Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Patricia Francis Cholakian

Critical Essay by Patricia Francis Cholakian

SOURCE: “The ‘Women Question’ in Molière's Misanthrope,” in The French Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 4, March, 1985, pp. 524-32.

In the following essay, Cholakian contends that Molière's Le Misanthrope's underlying presumption is that women camouflage their true selves in order to become what men desire.

Molière's theater is generally seen as profeminist because it champions the cause of ingénues, like Agnès in L'Ecole des femmes, against the tyrannical power of an older male who seeks to prevent them from exercising their “natural” right in the choice of a mate.¹

On the other hand Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes savantes have often been considered anti-feminist because they ridicule women who seek to break away from the role assigned to them within marriage and the family and to invade the male world of words and ideas (speaking and knowing).² According to Bénichou, Molière thus confines women to the feminine domain of...
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