Molière's "Misanthrope": Melancholy and Society in the Age of the Counterreformation

Author(s): Lionel Gossman

Source: Theatre Journal , Oct., 1982, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Oct., 1982), pp. 322-343
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Moliere's Misanthrope:
Melancholy and Society in
the Age of the
Counterreformation

Lionel Gossman

The Misanthrope has always been a problem. Contemporaries who praised the
play almost never mention that they found it funny. According to one:

This misanthrope is so sage

Decrying the manners of our age
That you might well think, reader dear,
It's a preacher that you hear.

A lefthanded compliment for a comedy, even one that came to be regarded as a

com'die de caract're and therefore not obligated to arouse laughter. In his famous
Letter on the Misanthrope, Donneau de Vise, alluding to the strongly literary, as dis-
tinct from theatrical qualities of the work, declared that Moliere "did not want to
write a comedy full of incident, but a play in which he could speak against the man-
ners of the age." The effect of this praiseworthy enterprise was apparently to drive

Lionel Gossman is Director of Graduate Studies and Professor of French in the Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of Men and Masks: A Study of Molibre.

323

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 "Will you disown this writing because it bears no name!?"

322

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324 / TI, October 1982

audiences away, for the play was not a great success. In 1739, three quarters of a
century after Moliere's death, Voltaire reported that the public was still staying
away, though to the philosophe this was almost a recommendation. "It is a work
that is more likely to please the intelligent (gens d'esprit) than the multitude, and
more fit to be read than to be acted." It was in fact among the least frequently per-
formed of all Moliere's plays in the eighteenth century.

Rousseau's devastating critique of the play in 1758, coming on the heels of Luigi
Riccoboni's disapproval of it, was symptomatic of a general moral earnestness and
an increasingly pervasive social and political disaffection that led audiences to iden-
tify with Alceste in deliberate disregard of the instructions of the text itself. During
the Revolution, as is well known, Fabre d'Eglantine made the play over completely
into a sentimental drama, with Alceste as the active friend of mankind and Philinte,
a sort of cynical Mandevillean, as the true misanthrope. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, August Schlegel reported with satisfaction - for he shared Rous-
seau's view of Molibre as an accomplice of despotism - that "when Moliere is played,
the principal theatre of Paris is a desert." Attempts to restore the situation by inter-
preting Alceste as an honest man among thieves appear to have been only moder-
ately successful. Stendhal was bored, both by the play itself and by the perfor-
mances of it that he witnessed between 1813 and 1815. The little scene with Dubois
(IV,iv), which the bourgeois audience of the time did not know how to take, he tells,
was the only one that pleased him, "the only island of gaiety in this ocean of serious-
ness," and he concluded that "for most of the audience, The Misanthrope is no more
than a serious didactic poem well recited." By mid-century, whatever comic ele-
ments there might have been in the play were being so sedulously and effectively ig-
nored that Alceste had come to represent the Romantic figure of the artist and the
exile - Nerval's prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie. Musset wept at the performance
he attended; Alexandre Vinet explained why Moliere was a "mdlancolique;" Flaubert
wrote of "la tristesse de Moliere." Even in 1930 Mauriac -not, it is true, the most jo-
vial of writers-insisted that "Molibre is sad, far sadder than Pascal."

All this earnestness has not helped to make the play go down better with au-
diences. Three decades after Schlegel, Musset also reported that he was "alone or al-
most alone" at the performance he attended; and in 1914 Jacques Arnavon, a direc-
tor who devoted much of his career to reinterpreting the major works of Moliere for
the modern stage, based his own production on the given fact that The Misanthrope
traditionally "doesn't 'go over' with the public" and is received "with polite applause
instead of enthusiastic ovations."'

1 See Jacques Arnavon, L'Interpretation de la comedie classique: Le Misanthrope. Mise en scene. D6-
cors. Representation (Paris: Plon, 1914); Jean-Pierre Collinet, Lectures de Molizre (Paris: Colin, 1974);
Henri Cordier, Molibre jugs par Stendhal (Paris: privately printed, 1898); Maurice Descotes, Molibre et
sa fortune litteraire (Bordeaux: Ducros, 1970); Christian Strich et al., fiber Moliere (ZUrich: Diogenes,
1973). All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

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325 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

In contrast with its moderate success on the stage, The Misanthrope has consis-
tently been popular with critics and scholars as a text to be read. Its ambiguities have
given it a place in Moliere criticism similar to that of Hamlet in Shakespearean criti-
cism. There is nothing surprising about this. The critic's stance is similar to Alceste's
and there is something melancholic about discussing comedy rather than performing
it. About two decades ago, Jacques Guicharnaud, Judd Hubert, Marcel Gutwirth,
and I added our mite to the accumulated mass of speculation and commentary, and
many of the ideas that were put forward at that time have - flatteringly and some-
what surprisingly perhaps - been taken up again in the most recent book on Molibre
to appear: Gerard Defaux's Moliere, ou les metamorphoses du comique: de la comb-
die morale au triomphe de la folie.2 Essentially, the argument proposed by Guichar-
naud and myself, at least, was that in the plays of Moliere's middle period, and espe-
cially in Dom Juan and The Misanthrope, there was a significant hesitation in the
basic comic reaffirmation of the rights of body over spirit, of freedom and desire
over order and law, of community over property, of life over death. In the specific
historical context of contemporary society, as distinct from the mythic one in which
comedy and tragedy represent competing but also complementary and alternating
visions of social life, the positive values supported by comedy were perceived as in-
extricably implicated in negative ones. There was thus no triumph and celebration
of these values, but an ironical, probing, questioning representation of them which
seems to have left audiences uncertain and perplexed, the comic characters them-
selves ambiguous and enigmatic. Dom Juan, for instance, occupies the traditional
comic slot of the lusty son whose victory over the crusty old father is celebrated in
so many earlier comedies of Molibre as a reaffirmation of the life of the community
over forces inimical to it. Here, however, though he retains some of his brilliance
and charm, he is also socially and humanly degraded, and he has been contaminated
by the role of the boastful Capitano. His rank serves to seduce serving wenches, and
the eros in him borders on perversity. His doctrines of liberation, as Brecht re-
marked, are not progressive: they are used to justify a petty libertinism.3 Likewise,
the impotent old man who should be a figure of fun is ineffectual, but respectable in
the case of Dom Juan's father, Dom Louis, potentially grandiose in the case of the
Commandeur, whose woman (wife, daughter, or ward) the Dom had presumably
stolen. Nevertheless, the text does not support a complete reversal: the blondin or
young gallant is not transformed unequivocally into a figure of comedy, and the au-
dience is not sure whether to take the speaking statue of the Commandeur seriously
or ironically. In The Misanthrope, though he is young, Alceste occupies in many re-

