The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de satin), subtitled “The Worst is Not the Surest,” is an epic verse drama by French poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel. He began writing the play after a diplomatic assignment in Brazil in 1918 and completed the work in 1925 (despite losing the manuscript of Act 3 during an earthquake in Japan in 1923).
The full play runs some 11 hours and has rarely been performed in unabridged form (although the complete work was staged, most recently, in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2004). As in his other dramas and much of his poetry, Claudel focuses on illicit love, religious faith, and the interaction of the transcendent spiritual world with that of the flawed and limited human sphere.
The drama is set in late 15th-century Spain, where the protagonist, Rodrigue, falls madly in love with a married woman, Prouhèze, who is in an arranged marriage with Don Pélage—a husband whom she admires but does not love. After discovering his wife’s love for Don Rodrigue, Pélage takes his wife on a military mission to North Africa to quell a rebellion.
Before they leave, she offers her satin slipper to the Virgin Mary with the hope that the Virgin will protect her from committing sin. Throughout the play, the forces of history, as Catholic Spain expands its empire abroad, conspire to keep the two lovers forever separated and their love unconsummated.
Though the work is ostensibly about divine grace and the triumph of religious faith, it also contains Eurocentric elements and racist overtones, which modern audiences may find disturbing.
The diversity of places, the lyrical beauty (influenced by the biblical psalms and Catholic liturgy), the large cast, and complex action—despite the heavy theological flavor of the work—draw the audience into the play and unfold a vast religious-historical panorama of the late 15th century.
The Satin Slipper also marks Claudel’s apotheosis in dealing creatively with the trauma of his youthful love affair with the married Polish woman Rosalie Vetch. He seems with this play to have taken the emotional distresses he suffered during and after that affair and related them to the sufferings of Christ, whose divine love expanded throughout the world.
The lovers Rodrigue and Prouhèze represent the ideal renunciation of earthly love and desire for the higher forms—the love of God and of religious faith.
Categories: French Literature, Literature, World Literature
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