Private Lives
38 pages • 1-hour read
Noël CowardPrivate Lives
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Themes
The Façade of Civility
A central theme in Private Lives is the façade of civility and the management of one’s public image to mask private, hypocritical behavior. As a comedy of manners, the play skewers the pretensions of the upper class, from the social graces of etiquette and decorum to the moral standards of honesty, monogamy, and the sanctity of marriage. The play’s title refers to how the characters, in their private lives, are far from the sophisticated and principled beings they purport to be, yet their wealth and privilege protect them from facing any negative consequences for their bad manners.
The play opens on a stage replete with signifiers of wealth and its accompanying assumptions of sophistication and propriety. The hotel in Deauville is a seaside resort for the rich and fabulous, with trays of champagne, a yacht in the water, live music, and fine dining at the Casino. Sibyl is “smartly dressed” (5), Amanda is “exquisite” (11), and the men are “pleasant looking” (5) and “quite nice looking” (11). Outwardly, Elyot, Sibyl, Amanda, and Victor exude elegance and courtesy as they engage in small talk profuse with “dears” and “darlings.” Act 1 plays on the assumption that these characters have earned the good things in life because they are good people.
However, it doesn’t take long for the façade of civility to show its cracks and reveal the underlying shallowness of the wealthy. Sibyl and Victor pester their spouses about their exes, which suggests that they’ve married people they don’t completely trust. Elyot and Amanda give them little reassurance, revealing that they’ve married people they don’t truly love. With the premise of mismatched couples and a reunion of divorcees, Coward packs the play with scandals, taboos, curses, slights, and physical fights to satirize how artificial the characters’ poise and moral principles are, particularly in the foundations of their marriages.
The animosity between Elyot and Amanda, rooted in jealousy and resentment, is far too toxic to remain below the surface. Amanda claims she has “good taste enough to refrain from making cheap gibes at Sibyl” (32), but Elyot retorts, “Your voice takes on an acid quality whenever you mention her name” (33). By the time the runaway lovers have spent a week hiding out in a Parisian flat, they have destroyed the apartment and are rolling on the floor in “paroxysms of rage” (66). The couple break their “compact, a sacred, sacred compact never to quarrel again” (39), treating the sanctity of their promise with the same irreverence as their holy matrimony. Instead of demonstrating courtesy and consideration, Elyot and Amanda are selfish and childish, qualities that their privilege and wealth engender as they run off to their next chic love nest.
In the play’s final scene, the two couples fail to maintain civility over coffee and brioches after negotiating the public fallout of another divorce and deciding to postpone ending their marriages. The conclusion is ambiguous regarding who will end up with whom, but what emerges most clearly is Victor and Sibyl’s transformation into another version of Elyot and Amanda. The play asks whether it is high time that Victor and Sibyl drop their façade, or whether it is better to feign an ounce of civility than to show none at all.
The Defiance of Rigid Gender Roles
In satirizing the upper class, Private Lives also challenges traditional gender norms and the assumption that men and women should fulfill the binary extremes of masculinity and femininity. Elyot and Amanda are eccentric and iconoclastic, and their rejection of their second spouses functions as a defiance of the rigid gender expectations that Victor and Sibyl represent.
Sibyl and Victor consider themselves ideal partners because they adhere to conventional definitions of femininity and masculinity. Sibyl is the young, doting wife, and Victor is the protective, rational husband. They attribute their spouses’ failed first marriages to Amanda’s and Elyot’s transgression of gender norms. Sibyl “hate[s] these half masculine women who go banging about” and contends to Elyot, “I should think you needed a little quiet womanliness after Amanda” (10). Sibyl abides by the binary, and asserts, “I like a man to be a man” (9). Victor views Amanda as a “poor child” (15) victimized by the domineering “swine” and “cad” Elyot. Throughout the play, Victor is quick to display machismo at any affront, threatening to “break [Elyot’s] damned neck” (13) and insisting Elyot “take back” his insults about Amanda and “behave like a man” (75) by fighting. However, Victor’s erstwhile virility and Sibyl’s insipid girlishness read as cartoonishly outdated in contrast to Amanda and Elyot’s sparkle.