2 Judd Hubert, Molibre and the Comedy of Intellect (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962); Lionel
Gossman, Men and Masks: A Study of MoliBre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963); Jacques Guichar-
naud, Molizre: une aventure theatrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); Marcel Gutwirth, Molibre, ou l'invention
comique. La metamorphose des thBmes. La creation des types (Paris: Minard, 1966); G&rard Defaux, Mo-
libre, ou les mktamorphoses du comique: de la comedie morale au triomphe de la folie (Lexington, Ky.:
French Forum Publications, 1980).
SBertold Brecht, Stiicke, vol. 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959), p. 190.

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326 / TJ, October 1982

spects the slot of the old man lusting after

an inappropriate young woman. Yet
while his discomfiture is supported and
required by the text, those who occupy
the slot usually filled by the young lovers
are not seen at the end of the play as hav-
ing restored an upset equilibrium, and
they do not get the girl. Acaste, Clitandre,
and Oronte are almost as comic as Al-
ceste. There is no frte, no marriage at the
end of The Misanthrope.

After twenty years, this reading of Mo-

liere's middle plays seems to hold up fairly
well. Rather than attempt a radical review
of it, I'd like to develop certain features of
it that were only touched on before. Firstly, I'd like to consider the specific characte
of Alceste as a melancholic - a man afflicted by the atra bilis or black bile, th
atrabilaire amoureux of the subtitle - and what that characterization might hav
signified ideologically in the seventeenth century. Secondly, though The Misa
thrope can and, in my opinion, at least, should be funny when it is put on stage, it
does have certain peculiarities, and I'd like to say something more of these than
said twenty years ago. Finally, at the risk of being an intolerable spoilsport or kill-
joy, another Alceste, I shall want to comment on a recurrent tendency, revived most
recently by Defaux, to privilege the most purely theatrical of Moliere's work
notably the comedies-ballets of the end of his career - over the problematic an
strongly literary middle plays.

Historically, there appears to be a close connection between melancholy and a

tistic creation. Alleviating sadness and raising dejected spirits are purposes often at-
tributed to art and literature. In the Thousand and One Nights, the talented Sch
herezade succeeds by her clever storytelling in reviving Schahriar's flagging curiosit
and bringing his spirits back to the world of time and history. One of the most fre
quent folk tale themes - it is the theme, for instance, of the very first story in Basile
Pentamerone - is likewise that of amusing a Prince or Princess or a King who h
sunk into lethargy and can no longer laugh.

In oral cultures, it is usually a listener who is to be cured of melancholy. Melan

choly, however, seems to be inseparable from the very existence of written or liter-
ate culture. Michelet's portrait of Ronsard, the first great literate poet in French -
deaf, solitary, and fanatically devoted to the labor of his pen- is exemplary. I
modern times, therefore, it may well be the writer himself who tries to cure his ow

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327 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

melancholy and solipsism by writing -as

often as not about melancholy. The poi-
son is also the remedy. The classic case for
English-speaking readers, of course, is
Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Mel-
ancholy first appeared in 1621. Burton de-
scribes himself at the beginning of this text
in the self-portrait of his persona Demo-
critus Junior: "I have lived a silent, seden-
tary, solitary, private life, mihi et musis,
in the University." And in the satirical
preface to the reader that he attributes to
his persona, he explains his reasons for
writing: "I write of melancholy, by being
busy to avoid melancholy. . ubi dolor, ibi digitus. One must needs scratch where i
itches."4

Among the types of the melancholic depicted on the frontispiece of the 1652 edi-
tion of Burton's Anatomy we find the hypochondriacus, the superstitiosus, and the
inamorato. Other types are described at length in the text, notably those suffering
from "religious melancholy" or enthusiasm, and atheism or impiety, Melanchthon
monstrosa melancholia, as Burton calls it. Avarice and apprehension of poverty ar
also associated with images of melancholy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu
ries. In his book on Diirer, Panofsky reproduces a late fifteenth-century Germa
woodcut in which melancholy is depicted as "an elderly, cheerless miser . . leaning
against a locked desk, the top of which is all but covered with coins, and grasping
the purse hanging from his belt."1 Freud still alluded to the melancholic's fear of pov
erty in the paper on "Mourning and Melancholia" of 1917. In seventeenth-century
terms, in short, Alceste is not the only melancholic among Moliere's comic heroe
On the contrary, taken together, they represent all the common forms of melan
cholia, as it was understood in Molikre's own time: hypochondria (Argan in The Im
aginary Invalid), avarice (Harpagon in The Miser), superstition (Orgon in Tartuffe)
impiety (Dom Juan in the play that bears his name), jealous suspicion and fear of de-
privation (Arnolphe in The School for Women, and George Dandin in the play of
that name). Moliere's work may thus readily be viewed, both pragmatically (in rela-
tion to its own intended effect) and thematically (in terms of its subject matter) as a

4 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Philadelphia: Claxton, 1883), pp. 16, 18. Further refer-
ences are to this edition.

5 Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1943), p. 159.

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328 / TI, October 1982

vast enterprise against melancholy. There may even be something to the old Ro-
mantic contention that Moliere was attempting, through his comic misanthropes,
hypochondriacs, and jealous lovers, to exorcise his own melancholia.

