Book contents
- Molière in Context
- Molière in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Charts and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Translations
- Abbreviations
- Biographical Preface
- Part I Socio-Political Context
- Part II Intellectual and Artistic Context
- Chapter 7 Philosophical Influences
- Chapter 8 Molière and Classical Theatre
- Chapter 9 The Survival of Medieval and Renaissance Professional Practices
- Chapter 10 Commedia dell’arte
- Chapter 11 The Literary Establishment
- Chapter 12 Are the Précieuses Only Ridicules? Molière, Salon Culture and the Shaping of France’s Collective Memory
- Part III Theatrical Context (Paris)
- Part IV Theatrical Context (Court)
- Part V Reception and Dissemination
- Part VI Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 12 - Are the Précieuses Only Ridicules? Molière, Salon Culture and the Shaping of France’s Collective Memory
from Part II - Intellectual and Artistic Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2022
- Molière in Context
- Molière in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Charts and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Translations
- Abbreviations
- Biographical Preface
- Part I Socio-Political Context
- Part II Intellectual and Artistic Context
- Chapter 7 Philosophical Influences
- Chapter 8 Molière and Classical Theatre
- Chapter 9 The Survival of Medieval and Renaissance Professional Practices
- Chapter 10 Commedia dell’arte
- Chapter 11 The Literary Establishment
- Chapter 12 Are the Précieuses Only Ridicules? Molière, Salon Culture and the Shaping of France’s Collective Memory
- Part III Theatrical Context (Paris)
- Part IV Theatrical Context (Court)
- Part V Reception and Dissemination
- Part VI Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Critics, commentators and historians have seized upon the ridiculous, comedic elements of Molière’s portrayals of salon culture and allowed the satire to upstage reality. Molière has been understood as belittling women’s attempts to influence expression in order to distance further salon culture from mainstream literary culture. However, considered in his seventeenth-century context, the playwright is not satirising women’s control of language or desire to critique literature in order to censure salon culture; rather Molière revels in exploring this complex cultural landscape that was as integral to the seventeenth century as the Sun King’s powerful rays. Molière’s contemporaries would not have interpreted the dramatist as censoring women’s agency. Posterity has tended to distance Molière from this worldly culture, recreating him as the all-knowing satirist who attempts to bring his contemporaries to their senses and excise worldly culture from the Grand Siècle. But Molière is not Alceste – he does not reject sociability, salon culture and galanterie. To conceive of salon culture and the values and practices associated with it – conversation, galanterie, sociabilité – as limited to a rarefied and marginalised space and practised only by an elite group is to misunderstand Molière’s context as well as the playwright’s intentions and his comedy.
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- Molière in Context , pp. 116 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022