The Goddess of Reason: A Drama in Five Acts — Key Ideas to Explore

A Drama of Contrasting Spaces

The five acts are set in sharply different locations, each carrying symbolic weight. Act I takes place at the château, a world of inherited privilege with its “great arched doors” and “perspective of garden alleys.” Act II moves to the garden of a convent in Nantes, a liminal space between religious seclusion and the encroaching city. Act III is a public square, where the crowd becomes a character. Act IV turns a church into a prison, and Act V shifts between a judgment hall and the banks of the Loire. This progression from private estate to public square to site of execution mirrors the revolution’s trajectory, though the excerpts do not reveal whether the movement is linear or cyclical.

The Voice of the Crowd and the Individual

Johnston gives the crowd multiple voices—shouts, songs, and chanted slogans—while individual characters speak in verse. The crowd’s lines are short, repetitive, and often exclamatory: “Vive Robespierre!” “Vive la Guillotine!” “Vive les noyades!” By contrast, characters like De Vardes and Lalain deliver longer speeches in a more formal, sometimes archaic diction. De Vardes’s interjections—“Cold / Are thy baths, O Apollo!”—are ironic and literary, while Lalain’s oration to the Goddess of Reason is a set-piece of revolutionary rhetoric, complete with invocations to “O Mother Nature” and “supernal Reason.” The play thus stages a tension between collective energy and individual expression, though the excerpts do not show how this conflict resolves.

Religious Imagery and Its Subversion

The excerpts repeatedly invoke religious language and iconography, only to redirect them toward revolutionary ends. The crowd’s float carries busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Robespierre—a secular pantheon. The Goddess of Reason is dressed in a white tunic and blue mantle, a deliberate echo of Marian imagery, and is worshipped with incense and censers. Yet the same procession includes a miniature guillotine and a tumbril heaped with “broken images, crucifixes, candelabra, chalices.” The play’s title itself, The Goddess of Reason, points to the revolutionary Cult of Reason, but the excerpts suggest that Johnston is interested in the theatricality of this new religion—its processions, costumes, and staged ecstasies—as much as in its ideological content.

The Role of the Spectator

Throughout the excerpts, characters frequently watch and comment on events as if they were spectators at a play. De Vardes observes the revolutionary procession from the church steps, muttering asides. Lalain, too, watches from a distance, planning his next move. The crowd itself is both participant and audience, cheering and singing. This self-conscious theatricality is reinforced by the inclusion of actors from the Theatre of Nantes, who appear “dressed as for the stage” and are announced by name. The play thus invites readers to consider how revolutions are performed—how symbols are staged, how crowds are directed, and how individuals become both actors and witnesses. The excerpts do not reveal whether this metatheatrical frame is sustained throughout the drama.

Readers approaching The Goddess of Reason for the first time should attend to the interplay between stage directions and dialogue. Johnston’s directions are unusually vivid, often carrying as much dramatic weight as the spoken lines. The play’s verse varies between formal declamation and colloquial interruption; noting these shifts can help track the power dynamics between characters. Because the excerpts are drawn from the first three acts, the final acts—set in a judgment hall and on the banks of the Loire—remain largely unknown. The play’s structure suggests a movement toward judgment and execution, but the precise fates of the central figures are not indicated in the available text.

Years between them, though they whisper the same truth—one finds a nation crowning Reason to quiet its storms, the other a woman stepping into her own quiet sea. Both are searching for some doorway out of the self. I think of The Lady from the Sea — A Closer Reading whenever I close Johnston’s garden gates. Different tides, same longing.