Are Alexandre Dumas fils and Émile Augier’s Comedies of Manners “Absolute Dramas” ?
The bourgeois theater of Dumas fils and Augier, known to defend and illustrate the model of “drama” in the sense of Peter Szondi, nevertheless violates one of its defining traits—respecting the “fourth wall”—which alone guarantees the “absolute” nature of dramatic fiction, that is to say its closure and its autonomy. Based on the citation and on the variation of classical plays, it appears as theater. In addition, characters assuming the role of reasoner, bearing a point of view on the action, mediate the relationship between the stage and the audience in the manner of an “epic-dramatic” figure. Finally, the dialogue regularly gives way to frontal enunciation modalities (songs, asides, words).