Coppélia

• Choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon

• Music by Léo Delibes

• Context: A comic ballet set in a village where a mysterious inventor creates a life-sized mechanical doll that entrances a young man, leading to confusion, jealousy, and reconciliation. Often regarded as the first “comic ballet” and a bridge between Romanticism and the Classical ballet tradition.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In Coppélia, Foucault would immediately discern a satirical enactment of biopower: the fantasy of manufacturing femininity, the anxious regulation of desire, and the symbolic policing of what constitutes the “real” body. This ballet is no innocent comedy; it is a discursive artifact that exposes the tensions between mechanization, representation, gender, and control in the late 19th century.

The key figure here is Coppélia herself—the automaton. She is the idealized woman as simulacrum, silent and compliant, beautiful but lifeless. Foucault, whose Order of Things traces the shift in how knowledge and life become categorized, would recognize in Coppélia an epistemological crisis: Where does nature end and the constructed begin? Where does woman end and machine begin? Dr. Coppélius, the dollmaker, does not merely create art—he engineers a fantasy, one that reflects the 19th-century dream of rendering the body intelligible, governable, and programmable.

From the perspective of The History of Sexuality, Coppélia represents a non-threatening, non-sexualized femininity, an empty vessel for male fantasy. Swanhilda, her rival and ultimate disruptor, represents biological and social femininity—the woman who moves unpredictably, laughs, deceives, and ultimately reasserts her moral superiority by embodying "true" womanhood. But even this "true" woman is a regulatory ideal—her actions reinforce a normative script where authenticity, vitality, and emotion are carefully disciplined through performance.

Foucault would also read Dr. Coppélius as a biopolitical figure: a symbolic representation of the scientist, the priest, the father—those who produce knowledge about the body in order to define, classify, and normalize it. His dream is to replace the chaotic living woman with an ideal copy, one devoid of desire, yet entirely constructed to elicit it.

In this context, dance becomes a field of disciplinary inscription. Coppélia dances perfectly—but mechanically. Swanhilda dances with life—but her movement is ultimately constrained by narrative resolution (marriage, forgiveness, domesticity). The comic aspect of the ballet masks its true function: to present the acceptable boundaries of gendered behavior, reward regulated desire, and contain unruly female agency within an aesthetics of mimicry.

Furthermore, Foucault would be interested in the comic reversal at the ballet’s heart. Swanhilda pretends to be the doll, turning simulation into subversion. In doing so, she deconstructs the male fantasy, revealing how easily desire is manipulated by surfaces. But this subversion is brief; it ultimately re-stabilizes the narrative. In Foucauldian terms, this is the classic movement of disciplinary society: a short-lived rupture that becomes absorbed into the apparatus of normalization.

In ethical terms, from Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Swanhilda becomes the subject of moral choice: she abandons deception, forgives, and reclaims the “real” through love. Yet Foucault would caution against romanticizing this arc. It is a performance of subjection, where the woman chooses to be governable, to become a subject within the terms permitted by bourgeois society.

Thus, Coppélia is not just comic ballet—it is a narrative of reproductive futurism, of technological anxiety, and of gendered control hidden behind musical charm. It marks the passage from the Romantic ghost (the sylph) to the industrial doll—both non-human, both feminine projections, both impossible bodies that teach us what real women are not allowed to be.

It is, in sum, a ballet about how femininity is manufactured, surveilled, and made intelligible through the gaze of culture.