Molière, Le Tartuffe,
1669
Defining France, week 14
Tartuffe
• Name = hypocrisy
• ‘type character’ – the ‘dévot’,
the ‘faux dévot’
• Not a priest so he can marry
Orgon
• Bourgeois
• Desire to believe
• Insecure
• Long history of being religious, a good
Christian like many in the audience
Cléante and Elmire
• Cléante:
• Voice of reason
• ‘Sans cesse vous prêchez des
maximes de vivre’ I, 1
• Not comic
• Elmire:
• Orgon’s 2nd wife
• Serious character
• Object of Tartuffe’s desire
The Younger Generation
• Damis:
• Exiled
• Importance of family honour
• Mariane:
• ‘inefficace?’
• Threat of her marriage
• Valère
• Mariane’s lover
Other characters
• Dorine:
• Voice of reason along with Cléante
• ‘suivante’
• Subversive but acts in the family interest
• From outside the household:
• Monsieur Loyal
• L’Exempt
Major Themes
• Religion
• Hypocrisy
• Household
• Masks
• Theatricality
Religion
• ‘To enjoy Tartuffe it is important to know that
to Molière’s contemporaries every aspect of
religion was an absorbing topic, but that one
did not write about it in a comedy.’
• Gaston Hall, Molière: Tartuffe (Southampton: The Camelot
Press, 1977), p. 7
• French Wars of Religion, 1562-1598
• Dragonnades
• Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685
Religion
• Jesuits and Jansenists
• Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement
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Survey of nation’s morals
‘directeurs de conscience’
Richelieu and Mazarin
Banned 1660
Role in Tartuffe’s censorship in 1664?
Charpy de Sainte-Croix and Bendinelli
Religion
• How to practice religion:
• Religion is serious
• Hair shirt, his scrounge, the whip
• ‘Que vous alliez vêtue ainsi qu’une princesse’, I, 1
• Actors excommunicated
• Pascal – hair shirt and belt with inward iron spikes
Religion and Hypocrisy
• ‘Voulez-vous qu’il y coure à vos heures précises, |
Comme ceux qui n’y vont que pour être apercus?’ II,
2
• Religion vs. façade of religion
• Use of religious language – gallant, poetic and
religious language for seduction, III, 3
• Hypocrisy a mortal sin
Satire
• ‘Gros et gras, le teint frais,
et la bouche vermeille.’ I,
4
• Hyperbole and satire
• Tradition continued today
Household
• Orgon 358 lines, Dorine 339
• Father as head of household
• ‘Faites que votre fils se taise ou se retire’, V, 4
• Jacques Guicharnaud ‘Orgon’s entourage reacts to
him rather like subjects would toward a king
[devoted]… to a bad minister.’
• Cited in Gaston Hall, Comedy in Context: Essays on
Molière (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984),
p. 145
Masks and Theatricality
• Elmire’s second encounter with Tartuffe
• ‘En mettant le théâtre sur le théâtre,
Molière peut, par un procédé d’ironie
dramatique, démontrer le mécanisme
même de l’illusion : l’apparence se
révèle comme le seul moyen de montrer
la vérité. C’est toute la force du théâtre
qui, se donnant pour illusoire, ne ment
pas et dit le vrai.’
• Jean Serroy, ‘Préface’, in Molière, Le
Tartuffe (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), pp. 7-30
(pp. 24-5).
Masks and Theatricality
• Hypocrite to impostor
• L’Exempt
• Deus ex machina/Rex ex machina
Molière and ‘Classicism’
• Central tenets: unities, alexandrine, acts and scenes,
vraisemblance, biensénace
• Alexandrine:
• Verse to imitate real life
• 5 acts to ennoble the play?
• Hint of tragic?
Molière and ‘Classicism’
• Unity of place:
• household
• Unity of time:
• ‘trois heures’, mentions of time throughout the play
• Unity of action:
• around the character Tartuffe
Molière and ‘Classicism’
• Vraisemblance
• Then vs. now – careful in our perceptions
• Bienséance
• Declaration, 16 April 1641, forbade ‘actions
malhonnêtes’, ‘paroles lascives ou à double entente qui
puissant blesser l’honnêteté publique’.
• Tartuffe’s seduction of Elmire as shocking
• Obedience to the rules vs. their expansion
Comedy
• The comedy of gesture
• The comedy of the language
• The comedy of characters
• The comedy of the situation
• The comedy of manners or ‘la comédie de mœurs’
Comedy of Gesture
• ‘(Mariane se recule avec surprise)’ II, 1
• ‘il fait mime de grande résistance’ II, 4
• ‘(Elle recule sa chaise, et Tartuffe rapproche la sienne)’ III,
3
Comedy of Gesture
• Damis in the cupboard III, 4
• Orgon under the table as
Tartuffe attempts to seduce
Elmire, IV, 5
Comedy of Language
• Language: what it says vs. what it means, III, 4
• Henri Bergson, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du
comique (1900)
• Repetition: ‘Et Tartuffe?’, ‘Le pauvre homme!’ I, 4
Comedy of Character
• Conflict:
• Orgon vs. Dorine
• Orgon vs. Cléante
• Tartuffe: those for and against him
• Exaggeration:
• Orgon’s readiness to believe
• Reflexion on our own weaknesses
Comedy of Situation
• Reversal of situations
• Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1941)
• ‘Carnevalesque’
Comedy of Manners
• Comédie de mœurs
• Characteristic traits of social class, stock characters
• Satire: parody, burlesque, exaggeration, irony
• ‘Comédie’ vs. comedy