Moliere Today 1

Michael Spingler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781135299828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This collection focuses on Moliere's theatre as works to be performed as well as read. The essays deal in their various ways with limits which are imposed and respected or violated and broken. The question of transgression both as a subject within Moliere's plays and as a dilemma confronting Moliere's critics and interpreters is addressed. The book aims to enlarge the scope of academic scholarship and include the thinking and insights of actors.

Molière’s Misanthrope: A Critique and Reluctant Defense of Courtly Life

Sylvie Romanowski

Molière set Le Misanthrope (1666) in an upper-class salon at a time when norms of politeness were being refined for the elite of French society. Molière uses theatre, one of whose functions it is to re-enact social change for the spectators, to examine the evolving norms of sociability. Society’s principal model and central institution was the court of Louis XIV. Alceste rebels against the demands for polite behavior demanded by courtly life, but at the same time hopes to marry the salon’s head, Célimène. His criticisms are powerless to reform the salon members and to win Célimène, but the salon collapses due to inner tensions. Molière thus shows the dangers of non-conformity to social norms of courtly life, even though these are often based on illusion.

KEY WORDS: Molière, Le Misanthrope, Courtly life and “honnêteté”, Anti-court critique, Function of drama in society, Critique and acceptance of social norms.

La cour ne rend pas content; elle empêche qu’on ne le soit ailleurs. —La Bruyère The court does not make people happy; it prevents them from being happy elsewhere.

Le Misanthrope, first presented in 1666, takes place in an upper-class salon of a wealthy widow, Célimène, where people gather in between their duties at Louis XIV s court (still at the Louvre at that time), mingle, exchange compliments and insults, scrutinize each other, and watch over their lawsuits. This world is dominated by the royal court, where courtly norms define behavior. Célimène’s salon is a microcourt¹ organized around a ruler, a mirror image of the royal court with overlapping constituencies.

Molière, who was himself close to the King,² makes it clear that the play’s milieu is close to the center of power situated at the Louvre: the court is mentioned twice in the first scene (verses 85, 165); Oronte offers Alceste an entry into the court in Act I, 2, and Arsinoé discusses the same possibility at length in III, 5. Célimène values some members of her salon principally because they can exert some influence at the court and assist her in legal problems (I, 2, 544).

Alceste’s rebellion can best be understood when certain important aspects of court life are kept in mind. Critiques of the court, court life, and courtiers were nothing new in that era; indeed they flourished simultaneously with the increasing importance and centralizing of the monarch’s entourage that took place during the Renaissance. Molière’s play can be usefully considered as taking part in that anti-court tradition, but it has aims beyond court critique, as I hope to show. This essay will focus on the relations between the play and the society that furnishes both its context for performance and its content. After discussing the nature of court society as it existed in Molière’s time, I will examine briefly the relations between drama and society. Alceste will be situated in this context in order to determine the specific meanings of Molière’s staging of court life and its discontents, and I will discuss the play’s specific critiques of court life. Where appropriate, I will give some examples from two recent productions of Le Misanthrope illustrating some essential features of court life, one in English and very updated to our own times (Falls, dir.), and the other (Rist, dir.), in French and also in modern dress.

A rebellion against conformity can be set in any kind of society, since every society has codes of behavior, and assumes that its citizens will follow certain common values. But Alceste, like the rebellious hero of Molière’s Dom Juan to whom he has been compared (Brody, 1969), revolts against a specific type of society which is very unlike our own post-revolutionary, industrial societies, so that if one wants to see beyond the universal element of revolt against generally accepted values and grasp the nature and import of Alceste’s rebellion against this society, one has to understand the nature court life of that time.

