Punk band Good Charlotte’s hit – Girls Don’t Like Boys, Girls like Cars and Money, isn’t an operatic aria but it is yet another riff on the old theme of women as gold- diggers and chancers, heart-breakers who are careless with money and fickle in love.
When Abbe Prevost wrote Manon Lescaut in 1731, he wasn’t altering the prevalent view of women, their morals or their culpability, but in Manon, and her fall and fall, he created a heroine whose beauty and fragility, - her childishness, had an iconic force. Until Dumas refined the model in his portrait of Marguerite, heroine of La Dame aux Camellias, (1848), Manon was the picture of Woman Gone Wrong.
Her equally fictional, equally famous, but male contemporary, Tom Rakewell, in Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress – the series of drawings that appeared in 1733 – is also led astray and ends in ruin. The crucial difference in these twin tales of weakness and vice is that Manon is to blame, (for the fates of her lover and brother as well as herself), but Tom is a victim.
It’s a story that goes right back to Eve and the apple. ‘The woman bade me eat…’
The coach arrives in the town square in Amiens. Lescaut is there to meet his sister Manon, on the way to a convent. Des Grieux,a young romantic student from a good family notices Manon and it’s love at first sight. But Manon has also caught the eye of a rich womaniser who propositions her. Love wins out, and Manon elopes with Des Grieux.
In Paris, cash is tight. Manon likes luxury and easily falls prey to her brother acting as pimp for the slavering elderly moneybags, Geronte. Des Grieux tries to win her back by cheating at cards – and is arrested. Manon is abandoned and sentenced to Transportation. Her brother Lescaut bribes the sergeant. Des Grieux is allowed to board the hideous hell-hole ship and travel with Manon to New Orleans, where more sexual intrigue follows, and both Manon and Des Grieux perish in the Florida swamps.
It is a page turning drama, and an obvious subject for opera – the right kind of heroine (one who suffers and dies), and a noble hero. Themes of love, loss, sacrifice and death are the stuff of opera, though it is remarkable how few women survive the final curtain… even Puccini, who rather liked women, allowed only one true happy ending (La Fanciulla del West). Turandot’s happiness is paid for by the death of the virtuous Li’u, while in La Rondine, as in La Traviata, the heroine, who is a fallen woman, denies herself her man to save his honour .
Death by Opera suggests that whether you are a good woman – like Madam Butterfly, or Gilda, or Tosca, or an independent woman like Carmen, or a BAD woman, like Lulu or Mimi, you will die a horrible death. The dead female seems to be good for men’s dramatic imagination, though much less good as a model for women themselves.
Massenet was a very popular composer in Belle Epoque Paris. His choice of subject, one hundred and fifty years after Manon Lescaut was published should not be seen as accidental – yes it is a very good story, but when old stories resurface, we should always ask, why now?’
1880’s Paris was the time of Third Republic, but not so long since the suppression of the Paris Commune – the radical uprising that included the Union des Femmes (1871), a proto-feminist movement that wanted recognition for all children, born in or out of wedlock, an end to the criminalisation – moral as well as legal, of prostitution, and sexual equality for women.
Massenet, whose own Manon takes her tone as much from La Dame aux Camellias, as well as from Prevost’s original, put so much seduction in the music that it is impossible to think of Manon as a victim. She is a seducer – her original childlikeness turns into vanity, and her fate is entirely her own weak (i.e. woman’s) character.
This reading wilfully blotted out the economic and social condition of women’s lives, where power and money rests with the male, and where a woman can access power and money only through marriage or a liaison.
It was this social and economic truth of women’s lives that Marx and Engels had begun to uncover in the Communist Manifesto – 1848 – published in the same year as Dumas’ La Dame Aux Camellias.
Dumas, incidentally, had various mistresses, was himself illegitimate, and was outspoken against the emancipation of women and the ‘vice’ of prostitution.
A year before La Dame, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre appeared in England – a very different portrait of women and sexual double standards.
But it was the glittering courtesan, the beautiful, soon to be abandoned mistress, the fallen woman, the femme fatale, that continued to obsess and excite the male mind, and not woman as man’s equal in an unequal world of power relations and sexual hypocrisy.
The success of Massenet’s opera in France at the time was as much to do with its affirmation of the status-quo, as its undeniably lovely music.
Since then, Manon has had more radical readings – Kenneth Macmillan’s ballet uses the music but questions the morality. The 1986 movie, Manon des Sources, doesn’t use the story, but lets us know that Manon’s mother has sung the title role. Manon herself is a timid girl who learns to fight back.
Operas, like all art, live outside their time, but they are also time capsules of a changing society, especially the way we think about love and sex, women and men. That’s why we always need new productions, inevitably showing the drama quite differently. The women are still slashed, suffocated or smashed, but we don’t take that as read (or sung) anymore…
PUBLISHED IN THE TIMES - June 2010
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