One cannot help but have a bittersweet feeling at the end of many of Molière’s plays, and especially those in this volume. There is of course the obligatory “happy” ending, usually a promise of marriage that conquers seemingly insuperable obstacles. In The Misanthrope, the engagement of Philinte and Éliante is the one happy note of an otherwise somber final scene. In The Miser, just as success seems all but impossible, Valère and Mariane are reunited with their father, Anselme, who then clears the way for them to marry Élise and Cléante, respectively. In The Would-Be Gentleman, Cléonte and Lucile are able to trick Monsieur Jourdain into allowing them to wed. In The Learned Women, Henriette is permitted to marry Clitandre when her mother’s preferred choice rebuffs them after learning of their supposed financial ruin. And in The Imaginary Invalid, Cléante finally overcomes Argan’s objections to his nuptials with Angélique. However happy such moments may be, spectators are not allowed to revel in them, for the central characters of these plays have not been transformed. After losing all hope of wedding Célimène, Alceste has left the stage in a huff, as indignant as ever at the hypocrisy and the vices of all those around him. Harpagon is just as much a miser at the end of the play as at the beginning. Not only has Monsieur Jourdain not learned the central lesson of the play—assume the social rank into which you are born—but all the other characters actually support the “Mamamouchi” charade so that, unbeknownst to him, he can preside over the marriage he has opposed from the beginning of the play. The intellectual and romantic ambitions of Philaminte, Armande, and Bélise are derailed as they watch Trissotin desert their salon. And Argan’s hypochondria shows no sign of abating; in fact, he decides to become a doctor so as to have the convenience (and the pleasure, one suspects) of treating himself.
The ambiguous circumstances at the end of these plays underscore the breadth and complexity of Molièresque comedy. At best, the dramatic conflict has been only partially resolved. At worst, as in The Misanthrope, it tends toward an outcome that has many of the hallmarks of tragedy. And, in every case, the central characters find themselves in a profoundly ironic situation, whether or not they perceive it (and they usually do not). It is no wonder, then, that we are often left with ambivalent or uneasy feelings after an encounter with these plays. But if we are, it is due to Molière’s conception of comedy and the effect it aims to have on spectators. Unlike much comedy, which invites us to distance ourselves from the actors and actions onstage, Molière’s plays provoke a more complicated response. Granted, there are clearly characters whom we laugh at—Harpagon, Monsieur Jourdain, Argan, to name but a few. Yet there are also characters who provoke a less straightforward response. Foremost among them is undoubtedly Alceste, whose lucidity about himself and others is anything but laughable, even if his tempestuousness makes him less than endearing. With a character such as this, Molière engages his spectators, forcing them to reflect and to laugh, to reflect even more than they laugh. Our playwright draws his audience into the action of his comedies in ways that might make us think of tragedy and its (theoretical) goal of catharsis, the purgation of passions through the representation of pity and fear, as Aristotle famously defined it. Molière’s plays obviously do not evince a pity or a fear of the same order as tragedies of the same period; and yet, they do draw on a similar investment by the audience.
Alongside a comic ridicule that allows spectators to distance themselves from the stage, then, there are also characters and situations that they cannot dismiss so easily. For spectators in seventeenth-century France, this meant characters immediately recognizable as social groups, “types,” and personalities of the day: the egotistical poet Oronte, the foppish marquis Acaste and Clitandre, the coquette Célimène, and the prude Arsinoé in The Misanthrope, for instance. This is not to say that Molière did not borrow from literary and theatrical traditions (he obviously did). Rather, his plays invite audiences of his day to recognize themselves and their faults in the action onstage.* But how useful this recognition might be is something Molière remains agnostic about. In other words, he does not entice his spectators into identifying with the characters and situations onstage with the expectation that they will be rid of the shortcomings and vices that ail them, or at least not easily. In fact, time and again, his plays express a pessimistic vision of society’s ability to transform itself. Molière displays social dysfunction rather than social transformation.
Take, for example, that staple of comic invention, the romantic dénouement. All of the plays in this volume make use of it, and the assurance that the star-crossed lovers will be united in marriage is what makes these plays comedies in the strictest generic sense. But it is less than clear that romance is something that Molière intends for us always to take seriously. The marriage arranged in the final moments of The Misanthrope is hardly based on mutual love: Éliante abruptly agrees to marry Philinte after Alceste, for whom she had professed feelings earlier in the play, decides to retreat from society. Never does Éliante indicate that she actually loves Philinte. It is almost as if love is beside the point. Rather, what counts is the convention of the marriage closure itself, which ensures that the play will fall within the definition of a comedy. The romantic dénouement also does nothing to temper (and even less to eradicate) the ingrained faults that are exposed in these comedies. The betrothal of Lucile and Cléonte at the conclusion of The Would-Be Gentleman is the result of—and not the end of—Monsieur Jourdain’s illusions of grandeur. And it is hard to envision how the couple will actually live their married life together without recourse to further duplicity. Even when it is an integral part of the plot, then, triumphant love is not the be-all and end-all of these plays.
