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This is the story
Our story begins in pre-Revolution France, during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette takes up the early leading role, as a young mischievous, fun-loving and strong-willed Austrian girl who is wed too early to a dull and weak-willed French prince - a very poor match. But the true heroine now famous fictious leading lady Oscar, soon takes center stage. She is Oscar Jarjayes, a noblewoman raised as a man.
Oscar quickly becomes Marie Antoinette's friend and bodyguard, and a few adventures of court intrigue and politics connect the two women. But Marie Antoinette's destiny is sealed by history. Confined to the monarchy, she must, as appealing and refreshing as she is at first, gradually become the proud but hardened queen. Oscar, however, is free, both as a fictious character and as a "nobleman," to show us othe aspects of the stage - the complex French backdrop where she explores what it means to be noble versus common, rich versus poor, a woman versus a man.
It is Oscar who ventures out into Paris and sees the poverty of its streets, who befriends a poor but noble girl (Rosalie), who hears the whisperings in the Palace and tries to warn Antoinette. It is, however, Antoinette who first teaches Oscar that a heart wrapped up in the shallowness of mere work and duty cannot understand the depth of human feeling.
Unfortunately, Antoinette soon becomes caught up in her own feelings of loneliness and unhappiness and her longings for true love. In contrast, Oscar gradually awakens to the universality of human physical, emotional and spiritual needs. As the story continues, she comes to see the injustice of inequality based on nobility. She comes to learn how to love, how to let go of that love and how to trust. She also comes to see the barriers that pushed noblewomen into narrow lives with narrow interests and limited vision, and she, while embracing her own woman's heart, also forges out to seize all the advantages and insights her "man's position" in society affords her. Finally taking her newfound convictions and infusing them with courage, she abandons safety and comfort by choosing to fight for the Revolution against everything a noblewoman is supposed to embrace.
Oscar, then, is a synthesis of human strivings, and a role model for breaking free of bounds and challenging what should have been a pre-destined life. Rejecting nobility, she sides with the commoner; rejecting both plain masculinity and a socially-limited form of femininity - she transforms them both into something new and vital. Rejecting privilege and comfort and dependence, she fights for the very right to fight for herself, to make her own decisions, to discover the truth for herself. And so it is fitting the most lasting image of Oscar is of a shining warrior upon a horse, challenging all that would imprison the human spirit.
Yet the story is not complete, not even after Oscar's death. If Oscar is the ideal, Marie Antoinette and those around her are the reality. Trapped in there rigid roles, strangely powerless against societal forces, unable to be who they really would like to be, they are pulled into the raging currents of history. Antoinette, lond enslaved to lonliness, idleness and frivolity, awakens too late - and her attempts to protect her family wind up hurting and angering the commoners even more. Cruel fate plays it's part, ruining an escape plan that might have saved them. Yet in this history, Antoinette never losis her regal pride and dignity. It is a stubborn dignity that got her into political trouble as a girl, one that infact saves her family when faced by an angry mob and one that stays with her to the very end, through the trial and the execution. Despite her deep regrets that she was not born an ordinary woman, Marie Antoinette seems somehow destined to have been born a queen, and to die a queen.
But was she a shallow and careless monarch who threw away opportunities and deserved what she got? Or was she a victim of circumstances beyond her control? Real history may well provide a different answer then this work of fiction, but we, as readers of this grand story, can see Marie Antoinette and the people around her as living, breathing, hoping, despairing human beings who did what they could with what they had.
bravenet.com