Historians of court literature and society of the old regime such as Elias (1939, 1969), Greenblatt (1980) and Scaglione (1991) have described the development and nature of court life from ancient times to the end of the old regime, as a hierarchically structured group of people organized around a monarch, linked to each other by codes governing etiquette, wealth allocation and power relations. By the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, the French court had increased in size and importance, on the one hand relegating to the periphery of power those nobles who did not belong to it, while on the other hand admitting to it larger numbers of recently enobled people. It was impossible to be close to the center of power and not be of the court; conversely it was impossible for a person who was not brought up in a court to have “l’air de la cour” (“courtly behavior”) (Elias, 1969, 204 and generally chapter 5).³ Court society was a cohesive, totally encompassing society, where individuals were on view and little or no distinction was made between private and public life, contrary to modern times. That there might be examples of a courtly type of structure in our society was suggested in a recent production of this play at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago (Robert Falls, dir.).⁴ The setting was Hollywood of the 1980s, the media world of Hollywood hills; Célimène and her friends were starlets, conscious of their appearance and bodies, while Alceste was a “beat” writer in a rumpled trench-coat trying to live in a society he both needs and hates.⁵ However, this is a very localized instance of courtly organization, and not at all a model for the rest of our society, whereas the royal courts of the old regime were at the center of power and of the state, having a “representative and central significance…for most Western European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (Elias, 1969, 36).

Individuals belonged to the court, in the strong sense of the word belong, and were connected by relations of interdependence that made people inextricably linked to their context. Elias (1969, 76) emphasizes the fact that the social context was not just an external context, but constituted the very being of individuals: “It was difficult if not impossible to turn their backs on the competition for socially valued opportunities…a threat to privilege as such meant for most of the privileged a common threat to what gave their lives meaning and value”.⁶ In our contemporary times, it is hard for us to fathom how difficult it was for a court member to escape this relationship with the court and with the ruler—precisely what Alceste will attempt to do. A recent production of Le Misanthrope by Christian Rist emphasized the omni-presence of people by having the characters not in the scene remain visible around the edges of the stage, in the orchestra pit, or behind a large, white, back-lit cloth screen where their silhouettes moved about and from which someone occasionally poked a head through to view the proceedings on stage.

The first movement of the play shows opposition to the court society by a person holding to other values that challenge the established order. Alceste’s particular position is that he wants to critique the people around him, make them comply to his own norms that are other than courtly, and still be recognized by that society. As part of that opposition, he wants to remove Célimène from that milieu and willfully possess her all to himself.

Alceste’s attitude points to another, important aspect of his epoch, which placed great value on strong-willed, autonomous individualism. In the Renaissance, a new sense of the individual arose which stressed “self-fashioning” (Greenblatt’s term, 1980) of one’s identity by the selfconscious exertion of willpower. The individual was understood as “self-identity as a center of knowing” (Reiss, 1982, 59) having a “will …associated with an entirely human reason” (Reiss, 1982, 38, his emphasis) which sought to possess knowledge and dominate the world. However, as Greenblatt notes, individuals were also caught in a web of relations: “fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions...were inseparably intertwined;…the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society” (1980, 256). A peculiar blend of self-affirmation and submission resulted in social codes and types of behavior that have been generally described as “theatrical”:

Theatricality, in the sense of both disguise and histrionic selfpresentation, arose from conditions common to almost all Renaissance courts: a group of men and women …revolving uneasily around a center of power, a constant struggle for recognition and attention, and a virtually fetishistic emphasis upon manner.

(Greenblatt, 1980,162, my emphasis)

The court was anything but a stable, restful place, in spite of its splendid allure: “Life in this circle is in no way peaceful” (Elias, 1939, vol. 2, 271).⁷ It was filled with rivalries, shifting alliances, competition between individuals and cliques—witness the description by writers of the period such as La Bruyère, Saint-Simon, or Madame de La Fayette who writes in her novel La Princesse de Clèves:

L’ambition et la galanterie étaient l’âme de cette cour…Il y avait tant d’intérêts et tant de cabales différentes…Personne n’était tranquille, ni indifferent; on songeait a s’élever, à plaire, à servir ou a nuire; on ne connaissait ni l’ennui, ni l’oisiveté, et on était toujours occupé des plaisirs ou des intrigues (1966, 44– 45).

(Ambition and love were the very soul of the court. There were so many interests and so many competing groups. No one was at rest or indifferent; people sought to elevate themselves, to please others, to serve others or to do them harm; people were never bored nor unoccupied, and were always busy with seeking pleasure or with intrigue.)

Yet the people of the court were also supposed to be “docile and diplomatically adroit servant[s] of princes” (Scaglione, 1991, 287), resulting in a paradoxical opposition between personal and public morality and the “pragmatic coincidence of the theoretically incompatible criteria of being and seeming” (Scaglione, 1991, 289). This instability and tension between the need to conform and the autonomy of ego is linked to a second movement of the play, in which competition leads to the increasing instability and eventual disintegration of Célimène’s salon. The first movement of Alceste’s critique attacks this world from an external perspective; the second movement shows how internal dissentions between individuals lead to the collapse of the salon.

