Molière’s L’École des femmes and the Work of Accessories

Abstract

In Molière’s L’École des femmes, fashion accessories—the small and mobile flourishes that festoon an outfit—circulate among characters in ways that limn the fault lines between the sexes and generations that Molière’s comedy explores. As Molière deploys accessories in the comic and sometimes deeply troubling interchanges between the bumbling old jaloux and the absurdly innocent ingenue, accessories embody but also undercut Arnolphe’s conception of women, marriage, and power. Accessories likewise accompany Agnès’s emotional awakening and concomitant intellectual development from accessory to actor. In other words, accessories in L’École des femmes distill the play’s central conflicts and articulate many of its animating cultural concerns. This article follows how these apparent trifles articulate the tensions propelling the play’s marriage plot, while also offering a vantage point for reflecting on broader (philosophical, ontological) cultural concerns that become legible in the ways fashion accessories constituted, blurred, transformed, and connected bodies.

Keywords:

• Molière
• L’École des femmes
• accessories
• clothing
• theater
• seventeenth-century France

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Juliette Cherbuliez, Noah Guynn, and Chloe Hogg and the two anonymous readers at Symposium for their generous questions, corrections, and insights, which have helped me improve this article conceptually, stylistically, and theoretically, and which have brought joy to the work.

Notes

1 Without highlighting the word “accessory,” Evelyn Welch and Juliet Claxton nonetheless use three accessories as exemplars of what they call “easy innovation in early modern Europe,” a class of items that offers quick and transitory transformation, and thus “challenge[s] our conventional notions of how fashions were formed and disseminated” (88). Aileen Ribeiro emphasizes the ever-increasing importance of detachable elements in fashionable dress: “The basic fabric was only the beginning of a suit or dress, and the fashionable customer needed accessories or trimmings. By the middle of the [eighteenth] century, women’s dress was increasingly dominated by decorative trimmings such as ribbons, lace and silk flowers; such trimmings or agréments were made and sold in special shops or warehouses in Paris” (59).

2 The 1674 Mercure galant comments how fringe precipitously fell out of style following a revival of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac: “Chacun allait se charger de Franges, et cette Mode prenait déjà un assez bon train; mais depuis que le nouveau Monsieur de Pourceaugnac en a paru accablé de deux ou trois mille aunes, chacun commence à s'en défaire” (VI. 268–9).

3 “Accessoire” could also denote supernumeraries or gig workers in a theater production.

4 The relationship between people and clothes explored by Jones and Stallybrass, for example, intersects a considerable body of recent scholarship engaging the imbrication between people and things. In the conclusion to Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Will Fisher notes a tension between a developing and eventually dominant conceptualization of the indivisible, atom-like subject discernable in the philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes and beyond, and a persistent “vision of the self as a kind of prosthetic god” (167). Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park contextualize how “the increased tendency toward reflectiveness about personhood” from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries necessarily includes reflection on the “notion of the supplement, of what augments, extends, or enhances the person” (Jacobson and Park 2–3), while Lynn Festa argues that the productive boundaries between people, things, and animals, engaged through the practice of fiction, are constitutive of Enlightenment understandings of humanity.

5 Ellen McClure pursues the related question of how Molière uses objects to explore the problem of idolatry (182–95).

6 The number of styles featured in the magazine was so excessive that in 1673 the editor commented, “chacun doit demeurer d'accord que leur nombre [de modes] ne diminue rien de leur agrément” (308). On fashion in the Mercure galant see Carson; Davis; DeJean, 46–59; Steinberger 51–52; Vincent.

7 In 1672, for example, the magazine describes in great detail the favored trimming on fans, which have just come back into fashion: “La bordure de la plupart des Eventails dont on s'est servi depuis qu'on a commencé à les reprendre, est de Point de France peint, et sert de tour aux cartouches dans lesquels les Peintres mettent à leur ordinaire ce qui leur vient dans l'imagination” (277).

8 The V&A “A History of Pockets” dates the incorporation of sewn-in pockets to seventeenth-century men’s costumes, while Rebecca Unsworth finds evidence for earlier attached pockets. In their rich history of women’s tie-on pockets Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux argue that in the eighteenth century, in terms of fashion history the period roughly beginning at the time of Molière’s play, pockets trace and facilitate the increasing opportunities for the kind of female autonomy Arnolophe is trying to foreclose: “the mobility made possible by pockets turned them into significant instruments for women’s appropriation of space. Armed with their pockets, women could navigate a variety of spaces […]. Their portability allowed her to move unencumbered and with a degree of self-sufficiency, making pockets essential to her participation in various commercial, cultural and intellectual activities” (143–44).

9 In Dutch still-life paintings the purse was sometimes depicted as a coded reference to female genitalia, as it would function in the famous scene in Freud’s Dora.

10 Lynn Festa notes that “While the glove as a signifier of refinement serves as the polite buffer between the too immediate contact with another’s flesh, it also serves as proxy for it” (“Things with Kid Gloves” 134).

11 For Claire Haru Crowston, the eponymous revendeuse in Florent Carton Dancourt’s 1692 play “La femme d’intrigues” figures the logic of market exchange and the function of credit (121).

12 For Michael Call, in choosing Horace based solely on the criteria of “a pleasure that has no need for intellectual justification” and the appeal of love rather than on any kind of internalized moral or religious framework, “Agnès bears a strong resemblance to Molière’s ideal spectator as described by Dorante in La Critique” (63).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Goldstein

Claire Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of French & Italian at the University of California, Davis. Her book Vaux & Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures and Accidents that Made Modern France was published in 2008 with the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is currently at work on a book manuscript on popular reactions to comets in the early years of Louis XIV's reign. Her current research also examines accessories and the limits of the human in early-modern France.