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Introduction
Denis Diderot’s
Dramatic Suburbia
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was one of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment—
along with Voltaire, Rousseau, and others—and one of the editors of the French
Encyclopédie, a massive work that both disseminated and popularized scientific
knowledge and philosophical doctrines. Diderot also wrote essays on dramatic theory and genres, actors, and acting, as well as plays that were performed in Paris
during his lifetime. He argued that seventeenth-century neoclassicism was too narrow in restricting the acceptable dramatic genres to only tragedy and comedy, and
that additional “middle” genres should be added: the drame (domestic tragedy or
bourgeois drama) and a type of comedy concerned with a new definition of social
virtue. Drame is linked to social ideas of reform and, with drame, drama’s utilitarian function becomes a primary virtue, as it is also linked to the new humanitarian
philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s best-known essay is The Paradox of Acting (Paradoxe sur le comédien)
(1778, published 1830), a one-sided dialogue on the artistic creation of illusion on
stage. He viewed eighteenth-century “sentimentality” as the source of mediocre
acting and he suggested that only in complete absence of sentimentality “was the
possibility of a sublime actor” (The Paradox 20). Diderot conceded that bursts of
“sensible emotion” could occasionally account for inspired moments, but that they
were unreliable and varying from performance to performance, and therefore useless to the professional. Art should be understood as the product of a disengaging,
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Two Plays by Denis Diderot: The Illegitimate Son and The Father of the Family
rationalistic process, of careful study and preparation, and of conscious manipulation of the theatrical language, speech, and gesture, and not of spontaneity and feeling. In this lies Diderot’s paradox: in order to move the audience, the actor should
remain unmoved.
To evaluate Diderot’s attitude and contribution in a cultural and socio-historical perspective, it should be pointed out that as an enlightened philosophe and encyclopedist, he reevaluated all concepts, including those about drama, according to
the positivist ideals of the “scientific age of Reason.” As Joseph Roach suggests,
Diderot displayed an appreciation of materialism and of professional craftsmanship, an understanding of processes and media, and an underlying vision of the ways
in which science could illuminate art (118). Diderot was concerned with portraying
the emerging middle class, the bourgeoisie, with realistic detail and moral approbation. He advocated a substitution of the grand abstractions of the neoclassical
tragedy for a realism that was familiar and immediate. He contended that the realistic depiction of the virtues, duties, and misfortunes of middle-class people in contemporary domestic life, engaged in circumstances appropriate to that class, would
be more vital and meaningful than the tragedy of distant kings and heroes. The
choice of the immediate environment as a source for characters and situations
reflects revolutionary tendencies, not only for the drama, but also in the political
consciousness of the European middle classes. The demand of the middle class for
dignity and representation is especially evident in Diderot’s dramatic works.
Thus Diderot attempted to create a theatre for the bourgeoisie, the major social
class and cultural force that came into political power in the eighteenth century.
He proposed a distinct critical position, characteristic of the developing bourgeois
culture as the dominant social, political, and moral force, through which:
1. He looked back to the classical tradition by stressing rules and technique.
2. He nevertheless emphasized reason and the positivist method of the
Enlightenment, and prescribed for the actor a “scientific” approach to
character.
3. His two plays anticipated nineteenth-century melodrama, with all of its
subsequent manifestations, including the sentimental validation of bourgeois values depicted in film and on television.
4. He also anticipated Romantic concerns: although he agreed with the validity of the classical rules, he rejected their requirement of empathy and classical rhetoric, an attitude which, as Marvin Carlson points out, brought
him much closer to the detached irony of the Romantic artist (Theories of
the Theatre 162).
5. Lastly, his ideas foreshadowed Realism. He urged the use of prose dialogue
and of domestic subject matter, chosen from everyday life, and he suggested
many innovations in staging with the purpose of creating a complete illu-
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sion of everyday reality: he was the first to advocate the duplication of real
rooms on stage and the fourth wall convention. In his Writings on the
Theatre, Diderot suggests: “Regardless of whether you are writing or acting, think no more about the audience than if it did not exist. Imagine a
wall across the front of the stage, dividing you from the audience, and act
precisely as if the curtain had not risen” (189). These ideas were not to be
fully explored and exploited until the late nineteenth century, when the
Realist movement gained dominance in both dramatic literature and scenic conventions; and the audience for this new theatre was the by then
well-established bourgeoisie who wished to watch themselves and their
own lives and stories on stage.
