As I sit down to write this piece I find myself doing about five other things at the same time. A man sits next to me in the cafe, for the same period of time, doing just one. I have ten screens open on my computer, he has two: his word document, and an Internet window (which he sometimes closes). I am living five realities; he is following one. Like Edmond Rostand’s Roxane in the play Cyrano de Bergerac (and perhaps Madonna, Beyonce, and any other woman who dares to invent a universe in which she exists) I am a fantasist. I am happy and unshackled in my ten-pronged reality and I admit I am perhaps a bit mad.

In Sasha Baron-Cohen’s latest satire Bruno, there is a middle-American pastor whose job it is to turn gay people straight. A ‘gay-converter’ who sympathises with the problems men might have with women. He puts it perfectly: women are annoying because they never get to the point. We are “devoid of logic”. I totally agree. It is a nightmare to live in a world where things have to have beginnings, ends and middles.

We all know Madonna and Beyonce. I recently saw Beyonce in concert in Los Angeles. It was like a journey through the mind of a woman on acid or, as I am arguing, a journey through the mind of a woman. Roxane was a ‘precieuse’, not self-proclaimed, but categorised as such by Moliere in his satires and the people around these women, who looked in. The Historic Dictionary of the French Language offers a definition: ‘a woman of a refined sensibility who adopts a different, uncommon way of living and speaking’. They met in the ‘chambre-blue’ (giving rise to the term bluestocking) in the mid seventeenth century – the period in which Cyrano is set – and spoke in high language about an ideal society. One where language was purified, where love was platonic, and its highest expression would not be the communion of bodies but in the communion of souls. Roxane, in Burgess’ brilliant translation proclaims: “your words all golden petals – the flower that shed them your soul, a soul afire with sincerity”.

Roxane wanted to create a world where her spirit could be ‘stirred’ by another spirit. Why, many critics ask, would such a clever girl (Cyrano cries: “never a girl more beautiful, clever… more blonde!”) not notice that the letters that are wooing her are not coming from her lover, but her cousin Cyrano? Well this is exactly it. There would be no fun, no drama, and no fulfilment of the romantic ideal if Roxane cracked that. Seeing that she invented the scenario, she demanded the high language, she threw herself into the story of it all; the fairytale – there would be no use in letting it all come crashing down.

Samuel Taylor-Coleridge is sometimes helpful (perhaps it’s the opium). He tells us “the man’s desire is for the woman, but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man”. Roxane is never so sexually excited in the play as when Cyrano is ‘making love’ to her in language in the balcony scene. Proclaiming his desire. Cyrano is never happier than when Roxane takes his hand in the first act, and touches him. Madonna has allegedly said since she was a teenager that she wanted to be a star; her greatest desire was to perform, and so incite the desire of her audience. Beyonce too has similar characteristics: she has invented Sacha-Fierce (as if Beyonce wasn’t enough), an alter ego that allows her more sexually fiercesome side to be free on stage. Under this pseudonym she can do as she pleases.

The tragedy is that Cyrano doesn’t tell her that he could love her back, once Christian has died. That he wrote the letters. But the question that remains unanswerable is: would being with Cyrano have made Roxane happier than living in mourning for her dead Christian? I think men are very helpful; a heterosexual woman is usually made happy by a man at some point in her life, if not at many points. But that is not all it takes, we know marriage isn’t enough for men, we know that all too well. What can women do when the fantasy that has sustained them – finding their knight – is a reality? Become a pop-star? Not likely. That is what Valium is for, or Prozac, or When Harry Met Sally.

Have we, four hundred years after this play has been set, yet accepted that women’s minds work differently? It is clear to me that Roxane is the driving force in the play Cyrano de Bergerac; she spins the yarn (although Cyrano is great, has great lines, speeches and great fights). But sceptics can see her as a problem, sometimes saying you have to suspend your disbelief too far to buy that she wouldn’t notice what is going on around her. But of course you don’t. She invented it, dumbo. Just like Madonna invented her world, and Beyonce hers.

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