The BadAsses
Marianne Angelle
Marianne is a French personification of liberty, equality, fraternity and reason. However, mostly known as the Goddess of Liberty. With the advent of the Revolution in 1789, the revolutionists looked up to the goddess of liberty to guide their fight for liberty.
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In the play, Marianne is a free black woman from Saint Domingue a French colony, today’s Haiti. The playwright describes Marianne Angelle a free badass woman working as a spy with her husband, Vincent. She is a revolutionary and a mom to ten-year-old, Annabelle and eight-year-old Vincent, named after her husband. Marianne’s husband who she loves deeply and fears might be dead due to her several returned love letters, is created from the historical figure Vincent Ogé, a wealthy free man of color demanding voting rights for free men of color. According to Lauren Gunderson, the playwright, Marianne is fueled by both “family and justice” and does not have the time to “save the souls of these white women”.
One of Marianne’s goals is to have control over how history is told, especially when it involves her. She does not want her history to be written by someone else when she has no say. She says “And if you don’t put the heart back in this revolution, who will? If you don’t write this down, who will? They will. And that’s how they win”. She wants Olympe to write the history she was witnessing.
Olympe De Gouges
Olympe De Gouges: The writer! Another badass woman. Created from an actual historical figure, Olympe was born Marie Gouze. Through her mother’s family, Marie (aka Olympe) was able to get an education. While married against her will, she had a son. However, she later changed her name to Olympe De Gouges after the death of her husband. Olympe De Gouges was a strong feminist who fought for human rights, freedom of speech and equal rights to be given to women. During her lifetime, Olympe has over sixty-eight pamphlets, novels, manifestos, and letters to her credit. One of her most famous writing, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, which she dedicated to Marie Antoinette, wife to King Louis XVI.
In the play, Olympe is looking for inspiration to write her play and decides to write about the women in her life. She makes the resolve to make them heroes in her play. However, this new goal for Olympe is thwarted by the need to “leave her office”. Basically, she wants to be a stay-at-home activist without doing the work. According to the playwright’s dramaturgy “she wants to talk like a rebel poet, and get credit for the rebellion, but without getting in too much trouble”.
Marie Antoinette
A Queen… former queen. In the play, Marie experiencing the Revolution with the women- in their sisterhood. While the play references what history has told us about her, “… her true drive in this play is almost entirely personal for her. She is aware of politics but does not feel impacted by them” (Gunderson). She has a child-like cheer about her but “become[s] a mother bear” and we see what she “really cares about: her kids. Suddenly all that is silly about her vanishes and we should see a mother, a woman” (Gunderson).
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Marie was the last queen of France before the Revolution- she was married to King Louis XVI in a contentious marriage where she was rumored to be promiscuous. Regardless of these rumors, the queen loved to spend money and invest in her looks, which the king always indulged. Marie loved the life of luxury and was not afraid to show it- while having access to the inherited jewels of France, she still loved to by more expensive jewels of her own. Queen Marie was a bit of a theatre lover herself, even though the way she went about it only made the people hate her more. The queen had Le petit Trianon (luh puhtee tree-ah-non), a small fenced-in theatre built on the grounds of Versailles. Here, she had people dressed and standing around like peasants while she also dressed like a peasant in her little peasant village.
Charlotte Corday
A badass and assassin! Charlotte is known for her murder of Jean-Paul Marat, a political leader responsible for the deaths of the Girondists – a political sect that campaigns for the end of the monarchy. Charlotte was influenced by writings/literature of the enlightenment period. As a young girl, she is fully aware of herself and has nothing to lose.
When she meets the women, she is plotting the murder of Jean-Paul Marat and is aware of her possible death. However, she wants to write her own history as she knows her actions will get talked about, she wants ahead on the narrative.
