The School For Wives and the Learned Ladies, by Molière by Richard Wilbur

Author:Richard Wilbur [Moliere]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

But in fact this desiccated man has no heart, and for all his mixing in society, he is perfectly antisocial in the sense of being perfectly selfish; all of his attentions and flatteries to Philaminte's circle, all of his intrigues for dowry or pension, are for the benefit of a self which consists wholly of literary vanity and the pursuit of reputation. Literature and thought, for such a man, are unreal because unrelated to human feeling; in consequence, his life is vicious and his verse is dead.

The healthiest attitudes toward the play's theme are embodied in, and expressed by, Clitandre and Henriette. In respect of two repeated topics, spirituality and language, they represent an agreeable median position. Philaminte and Armande urge a life of pure intellect, and Bélise will have nothing to do with "extended substance"; Chrysale, at the other extreme, identifies himself with his body (mon corps est moi-même); but in Act IV, Scene 2, Clitandre firmly tells Armande that he has "both a body and a spirit," and Henriette has already proven the same of herself in the first scene of the play. In regard to language, we have at one extreme the pungent, direct, but limited and ungrammatical speech of Martine; at the other, we have the stifling or prissy rules of the proposed academy, the substanceless flatteries and phrase-making of Trissotin and Vadius, and the absolute dissociation of style and function in Philaminte's proposal that a French marriage contract express the dowry "in talent and drachma," and be dated in "ides and calends." (Since Philaminte twice upbraids the notary for his barbaric style, it is amusing that she is here proposing the use of literal barbarisms. Though Henriette's speech is at times strategically flat, and though Clitandre, when aroused, can rattle on for thirty lines like Hotspur, their discourse is, on the whole, straightforward, pithy, sprightly, and graceful, and amounts to the best employment of language in the play. The virtues of Clitandre and Henriette are not all to be discovered in some middle ground, however: for instance, despite all the high-minded talk of others, it is they who, in the final scene, represent the extreme of active unselfishness in Les femmes savantes.

It is possible to exaggerate the play's anti-intellectualism. One should remember that the action takes place not in the university, the church, a great salon, or the manor house of Madame de Sévigné, but in an upper-bourgeois milieu, where an ill-founded pursuit of the semblance of culture can pervert all of the norms of life. Molière does not deny that there may be truly learned men and women, or true literati like Boileau, and he has Clitandre speak of persons of genuine wit and brain who are not unwelcome at the court. If the pseudo-intellectuality of the "learned ladies" were not so flamboyant, and Clitandre and Henriette so occupied with resisting it, one would more readily notice that the young lovers are literate people who read poetry (Trissotin's, for example and judge it with some accuracy.

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