Salon women's conversations and subsequent contributions to fiction offered vistas of previously unimagined possibilities. They examined women's roles and began to expose the fragility of a gender system that only seemed natural and stable. Furthermore, thoughts about women and marriage were in flux at this time, and women had become more visible interlocutors in the debate about their place in marriage. More than ever before, contemporary women were attempting to assert more authority in a variety of realms—from the social and cultural to the political—and love and marriage were integral issues to their cause. As I have shown in this book, subsequent dramas transformed these women's ideas into caricatures to contain the threat of their ideas and to predict the potential consequences of women out of bounds. Many of the works treated here portray women without marriage as the embodiment of chaos, wreaking havoc on the structures of society and destabilizing men's places in the world.

These dramatists wrested narratives away from women and weaponized them in a defense of the status quo. Looking back from today's perspective, we can see that the kinds of stereotypes represented on the early modern French stage have had greater longevity than the heroines in women's novels. Moreover, the cultural scripts I examined in this book illuminate the cultural forces at work that constrain real women, and provided the methods for turning women into spectacles offstage. Even at the time, librettists perhaps imagined that women would learn instead to discipline themselves based on what they saw in the theater, rather than seeing in women's writing a world of opportunity.

The musical works discussed here in many ways set the stage, so to speak, for the ways we continue to castigate disobedient women. Sady Doyle has recently examined what she calls the “celebrity trainwreck”—unruly reallife women who have been condemned for living lives in excess of feminine norms. She studies women from Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Brontë to Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. She observes that the primary characteristic of the train wreck is the public nature of her sexuality, shared with or without her consent.