather not see or hear any more of it. (Goethe, Elective Affinities, 82-3). Mereau solves the marriage problem by keeping her characters squarely in front of the curtain, always performing, always ready to play a new role. The fantasy-parody of marriage that is implied at the end of the story is perhaps, as von Hammerstein notes, "a flight from the given reality." But it is also an expression of Mereau's deep suspicion of and dissatisfaction with the confining expectations of a societal system in which marriage locked women out of virtually every possible role except that of housewife and mother. By suggesting that marriage and bourgeois life might merely be seen as another act of performance, as Verstellung, Mereau pointedly undermines the institution of marriage and the role it plays in anchoring bourgeois mores and values.
The surface, "performative" nature of its characterizations gives "Flight to the City" the opportunity to make a radical critique of eighteenth century bourgeois norms, particularly as they applied to women. By forsaking the self-reflexivity and self-understanding so crucial to the Bildungsroman - and to the relatively new understanding, promoted by the Bildungsroman, of the "self" as the homologous outward expression of one's "inner being" - Mereau's story puts at stake the concept of a fixed and stable identity, and with it notions about naturalized or proper social and gender roles. In addition, by positing a heroine who survives as an independent and happy woman and who reaches the ultimate goal of every comedy -- that is, closure through marriage -- through the deployment of Verstellung, "Flight to the City" ironically calls the bourgeois condemnation of acting into question, and suggests the emancipatory possibilities that an embrace of the performative in life might offer.