I'd like now, to consider some of the characteristics of the melancholic hero in the
seventeenth century and then say something of the specific place of melancholy in
the culture of the Counterreformation.

The first thing to note, probably, is that in the seventeenth century the literary
melancholic is still a type. In the course of the next century, as classical comedy be-
came increasingly compromised by the perception of it as an instrument of social
discipline in the service of the despised status quo, an attempt was made to "save" it
by disregarding the typical features of traditional comic heroes and substituting in-
stead more individualized characters. This occurs not only in the new comedies writ-
ten in the eighteenth century-in the works of Dufresny, Destouches, Marivaux,
and Beaumarchais, among others -but in the interpretation of older comic works.
Goethe's reading of Moliere, for instance, and especially his understanding of Al-
ceste, is strongly marked by this revisionist interpretation.6 I think it needs to be em-
phasized that the melancholic in Moliere still retains many features of the type, even
though there is an incipient tendency, which La Bruyere was to develop a few years
later, toward a more nuanced and individualized character.

Secondly, the type of the melancholic in Moliere is almost without exception a

comic figure. The melancholic ruler or prince - troubled by an incompatibility be-
tween the divine law or order, by which the human order is supposedly legitimized,
on the one hand, and human ideas of justice, on the other, between the respective
rights of the whole and the part, the state and the individual- appears only in the
parodied form of a domestic tyrant, the barbon or Pantaloon of the commedia.
Most often, melancholy in Molibre is appropriately the affliction of men of prop-
erty, fathers and husbands, rulers, but no attempt is made to enlist the sympathies of
the audience for their sufferings and difficulties.

Invariably, as rulers, the melancholics are preoccupied with conservation and re-
tention, dead set against novelty, mobility, change, and exchange, the circulation of
goods and of money, the free circulation of women and of signs -everything that
might unsettle the established order of things. They all want to have absolute con-
trol over the distribution of the economic goods of society, its women, and its lan-
guage, and are engaged in desperate combat with the forces that escape their control
-free sexual desire, especially that of women; free signs that signify "nothing," as
they see it, such as the signs of fashion or courtly flattery; gratuitous and wasteful
expenditures; words and gestures that are ambiguous and open to interpretation. In
The Misanthrope Philinte takes a positive view of commerce and the circulation of
words, goods, and services:

6 See Goethe's conversations with Eckermann for 12.5.1825 and 28.3.1827. According to Goethe, Mo-
]iire's comedies 'border on the tragic."

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329 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

When someone greets us with a show of pleasure

It's but polite to give him equal measure,
Return his love the best that we know how
And trade him offer for offer, vow for vow.

Alceste in contrast speaks indignantly of "shameful commerce" and "prostituted

esteem" (I,i; Wilbur translation).

The melancholic's distrust of circulation and change - of everything that is not in

its "proper" place - is frequently accompanied by a special distaste for those whose
art consists in regulating property disputes and interpreting ambiguous signs. Bur
ton's Democritus Junior is as outraged by the proliferation of lawyers -which he
considers a mark of corruption - and as mistrustful of legal justice, as Alceste is. The
virtuous man cannot but be distressed, he complains, "to see so many lawyers, ad-
vocates, so many tribunals, so little justice, so many magistrates, so little care of the
common good; so many laws, yet never more disorders; . . to see a lamb executed,
a wolf pronounce sentence" (p. 42).

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330 / TV, October 1982

The seventeenth-century melancholic - and Moliere's melancholic is true to type -

is indignant, self-righteous, accusatory, denouncing the evils and disorders of soci-
ety while remaining blind to his own. Melancholy, according to Democritus Junior,
"extends itself not to men only but even to vegetables and sensibles ... Kingdoms,
provinces, and politic bodies are likewise sensible and subject to the disease" (p. 51).
The disorder he attacks, in sum, is not in the Self but in the Other, in the World. To
the melancholic, it seems that it is not he who is affected by a distemper but every-
one else.

Democritus Junior can indulge his railing against the evils he observes in the world
at greater length than the constraints of a five-act comedy allow Alceste to do. The
object of his tirades is the same as Alceste's, however: the space between signifier
and signified, sign and referent, or, in seventeenth-century terms (for our modern
technical terminology moderates what was a scandal by depriving the second term
in these pairs of ontological priority), appearance and reality; and the baroque
confusion, disorder and endlessly shifting vision of things that results from it. "A
vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws,
proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears," Burton's
character laments. "Today we hear of new lords and officers created, tomorrow of
some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose,
another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour
turns bankrupt ... It's not worth, virtue . .. wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, re-
ligion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected. . . . Honesty is accounted
folly; knavery policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem
to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flatter-
ing, cozening, dissembling, 'that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be
conformable to the world'. . or else live in contempt, disgrace and misery" (p. 17).
Like Alceste later, Burton's virtuous man is outraged, "to see a man turn himself into
all shapes like a chameleon . . . to act twenty parts and persons at once, having a
several face, garb, and character for everyone he meets" (p. 43).

And just as Alceste outlines the rules men would follow in the world if he had his
way -"Let men behave like men; let them display/their inmost hearts in everything
they say" (I,i)- Burton's melancholic outlines "an Utopia of mine own, a new Atlan-
tis, a poetical Commonwealth of mine own, in which I will freely domineer, build
cities, make laws, statutes, as I list myself" (p. 62). Everything in this Utopia is, of
course, minutely ordered -location, climate, sexual behavior, education, govern-
ment, commerce, justice (predictably, the number of lawyers is strictly limited).

