Hypocrisy Of Religion In Tartuffe

While reading Tartuffe, I was constantly dumbfounded by the prevalence in the world today of Moliere’s, comedically portrayed, accusations regarding ignorance in arranged marriage, social class dynamics and religious hypocrisy. Moliere created the characters to the complete contrast to what society saw them as, which was intriguing and comedic. He also displayed the average practices, such as planned marriage, to be disgraceful and shameful. Lastly, but most prevalently, Moliere saturated the hypocrisy of religion by later in the story revealing the religious character’s deceitful and malign nature. In this essay, I will be using historic and literary theory to examine Moliere’s interesting views of such practices and the satire involved. Moliere

Many fathers in that day in age, especially those belonging to the upper-class, had arranged marriages for their daughters and Moliere’s blow to planned marriages most likely greatly upset them. For a man to come and tell the public what they are doing or what they have done is seen as a comedy, is rather upsetting and degrading to say the least. During the time period of when Tartuffe was written, planned marriages were prevalent, but mostly only in the upper-class. Women who descended from a wealthy family, was most commonly arranged a marriage in order to sustain wealth and land. When individualism and free thinking came about, women began to urn for true love in a husband. Many parents in the world today still plan marriages for their children. For example, the members of Indian culture still practices arranged

The topics discussed in Tartuffe would follow literature all the way to today. All literature today was rooted from the philosophies and works published during the Enlightenment, especially the works of Pluto. Robert Browning’s, My Last Duchess, was written two centuries after Tartuffe, discusses the issue of marriage, and also the superiority of men to women, a topic subtly mentioned in Tartuffe. Perhaps had Moliere never republished Tartuffe the world of literature would still lack satire and courage to test the common held beliefs of