Hooked On Literature - Part 3

This discussion I had with my class—and it was a very animated one—provided me with a very simple, elegant, and organic transition to another aspect of the play: its structure. In general, children of the digital age loathe talking about such matters because they seem so arcane, so divorced from their practical realities. But once I convinced them that Orgon was the more dangerous of the two, it was easy to make them understand why the structure of a literary text is so important.  Here the action revolves around the family’s endeavour to destroy Tartuffe in order to save the head of the household from himself and, consequently, to save itself from his religious lunacy.

As I emphasized to my students, the first two acts of the play dwell on the nefarious influence the religious hypocrite exerts over the credulous fool who believes in him unconditionally. We don’t see Tartuffe himself until the third act. This enables Molière to evoke a frightening albeit comic paradox. Tartuffe wields total power over his benefactor, Orgon and, by extension, over the latter’s family. Yet it is Orgon’s naïveté that sustains this power. If Orgon’s judgment were not poisoned by his fanatical belief in his fraudulent hero, he and his family would never be threatened and Tartuffe would have to find another gullible victim to prey on. I then pointed out that in the third and fourth acts Elmire, Orgon’s lovely wife will lead the attack against the religious hypocrite.

She knows that Tartuffe secretly covets her. She will use his obsession with her flesh as leverage against him. She requests a meeting with him in order to get him to agree not to marry Marianne, Orgon’s daughter from a previous marriage. This was one of Orgon’s hair-brained ideas. Naturally, in the presence of the woman he lusts after, his ardent libido breaks through his mask of piety. He ends up confessing his erotic passion for her.

Elmire could have used this confession as blackmail against him. Unfortunately, Orgon’s son, Damis, overhears their conversation and denounces Tartuffe to his father. Far from feeling gratitude towards his son for unmasking the fraud, Orgon is convinced his family is determined to sully the virtue of a holy man. Not only does he refuse to believe the accusations against Tartuffe, he disinherits his son and designates the hypocrite as his sole heir.

Now, as I stressed to my students, Elmire must have recourse to draconian measures. She must set up a sexual ambush for Tartuffe and have her husband witness his idol’s attempt to seduce her. Only a visual experience will save Orgon from his terminal intellectual and moral blindness. The strategy works because Tartuffe’s sensual cravings make him fall into the trap. Outraged, Orgon orders him out of his home. The play could have ended there.

However, as I reminded my students, Orgon had bequeathed all of his possessions to Tartuffe, and so it is the religious hypocrite who orders his benefactor to leave. Moreover, in his incredible naïveté Orgon had entrusted to the care of his false idol incriminating documents that, if uncovered by the government of France, would provide sufficient evidence to condemn him as a traitor to his country. These unexpected plot complications justify a fifth act where Molière adroitly keeps us in suspense until all the issues are resolved in the final scene.

So far so good.