Performing Maternal Suffering on the Operatic Stage: The Case of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust

Among the numerous adaptations of Goethe’s Faust, Gounod’s opera stands out for how it highlights the complex emotional journey of the story’s heroine, Marguerite. The demanding role combines challenging music with a traumatic story line that, when taken seriously, invites meaningful, psychologically driven treatment on the stage.1 Throughout the plot, Marguerite faces circumstances that set her apart from many of her counterparts in other nineteenthcentury operas: she experiences social ostracization after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and she ultimately kills her infant in an act of extreme desperation and possible insanity. Much of the opera’s music and libretto, however, aestheticize and idealize Marguerite’s trauma while effectively silencing the maternityrelated aspects of her suffering. Furthermore, traditional staging decisions depict neither Marguerite’s pregnancy nor her act of infanticide. By omitting visual reminders of Marguerite’s pregnancy and violent experience with motherhood, I suggest that directors from the nineteenth century onward have effectively sanitized her maternal trauma. And in excising the aria “Il ne revient pas” (act 4, scene 1), in which Marguerite expresses her pain and isolation after Faust abandons her, they have suppressed her voice and perspective. Conversely, various twentyfirstcentury productions of Faust have moved in the opposite direction, foregrounding stark depictions of Marguerite’s pregnancy and infanticide. While some of these productions present Marguerite’s maternity and consequent trauma in an empathetic manner that highlights both her troubled