The Bald Soprano

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1950

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 8-20

Pages 20-42

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Absurdity and the Collapse of Language and Meaning

Widely considered one of the foundational works of the Theatre of the Absurd movement, The Bald Soprano uses language in ways to disrupt all that we hold to be true. While the beginning of the play starts in relative normalcy, with an English couple enjoying a quiet evening resting in their armchairs after dinner, the play quickly upends any sense of logic through nonsensical conversations and scenarios. As meaning spirals further and further away from logic or sense, the play prompts the audience to question the stability of language and the process of meaning-making.

Ionesco describes The Bald Soprano as a “tragedy of language,” where language ceases to communicate anything of meaning. While the absurd dialogue, actions, and premises in the play make for a comedic farce, rather than a tragedy, the “tragedy” comes from the underlying truth that language is not as concrete as we think. This “tragedy” was inspired by Ionesco’s experience learning English from an English language primer, in which the act of communication was distilled into very basic facts and artificial exchanges. Ionesco channels his experience with the primer into a stylized form of language in the play, where everyday conversations and truths of the world become distorted. Take, for example, how Mrs. Smith tells Mr. Smith basic information about his own life, such as the fact they “live in the suburbs of London,” that their name is “Smith” (9), and that their daughter, Peggy, “who is two,” eats a diet of only milk and porridge (10). These statements, reminiscent of phrases designed to help beginning English speakers grasp the basics of a new language, are here placed in the context of everyday life. In doing so, the conversation begins to sound absurd.

The play makes further parody of the way small talk and niceties are devoid of real meaning. For example, Ionesco mixes basic facts of life in with nonsensical logic, until nothing uttered on stage makes sense. Mr. Smith mentions “Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Tuesdays” (13) as three separate days of the week; Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith can’t decide if Bobby Watson is dead or getting married or even which Bobby Watson is Bobby Watson; the group is astonished to hear about a man tying his shoe; and it is too difficult to figure out whether a ringing doorbell means someone is at the door or not. In using language to disrupt logic, Ionesco illustrates how logic and sense are entirely dependent on language, which is unstable in its ability to convey meaning. The play follows this relationship between language and meaning to the extreme as the “conversation” between the two couples explodes into a screaming match of non-sequitur phrases at the play’s climax. Small talk and platitudes are used ubiquitously and begin to make less and less sense until language simply fails to communicate, thus leading to an absurd collapse of meaning.

A key component of the absurd aesthetic is that any “story” or what might be thought of to be narrative should convey the true absurdity of everyday existence. In particular, repetition can rob even basic truths—such as “the ceiling is above, the floor is below” (38)—of meaning. As the couples repeat names, words, and sounds throughout the play, they desensitize the audience to the meaning of the language and shift the focus to the sounds, which further distances the word from what it means. According to absurdist philosophy, everything is inherently meaningless because language—how we know anything—is inherently meaningless. The only “meaning” is that which we ourselves ascribe to things. Language and meaning are human constructs that exist only because we have willed them so. Absurdist philosophy claims that we accept social niceties, language etiquette, and basic facts as given truths simply because we always have. However, by taking the world and language we are familiar with, and using these to communicate nonsensical meaning throughout the play, the world as we know it gets framed in absurdity. In essence, the disintegration of meaning, logic, and communication in The Bald Soprano breaks us out of our everyday stupor and invites deep contemplation by flipping everything we know about our world on its head.

Alienation, Identity, and Human Connection

Part of the absurd logic in The Bald Soprano is derived from a constant shift in reality, where nothing the characters previously said or experienced seems to transfer from one moment to the next. This fragmentation of memories and experience emphasizes an alienated sense of identity, where characters are constantly disconnected from one another, from any kind of history, and thus the very essence of who they are.

In the world of the play, facts and experiences never seem to cohere through time. After Mrs. Smith recounts the extensive meal she just shared with Mr. Smith and their children, the couple grows irate at the late arrival of their friends the Martins and the absence of their maid Mary, which caused them to go all day without eating. The Smiths’ children also disappear from the picture as quickly as they appeared and leave the audience wondering if they do or do not have children at all. And after going to change clothes, the Smiths come back in the same clothes they were wearing, apologizing for the delay as they changed into finer apparel. While one or even two characters might be thought to have poor memory, the play presents the audience with no characters who have a coherent reality from one moment to the next. As soon as a character introduces a new sense of reality—one where the Smiths have not just eaten, for example—this becomes the reality for all the characters.

This elusive sense of a stable reality or concrete experience means the characters have limited opportunity to develop identity. Identity is shaped by the way one experiences the world, and the juxtaposition of these experiences with one’s sense of how others experience the world. In The Bald Soprano, characters do not experience the world in any one clear way from moment to moment since reality and facts about the characters’ existence and experiences are constantly changing. The characters go through these shifting experiences as empty shells, which can take on any number of “personalities,” which might be read as having no personality at all. Their identities get distilled into the very basic social labels they carry throughout these shifting realities: gender, social class, occupation, marriage status, and nationality. Nothing that might be thought of as a soul ever takes root.

