Each is accompanied by a short contextualizing introduction with details about the music, playwrights, and staging. Aren't Mormon women, because of their numbers in a household, more liberated than French women who can't divorce? What is polygamy but another name for multiple mistresses? This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth's Twelve Wives (1890) and Stephana's Jewel (1892). Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent 'others,' however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons.
This highly enjoyable volume is recommended to both scholars and students interested in the topic.Paperback. An instructor could have students act out scenes from these plays, followed by a discussion about gender and social norms. All the plays are easily accessible and entertaining. With a vulgar reference to Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748), Stephana’s Jewel ( Le bijou de Stephana) provides the most Orientalist depiction of Mormons. A marriage broker features prominently in one of the plays, Japheth’s Twelve Wives, and Cropper and Flood remind us that at the time, 25% of marriages in France were arranged by marriage brokers.
While the plays end with traditional bourgeois values being reinstated, the plays bring up issues about gender roles and divorce that were being hotly debated in France at the time. The central comparison made in all the performances is between a foreign religion that practices polygamy and respectable French society where men both marry and maintain mistresses.
All four plays focus heavily on marriage. The plays exoticize the Mormons, at one point comparing their practices with those of Muslims ( Stephana’s Jewel). The authors suggest some intriguing connections between France’s longstanding attraction to Orientalism and the Otherness of Mormon polygamists. Cropper and Flood draw a sharp distinction between the ways Mormons were represented on the stage in America, where they were objects of outrage and scorn, and representations on the French stage, where, despite some outlandish mischaracterizations, there is a certain bonhomie. Their primary sources range from the social theorist Hippolyte Taine, who worried that this religious experience was contributing to the erosion of Enlightenment rationalism, to Jules Verne’s Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873), which includes a brief visit to Salt Lake City. First, Cropper and Flood provide helpful background information on French perceptions of Mormonism. Readers are first treated to a well-researched introduction that situates nineteenth-century Mormonism in the context of France and the French. They bring to the plays a critical apparatus that is both targeted and judicious, a welcome contrast to editions where the critical apparatus utterly overwhelms the primary text(s). Cropper and Flood treat us to lively translations of four such musical comedies. France’s fascination made its way to the stage in the form of vaudeville comedies, a popular nineteenth-century genre that focused on ménages à trois and farcical reversals. This practice, more than anything else, defined this upstart religion in the period. In the second half of the nineteenth century, French society was quite interested in the curious, exotic-sounding religious movement dubbed Mormonism, with a particular prurient interest in polygamy. This delightful volume brings to light a phenomenon that most of us likely had no idea existed. As odd as it seems to describe an academic book as fun, this is the first word that comes to mind in describing this work.
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