Rousseau's Hostility To Theater example essay topic

In Rousseau's critique of Moliere, he sees Moliere as being a perfect author. Moliere incorporates betrayal and distortion to stir the emotions and gain our interest, as well as sympathy. Rousseau feels that Moliere doesn't help society, instead, he harms it. The reason is because Moliere is bringing down the value of society by using politics and comedy together.

People are starting to see their flaws as being acceptable due to the content they see in Moliere's work. If the first thing that one learns about Rousseau is that he was a supporter of community, the second is almost always that that he was moralistically opposed to theater as destructive of community morals. The source for this judgment is the Letter to D'Alembert, a text Rousseau addressed to his cosmopolitan friend when the latter had (on the probable urging of Voltaire) suggested in his article on 'Geneva' in the Encyclopedia that opening a theater in Geneva would bring together the 'wisdom of Lacedemonia and the grace (politesse) of Athens. ' Rousseau was not primarily concerned with the supposed corrupting effects of actors and actresses (D'Alembert had seductively suggested that with proper regulation Geneva might have a group of morally well-behaved actors) but with the experience of theater itself. His apparent hostility has two elements, one moral, and the second epistemological.

On the moral level, Rousseau's concern is with the status of the audience. He argues that in the contemporary theater what the audience experiences as emotion is not really their own. Thus one can afford to be upset or take pleasure in the spectacle for in the theater 'nothing is required' of the audience. By 'nothing is required' Rousseau means that our emotions have not life-consequences.

It is, as it were, irresponsible to be an audience member, a bit as if one were on holiday from one's everyday, common humanity. For Rousseau, this irresponsibility is associated with the experience of an isolation which keeps one from being at home with one's self, a home which, he is at pains to show, can only be achieved with others. The source of this moral danger -- the danger of irresponsibility -- derives from a second more basic quality of theater. Theater is, inevitably almost, representation.

Here Rousseau's hostility to theater reflects and is reflecting in his hostility to representative sovereignty. Representation (on stage) requires interpretation of its audience, whereas a just political society was to be built from that which was so transparent in time and space that it could not be other that what it was. No matter what its subject theater cannot be common. And it cannot be the everyday -- it is the perfected, immortal, transcendent particular self, precisely that self that wants to overlook the common, more like a god than a human being.

Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert" reaches two apparently contradictory conclusions: that theater does, and does not affect a society's culture. These divergent results can be explained by Rousseau's argumentative strategy: he looks at theater from the perspective of the stories plays present, and he also looks at it as an institutional presence. It is in this latter sense that theater has its most deleterious effects. Rousseau highlights the economic damage having an ongoing theatrical enterprise will cause in Geneva.

His argument appeals to the self-interested 'commercial spirit' of his audience, the Genevan middle class. But in conceiving this audience as motivated by commercial concerns, Rousseau concedes a gap between the city as he finds it and his own political ideal. As part of his attack on theater in the 'Letter to d'Alembert', Rousseau rebuts the defense that playgoers experience a catharsis of dangerous emotions, denying that theater actually purges passions from the spectators. Rather than working to stimulate emotions, which are then purged, Rousseau holds, theater simply makes people more susceptible to emotions.

Building on his analysis of spectatorship, Rousseau indicts theater for causing 'moral catharsis': the purging of spectators's else of moral responsibility..