About Me
Berusaiyu no Bara or The Rose of Versailles is a historical fantasy, written by Riyoko Ikeda, set in France in the years before the French Revolution. Its three main characters are: Oscar Francois de Jarjeyes, a fictional swordswomen; Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France; and Andre, Oscar's childhood friend and companion. Beginning just before Marie's arrival at Versailles and her marriage to the heir to the French throne, we follow the lives and loves of these people at the very top of French society, all the while seeing the signs of the upcoming Revolution that will bring it all crashing down. The Rose of Versailles incorporates many real French historical figures and events into its story, all the while maintaining the emphasis on human relations and emotions.
Shot at 2007-07-08Our story begins in pre-Revolution France, during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette herself 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, Ikeda's now-famous fictitious leading lady, soon takes center stage. This 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 fictitious character and as a "nobleman," to show us other 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 their 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, long enslaved to loneliness, idleness and frivolity, awakens too late—and her attempts to protect her family wind up hurting and angering the commoners.Cruel fate plays its part, ruining an escape plan that might have saved them. Yet, in this story, Antoinette never loses her regal pride and dignity. It is a stubborn dignity that got her into political trouble as a girl, one that in fact 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 than 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.
Thus, while it might be easy to call BERUSAIYU NO BARA a piece of "historical fiction," or a romantic love story, or propaganda against gender inequality (this was, after all, published in a Japanese era not widely known for being egalitarian), it is perhaps all that and more—an exploration and celebration of the human spirit. Doubtless its influential call for liberty and equality is felt throughout Japan and, in fact, the world, through the lives of those who have been touched by it. It certainly changed this reviewer's life—who knows what it has done for others?