A few of Diderot’s writings on the theatre have been translated into English,
thus providing access to his work for English-speaking scholars and students of
French and Theatre Studies, although most of these translations already date back
forty, fifty, or more years. His plays, however, had never been published in English
until now. The plays are in many ways Diderot’s showcase for his theoretical concepts; he integrated these concepts into the very practice of the popular medium
for which he wrote them: the theatrical stage. Diderot wrote two full-length plays,
three discourses on the plays, and outlines and sketches preparing the groundwork
for five more plays that he never finished. His two prose drames (domestic dramas)
are Le Fils naturel (The Illegitimate Son) and Le Père de famille (The Father of the
Family), published in 1757 and 1758, and performed in Paris respectively in 1771
and 1761. They both delve into the attitudes of the bourgeois, middle class society
and reveal an eighteenth-century “suburbia” that populates dramatic and suspenseful situations and settings.
The Illegitimate Son is a very complex play that can be read on various levels.
One of the questions it posed to the forming bourgeois society of its time was: how
is it possible to be a good man, to be virtuous, in a social order which is deeply corrupted as well as corrupting? The opposing answers that the play’s characters bring
to this question are in many ways relevant to our own “new-century” culture. This
is also a question that all dissidents, all intellectuals who are critical of the social
and cultural order of their time, have to face. For Diderot’s protagonist, Dorval, the
only way to be virtuous is to withdraw from a society that forces its members to be
criminal. On the other hand, for Dorval’s interlocutor (and future lover), Constance,
one should not withdraw from action. She believes that we have a moral duty to
participate in society and rewrite its rules. Thus The Illegitimate Son crystallized a
major philosophical debate of the French Enlightenment.
Moreover, as Suzanne Pucci notes, the play pointed to the emergence of modern society that in the eighteenth century seemed to be conceived in large part
around the newly valorized social unit of the bourgeois family (272). In his preface
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Two Plays by Denis Diderot: The Illegitimate Son and The Father of the Family
to the play as well as in the three discourses about the play, the Discourses on the
Illegitimate Son (Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel), Diderot discussed the staleness of
the old dramatic genres and the new possibilities that his drame offers. He formed
his own theatre poetics based on the central concept of his philosophy: the energy
of nature, an energy sometimes resistant, slavish, and repetitious, and sometimes
active and liberating. This also brings into play the question of what eighteenthcentury culture considered “natural,” and more specifically the shift of belief and
practice in both the writing and performing of plays during this period, as a new
order of understanding nature, and a new concept of what natural style was found
its way onto the stage.
The Father of the Family exemplifies Diderot’s development of the drame, as the
play is uniquely concerned with articulating and representing the bourgeois world.
In even the most general studies of the evolution of the drama there are references
to The Father of the Family as a source of inspiration for the subsequent development of modern drama. This emphasis on the world of the middle class is also
expressed through innovative dramatic techniques. The character of the Father
involves a complication of the standard Terrentian typification of the worried patriarch by issues of popular philosophy, morality, and sentiment as they existed in the
time of the Enlightenment. If the philosophes consistently pointed to the conflict
between humanitarian inclinations rooted in the individual and social conventions,
and described the opposition between the “natural” man and the stultifying conditions of human existence, The Father of the Family may be viewed as a representation of this conflict between the demands of the individual and social necessity.
The Father envisions the destruction of society or personal ruin as the consequences
of refusing to submit to the exigencies of social responsibility, and his son can see
only tyranny in authority as it denies his individual necessities.
A century before Chekhov, The Father of the Family displayed the use of dissociated dialogue, brought about by making the milieu an active element in character interaction. In fact the card game in the final act of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull
employs the same subordination of individual utterance to the social milieu, as does
the backgammon game (known as trictrac) in the first scene of The Father of the
Family. The innovations that Diderot’s play introduced to the stage proved to be
very successful. Diderot declared that he was delighted to make the audience believe
that they were in front of a family and to forget that they were in the theatre, by
turning the stage into a private home.
The approach to the translations of The Illegitimate Son and The Father of the
Family is informed by the belief that a theatrical play is not only a literary text to
be analyzed in a theoretical manner, but also a work intended to fulfill its purpose
on a theatrical stage in a particular culture.1 The focus is on preserving Diderot’s
unique writing style—as he interchanges fast-paced scenes with long speeches, or
everyday dialogue with philosophical conversations often immersed in sexual ten-
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sion between the two interlocutors—with the purpose of bringing the plays alive
to early twenty-first-century English-speaking culture.
Note
1 An early version of the translation of The Illegitimate Son was staged by Kyle R. Deise in October
of 1996 at the University of Pittsburgh to high critical and audience acclaim. A symposium on
Diderot’s theatre was also organized at the time, in conjunction to the performance of The
Illegitimate Son, by the Theatre and French departments at the University of Pittsburgh.
Bibliography
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