ABSTRACT
Rachilde wrote her first plays for the Théâtre d'Art, the avant-garde symbolist theater founded by the young poet Paul Fort in 1890. Antoine's naturalist Théâtre Libre had just created a sensation in Paris with its new, super-realistic staging. Subscription audiences marveled at the acting, which seemed close to real life, and at scenery like the butcher shop with actual dripping carcasses of beef. Antoine's methods were an improvement over the predictable mediocrity of most commercial nineteeth-century theater, but the symbolists wanted a theater of the soul, in which a mystical inner life would transcend the corporeal world. They believed that realistic sets and even the bodies and voices of live actors could interfere with achieving a state of reverie.