Not surprisingly, in his Utopian pursuit of order and transparency, the melan-
cholic finds himself aligned primarily against women and children. For what the
husband-father decries as disorder and opacity may be perceived by his wards as
their opening to freedom. In ancien regime Europe every woman was born into legal
dependence on her father and escaped it by accepting a new paternal authority in her
husband. Only as a widow, like Cd1imeme in The Misanthrope or Dorim~ne in The
Bourgeois Gentleman, did a woman achieve legal independence of both father and

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331 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

husband - whence the many eulogies of widowhood put in the mouths of female
characters in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century comedies. In a world of
aggressive and predatory males, however, though legally free, the unattached
woman was vulnerable and needed protection, and she had to decide whether she
would accept it from another husband, at the inevitable price of her newly acquired
freedom, or would try to preserve her freedom by seeking the protection of many
men rather than a single one -by manipulating, in sum, the desires of men to suit
her own interests. If she chose the latter course, she had to learn to multiply the signs
of her good intentions without making any firm commitments: to make a little go a
long way, we might say. In economic terms, husbands and fathers, as property own-
ers, tend toward a kind of semiotic monetarism-strict correlation between the
quantity of signs and the supply of referents - while woman naturally has recourse
to inflation.

The opposition between the two systems - that of the propertied male and that of
the propertyless female - is especially striking in The Misanthrope: in Alceste's refu-
sal of the ambiguous code of gallantry, his insistence that Ce1imene publicly declare
herself, his attempt to obtain mastery of meaning through possession of the letter to
Oronte; and, on the other hand, in C1limene's struggle to maintain the cipher-like
quality of language, to keep it circulating, to prevent her letters from falling into the
wrong hands. Whereas in other comedies of Moliere, the young woman has an ally
in the gallant who aims to steal her from her old guardian (husband or father), here
the discrepancy between the objectives of the woman and those of the young men
who court her is made patent. Ce1imene has no allies. On the contrary, all the men,
the gallants as well as the melancholic hero, are brought together at the end of the
play in common possession of Ce1imene's letters and in a common resolve to pin
down and gain control of meaning. Interestingly, in this endeavor they have the sup-
port of Arsino&, who is old enough, as Ce1imene pointedly reminds her, to be
Ce1imene's mother, and who, in this different situation, has chosen the matronly
role of active collaboration with the oppressor, identification with the male order, as
the only effective means available to her of manipulating it. It is Arsinoi who pro-
cures the first of Cdlimene's letters for Alceste.

What is especially striking in The Misanthrope is not, however, unique to that

play. The criticism of fashion, legalism, female freedom, filial disobedience, and the
corruption of the world, is common to all Moliere's comic melancholics. Philinte
himself makes the point when he compares himself and Alceste to "those brothers in
the play/called School for Husbands . . ." (I,i).

Moliere's identification of the melancholic with the traditional Pantaloon figure of

the commedia is probably not accidental. It coincides with an important shift in the
meaning and value attributed to melancholy in the mid-seventeenth century and
with a growing intolerance of any form of dissidence on the part of the Counterre-
formation state. Throughout the Middle Ages the predominant conception of mel-
ancholy had been the Hippocratic one of a physical disorder of the humors in the af-
flicted individual. Taking its cue from a passage in Aristotle's Problematica (XXX,1),

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332 / TI, October 1982

Renaissance Neoplatonism turned this conception on its head. As the order of the
post-medieval universe no longer seemed immediately evident but was now held to
be discernible only by thQse endowed with special gifts of insight - those, in sum,
who had maintained contact with an original nature-melancholy was no longer
identified as a disorder of nature, but became associated with detachment from im-
mediate empirical reality and the possession of extraordinary visionary powers.
Thus Democritus Junior refers to his malady - ironically, it is true - as "my Aegeria"
(p. 18).

The new idea of melancholy, though never without its critics and satirists, became
so commonplace, that people even began to affect it as a sign of distinction. In his
book Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, L. C. Knights cites many examples
from the literature of seventeenth-century England to demonstrate not the actual
prevalance of melancholy at the time, which in fact Knights doubts, but the wide
popularity of the melancholic hero in literature and of the melancholic pose in soci-
ety.7 Shakespeare's Jacques, it will be remembered, used the fashionable mask of
melancholy to conceal his real melancholy.

The destructiveness and subsequent decay of the princely courts of Renaissance

Italy and the bitter experience of the dynastic and religious wars that devastated the
rest of Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries undermined the
Neoplatonic idea of a relation between melancholy and genius. The intensity of the
experience of disorder made it virtually impossible to sustain the Neoplatonic belief
in a hidden objective order and harmony of the universe which the man of genius
with his special senses could perceive behind the discouragingly untidy veil of ap-
pearances. Melancholy became simply the awareness of the dereliction of man and
of the chaotic, unintelligible condition of the universe, the fictive character of all the
patterns attributed to it. The doctrines of reformed Christianity, which both re-
sponded to and promoted this experience of the world as a wilderness, were also
conducive to melancholy and likewise attributed no special status to it, except in so
far as it might mark a coming to consciousness of man's miserable fallen condition
and therefore, potentially, a first step on the road to salvation. For by denying the
effectiveness of works and placing exclusive emphasis on faith and the power of
grace, the reformed religions confirmed the evacuation of meaning from mundane
existence. Faith was placed on one side, naked and absolute; on the other, the undif-
ferentiated mass of human actions in the world; and there was no mediation be-
tween the two. Human life was thus virtually bereft of meaning. The only rule left
for the conduct of it - and it is not unlike Philinte's in The Misanthrope - was that of
the humble people: to live as honestly, decently, and obscurely, in worldly terms, as
possible. In Diirer's Melancholia all the tools of the active life lie unused at the
figure's feet, while she stares vacantly, but with a kind of desperate intensity, into
space. The unmediated opposition of faith and works, absolute virtue and worldly

(London: Chatto, 1937), pp. 323-24.

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333 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

wisdom, the Hero and the King, continued to structure classical thought throughout
the seventeenth century - tragically in the Surena of the aging Corneille or in
Racine's Athalie, comically and ironically in The Misanthrope.

