[Mould is an American educator and critic who specializes in seventeenth-century French theater. In the following essay, he examines Molière 's treatment of the paradoxical relationship between illusion and reality in his plays.]

Molière is the first French dramatist to use the paradox of illusion and reality to express a sophisticated world view. His work transformed a dramatic device into a powerful statement of belief in man's ability to create his own universe. The distinction between illusion and reality forms the basis of theatrical experience, implicit in all drama, and explicit at certain moments in dramatic history. The earliest Greek plays used masks and other visible exaggerations partially to emphasize the nonreality of the spectacle; Plautus and Terence often had one character disguise himself to deceive another. Early French drama and the commedia dell'arte also offered on occasion primitive plays within plays, and the baroque theater of Rotrou's Saint Genest (1646) and Corneille's Illusion comique (1636) shows a renewed interest in the device. Although Rotrou had employed the play within a play to blur the distinction between tragic reality and the illusion of tragedy on stage, and although Corneille had used the device to excellent comic effect while enhancing the aesthetic impact of his comedy, it was Molière who used the play within a play to create a new perception of reality. "Corneille's subject [wrote Robert J. Nelson in his Play within a Play (1958)] is not the theatricality of life but the theatricality of the theater…. Sure of his values, the artist does not confuse appearance and reality except to the extent that he deliberately does so in order to please."

The seventeenth century had a real passion for the theater, perhaps because everyday life was itself so theatrical. The tribunes of Gothic and Renaissance cathedrals became the theater loges of the Jesuit-style church of Saint Paul-Saint Louis. Extraordinary etiquette and polite circumlocutions veiled genuine feelings. High titles and great offices were costly, empty charges. Versailles was a gigantic theater, the monarch its chief actor, the Hall of Mirrors its symbolic deception. People from all walks of life went often to the theater, and in real life frequently acted as if they were playing roles. The reality of this theatrical illusion was prevalent in human activities and is mirrored in Molière's theater. His audience liked to recognize on stage representations of characters and situations familiar to their daily life, yet they wished the theater to be far enough removed from the reality they knew to be comic. Molière's theater created a link between the reality of illusion in life and the illusion of reality in the theater. His plays are often very realistic in their portrayal of characters and social mores; the illusion closely resembles the reality of daily existence. It was, of course, precisely this realism which so delighted and infuriated Molière's contemporaries.

The comic universe is based in part on the ironic disparity between illusion and reality. Molière invents doctors who do not cure, a sick man who is not ill, a misanthrope in love with a coquette, and, for Tartuffe, a Monsieur Loyal who "porte un air bien déloyal." Eventually, the comic spectacle created through interaction among the characters will be generally superseded by the comedy of illusion resulting from self-deception. The Mascarille of L'Etourdi is the prototype for Scapin, adding ruse to plot, but always maintaining a clear distinction between the real and the imaginary world. The Mascarille of Les Précieuses ridicules refuses to leave his fantasy world where he is a cultivated marquis, just as Monsieur Jourdain remains convinced at the end of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme that he is a true "mamamouchi." The hypocrisy practised by Tartuffe, with its creation of sinister illusions, is another form of Molière's investigation of the problem of illusion and reality. Finally, the process finds its culmination in Le Misanthrope where Alceste, the iconoclast, is so self-deceived that his concept of reality is itself an illusion.

Molière has several approaches to the paradox of illusion and reality, and these approaches become more sophisticated as he matures. At first, like his predecessors, Molière uses it principally as a theatrical device to amuse, with only accidental deeper import. The play within a play is the principal manifestation of this early approach, and it first appears in L'Etourdi (1658). Mascarille (his name means, appropriately, "little mask") is a valet serving the love of his master Lélie for the beautiful Célie. The servant piles playlet upon playlet, creating illusions almost more quickly than they can be dispelled. Like a medieval meneur du jeu, Mascarille tries to induce others to play roles, but he is continually foiled by the honest naiveté of his master. Lélie, like Pridamant in L'Illusion comigue, is always the spectator, so the audience is never completely deluded by Mascarille's playlets. Lélie tries time after time to join in his valet's illusions, but he is incapable of it; he has an indirect role, and rather than acting in Mascarille's spectacles, he reacts to them from outside. This helps the spectator to remain very certain as to the line between illusion and reality. That clarity occurs frequently in Molière's theater: Toinette in Le Malade imaginaire (III. 8 and 10) is obviously in disguise as a doctor; the same is true of Clitandre in L'Amour médecin. Only the fools Argan and Géronte are deceived in the latter play, just as only old Argante and Géronte are fooled by the fourberies of Scapin. In the end, Lélie wins Célie, not through any of the increasingly theatrical machinations of Mascarille, but by virtue of his honesty and inability to feign. All of Mascarille's schemes are pointless: the goal is reached without him. Lélie, completely open and truly incapable of deception, cannot function in a world of illusion, but triumphs with the weapon of truth. If the later Scapin wins out through trickery more malicious than Mascarille's, it is perhaps due to the progressive darkening of Molière's attitudes. Despite the possible significance of the victory of naiveté in L'Etourdi, the real function of these playlets is dramatic and not ethical. A play within a play renders the main drama more "real," because the spectator's awareness of illusion is transferred to the second play. In later comedies such as Tartuffe and Le Malade imaginaire, the play within a play presents an illusion which leads to the truth. Elmire, pretending affection for Tartuffe, convinces her husband of the hypocrite's treacherous nature. Argan, feigning death, learns the true sentiments his wife and his daughter hold for him. In both cases, an illusion has been constructed in order to clarify reality.