As is often the case in comedy, the obstacles to the union of lovers are many times the result of disruptions in the family unit. But once those obstacles are removed, all is still not well with many of Molière’s families. After a particularly nasty altercation with his son, Cléante (IV, 3–5), in the final scene, Harpagon is still far more concerned about his “dear money-box” than his children, refusing even to pay his own daughter’s dowry. Madame Jourdain struggles to rein in her husband’s extravagances, but in the end she renounces her quest for plainspoken authenticity and is delighted to be able to deceive her husband. Throughout most of The Learned Women, it is decidedly Philaminte who wears the pants in the household, insisting against her husband’s wishes that their daughter Henriette marry Trissotin. When Chrysale is able to reassert his husbandly authority at the end of the play, nothing indicates that the couple’s power dynamic has been fundamentally reordered. All in all, the responsibility for dysfunctional families falls squarely on the shoulders of husbands and fathers, according to Molière. If they were able to maintain proper control of themselves, they would also be able to function appropriately at home. But since they cannot, we are treated to the spectacle of ridiculous, even pathetic, men who are unable to wield the authority that society entrusts to them for the benefit of their wives and/or children.
Molière’s pessimistic vision is not limited to the family, but extends to society as a whole. In particular, the playwright paints a less than flattering picture of the means by which his society sought to regulate behavior. Seventeenth-century France was enamored of what Norbert Elias calls the “civilizing process,” the gradual elaboration and assimilation of politeness and “good manners” in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.* Conduct manuals and much of the literature of the time had as their express purpose the justification and inculcation of elegant behavior. Yet what Molière shows us so much of the time is scenes of people behaving badly: Arsinoé and Célimène exchange insults thinly veiled by mutual compliments; Harpagon, ever the egotistical miser, fails to show his future in-law, Anselme, even the most basic of courtesies; Dorante and Dorimène mock Monsieur Jourdain right under his nose; and it doesn’t take much for Trissotin and Vadius to go from heaping praise on each other to trading invectives. It could be argued, of course, that this is fairly standard comic fare and that these scenes are negative exempla of an implicit ideal.
What is less conventional, however, is the attention Molière gives to dissecting the civilizing process itself. The Misanthrope performs a devastating critique of the social and ethical objectives of that seventeenth-century code of civility known as “honnêteté.” In the very first scene of the play Alceste and Philinte defend two diametrically opposed visions of social interaction. Against Alceste’s dogmatic insistence on truth and transparency with everyone at all times so as “[t]o clash head-on with the whole race of man” (96), Philinte presents a far more accommodating and, ultimately, infinitely more equivocal approach. “We have to live with people as they are,” he declares. “And the greatest folly of the human mind/Is undertaking to correct mankind” (156–58). That there is no consensus among critics about which position the play endorses—Alceste’s or Philinte’s—speaks to the lack of a reasonable alternative to either the Misanthrope or his friend. We might admire Alceste’s attachment to sincerity and authenticity, but we balk at his intractability and his self-righteousness. We might condone Philinte’s preoccupation with social niceties, but it is hard to be enthusiastic about a character who paints himself into an ethically dubious corner and who, thereby, renders himself powerless to avert Alceste’s self-imposed exile. Depending on the perspective adopted, civility is either a crutch that only magnifies vice (Alceste) or a smoke screen that diverts our attention away from it (Philinte). Neither viewpoint is particularly compelling, to say the least.
The effects of the civilizing process are shown to be no less questionable in The Would-Be Gentleman. The play opens with Monsieur Jourdain seeking to acquire the cultural capital denied to his social rank by attempting to learn the rudiments of music, dance, fencing, and philosophy. But the task he gives himself is an impossible one. By his very nature, he is incapable of mastering the signs of aristocratic refinement. The play leads us to believe that he already knows everything he needs to know, given his station in life. We laugh when Monsieur Jourdain expresses surprise and joy at the discovery that he’s been speaking prose his whole life without realizing it. And our laughter confirms the play’s message that his attempt to refashion himself is a ridiculous waste of time. But Monsieur Jourdain is not the only target of this play. His “masters” are mercenary and self-centered, less interested in lofty artistic or intellectual goals than assuring their own livelihood at the expense of a gullible arriviste. And Dorante and Dorimène, the only two aristocrats in the play, reveal themselves to be anything but the exemplars of noble gentility we might expect them to be. Even if it were possible for Monsieur Jourdain to learn everything that goes with elegant manners, it’s hard to see where he might turn to learn them. Once again, Molière leaves us with more questions than answers.