Against the subversively pessimistic vision of the late Renaissance and the Refor-
mation, the Counterreformation - absolutist Prince and Catholic Church togeth-
er - dreamed up the ideal of a new synthetic order purportedly reuniting the world
of action and the world of faith; political life, religious life, and the life of the imag-
ination; state, religion, and culture, in Burckhardt's terms. The new order, however,
was conceived as laying claim to authority not in virtue of its being recognized as
true, an image of the divine order and a mediator between heaven and earth, as in
the Middle Ages, but simply on the pragmatic basis of its success - as manifested in
its power and its ability to get itself accepted.

If the reformed faiths deprived the melancholic of any special status, the new
Counterreformation state could see him only as a potential dissident. By the end of
the sixteenth century, according to the Wittkowers, the ideal of the artist as genius
was already being replaced in Italy by the ideal of the gentleman or courtier artist.8
This normalization of the artist and his integration into the fabric of official culture
through state-supported academies and princely patronage culminated in the model
of the painter implied by Charles Perrault's famous portrait of Mignard in vol. II of
Les Hommes Illustres (1700): "Well bred persons found his conversation and society
as delightful as connoisseurs judged his works to be."9 Art, like faith, was to be made
tractable and brought into line with the aims of society and the state.

The monarchy of Moliere's patron, Louis XIV - Mars Christianissimus - with its
powerful administrative bureaucracy, its national religious and military policies,
and its elaborate system of academies and pensions in the arts and sciences was the
supreme and most successful embodiment of the Counterreformation state. As is
well known, its chief architects believed that their uniform and hegemonic structure
had to be raised on the ruin of every independent center of action, whether intellec-
tual or poetic (the attack on the whole libertine movement of poets and philoso-
phers, as well as on preciosite), religious (persecution of the Huguenots, and subse-
quently of the Jansenists as a dissenting group originally within the Counterreforma-
tion), or social and political (the Fronde and its aftermath, the Fouquet affair, the
role of the Court in the domestication of the nobility, the progressive displacement
of the old independent magistrature by new administrative cadres directly depen-
dent on the King). The element of political dissidence in his melancholy heroes is
sometimes made discreetly explicit by Moliere who, as the director of the "troupe du
roy," or King's players, could be expected to subscribe to the aims of the new state.
Orgon, it will be recalled, though loyal himself, had a political skeleton in his cup-
board, in the form of a compromising association with an activist in the Fronde;

8 Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963), pp. 90-93, 106.
9 Les Hommes Illustres (Paris: Antoine Dezallier, 1697-1700), vol. II, pp. 91-92.

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334 / T", October 1982

Dom Juan is an old-style grand seigneur, who is not about to cave in to the new ide-
ology, even if he has nothing left to do but chase after skirts - a brilliant forerunner
of innumerable Valmonts and Dolmances to come; Alceste, according to one con-
temporary, "est . . . sage, en frondant les moeurs de notre age" (freely translated:
"shows his respect for good order by rebelling against the manners of our
time")-the political reference is unmistakable here in the use of the verb
fronder- and like many a gentilhomme out of sympathy with the court and favor
with the king, he has found refuge in the lesser world of the salons.

In its attempt to overcome melancholy, however, the Counterreformation state

succeeded only in suppressing it. Indeed, in many ways, it aggravated it and ex-
tended its sway. With Dom Juan and Alceste, melancholy begins to affect sons and
lovers as well as old fathers. In a self-portrait composed in 1659, a few years before
The Misanthrope, La Rochefoucauld writes unequivocally about the causes of his
own melancholy, which he identifies as the enforced idleness and political obscurity
imposed by the regime on men of independent character and ambition.1o

Melancholy was not confined to those out of favor with the king or excluded from
court, however. The formalism, the alienation of the personality required by court
etiquette and court life in general, the constant fear of humiliation in a world dom-
inated by the imaginary, were themselves productive of melancholy and feelings of
futility. It was at court that Madame de Maintenon discovered what boredom was.
"Before coming to Court," she wrote, "I had never known what it was to be bored;
but I have had my fill of it since. The most boring days are the ones on which we
celebrate."" And she admitted to a friend: "I long desperately to withdraw from the
world."12 The demands that Louis XIV's state made on the individual were not total:
formal, visible acceptance of it was sufficient, provided it was absolute. It was not
inconceivable, in other words, that one would be bored at court, but to avow it, to
manifest it by any sign whatsoever was inadmissible, a provocation, a dangerous in-
dication of dissidence and potential subversiveness, a threat to the order of the state.
"One is almost invariably bored," La Rochefoucauld observed, "with those in whose
company it is not permitted to be bored."13 The Ludovician system permitted private
withdrawal in sum -indeed it probably promoted it - but not public withdrawal,
Philinte's solution of "ritualism," to borrow Robert Merton's sociological categories,
but not Alceste's threatened response of "retreatism."'4 The king, we are told by
Saint-Simon, could not abide sick people and melancholics -anything that might

10 Oeuvres (Paris: Hachette, 1868), vol. I, p. 6.

" Quoted in Wolf Lepenies, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969),
p. 197.
12 Lettres de Madame de Maintenon, ed. Marcel Langlois (Paris: Letouzay et And, 1935-39), vol. 2, p.
90 (letter of 26 July 1676).
13 Maximes, no. 352 (1678 ed.)
14 Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1968 [1st ed.
1949]), pp. 185-214.

