The Complex Alceste of Molieres Misanthrope Essay -- Moliere Misanthr

The Complex Alceste of The MisanthropeI can non improve on it, and assuredly neer shall, said Molire of his satire The Misanthrope, 1 and the critic Nicholas Boileau-Despraux concurred by be it one of Molires best dawdles.2 But the French public did not like it much, preferring the dramatists more farcical The Doctor in Spite of Himself--a play that, according to tradition, was written two months after The Misanthropes premiere to make up for the latters lack of success.3 In fact, The Misanthrope horrified Rousseau, who thought that its deal was, in Donald Frames words, to make virtue ridiculous by pandering to the shallow and pitiful tastes of the slice of the world.4 Both he and Goethe after him regarded Alceste, the protagonist, as a tragic figure rather than a comic one.5 It is unpatterned from such a diversity of sentiments that the work before us is hard enough to provoke a variety of reactions. On the one hand, Molire made The Misanthrope a comedy, not a tragedy. Alces te, despite his right-down railings against the hypocrisy of society, often finds it impossible to set a heroic guinea pig in front of his all-too-civilized circle. He is no lone upholder of a noble creed forced to martyrdom for his beliefs in fact, his announcement, at the end of the play, of the martyrdom he is imposing upon himself--exile to well-nigh solitary tooshie on earth/Where one is free to be a man of worth6--makes him look less heroic than ridiculous. And yet, if we do not place our sympathies with Alceste, we search this play in vain for another grammatical case worthy of them. The silly marquises do not command much respect. Arsino is conniving, spiteful, and a critic of everyone elses morals. Oronte is not only as vain a... ...f which is given in Brown and Kimmey, pp. 121-72), this is marked as V.viii, ll. 21-2. 7 Cf. John capital of Delaware Wilson, Introduction, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Wilson (Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1936), p. xlviii. 8 II.v, ll. 7 11-30 (ll. 153-72 in Wilbur). 9 I.i, line 118 (so also Wilbur). 10 Frame, Introduction to The Misanthrope, op. cit., p. 21. 11 Richard Wilbur, Introduction to The Misanthrope, in Brown & Kimmey, p. 360. 12 Ibid., p. 361. 13 V.iv, line 1782 (V.viii, line 50 in Wilbur). 14 I do not include Arsino in this, since in a sense she receives some sort of punishment when in the last scene (V.iv V.vi in Wilbur) she is fructify to shame by Alcestes implication that he is fully aware of her uncoiled motives. Her discomfiture should be enough to satisfy a sense that poetic justice has been served in her case.