If Molière is skeptical about the civilizing process, he is equally so about the effects of comedy. Exploiting a theatrical convention widely used at the time, he frequently inserts scenes that amount to plays within plays. With the full understanding of the audience but unbeknownst to the central figure (usually the father), one or more characters contrive a situation that breaks the impasse in which they find themselves. Take just these few examples: After learning that his miserly father, Harpagon, is his rival for the hand of Mariane, Cléante pretends to act on his father’s behalf when he declares his own love for her and gives her his father’s prized diamond ring. To circumvent Monsieur Jourdain’s refusal to allow him to marry Lucile, Cléonte disguises himself as the “Son of the Grand Turk” and pays a visit to his soon-to-be father-in-law in order to perform the famous “Turkish ceremony.” In The Imaginary Invalid, Cléante and Angélique pretend that the love songs they sing to each other—in front of Argan—do not reflect their real feelings. However, the effect of these and numerous other moments of embedded theatricality is ambivalent. They represent both success and failure. On the one hand, the “actors” of these plays within plays are able to manipulate things to their own advantage. Cléante expresses his love to Mariane; Cléonte extorts Monsieur Jourdain’s consent to marry Lucile; and Cléante and Angélique declare their mutual love. On the other hand, the person being manipulated fails to recognize what is happening. Harpagon is too preoccupied with the loss of his diamond ring to understand that his son is courting Mariane; Monsieur Jourdain is far too enthralled by his new title “Mamamouchi” to see that the Son of the Grand Turk is Cléonte; and Argan is too concerned about his imagined maladies to recognize the ruse of his daughter and her music teacher. In other words, Harpagon, Monsieur Jourdain, and Argan never understand that they are spectators of plays that are staged just for them. With their lack of understanding, Molière seems to be conveying two things: They, like some theatergoers, are incapable of performing the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to become reflective spectators. But, likewise, staged spectacle is not necessarily capable of peeling the scales from the eyes of characters who are blind to their own faults.
What, then, is the purpose of comedy, according to Molière? We might glean something of an answer from the ambiguous roles of the eponymous trickster in The Mischievous Machinations of Scapin. Scapin, played by Molière himself during the first performances, is nothing short of a stage director. From beginning to end, he is the chief intermediary among the characters. For the purposes of the comic plot, of course, he works on behalf of Octave and Léandre and against their obdurate fathers, Argante and Géronte. But Scapin is just as much, if not more, an intermediary between the stage and the audience. Not only do the numerous asides to the spectators forge a bond with him, but many scenes do very little to advance the plot and far more to provoke laughter. Consider, for instance, Act II, scene 3, when Léandre comes after Scapin, whom he thinks has divulged the secret of his love for Zerbinette to his father, Géronte. Trying to beat Scapin with a stick, Léandre extracts not the confession he desires but a litany of tricks his valet has played on him: drinking his wine, pilfering a gift destined for Zerbinette, and dressing as a werewolf to beat him. By exasperating Léandre to no end, Scapin aims to display his mischievous genius, above all for the audience. Scapin’s penchant for self-display reaches its height in the famous sack scene (III, 2). To get his revenge on Géronte, Scapin entices him into a sack, then mimicks a variety of voices while beating him with a stick. While only minimally integral to the plot, the scene is a virtuoso performance of theatrical illusion, staged and acted by Scapin himself. Far from setting things right with the world depicted onstage, scenes such as this one put the spotlight on the amorality of Scapin and the theatrical enterprise he symbolizes. Comedy does not portray an ideal world or even the promise of such a world. It raises far more questions than it answers.
Taken as a whole, Molière’s theater invites readers and spectators to confront themselves in a quest for self-understanding. But it also offers no hope that this goal is really possible. Harpagon, Monsieur Jourdain, and Argan are there to remind us that more often than not self-illusion is stronger than self-illumination. Even Alceste, who is endowed with a remarkable degree of lucidity, especially about his own faults, is unaware of just how self-centered his ideal of moral transparency ultimately is. Whether we consider the portrait of characters such as these, the romantic dénouement, the family unit, the civilizing process, or comedy (among other things), Molière’s theater has a disquieting effect.
But this is not its only effect. Again and again, Molière’s characters delight in theatrical display, be it literal (as in the “Turkish ceremony” in The Would-Be Gentleman or the finale of The Imaginary Invalid) or figurative (as in Trissotin’s poetry reading in The Learned Women [III, 2]). These moments of theatricality are also, by their very nature, profoundly social. They are moments at which the microsocieties of these plays bear witness to what brings them together and what they share. Likewise, by encouraging readers and spectators to delight in their theatricality, these plays can be seen as reasserting a sense of collective belonging that transcends solipsism. And by provoking readers and audiences to laughter, they necessarily exploit the social nature of the comic. By laughing, we acknowledge our connection to a social order and its expectations, and we reaffirm that order. Molière, of course, knows this and uses it to the full effect of his comic genius. In the final analysis, he realizes that without a social bond, there can be no theater. No matter how much society is derided, no matter how skeptical he is about the possibility of changing society, then, Molière—unlike Alceste—does not abandon society. He remains, but with no illusions, and he laughs.
LEWIS C. SEIFERT