Concept of Character in Giraudoux's "Electre" and Sartre's "Les Mouches"

Author(s): Dolores Mann Burdick

Source: The French Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Dec., 1959), pp. 131-136
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
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Concept of Characterin Giraudoux's"Electre"

and Sartre's "Les Mouches"
by DoloresMann Burdick
THE

MYTH OF ELECTRA has been adapted by two modern

French dramatists-Jean Giraudoux (Electre, 1937), and Jean-Paul Sartre

(Les Mouches, 1943). The fact that these two authors happen to present
a marked contrast in their artistic and intellectual preoccupations makes
the comparison of these plays a particularly fruitful undertaking. Both
authors see the central issue as a test of character, but their respective
manners of envisaging character are at first sight so divergent that we are
invited to re-examine the entire problem of dramatic character in its relation to action.
We might begin with the general proposition that dramatic action is a
function of motive and morality. That is, a character finds himself driven
by needs, desires, or impulses which are a product of his situation; whether
or not he will act in order to achieve the desired ends will depend largely
upon the sanctions of his morality. When we deny either or both of these
components of action, we enter the realm of the acte gratuit, which to be
sure cannot be ruled out as a conscious element of dramatic art. But even
the acte gratuit must be seen in relation to the posited categories, if only
as an attempt at their negation.
Always bearing in mind that they are not conceived as air-tight compartments, let us set up our categories more clearly, by restating them as
a list of antinomies: dramatic action, then, would be the result of an interaction between a motive (contingent, historical, occasional, the product of
situation and desire), and morality (the ethical continuum, the ideal, the
abstract and universal, the "code of values.") Motive is subjective, but is
always generated by an external situation.
If motive sets the stage for action-selects it, indicates it, yearns for itmorality is the arbiter which provides the necessary approval for this action. It is morality which justifies or opposes, encourages or sets up inner
obstacles to action. When there is no negation to action implicit in the
ethical continuum, action can usually proceed.
To illustrate these entities, we can say that Sophocles' Electra is motivated to seek vengeance by the murder of a father, the incestuous (in her
eyes) behavior of her mother, the usurpation of a throne which should
rightly devolve upon her brother, and the patent mistreatment she herself
131

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132

FRENCH REVIEW

is receiving at the hands of the present rulers of Argos. In addition, she

possesses a morality which bolsters and justifies her motive-her belief in
justice, her love of moral order, all her values, in fact, support the desire
for vengeance and permit her to go forward untrammelled by inner conflict. The relation between our two categories is so delicate that morality
can almost become identified with motive; who is to say, finally, whether
Electra's love of justice has not developed into a motive as strong as any
of the others? From its r6le as arbiter, her morality has joined the ranks of
her driving passions, and we find it difficult to separate what Electra desires
from that moral continuum which approves her desires. This is perhaps a
sign of the authenticity of her morality: it has become a creative and active
force.
What is the nature of dramatic morality (i.e., the values which function
in theatrical action as we have defined it)? We can, for our purposes, distinguish two types of morality as exemplified in these plays, without attempting to set them up as universal categories applicable in all theatre
and all life.
First we may speak of a morality which is congruent with and derived
from the accepted norms of a society. That is, the "morality of conformity."
This term is not to be construed as derogatory, since, like its counterpart
(the "morality of non-conformity") it may be said to subsume two more
categories: the pharisaic and the authentic. To summarize this tentative
formulation, let us outline it as follows:
MORALITY
A. Conformist (dictated by, or deriving from the accepted norms of
a society).
1. Pharisaic (uncritical, superficial, parroted).
2. Authentic (fully assumed, interiorized, central to the core of
character).
B. Non-conformist (diverging from the norms of a society, rebellious).
1. Pharisaic (the dandy, the poseur, the bohemian, the "rebelwithout-a-cause").
2. Authentic (as in A.2.).
As exemplifications of these types, drawn from the plays under consideration, we may cite Sophocles' chorus and the people of Argos in Giraudoux
and Sartre as being Pharisaic-Conformist, recalling always that the process
of grouping several entities under the same heading in no way implies a
wilful levelling, or a forced equating, or that we discard their differences as
trivial in the light of their resemblances.
Sophocles' Electra, who rejects the bourgeois timidity of "measure"
advocated by the chorus (and more concretely embodied in the person of
Chrysothemis) possesses her morality so surely that she is possessed by it,

