Genre polymorphism in the theatre of Alfred de Musset

Abstract

Alfred de Musset’s theatre was created over the course of a quarter century. At first glance, it appears to be a collection of works differing in theme, length, form (prose or verse), genre (comedy, drama, dramatic poems, dramatic “proverbs”), and united solely by intonation and style. The impression of diversity and heterogeneity arises, however, only when Musset’s plays are regarded apart from each other. Considered as a whole, they reveal a continuous overlap of motifs and plot ideas. Such a motif may be a character trait or a one-sided argument; such a plot idea — jealousy induced artificially, a debate about women’s perseverance, forced marriage, etc. In this case, a metaplot does not emerge, only its individual blocks, which are not brought together into a single structure. The author also pays special attention to the scene of action, which in Musset’s theatre serves as a marker of genre vectors. The migration of motifs enhances the effect of genre boundaries blurring, manifesting itself both within each play and throughout the entire corpus including the art of implications, that add ambivalence to the definition of genre with its constant fluctuation between the poles of the tragic and the comic. As a result, Musset revives the very genre of tragicomedy, which seemed to have been buried forever by Diderot’s program and the experiments of the Romantics.