This Sunday I
went to see “Marie Antoinette” at Steppenwolf, written by David Adjmi and
directed by Robert O’Hara. In case you don’t know the history: Marie Antoinette
was a woman married to the French prince at the age of 14 in order to better
Austrian-French relations. She was accused of spending France into debt. When
the French revolution came about, She and Louis XVI were executed and their
children died in prison.
The play
explicated the inherent sexism in Marie’s portrayal as a “frivolous woman,” and
the way society built her to be contemptible. She had virtually no education,
and was never given a childhood or adolescence to create herself, how was she
supposed to responsibly rule a country. When she crossed the border, she was
stripped of all her Austrian belongings, effectively, asked to strip herself of
her identity. The French court called her “the Austrian Bitch.” Reducing her to
a racial and sexual slur (this still happens to powerful women all over the
world.) She was celebritized and objectified, meant to be seen rather than
heard. Her only validation was gained
through her appearance; it makes sense that her response would be to
extravagantly spend on embellishing herself.
The play shows
her personhood being gradually snatched away. Beginning in a figurative prison
(the palace of Versailles and court), moving to a literal prison and the
separation of her children, ending with execution. Marie was always the
headline of France, said to have “given blowjobs to the entire king’s guard,”
had lesbian affairs, and engaged in incest. She was constantly the subject of
degrading pornographic political pamphlets. It made me think of the prevalence
of “revenge porn” in our society, the systematic destruction of someone’s
(usually a woman’s) reputation through sharing their sexual habits and revealing
compromising photographs.
I couldn’t find
out if there is any historical evidence for this, but in the play, Marie
Antoinette, speaking from the dead, said the revolutionaries took her head,
paraded it on a spike, and then placed it between her legs and left her on a
field to rot.” What struck me, apart from the graphic violence, was the way
that even in death, her womanhood was derided and she was reduced to a
spectacle.
Below are paintings of Marie Antoinette at 12 and 13. Already being sexualized.
An article on
revenge porn:
A woman
innovatively regaining ownership of her body after her nude pictures were
shared online without her consent:
