ABSTRACT
Good mothers are hard to find in seventeenth-century French comedy. Comedy has a long tradition of portraying older female characters as blocking figures who delight in either nagging their husbands or frustrating the romantic projects of their children. When present at all onstage, mothers in seventeenth-century French comedy are generally capricious tyrants or selfish, vain coquettes. L’Embarras de Godard is remarkable not only for its unprecedented treatment of the theme of childbirth, but also for its presentation of a kind of mother new to the comic stage. Benevolent mothers sympathetic to their children’s needs and desires are not comic characters; those who seem to have gotten laughs were mothers clinging vainly to youth, masquerading as young girls. Historical research thus indicates that the development of the newly sentimentalized theatrical character of the good mother corresponds to a new chapter in the history of private life.
