A mainspring of Jean Anouilh's work has been a savage indictment of society, despite his belonging to the political right (although there is, to be sure, the phenomenon of right-wing anarchism). His work has had an abundance and diversity that puts it in the first rank. Anouilh was famous before the war for L'hermine (1931, The Ermine), Le voyageur sans bagage (1936, Traveler without Luggage), and La sauvage (1934, The Savage). In these, the Anouilh hero, obsessed by youthful idealism and rejecting the compromises of ordinary life, appeared in various guises. Antigone gave the Anouilh hero (or heroine, in this case) the prestige of an ancient myth. Creon, who accepts the demands society makes on the individual, is not an entirely contemptible figure, but the play is naturally dominated by Antigone herself, whose unreasonable behavior is seen as reasonable.
This conflict (close to the one we find in Montherlant) between personal purity and the demands of society tended, after the war, to disappear in Anouilh's work in favor of a savage pessimism that rejected any alternative. His early division of his plays into the pièces noires and the pièces roses gave way to a uniform atmosphere of sourness and asperity. Ardèle, ou la marguerite (1948, Ardèle, or the Daisy) was a pitiless debunking of all respectability and all enthusiasm. A sexuality of resentment, not unlike that found in Sartre's novels, was expressed in the harrowing scene in which two children parody their parents' dissolute behavior. In La valse des toréadors (1952, The Waltz of the Toreadors) and Le boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron (1968, The Baker, the Baker's Wife, and the Little Baker's Boy) Anouilh continued this picture of incurable degradation and disgust. This exaggerated pessimism seems to have been caused largely by the events of the Liberation of France, which Anouilh felt had involved excess and injustice, proving that evil inevitably results from the illusion of good.
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