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335 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

threaten his royal narcissism.'s Nevertheless, if there was a tireless pursuit of distrac-
tion in the reign of the Sun-King, there was equally an obsession with the boredom
and melancholy from which distraction was sought. Everyone wrote about it, com-
plained of it, observed and analyzed it. It was at the court and in the salons, among
the courtiers, the king's loyal subjects, and among the ex-frondeur princes and no-
blemen who were not permitted to present themselves at court. Michelet, who knew
the literature of the grand siecle well, found "sadness everywhere: in the buildings, in
the monuments, in people's characters: harsh in Pascal, in Colbert, suave in Mme.
Henriette, in La Fontaine, Racine, and F'nelon ... In not a single soul is anything
left of the divine attribute that had been so common in the sixteenth century -
Joy. .. "16
It was in this context of pervasive, yet inadmissible melancholy that The Misan-
thrope was performed in the mid-60s. From the beginning, it encountered audience
resistance, and was hard to put on as an unmitigated comedy. As I have tried to sug-
gest, the difficulty does not lie with the character of Alceste, despite the way the role
is now frequently interpreted. There is ample evidence that Alceste is and should be
played as a comic figure. From the outset he is marked by those reversals of "normal"
hierarchic order that, according to the anonymous author of the Lettre sur Inm-
posteur (1667), are productive of comic effects. What Alceste has to say, moreover,
is about as effective and original in the troubled, yet sophisticated world of the
Counterreformation, as the pious precepts with which Dom Louis sermonizes his
son in Dom Juan. If the elegant and attractive Cdlimene keeps this facheux in tow, it
is no doubt as a "character," who, though a bore, is also, like the characters in
Ce1imene's portraits, a distraction from boredom.
The peculiarity of The Misanthrope is that whereas in Moliere's earlier comedies
the hero's comic reversal of norms was righted in the text of the play itself, this does
not happen here. Alceste's melancholy and his hopeless love for the narcissistic
Ce1imene are no doubt to be viewed in the light of his own inordinately exigent but
less successful narcissism, as Lacan once pointed out.'7 Failing to recognize that he
himself suffers from the very disorder he rails against, the hero, in other words, is to
be perceived as a comic oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. But equally C61im'ne's
narcissism, as well as that of her entourage, is always on the verge of melancholy.
The comedy reveals the contradiction in the comic hero - the extreme narcissism in
him that he denounces in others - but it does not completely mask a corresponding,
contradiction in the world. C61imene's salon is perilously close to the solipsism and
melancholy it derides in Alceste. Whence the urgency and single-mindedness with
which, in order to avoid falling into lethargy and nothingness, it demands support
for its own autonomous creation of meanings and orders. The habitues of the salon
ground their existence in the Other's response to the persona they create by their use

15 Saint-Simon. Presentation de Genevieve Manceron et Michel Averlant (Paris: J'ai lu, 1965), p. 142.
16 Histoire de France au dix-septieme siecle: Louis XIV et la revolution de 1'dit de Nantes (Paris: Cal-
mann Levy, 1898 [Histoire de France, vol. XV]), Preface, p. 17.
17 "Propos sur la causalite psychique" (1946) in J. Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 173-75. See also
Francesco Orlando, Lettura freudiana del 'Misanthrope' (Turin: Einandi, 1979).

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336 / T, October 1982

of the signs of language and gesture. One might say that they are this persona.
C61im ne, as Eliante observes, has no specific desire: only desire for the desire of the
Other. For this reason, the bore who can neither provoke a response in others nor
respond to their provocation, who can neither seduce nor be seduced, is the chief ob-
ject of the salon's apprehension and derision, and the chief danger to its life. In the
famous portrait scene, all Cd~limine's victims are denounced for the same fault: they
are poor users of language, incapable of arousing and holding attention and incapa-
ble of rising or being held to attention. Damon has the art of saying nothing inter-
minably; Timante is always "whispering, as if they were confidential, things that are
absolutely inconsequential;" Getralde's gossip is insipid; Bdlise is a real conversation
stopper in whose company one has to sweat, as Celimene puts it forcefully, to keep
things going:

Whenever she comes to call, I grope about

To find some topic that will draw her out,
But owing to her dry and faint replies
The conversation wilts and droops and dies.
In vain one hopes to animate her face
By mentioning the ultimate commonplace.
But sun or shower, even hail or frost,
Are matters she can instantly exhaust.
Meanwhile her visit, painful though it is,
Drags on and on through mute eternities.
[II,v]

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337 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

C61limene's annihilating portraits of the bores confirm, of course, her own baroque
vitality and power of seduction; indeed they enhance it by the contrast they estab-
lish between the dangerous vacuousness ascribed to her subjects and the almost
magical artistry with which she transmutes that supposed emptiness into brilliant
images, breathing life, as it were, into inert corporeal substance. Climitne fights
boredom and melancholy not only by fleeing solitude, as Alceste remarks, but by
upstaging others, enhancing her own reality at their expense. Her wit and theatrical-
ity are never gratuitous. They are entirely at the service of seduction. Unlike Al-
ceste, Cdlimi~ne accepts and exploits the gap between signifier and signified, and be-
tween sign and referent, but she intends, no less than the man with the green rib-
bons, to retain mastery and control of the signifier.

Since she is dependent, as Alceste rightly observes, on the admiration and ap-
plause of her suitors, and since they, in turn, are dependent on the admiration and
applause of their rivals, there is an inordinate amount of competition and aggressiv-
ity in CQlimene's salon. Every one wants to dazzle every one else and to ground his
persona in the admiring look of the Other. Every one's persona is thus dependent on
those it aims to seduce and dominate. The mistress of the salon herself takes re-
venge, in the only way she can - by her wit - on the men whose social rules, though
they are designed to hold her in thrall, she is obliged to observe, and whose adula-
tion she cannot afford not to seek. To Acaste himself, for instance, C61imene cannot

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338 / TI, October 1982

reveal her contempt - she cannot even acknowledge it unequivocally to herself with-
out undermining her entire project of seduction and thereby the foundation of her
own value and reality - but she can humiliate him indirectly by unmasking the
vacuousness of a rival who spends hours at a time spitting into a well to make circles
in the water.

Participating, as courtiers, in Ce1im'ne's condition of dependency, the men share

her resentment and aggressivity. Their inner lack of confidence and self-esteem is re-
lieved by being projected on to their likenesses Timante, Damis, or G&ralde, and
they delight in Ce1imene's expert humiliation of their doubles. But this delight is ac-
companied by repressed anger and by fear of the dangerous female who can inflict
these humiliating defeats. And when the time comes, they are merciless in their pur-
suit of their victim.

