La Palatine, une spectatrice paradigmatique ? De l’intérêt du théâtre : usages, goûts, expérience

Abstract

The “spectatorial motif” is a recurrent one in the voluminous correspondence of Elisabeth Charlotte von der Pfalz, Princess Palatine and Duchess of Orléans. In addition to revealing her compulsive passion for theater and the eclecticism of her favorite repertoire, her letters provide a multilayered account of her practices and reactions as a woman theatergoer over five decades, which make them an unparalleled source for the historian of early modern French culture. This article investigates what makes theater interesting for Elisabeth Charlotte, at once as a social activity, an object of discourse, and a source of emotional pleasure. Even though she never formulates theoretical positions, it is nevertheless possible to identify certain tendencies in her theatrical preferences. Her evaluative judgements proceed from a composite taste, which combines Aristotelian precepts with the gallant aesthetics of sensibility. By describing attending the theater as an embodied experience, she tends to underplay the criteria of good taste as social distinction and of poetic rules as worthy knowledge, emphasizing instead the critical value of the subjective emotions of the female amateur’s “heart”. Madame’s particular position at the French court invites us to interrogate the use of a specific case study to identify the paradigmatic features of female spectatorship at a given time. In her accounts, how to differentiate between what is enshrined in a social and gendered habitus, what results from her idiosyncratic personality, what is part of her epistolary rhetorics, and what may be explained by the lacunae in her preserved correspondence?

Keywords

• Elisabeth Charlotte
• correspondence
• letters
• theater
• seventeenth century
• eighteenth century