al nature. Externally, he presents a mien that is entirely noble in nature, while internally he is corrupt, a woman-chaser because that is the role he has in society--Beaumarchais says that this reflects the morals of his day. The story of this play is well-known through the opera version by Mozart, though there are some differences in terms of characters and the way those characters are played. Essentially, though, the nature of the roles of men and women are the same in each, with the corrupt male in the form of the Count brought to heel through the machinations of his wife and Suzanne. The image of the sexes emerging from this play is the eternal battle of the sexes, with the male constitutionally promiscuous and the woman long-suffering, intelligent, and often vengeful, with good reason.
This eighteenth-century play is structured carefully as a farce, with multiple crossing plots and complex comic action on several levels. Relations between men and women are on the order of a military campaign, with each side battling the other, sometimes gaining and sometimes falling back, but always returning to the fray as a battle that has to be fought and won. The two sides are essentially separate, however. The women are challenging male behavior, not male social roles. The Countess is interested in punishing and stopping her husband's philandering, but she is not interested in taking power from him or in asserting herself outside the home.
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a non-dramatic, non-fictional view of male and female roles in the eighte
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