The world of the salon is lively, witty, and elegant; it is also empty and cruel. If
Alceste's ideal of a true and necessary order is laughed at as the ideological instru-
ment of ineffectual social and political conservatism, the apparently purely formal
and conventional order of the salons, which is opposed to it, is in turn deftly un-
masked as a scene of domination, oppression, and resentment. The audience's per-
ception of the sorry reality of the salon takes away none of its brilliance or seduc-
tiveness, but it prevents it from serving as a norm with reference to which the comic
character's reversed hierarchy might be set right. At the end of The Misanthrope
Ce1im'ne has been forced off stage, and Alceste has left it in a huff. Neither the
world nor its critic remains to be feted and vindicated.

Historically, Cdlimene's salon is distinguished from the court. Though frequented

by courtiers such as Acaste and Clitandre, it is also a refuge for those, like Alceste,
who are not well viewed at court. Many of its denizens, moreover, are obviously in-
tended to be viewed as aberrant courtiers, in the same way that Dom Juan may be
seen as an aberrant, not a typical grand seigneur, and Cathos and Madelon as aber-
rant pricieuses: precieuses ridicules. Above all, the authority of the mistress of the
salon, unlike that of the master of the court, is visibly fragile, for unlike him, she
cannot deliver on her promises. Thus nothing imputed to the salon need be imputed
to Louis XIV's court. Structurally, however, the relation between the two is uncom-
fortably close, and the entire public world of the Counterreformation state, even in
its modified classical version, is implicated in the unmasking of Ce1imene's baroque
salon. Michelet remarked that Louis XIV, like the characters in Moliere's play, liked
to humiliate his friends and that the play pleased him because he saw it as a series of
satirical portraits of court figures.18 Moliere's comedy, in short, functioned at court
in the same way that Cdlimene's witty and destructive portraits of others functioned
in her salon. The pragmatics and the thematics of the play coincided exactly.

18 Michelet, op. cit., ch. 6, p. 86: "Tous les visages etaient reconnaissables. C'est ce qui amusa le roi et
lui fit supporter la piece."

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339 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

The audience, in sum, were free to enjoy the humiliation of the characters in the
play - the habitues of the salon as well as the misanthrope himself - in the same way
that the latter enjoyed the humiliation of their unacknowledged likenesses. The pla*y
could also function, however, as a mirror revealing the audience to itself. As Sartre
observed in What is Literature? the simplest representation is potentially subversive
in that it opens up a small space of doubt and self-awareness. The audience that
recognizes itself in Ce1imene and her salon is at the same time distanced from itself
and brought to consider the problematics of the play as a whole. For no identifica-
tion is encouraged, either with Alceste or with Ce1imene and her friends, or even
with Philinte, whose accommodating wisdom and eternal sermonizing -recog-
nizable as those of the dottore or pedante of the commedia -are denounced as te-
diously boring by Alceste himself. This Verfremdungseffekt, which audiences seem
to find uncomfortable and to accept only grudgingly, brings Moliere closer in some
respects to Brecht than to the joyful spirit of the commedia. The Misanthrope bears
out Adorno's claim that all art -"and so-called classical no less than its more an-
archical expressions, always was, and is, a force of protest of the humane against the
pressure of dehumanizing institutions, no less than it reflects their objective sub-
stance."19

Among both critics and the public there has always been a tendency to escape
from the uneasiness produced by plays like The Misanthrope and Dom Juan to the
happier world of pure theatricality. Moliere himself was the first to pursue this
course according to Jacques Guicharnaud, and more recently G&rard Defaux. To
Defaux, the comedies-ballets of the end of Moliere's career, and most notably The
Bourgeois Gentleman, represent not only a practical solution that enabled the play-
wright to continue to write comedies after the difficult period of the mid-sixties, but
the ultimate wisdom of the chastened moralist: the transcendence of melancholy in
the pure play of a baroque imagination.

Defaux's position, which I'd like to conclude this paper by commenting on briefly,
is not new in Moliere studies. (After 300 years almost nothing is.) It was anticipated
in the 1840s by Theophile Gautier, who complained of the common neglect of Mo-
liere's "intermezzi of Punchinellos, Trivellinos, Scaramouches, Pantaloons, and Ma-
tassins ... a magical and marvelous world that passes through his comedies with
leaps, songs, and peals of laughter, like crazy fancies passing through a wise and
thoughtful brain." The real Moliere, according to Gautier, is "unknown on our
stage," and he ended his article with an appeal: "Revive for us all those comedies-bal-
lets. .. give us back those charming plays that we never get to see - Le Sicilien ou
I'Amour Peintre, La Princesse d'Elide, Les Faicheux, L'Impromptu de Versailles, Mdli-
certe, Dom Garcie de Navarre" (La Presse, 11.1.1847). Later, in the 1860s, amid the
material achievements of the Second Empire, Gautier again recalled a Moliere he
claimed had been suppressed by the official bourgeois culture of his time - "a joyful

19 Theodor Adorno, 'Theses upon Art and Religion Today" (1945), Repr. in Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 648.

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340 / T, October 1982

impresario of fates galantes, an author of ballet books, an inventor and director of

intermezzi which our rigid classicism persists in neglecting" (Le Moniteur Universel,
25.8.1862). Likewise for Jacques Copeau, in the middle years of the present century,
Moliere is above all the friend and disciple of the mimes and acrobats he frequented
in his bohemian youth, a baroque theatre artist - and not simply a writer - of great
imagination and power: "Author of The Misanthrope and of Tartuffe . .. he re-
mains haunted by a comic poetry in which truth is only a pretext. The fantasy in-
deed the paroxysms of this poetry are capable, in their boundless energy, of releas-
ing hidden potentialities and forcing man, body and soul, into the most extreme
postures."20

For Gautier and Copeau, recalling those inventions of Moliere, which were more
in the spirit of Baroque illusionism or commedia dell'arte and which seemed to
stretch the spectator's imagination more vigorously and freely than character com-
edies bound to the rule of verisimilitude, was almost certainly a way of protesting
against the leaden serieux of the official culture and ideology of bourgeois France.
Where melancholy has been taken over, sentimentalized and institutionalized as the
conscience of the bien pensants, a play like The Misanthrope cannot function crit-
ically, and romantic interpretations of Alceste, inviting the identification of the au-
dience with the role, simply allow the complacent viewer to wallow in his moral
idealism. It isn't hard to sympathize with Gautier's and Copeau's rejection of a Mo-
liere whose supposed natural good sense, taught on the same days, at the same hour,
in all the lycees of France, had become one of the bulwarks of contemporary philis-
tinism. Yet the position they espouse, which in our time seems related to the various
artistic protest movements that can be considered together under the general um-
brella of "art for art's sake," may be only the reverse side of the philistine coin.