The best example of this lack of internal depth is Mr. and Mrs. Martin, who first appear in the play as expressionless, monotone characters with no personality. Their characters begin to take shape before the audience onstage. While at first they are uncertain about their own identities and how they know each other—despite sharing a bed and a daughter—they work out that they must be a couple. Having arrived at this conclusion, they happily wear the label of married couple and carry on with their lives, even though none of their “shared” memories or experiences have registered in them as something shared. Mary does reveal that the couple are not each other’s spouses after all, suggesting that the definition of “husband and wife” requires something beyond the label to be true. But the audience can also see that the couple is happy with their conclusion, which then prompts questions of whether it matters if the marital status of the couple is true or not true (and how does the audience even know that Mary tells the truth anyway?).

A key theme in absurdism is the tension between the meaninglessness of life and the inherent human desire for life to have meaning. Typically, this theme depicts the human endeavor to find meaning as futile. The Bald Soprano makes a spectacle of this futility as the characters become untethered from each other, themselves, and the audience becomes untethered from the reality and expectations that come from being an audience. Meaning never takes hold as a lack of remembered experience and formed identity combines with the gradual collapse of language in the play to plunge the characters into complete disassociation. The characters cannot connect with themselves or their sense of identity as they hardly remember anything they have previously said or experienced. Audiences may remember too many details about the characters, which ultimately contradict each other and leave audiences unable to connect to characters that are so unstable.

When connections can be made, as occurs with the Martins, these connections are fallible. The characters struggle to communicate their sense of identity and experiences to other characters—a challenge made more complicated as language begins to carry less and less meaning. Nothing the characters say seems to resonate or even be heard by the other characters, leaving the characters alienated from any true human connection. The characters try to uphold societal expectations with dinner parties, niceties, and storytelling, but they are ultimately alienated from these tenets of polite society as meaning evades them. Audiences may try to follow or create some kind of logic from the shifting realities, which actually creates an excess of meaning, but are inevitably frustrated by the play’s resistance to narrative logic. Thus, audiences may not understand their own identities as an audience to something that lacks coherent meaning.

This commentary on identity and connection parodies the isolating nature of the monotony of everyday life, where in getting caught up in the details and social expectations of the day-to-day, we end up hardly able to recognize the bigger picture of who we are and who we are spending our time with. In a world that is ultimately meaningless, any attempt to solve this ultimately ends in more absurdity and alienation.

The Bourgeoisie and Social Conventions

One of the major topics of satire in The Bald Soprano is the bourgeoisie and their specific conformity to social conventions. In the topsy-turvy world of the play, traditional conventions of proper English etiquette, social class, and gender norms are viewed through an absurdist lens to question our general acceptance of these social constructs in our everyday world.

While a parody of English society is the focus of the play, Ionesco has claimed this emphasized Englishness is just happenstance, since he happened to be learning English when he was inspired to write the play. What he claims he is really parodying is any bourgeois identity in any culture. However, in this specific instance, the parody looks at English society and the markers of the specifically English bourgeoisie. For example, the very English characters of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and phrases such as the saying “An Englishman’s home is truly his castle” (38) that appear in the play, are adapted from Ionesco’s English language primer. Although such a phrase may be used when learning words for nationalities (“Englishman”), places (“home”), or uses of gendered pronouns (“his”), the sentence itself conveys not only a sense of “Englishness,” but a particular kind of Englishness which is established through a man’s ruling of his home as a king might a castle. As Ionesco adapts the phrasing and characters of his English primer to a potential reality (the play), he illustrates how an “everyday” depiction of an English person is actually a clearly defined class of English society. The bourgeoisie often imagine that there are no other ways to be English, which is then conveyed to the rest of the culture through something as “neutral” as a language primer.

Ionesco parodies this subconscious adherence to social norms by peppering in absurd variations on common and normative ideas of social class and gender that end up just causing further chaos. As members of the English bourgeoisie, the Smiths and Martins try to uphold classic English manners that nonetheless go awry—the Martins arrive late and offend their hosts because they dare not enter the Smiths’ house without being let in by the maid, or the Smiths pretend to change clothes out of respect for their guests, when they truly didn’t change clothes. They give little thought to the plight of their non-English neighbors who, as only naturalized citizens, are not allowed to extinguish fires at their own house as they “have the right to have houses, but not the right to have them put out if they’re burning” (29). They express shock when their maid tries to tell a story and dares to embrace the Fire Chief in an un-English show of affection—causing Mr. Smith to exclaim: “This is too much, here, in our home, in the suburbs of London” (35). No social convention is left unscathed as Ionesco tries to follow the “logic” of socially correct behavior and thinking.

While these social conventions are theoretically meant to encourage a more cohesive, polite society, the characters’ attempts to adhere to social niceties and stereotypical bourgeois beliefs only give way to more absurdity and chaos. As language and meaning disintegrate in the play, the characters’ “polite” statements fall on non-listening ears and conversations fail to make sense. The characters’ attention to increasingly absurd social rules keeps them from ever reaching a moment of empathy or connection. Performative social niceties drive the characters further and further from each other, until the play descends into a shouting match of platitudes. Through this absurd parody of the bourgeoisie and conformity to social norms, manners and social rules prove to be empty, keeping characters from reaching any sense of true human connection.