Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T04:24:05.920Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Jan Clarke
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Molière in Context , pp. 116 - 124
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×