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GIRAUDOUX AND SARTRE

133

and refuses to abandon her divinely-approved aims or compromise her

values by attenuating them. An example of A.2. on the scale above, she is
analogous to the authentic Christian living out the dangerous implications
of his faith as opposed to the "Christian" who contents himself with a
Sunday morality.
Leaving the realm of Greek gods and Christian heroes, we come to that
body of modern French drama which treats of an era where conformist
morality has lost much of its vigor. Often forced to seek his values elsewhere than in received religion, the modern hero may find himself driven
to the camp of revolt (B.). He is now out of line with a society still founded
on a certain received morality, still clinging to it pharisaically or authentically as the case may be. Within that society made up of dedicated
Christians (A.2.) and pious frauds (A.1.), the new hero may either take
refuge in a pose, manifested morally by the eclectic dandyisms and amoralisms of Bohemia (B.1.), or else he may forge an authentic, personally-felt
code, one which will serve as a true guide to action (B.2.). The Electre of
Giraudoux and the Oreste of Sartre appear to belong to this last class.
If dramatic action is the vehicle which reveals character, then a basic
question would seem to be whether "character" exists independently of
(i.e., anterior to) action. Generally a character may be conceived in one
of two ways: as a fully formed entity which expresses its "nature" through
its acts, or as a somewhat amorphous phenomenon, seeking to establish its
own identity, also through its acts. We can call these entities the Being
and the Becoming, or the Essential and Existential views of character. The
essentialist view would emphasize the inherent morality of the character as
expressed in his acts, while the existentialist would hold that morality
(values) is a product of action and cannot be known in advance. Many
modern dramatists (in particular Gide, Pirandello, Sartre, Giraudoux) are
self-conscious about these dichotomous approaches, often making the problem itself a central issue of the play. Thus Giraudoux portrays characters
as full-blown essences, almost mystically fated to behave in certain ways.
Gide emphasizes the search for identity (Le Roi Candaule, Sail), while
Pirandello is mainly concerned with the transient and deceptive nature of
being, which only seems to exist in the eye of the beholder (Right You Are
if You Think You Are).
The two concepts of character both revolve around the problem of values.
I form my values, then I act. That is, I am myself, and express myself by
what I do. Giraudoux's characters seem to reveal this kind of confidence.
But Sartre's characters, true to the other concept, act first and find out
who they are only in the light of these completed acts and the values they
imply. Giraudoux and Sartre thus exemplify the two poles of conceiving
character--the former seeing character as an expression of held values,
while Sartre sees a character in that moment of anguish when it morally

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134

FRENCHREVIEW

gives birth to itself, so to speak. Sartre himself has expressed the antagonism
between the two concepts: ".. . pour Giraudoux, la libert6 de l'homme
r6side moins dans la contingence de son devenir que dans la r6alisation
exacte de son essence."'
The major part of Giraudoux's Electre is devoted to a depiction of the
heroine as a "fatal" incarnation of the hatred of impurity, a role in which
she gains our sympathy over the ignoble Egisthe, the pain-ridden Clytemnestre, and the rather weak-willed Oreste. But in the end she is made to
face the consequences of her single-minded pursuit of personal vengeance
in the name of purity-her "essence," unbending and brittle, destroys a
city and is left with the cold comfort of having "declared itself" at last.
The prospects for the eventual revival of a "pure" Argos are left unclear
in the image of a holocaust which may also be a dawn. Electre's character,
psychologically complex in Act I, is simplified and made rigid in Act II,
and appears to exist prior to and independent of her acts.
Egisthe, the second protagonist of the play, whose stature rises quite
suddenly to the heroic in Act II, incarnates a new-found morality seeking
expression in a "good" act (he wants to save the city before giving himself
up to Electre's vengeance). He claims he is no longer the man who murdered Agamemnon, since his projects and motives have undergone a profound change, but he is still willing to do penance for the crime his "former
self" committed. Egisthe thus conforms to the Sartrian ideal of a man who
creates himself by his acts, and who assumes his past with responsibility,
even though he recognizes that he is no longer identical with what he was.
His perceptible character (the en-soi) is capable of renewal and revision
through the active choice of his lucid conscience (the pour-soi). Even for
Sartre, Giraudoux's Egisthe would be acting "in good faith"-his final
aims are frustrated, his act is not accomplished, but by the authenticity
of his intention he has redeemed himself as a being whose "essence" is to
affirm his own liberty.
We seem to find the two positions converging here in Giraudoux's treatment of Egisthe. But to point up the distinction, let us continue, just now,
to say that Giraudoux emphasizes Being, Sartre Becoming.
In the third act of Les Mouches, Sartre makes what is perhaps his most
original contribution to the use of this myth. Sophocles and Giraudoux
close their action shortly after the killing of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus,
since both authors are primarily interested in the developments which
lead up to the crime. But Sartre devotes his entire last act-only a little
less than one-third of the play-to an investigation of the aftermath of the
climax.
Here is a structural echo of the philosophical bias of the author. For
Sartre, a man both liberates and defines himself by his acts; since Oreste
1

Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations I (Paris, 1947), pp. 96-97.