To Amanda and Elyot, the performative gender alignments that Sibyl and Victor take pride in are the least interesting aspects about them. Elyot sends up Sibyl’s binary thinking: “If you feel you’d like me to smoke a pipe, I’ll try and master it” (9), mocking her idea that masculinity is simply a matter of the right props. Amanda’s expectations for men and women are likewise packed with irony. Using both air quotes and italics, she explains to Victor, “The ‘woman’—in italics—should always retain a certain amount of alluring feminine mystery for the ‘man’—also in italics […] Never mind, darling; it doesn’t necessarily work out like that; it’s only supposed to” (18). Amanda and Elyot disagree with Sibyl and Victor’s characterizations that the failure of their marriage was one-sided. Rather, since Amanda is a bold, worldly woman and Elyot an irreverent dandy, their compatibility is founded on disregarding social norms and being more authentically themselves, for better and worse.
In her conversation with Victor, Amanda highlights the play’s central theme: “I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives” (18-19). Her line unveils the hypocrisy of class and acknowledges the social construction of gender norms.
Flippancy as Social Critique
Flippancy is often the tone of comedy of manners, a genre that satirizes the etiquette and propriety of the upper class from a cynical standpoint. Coward is known for his distinctively irreverent style and sharp wit, which he wrote into his characters’ dialogue and performed via his own public persona. Elyot’s motto to “[b]e flippant” (57) in the face of social scrutiny lampoons the hypocrisy that those who dictate standards don’t take them seriously themselves.
Elyot’s glibness undercuts upper-class pretension. Men like Victor believe themselves to be morally upright, serious, and superior. Outwardly, they appear concerned, but the play reveals these concerns to be shallow. Coward employs flippancy as social critique, imbuing Elyot’s frivolity with a deeper, biting subtext that challenges the principles of good manners and bad taste, and skewer the pieties held by legal and social institutions, like marriage and religion. When Amanda worries about absconding from their spouses and whether their happiness will last, Elyot advises, “You mustn’t be serious, my dear one, it’s just what they want […] All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths” (58). Elyot privileges irreverence, exaggeration, and irony to subvert constrictive, social norms, especially those that are considered sacred. He jokes that because Catholics do not believe in divorce, he and Amanda are still married in “the eyes of Heaven” (44). To Elyot, marriage, God, love, and death are empty concepts that expose human fears and foibles rather than chasten them.
Elyot’s flippancy also points out the artificial ways morality is externally imposed rather than inherent. When Victor threatens to fight Elyot for his sarcasm and “extremely bad taste” (72) in making light of their situation, Elyot defends his flippancy as being “[n]o worse than bluster, and invective” (72). He contends, [T]his situation is entirely without precedent. We have no prescribed etiquette to fall back upon. I shall continue to be flippant” (72). To Elyot, their situation is so farcical that there are no predetermined rules of conduct for it, suggesting all available rules are simply social constructs. Victor believes that beating up Elyot is what a man would “naturally” do, whereas Elyot points out, in a step-by-step deconstruction, “[I]f you hit me, I shall certainly hit you […] Then you’d hit me again, and I’d hit you again, and we’d go on until one or the other was knocked out” (76). He concludes that Victor’s peace of mind would come only if Victor wins, implying that ego rather than morals is what’s at stake.
Elyot, much like Coward himself, subverts norms by thriving on exaggeration and artifice, aspects that cultural critic Susan Sontag later defined as “camp,” with a reference to Coward’s plays as a “deliberate” and “wholly conscious” version of it (Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Partisan Review, 1964). Although Sontag privileges camp’s style over substance, Private Lives offers both in its irreverent critique of the upper class, marriage, religion, and sexuality.
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