The Characters of Molière's The Misanthrope
The characters in Molière's The Misanthrope inhabit a world different from that of many of the playwright's other works: we are viewing the actions of people at the very top of the social ladder of 17th-century France. For example, the foppish Acaste and Clitandre, who come into Célimène's house in the second act, are marquesses, the second-highest rank one can hold in the country. They can spend most of the day with Célimène, if they so choose, for their only remaining duty at court is to attend the coucher of Louis XIV, the formal going-to-bed ceremony of the king, to which only the highest members of the court were invited to attend. The characters of The Misanthrope own estates, hold power, and are immensely wealthy. They are not the bourgeois household of Tartuffe, they are not members of the upper-middle class--they are the court.
Through Alceste, the misanthrope of the title, Molière mocks and attacks the behavior of the highest level of his society. But Alceste is no Tartuffe, censuring those about him, while giving the appearance of a puritan, set apart from society. No, Alceste, himself an owner of estates, yearns to be accepted by the very society he condemns, and that was seen from the first in the costume which Molière wore when he played Alceste, a costume that represents the latest fashion--expensive, tasteful, and stylish.
We do not know much about this costume from the script, other than it is adorned with green ribbons. We know what Alceste wore--at least in the first productions--from an inventory of Molière's effects, made after his death:
Item, another box where one finds the costumes for the presentation of Le misanthrope consisting of breeches an...
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... wearing a curved-brimmed hat, fashionable shoes, and richly embroidered, highly fashionable justaucorps. It was (and is) an Alceste as hypocritical as the society he condemns for hypocrisy, a "supremely paradoxical creature," as David Whitton has called Alceste: "a fish which cannot abide water, nor live out of water."
Works Cited
Dock, Stephen V. "Authentic Costuming for Tartuffe and Le misanthrope." Approaches to Teaching Molière's Tartuffe and Other Plays. Ed. James F. Gaines and Michael S. Koppisch. New York: MLA, 1995. 117-36.
Lawrenson, Tom. "The Wearing o' the Green: Yet Another Look at Ôl'Homme aux Rubans Verts.'" Molière: Stage and Study. Essays in Honour of W. G. Moore. Ed. W. D. Howarth and Merlin Thomas. Oxford; Clarendon, 1973. 163-69.
Whitton, David. Molière: Le Misanthrope. Glasgow: U of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991.
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... her later years. One factor of not talking to many people is because she had many people die that she was close to. When Dickinson collapsed from nervousness she said, “The doctors call it “Revenge of the Nerves”, but who but death had wronged them,” (Dickinson) Dickinson was also called the riddle of Amherst because while laying on her deathbed, she wrote an entry in her diary that Berry stated. It read, “She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistles sounded for six.” Dickinson lost conscience at age 55 May 13,1886 and the riddle of Amherst was dead. Dickinson was a very ambitious author. She made a new meaning to poetry. She inspired many of the poets today and will continue to do so in the future. Dickinson was an outstanding American poet where her childhood, friends and family, religion, and education inspired most of her poetry.
Emily Dickinson is one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth century America. In her lifetime, she composed more poems than most modern Americans will even read in their lifetimes. Dickinson is still praised today, and she continues to be taught in schools, read for pleasure, and studied for research and criticism. Since she stayed inside her house for most of her life, and many of her poems were not discovered until after her death, Dickinson was uninvolved in the publication process of her poetry. This means that every Dickinson poem in print today is just a guess—an assumption of what the author wanted on the page. As a result, Dickinson maintains an aura of mystery as a writer. However, this mystery is often overshadowed by a more prevalent notion of Dickinson as an eccentric recluse or a madwoman. Of course, it is difficult to give one label to Dickinson and expect that label to summarize her entire life. Certainly she was a complex woman who could not accurately be described with one sentence or phrase. Her poems are unique and quite interestingly composed—just looking at them on the page is pleasurable—and it may very well prove useful to examine the author when reading her poems. Understanding Dickinson may lead to a better interpretation of the poems, a better appreciation of her life’s work. What is not useful, however, is reading her poems while looking back at the one sentence summary of Dickinson’s life.
Moliere sets up the exposition of the play in Act I by the apothecary bills Argon is reading aloud. After Toinette, the maid, then enters the scene she sarcastically makes a comment about all of the bills lying on the table. Toinette lets the audience know that Argon is a hypochondriac by rebutting everything he says about his doctors and illnesses with sarcastic comments. For instance, when Argon says, “You leave my insides alone.” She comes back with, “I wish you would. You’d be a different man.” She also lets the audience know by saying, “Why, if it wasn’t for him you wouldn’t even know you were ill,” speaking of the apothecary. The main conflict of the play is Argon’s unwillingness to accept that he is not ill and he is, in fact, a very healthy man. This “illness” leads to the selfishness that he shows his family, especially his daughter Angelica. Later in Act I his “illnesses” prove to have relevance to the conflict when she speaks of Cleante, the man she loves. Cleante is not a doctor; therefore, Argon will not give his blessings for Angelica to marry him.
Emily is still one of the most well respected and influential writers today. All the things that happened in her life affected how she wrote and what she wrote about. Emily suffered through a lot of death,but through this, death became one of her main themes in her poetry. Due to her love for nature Emily made it one of her prominent themes as well. Other things such as the civil war, time and eternity, and death are presented as common themes. Most of her life was spent in seclusion, but this seclusion led to her beautiful writings,which influenced other poets and the literature world in general. Emily Dickinson will forever be recognized as an astonishing writer.
Crumbley, Paul. “Emily Dickinson’s Life.” Modern American Poetry. National Biography Online. 2000. Web. 31 January 2014.
“The finest tax-deductible minds were brought in to address the Project’s Co-ordinating Committee. The French intellectual was a slight, neat figure in an English tweed jacket half a size too big for him; with it he wore a pale blue button-down shirt of American cotton, an Italian tie of flamboyant restraint, international charcoal wool trousers, and a pair of tasselled French loafers” (54).