SOURCE: Amoia, Alba. “The Heroic World of Jean Anouilh.” In Twentieth-Century European Drama, edited by Brian Docherty, pp. 109-23. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Amoia provides an overview of Anouilh's heroic heroines and contrasts these female characters with their unimpressive male counterparts.

Women are the dominant figures in the theatre of Jean Anouilh, around women rotates the axis of his world of heroism, and to women does the author ascribe the epithet, ‘flowers in the midst of garbage’.

The cast of Anouilh's preeminent female characters ranges from the uncouth and sublime ‘lark’ (Joan of Arc) to the pure and untamed ‘sauvage’; from the uncompromising Antigone to the adamant, hunchbacked ‘daisy’ (Ardèle, ou la Marguerite). Anouilh's intransigent heroines are willing to die in defence of a cherished principle; they refuse all happiness, love or romance that is not ‘pure’; and they take an ethereal...