Fragile constructs : examining masculinity and power dynamics in Yasmina Reza's Art, Le Dieu du Carnage, and Trois versions de la vie
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What happens when the carefully curated image of masculinity begins to fracture--despite embodying all the hallmarks of what it means to be a man? What if stoicism, rationality, emotional restraint, intellectual wit, economic status, and social refinement are nothing but a brittle façade, concealing a desperate fragility? This study interrogates the representation of masculinity as a socially constructed and performative identity, laden with anxiety, competition, and symbolic struggles for dominance. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theories of cultural and symbolic capital, Michel Foucault's analysis of power, knowledge, and subjectivation, and R.W. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, the thesis explores how Reza's male characters attempt to negotiate their identities through performances of intellect, taste, and rhetorical control within the confined, often domestic spaces of her plays. The analysis contends that masculinity in Art, Le Dieu du carnage, and Trois versions de la vie is neither stable nor triumphant, but rather a fragile construct continually destabilized, particularly through the failure of the very traits and symbols used to assert masculine authority, the interventions of women, and the subversive deployment of humour and irony. Each chapter examines how cultural capital, discursive control, and symbolic objects are mobilized in the assertion of dominance, only to collapse under the pressures of interpersonal conflict, social performance, and self-contradiction. Ultimately, the thesis reveals how Reza dramatizes masculinity as a precarious and performative battleground where power is fluid, contested, and constantly undermined, laying bare the insecurities at the heart of traditional masculine authority.
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M.A.