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GIRAUDOUX

AND

135

SARTRE

had been both enslaved and formless in his moral inertia, it follows that
having once committed "his" act, having broken loose from that tragic
dilettantism which had kept him a stranger in every city, Oreste is now
a new man. We are interested in him-the crime was only a pretext to
bring him to engagement, and Electre has dwindled into little more than
a foil. Sartre needs a whole act in order to show us Oreste as a new manfree, engage, lucid, humble, and proud-a triumphant exemplar of the
Sartrian revolt against inauthenticity.
For Giraudoux, then, a character "is" before he acts; for Sartre the
process is reversed. We feel a certain portion of truth in each position, yet
both men could be accused of a fundamental oversight. Giraudoux, when
pushed to the limits of what his position implies, might have to admit that
morality arising from a vacuum is not only gratuitous, but rarely to be
found in nature. Sartre too is almost poetic when he fails to posit a moral
basis for the authentic act, just as Giraudoux is ignoring a vital part of
the chain when he minimizes the r6le of action in the formation of what
we call the "nature" of a character. In point of common-sense fact, we
happen to feel that values and action are products of and endless reflexive
process; they influence and create each other incessantly.
Let us attempt to present this process diagrammatically, utilizing the
terminology evolved thus far, arbitrarily beginning the chain with Motive:
--+ MOTIVE > ACTION > MORALITY I + MOTIVE > ACTION >

MORALITY II + MOTIVE > ACTION > MORALITY III +

MOTIVE > ACTION > MORALITY IV -- etc.
For Sartre the above scheme would break down to show only one portion
of the paradigm, as follows:
MOTIVE > ACTION > MORALITY
And for Giraudoux:
MORALITY + MOTIVE > ACTION
To illustrate the basic "compatibility" of these partial views, let us locate
them on the overall scheme suggested above:
Sartre
MOTIVE > ACTION > MORALITY

+ MOTIVE >

ACTION> MORALITY + MOTIVE > ACTION >

Giraudoux
MORALITY + MOTIVE > ACTION

> MORALITY-etc.

Sartre lodges the "self" within the Action (the moment of discovery);
Giraudoux within the Morality ("essence") preceding and dictating the

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136

FRENCH REVIEW

Action. We see that either Morality or Action can be made the "prime
mover", depending upon where one cares to begin the chain. It is our contention that both views tend to falsify reality by cancelling part of the
chain, or insisting on the anteriority of one element rather than another.
Both men are looking at the same phenomena, but each chooses a different vantage-point. While Giraudoux envisages the moment of moral becoming as anterior to the act which expresses the self thus defined, Sartre
sees in the act itself a creation of identity, excluding from his field of vision
those determinants which may impel the character to do this thing rather
than that. (Oreste never really talks about the "justice" of what he proposes to do.) Both views are only partial. The continuum of human "being"
and "becoming" is far more ambiguous and thickly-textured than either
will confess. Yet each author is certainly free to create dramatic personages
which will represent his own partial vision, and there is no reason why a
critique of the psychological or philosophical base involved should prejudice
the esthetic response to a work of art.
To return for a moment to the terminology we set up in regard to action,
a Sartrian hero would arrive at an authentic personal morality (B.2.) only
after having committed an act within a contingency (motive). For Giraudoux, the hero's morality (B.2.) exists before the contingency; it is expressed
rather than created by the act.
Upon examining the two views, which we have seen Sartre himself to
consider antagonistic, we cannot help wondering whether they are, in fact,
so opposed as he feels. Is it not rather a difference of angle of vision rather
than of fundamental concept? Giraudoux, like Sartre, has performed a
poetic elision, choosing to omit from his scheme the moment at which his
character elected his values. That moment is in the past and is taken for
granted. How far back in time must we go? Somewhere in her history,
Giraudoux's Electre "became" Electre; how much further forward in time
must we go? After his act, in his future, Sartre's Oreste will "be" Oreste.
May we not be confronted here with two ways of characterizing the same
phenomenon? Two pictures which can only give a consistent notion of
reality when placed side by side and viewed in a stereopticon where each
view may borrow the dimension seized by the other? After all, Giraudoux
and Sartre are both concerned with the crucial acts that define a man. One
is tempted to suspect that Giraudoux's Electre who at last "announces her
essence" by committing her fatal deed is not so different in kind from
Sartre's Oreste who "discovers his liberty" in the same way. Announcing
one's essence-discovering one's liberty-might these not be two contraries whose contrariety resides more in verbal appearance than in conceptual actuality?
SMITH COLLEGE

Dolores Mann Burdick is a previous contributor to the French Review.

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