Moliere's Tartuffe - Book Report/Review Example

Religion, as portrayed by Moliere, was another type of absolutism that stifled critical thought and freedom of expression. For purposes of this essay, it is Moliere's interposition of a sort of religious absolutism into a familial absolutism that best illustrates the dangers of absolutism in any form. The conventional wisdom is that Moliere sought to point out religious hypocrisy through Tartuffe; a more reasoned and nuanced approach would probe deeper and conclude that Moliere was more interested in the dangers of absolutism in any form than with religion more specifically.

Religion was Moliere's means to an end rather than the end-criticism itself. Religion, as will be demonstrated, was also perceived by Moliere as a threat to the monarchy and the wise leadership of France. This essay will argue that the pattern of conflicts created by Moliere, and best exemplified through the relationships cultivated by Tartuffe, were avoidable in large part but for the blind reliance of certain characters on unproven assumptions underlying certain types of absolutism. More specifically, the Tartuffe approach created by Moliere demonstrated how absolutism could be manipulated by unscrupulous characters, how people's lives could be placed in jeopardy by relying on absolutist principles to the exclusion of critical thought, and how deception could be used to create divisions among even the closest family relations.

The pattern of conflicts, therefore, is almost always underpinned by the tension between a governing absolutist mode of thought conflicting with those whom would attempt to think critically. 18th Century France: A Pervasive Absolutism As a preliminary matter, in order to establish the proposition that Tartuffe was more critical of absolutism than religion per se, it is necessary to place the play within its proper historical context. It is therefore important to identify Moliere's audience if one is to understand the nature of his literary criticisms; as stated by Baker, The audience for which Moliere wrote Tartuffe was a worldly sector of the social elite in Paris in the latter third of the Seventeenth Century.

Indeed, its original audience was the royal court at Louis XIV's great palace Versailles. At least officially, that society remained unabashedly patriarchal: husbands and fathers exercised sovereign authority over their dependents (1996: n.p.) This quotation indicates a number of important historical and contextual points. First, the audience was the social and cultural elite of the time. More specifically, the royal court would be exposed to the play, the portrayal of the dangers of relying upon religious orthodoxy uncritically would be presented to these elites, and the character hiding behind the sacred cloak of religious devotion would be the scoundrel and the deceptive character.

Second, this play took place in a society that prided itself on an "unabashedly patriarchal" social order. Thus, royalty, the church, and the family were institutions that were revered and criticism of them was bound to stir up resentment and animosity. Moliere was, quite clearly, aware of the risks associated with his play; his social and cultural setting, for instance, has been noted for its "climate of social and religious persecution" (Tartuffe by Moliere: Political and Historical Context, 2005: 1).

In short, the setting was a very dangerous one