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Women in seventeenth century France enjoyed few rights, particularly regarding the choice of a husband. This book explores how Molière's comedies presented women using one of the few assets they had: their mastery of words, particularly the rhetoric of irony, to frustrate the plans of fathers, guardians, and other authority figures.
List of contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I: Schools for Marriage
- 1: L'École des maris: The School of Preterition
- 2: L'École des femmes: Idiocy and After
- Part II: Courtship and Therapy
- 3: Le Misanthrope: Two Versions of Pastoral
- 4: Don Garcie de Navarre: Female Reason and Male Pathology
- Part III: Freedom to Marry
- 5: Les Femmes savantes: Role Reversal and Tyranny
- 6: George Dandin: The Marriage Market
- 7: Monsieur de Pourceaugnac: Desire as Defence
- 8: Les Précieuses ridicules: The Demand for Courtship
- Part IV: Being Married
- 9: Le Tartuffe: Negotiating for Freedom
- 10: Amphitryon: The Problem of the Perfect Lover
- Conclusion: Adversaries or Allies? Don Juan and Célimène
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
After his Ph.D. at Yale University, John Lyons taught French and Italian at Dartmouth College, where he also served as chair of the Comparative Literature Program. During part of that time he was also Director of the Centre Américain du Cinéma in Paris. In 1987 he joined the Department of French at the University of Virginia, becoming Commonwealth Professor in 1992. His research has been funded by the NEH, the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2007 he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.
Summary
Women in seventeenth century France enjoyed few rights, particularly regarding the choice of a husband. This book explores how Molière's comedies presented women using one of the few assets they had: their mastery of words, particularly the rhetoric of irony, to frustrate the plans of fathers, guardians, and other authority figures.
Additional text
Lyons's lucid study is structured in such a way that individual plays receive their own chapter, making it an instructive scholarly and pedagogical companion that will enable less-known plays by Molière to be taught and studied and new light to be shed on his canonical works.
