SOURCE: "Some Political Implications of The Madwoman of Chaillot," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring, 1968, pp. 2210-22.

In the following essay, Cohen finds that, despite its "whimsical" surface, Hyppolyte-Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot is an existential drama concerning the political nightmare of World War II.

It may seem overly narrow to speak of The Madwoman of Chaillot as a political play concerning France in the Second World War. The play is full of fancy, a superbly whimsical collection of farce, fantasy, and flippancy which has achieved as great a popular success as any of Giraudoux's plays. Social seriousness, which continually peeks from the interior of Siegfried and The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, and is mixed with bothersome intellectual discursions in Electra, seems at first totally missing from The Madwoman. One American textbook edition even bases its approval of the work on its total removal from...