Women in Molière’s Comedies

Women in Molière’s Comedies
Author: Diana Koloini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2024-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040132448

This book offers a new approach to the work of the great classical author. Molière’s is obviously a patriarchal world in which women are most often treated as objects of patriarchal autocracy, which expects their submission. Yet in a number of his plays, women display ample resourcefulness in countering the patriarchal rule, often managing to outwit it. To explore this topic, the book scrutinizes Molière’s most important comedies, The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, and Don Juan, all of which feature complex female characters who play important roles. They show that Molière acknowledged a fully valid space for women and recognized their right to their own lives. As a prelude, the book analyzes two comedies from the margins of Molière’s oeuvre, The Ridiculous Précieuses and The Learned Ladies, which provoked controversy and indignant feminist criticism, since they appear to deride the emancipatory efforts of the time.

Women and Irony in Molière's Comedies of Marriage

Women and Irony in Molière's Comedies of Marriage
Author: John D. Lyons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198887396

This is a book about how Molière, France's most celebrated author of comedies, made something strikingly new out of the traditional comedy plot of thwarted courtship. Though justly celebrated for his mastery of physical comedy and farce, one of Molière's key moves was to pay attention to the way women could use language. Seventeenth-century France was a time when speaking well became exceptionally important, and in this arena women were the trend-setters. Among the most important places to display taste and social skills were the salons, gatherings presided over by women. Yet women still enjoyed little in the way of rights, particularly regarding a central decision in their lives: the choice of a husband. French regulations of marriage contracts became increasingly restrictive, largely to the detriment of women. To draw attention to their plight, women novelists and essayists presented case studies in how men and women misunderstood one another, how women were coerced to wed, how marriages could become nightmares, and how courtships could fail. Against this fraught social background Molière showed women using one of the few assets they had, their mastery of words, and in particular the rhetoric of irony, to frustrate the plans of fathers, guardians, and other authority figures. The comedies discussed here include very well-known plays such as The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The Learned Ladies, The School for Wives and Don Juan, and also less known but revealing and thought-provoking works such as The School for Husbands, George Dandin and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.

The Fan

The Fan
Author: Carlo Goldoni
Publisher:
Total Pages: 146
Release: 1925
Genre: Fans
ISBN:

Modesty

Modesty
Author: Paul Hervieu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 36
Release: 1915
Genre:
ISBN:

Moved by Love

Moved by Love
Author: Mary D. Sheriff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2004-01-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226752877

No happy endings, though, were imagined for such inspired women writers as Sappho and Heloise, who burned with an erotomania their art could not quench. Even so, Sheriff demonstrates that the perceived connections among sexuality, creativity, and disease also opened artistic opportunities for women - and creative women took full advantage of them."--BOOK JACKET.