The ideological ambiguity of this protest was already apparent in the late eigh-
teenth century in Carlo Gozzi's influential vindication of the gaiety of the old impro-
vised commedia against the literary character comedies of Goldoni. In Gozzi's de-
lightful commedia scenario, The Love of the Three Oranges, presented at the Teatro
San Samuele in Venice in 1761, the young prince Tartaglia (a stock character of the
Venetian commedia) has been filled with the black bile by reading the dreary, pom-
pous, erudite tragedies in Martellian verse (i.e., Alexandrines on the French model)
of the abbe Pietro Chiari, represented in the play by the wicked fairy Morgan (fata
Morgana). The hero of the action is the marvelously nimble and resourceful Truf-
faldino, who has the knack of upsetting everybody's applecart, and thus, un-
consciously, as though guided by a higher law, restoring order to a disorderly
world. Through Truffaldino's action, the prince's melancholy is finally dispelled.
Gozzi was fairly kind to Goldoni in this work, but it was well known in Venice that
the old nobleman's quarrel was not only with the fake seriousness of Chiari but with
the bourgeois character comedies of Goldoni. Even as he correctly sensed the begin-

20 Descotes, Molibre et sa fortune litteraire, pp. 133-34, 147-48.

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341 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

"Madam, I am rather late;

but I was obliged to read
my piece at the house of
the Marchioness."

nings of philistinism in Goldoni's moral sentimentality, however, Gozzi was sup-

porting the essentially conservative, fixist, mythical view of the world represented
by the stock scenarios and unchanging characters of the commedia against the opti-
mistic implication in Goldoni that there is something else besides the endlessly re-
peated, unchangeable, unresolved and unresolvable alternation between tragic and
comic versions of the world.

Gozzi's work was immensely and understandably popular among the German Ro-
mantics, and in E. T. A. Hoffmann's "capriccio" (the author's own term), Princess
Brambilla (1820), the Venetian nobleman's central theme was given a characteristi-
cally Romantic twist. In the eighteenth-century scenario, melancholy, and heavy-

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342 / TI, October 1982

handedness are outside, in the World or the Other, and they are overcome in the En-
lightenment manner by a simple act of negation. In Hoffmann's story, they are part
of the self, and have to be transcended first by ironical self-reflexiveness, then even
beyond the self-consciousness of irony, by the complete liberation realized through
joyful artistic creation. In the mythical story of the Urdarquelle, which is embedded
in the tale, King Ophioch's chronic sadness is changed into mirth when the magician
Hermod makes him see his own reflection mirrored in the surface water of a spring.
The triumph of the commedia dell'arte over the theatre of false pathos in the main
story of Giglio and Giacinta marks a further step on the road to true wisdom. The
actor Giglio Fava is transformed from a vain and mediocre player of pompous roles
in bad tragedies into a brilliant Brighella and Truffaldino after a hallucinating ad-
venture in which, dressed as Captain Pantaloon, he kills his double, a cardboard
puppet, which, on being opened up, is found to be stuffed with the "miserable tragic
verses of a certain abbe Chiari." The cure for melancholy, we are to conclude, lies in
self-transcendence through art.

Its Romantic pedigree does not undo or discredit Defaux's rehabilitation of the late
Moliere - the inventive deviser of comedies-ballets, the poet of the theatre as total
spectacle, the pure artist released by his vivid theatrical imagination from a poten-
tially melancholic preoccupation with social reality and a correspondingly constric-
tive concentration on the literary aspect of the theatrical work. But we should per-
haps consider it- as well as the broader modem attack on the "literary" stage from
which it is probably inseparable - with some circumspection and with a sense of the
historical context in which it is being put forward. The free imagination, as the char-
acter of Jourdain himself makes abundantly clear, can be an accomplice as well as a
critic of oppression, and a prisoner as well as a liberator. The astringent effect of the
sober elegance, the clarity, the humor, the equanimity and the serene rationality
Moliere brought to his cool, critical portrayal of the complexities of social existence
in The Misanthrope seems to me as necessary an artistic experience as the wonder-
fully exhiliarating play of fantasy and imagination to which The Bourgeois Gentle-
man invites us. My last word will not be mine, but Brecht's. It is from one of the de-
lightful verse fables-in this case a modem version of the traditional bird de-
bates - which he wrote in a typically lighthearted yet serious moment:

Es war einmal ein Rabe,

Ein schlauer alter Knabe.
Dem sagte ein Kanari, der
In seinem KAfig sang: Schau her,
Von Kunst
Hast du keinen Dunst.
Der Rabe sagte irgerlich:
Wenn du nicht singen konntest
Wairst du so frei wie ich.21

21 Bertolt Brecht, 'Tierverse," from Kinderlieder, Gedichte, vol. V (1934-41), (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 38.

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343 / THE ART OF MELANCHOLY IN THE MISANTHROPE

Somewhat freely translated, with apologies to the author-

There once was a crow
A sly old fellow.
See here, said a canary,
Singing in its cage, you've nary
A notion of art.
Crow's reply was tart:
With less art you might be
As free as me.

Drawing by Raoul Dufy.

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