One of the principal functions of drama is to show and interpret conflict during periods of cultural change. As Mary-Beth Rose says (1988, 1): “drama not only articulates and represents cultural change, but also participates in it…not only to define, but actively to generate, and in some cases to contain cultural conflict”. Drama can articulate and represent two kinds of cultural change. One is the passage from a former, outmoded society to the present society, and the other is a change from the present society to a possible, imagined, future societal order, Reiss (1980, Chapter 1) represents the first view, whereby Renaissance tragedy breaks with mythical thinking and replaces it with a society based on a new model of analytical, logical thinking. Comedy, he says in a footnote (309), “can (and no doubt should) be examined in these terms…comedy appears to put socialized discourse into question, into crisis, in such a way as finally to allow its affirmation as a visible order”. The second possible relation between drama and society views drama, not as the justification of the present order, but as a critique and the imagining of different or future possibilities. Jean Duvignaud (1965, 557–558) emphasizes theatre and art generally as a thought-experiment: “L’expérience artistique tend surtout à répondre à des désirs qui ne sont pas encore définis…l’art n’est pas la réponse à une question, il formule une question pour une réponse qui n’existe pas encore”. (“Artistic experience mainly tends to address desires that are not yet defined… art is not a response to a question, it formulates a question for an answer that does not yet exist”.)

Whether theatre is a justification of the present order, or a “simulation” (Apostolidès, 1989, 98) of a possible order, one common aspect should be stressed: theatre does not merely show change, it performs it, producing a change in an audience. Reiss (1980, 24) draws a very important distinction between what a play says and what a play does, between what the characters know and what the spectators construct out of what they have seen: “The protagonist may remain ‘in the tragic’ but not the spectator, not the one who constructed the code”. Thus the question becomes whether Le Misanthrope may be seen as a backward- or forwardlooking play, and that in turn may be discussed in the context of the particular cultural moment at the time of Molière’s writing of the play.

At the beginning of this essay, I stated that Le Misanthrope was set in a salon, which was a space where the privileged upper classes could mingle (Lougee, 1976), both the upper strata of the bourgeoisie on their way to enoblement, and the nobility itself, which, in the second half of the seventeenth century, consisted increasingly of the new nobility of the robe and less and less of the old, traditional nobility of the sword inherited from feudal times (Scaglione, 1991, 283). Conformity to the new norms was an instrument of upward social mobility and consolidation, in that it enabled the new nobility emerging out of the bourgeoisie and the old nobility to blend together in agreement with a recognized code of behavior. At the time of the young king’s establishment of his own court, codes of behavior were being defined for this new milieu, under the general rubric of “honnêteté”—a term that means “courtesy” and generally replaced the outdated terms “courtois” and “courtoisie” (Stanton, 1980, 48–53, Scaglione, 1991, 253). The passage from “courtoisie” to “honnêteté” was a late stage of the long evolution from knight to courtier to gentleman: “The ideals of courtliness and chivalry underwent a momentous reduction that centered the new idea of nobility on personal ‘honor’, with an accent on the duel as the definitive test of truth and merit” (Scaglione, 1991, 282). The development occuring at the time of Louis XIV took this one step further, replacing honor with “honnêteté” and the duel (in France outlawed in the 1630s by Louis XIII, but still practiced against the law, a problem represented in Corneille’s Le Cid) with the lawsuit.⁸ The chief exponent of the new “honnête homme” was the Chevalier de Méré, whose first Conversations were to be published two years after the first performance of the Misanthrope. It was a world where the semantic shift from “courtisan” and “homme de bien” to “homme habile” and “homme galant” as well as “honnête homme” showed that sociability counted above all else, above virtue and morality (Stanton 1980, 52). Individualism was tamed by docility, in a world which revolved around a young king desirous of establishing his auth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Obituary
• Introduction
• Antoine Vitez Re-staging Molière for or the 1978 Avignon Festival
• Interpretation by Design: A Tale of Two Misanthropes
• Molière's Misanthrope: A Critique and Reluctant Defense of Courtly Life
• Notes on Contributors