The Learned Women

📖 The Scoop

Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies) is a comedy by Moli�re in five acts, written in verse. A satire on academic pretention, female education, and pr�ciosit� (French for preciousness), it was one of his most popular comedies. It premiered at the Th��tre du Palais-Royal on 11 March 1672.Two young people, Henriette and Clitandre, are in love, but in order to marry, they must overcome an obstacle: the attitude of Henriette's family. Her sensible father and uncle are in favour of the marriage; but unfortunately her father is under the thumb of his wife, Philaminte. And Philaminte, supported by Henriette's aunt and sister, wishes her to marry Trissotin, a "scholar" and mediocre poet with lofty aspirations, who has these three women completely in his thrall. For these three ladies are "learned"; their obsession in life is learning and culture of the most pretentious kind, and Trissotin is their special prot�g� and the fixture of their literary salon.The Learned Ladies" was the last-but-one of Moli�re's plays and the last of his great rhyming-couplet comedies. Its predecessors had used the artificiality of the style to add point and irony to some of Moli�re's most trenchant examinations of aspects of the human condition. For lighter-hearted satire, sending up specific behaviour rather than the general human condition, Moli�re tended to use prose. "The Learned Ladies" has the best of both worlds: it satirises a specific fad (intellectual pretension) but - perhaps because its subject requires an appropriately "high style" - is written in rhyming verse. Targeting cultural snobbery, "The Learned Ladies" mocks the fashion, current among upper-class ladies, for holding "salons" to discuss such "learned" matters as the arts, philosophy and science. The joke, to Moli�re's audience, was not merely intellectual snobbery, but that the snobs were women. This was an age when matters of the mind were, in theory, still the province of men; upper-class women were expected to be charming, witty, interested in the world and its doings, but not scholars. The majority of the aristocratic ladies in Moli�re's own audience probably took this view and shared the opinion of the men, that "learned ladies" and their gatherings were fools, fit targets for the pedants, charlatans and other confidence-tricksters who preyed on them. "The Learned Ladies" played for a couple of dozen performances (a successful "run" for court plays at the time) and attracted none of the hostility and scandal of Moli�re's more contentious works. This French-to-English translation is by A. R. Waller and is scrupulously accurate to Moli�re's meaning.

Genre: Literary Collections / European / French (fancy, right?)