THE LEARNED WOMEN

A verse comedy in five acts, first performed on March 11, 1672, at the Thèâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris by Molière’s Troupe du Roi. Molière played Chrysale; Baron, Ariste; La Grange, Clitandre; La Thorillière, Trissotin; Du Croisy, Vadius; Hubert, Philaminte; Mlle. Villeaubrun, Bélise; Mlle. de Brie, Armande; Mlle. Molière, Henriette; and Martine was probably played by Mlle. Beauval.* The play was well received.

Molière seems to have had this play in mind for over three years, ever since he was criticized for presenting five acts of prose in The Miser. In many ways it recalls his first great success, The Ridiculous Précieuses; for it is another lampoon of their kind. What is surprising here is the sharpness and personality of Molière’s attack, not so much on the learned women themselves as on the pedantic would-be poets Vadius and especially Trissotin. Vadius clearly represents the Hellenist Gilles Ménage, and Trissotin—whom Molière had apparently once thought of naming Tricotin—the Abbé Cotin; the quarrel between the two is attested in anecdotal history. In making Trissotin not only ridiculous but rather despicable, Molière has carried reprisals far. Some have considered this a blot on his name; but since Cotin had been pretty venomous himself, I find this less distressing than a certain heavy-handedness that occasionally detracts from the comedy.

However, this is a natural risk of another of Molière’s ventures into the “serious” comedy of values. The learned women are not merely silly, like the précieuses; the power they wield is an actual danger. Besides dominating the pusillanimous Chrysale and thereby ruling his family, they plan a woman’s academy that shall be an absolute arbiter of taste. Their values are false in that they take words for things and—as happens so often in Molière—seek to “escape from the man” by rejecting all the physical side of human nature. Or perhaps they do not seek so much as claim this; for Armande still wishes to be courted by Clitandre, and Bélise enjoys the delightful fancy that every man is secretly and submissively in love with her. In this and other ways the learned women often fail to practice what they preach. They regularly deceive themselves, constructing a verbal world and taking it to be real, so that the ultimate sin comes to be that of Martine against grammar. Their delusion extends to their motives, mistaking arrogant one-sidedness for sublimity, and lust for power for idealism. Hence the confrontation of them with the others, and with it the overall tone of the play, remains comic.

Another difference from the Précieuses is that The Learned Women is mainly a comedy of character: the conceit of Trissotin, and to a lesser extent of Vadius; the happy delusions of Bélise; the dilemma of Armande, who spurns marriage but craves dangling suitors; the adroit arrogance of Philaminte; and the brave posture of the henpecked Chrysale—as long as Philaminte is not there. The best comic scenes are those confronting the learned women with the sturdily ungrammatical Martine and with the ineffable inanity of Trissotin’s poetry.

The conclusion resolves the plot happily. The learned women are not converted; Molière’s comic characters never are. Philaminte’s recognition is not of Trissotin’s inanity, merely of his mercenary motives. However, even this may open the door to a healthy breeze of self-doubt; and she does promptly accept Clitandre as son-in-law even though this means coming over to her husband’s side. A full conversion would have fitted a melodrama or a moral tract; and Molière, happily for us, was writing a comedy.