When Molière approaches illusion on a more significant level, his attitude is often highly critical. In Tartuffe we are no longer dealing with light-hearted machinations designed to serve young love but with vicious hypocrisy whose goal is self-advancement and universal destruction. In the hands of Tartuffe, truth is twisted into lies; he convinces Orgon that his own son, Damis, has falsely accused the hypocrite:

Vous fiez-vous, mon frère, à mon extérieur?
Et, pour tout ce qu'on voit, me croyez-vous meilleur?
Non, non, vous vous laissez tromper à l'apparence,
…
Mais la vérité pure est que je ne vaux rien. (III. 6)

Only Tartuffe is dishonest; the other characters could say, with Mme Pernelle, "Je vous parle un peu franc, mais c'est là mon humeur" (I. 1). Gradually, the construction of appearances which forms Tartuffe's existence leads even the honest Orgon to equivocate. The casuistry of Tartuffe causes Orgon first to lie to his brother-in-law Cléante about Mariane's marriage, and then to "faire des serments contre la vérité" (V. 1), swearing that he does not have papers which, for all practical purposes, he does possess. Tartuffe's world of deception leads others, especially Orgon, to be incapable of distinguishing appearance from reality. Orgon believes that he, too, can create a world by the sheer effort of his will: "Mais je veux que cela soit une vérité" (II. 1). His attempt to fuse illusion and reality is doomed, for the fusion would be based on transforming his daughter's affection for Valère into distaste, and her loathing for Tartuffe into love. Mythopoesis can function only when the new universe corresponds to the desires of its participants; that is, the illusion created by Tartuffe for Orgon and Mme Pernelle is acceptable to them because they wish to find a person of his sort of piety. It matters little that Cléante is able "du faux avec le vrai faire la différence" (I. 5); the world built by Tartuffe can be destroyed only by the suspension of belief on the part of Orgon.

The dénouement of Tartuffe, like the endings of so many of Molière's plays, has often been attacked for its lack of verisimilitude. It is, indeed, fantastic that the King's justice should descend on all, condemning Tartuffe and pardoning Orgon. Such extravagant scenes, which mark the endings not only of Tartuffe, but of L'Ecole des femmes, L'Avare, Les Fourberies de Scapin and L'Etourdi, are sometimes thought to be due to the impoverished imagination of their author. Mascarille may well say:

C'est qu'en fait d'aventure il est très-ordinaire
De voir gens pris sur mer par quelque Turc consaire,
Puis être à leur famille à point nommé rendus,
Après quinze ou vingt ans qu'on les a crus perdus.
(L'Etourdi, IV. 1)

There is nothing at all ordinary about such adventures. In each of these dénouements Molière has created a new illusion. Such extravagance underlines with heavy irony the very impossibility of happiness and balance in a universe dominated by monomania and hypocrisy; a huge and improbable illusion is constructed in the final scene, so that the comedy may end happily. These dénouements, springing from recognition scenes, are dependent on events beyond the control of the characters, but the final scenes of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire rise out of the obsessions of the major characters. Monsieur Jourdain will live forever in the belief that he has attained the noble rank of "mamamouchi"; Argan is convinced of the validity of his farcical initiation into the medical fraternity. In both cases, happiness for the other characters, especially the young lovers, can be attained only by acceding to the illusions of the monomaniac and by constructing a final, everlasting illusion around him. Illusion becomes the only way to bear the horror of a reality which would dictate that Jourdain's daughter marry an unknown nobleman she cannot love, and that Argan's Angélique be wedded to the atrocious Thomas Diafoirus. The men who give themselves over to these illusions have departed from a reality which rejects their foibles. Fortunately for them, both Monsieur Jourdain and Argan are in a position to create their own reality; it suffices that each believe his obsession to be satisfied, for all of the results to occur as if that illusion were true. Such, of course, is not the case with the valet Mascarille of Les Précieuses ridicules, described by his master as "un extravagant qui s'est mis dans la tete de vouloir faire l'homme de condition" (I. 1). In this first play (1659) where Molière shows a fusion between illusion and reality, the servant enters so well into his role of foppish marquis, that the blows and insults heaped on him at the end of the play do not really seem to disabuse him. He is so taken with his role that he confuses illusion and reality, and refuses to abandon his assumed identity: "Je vois bien qu'on n'aime ici que la vaine apparence, et qu'on ne considère point la vertu toute nue" (sc. 16). Nonetheless, valet or master, mamamouchi or doctor, Molière's men will often insist on living in a world where they have fused their illusions with reality in order to create a bearable existence.

In some of his most sophisticated plays, the dramatist Molière joins his characters in operating a fusion between illusion and reality. Now, there is no one left on stage who does not deal with nonreality to considerable extent. Amphitryon (1668) is the story of a complicated illusion created by Jupiter to seduce the faithful Alcmène. Jupiter disguised as Amphitryon, and Mercure as the valet Sosie, play their roles perfectly. Until the very end, neither god does anything to break the illusion they have created; unlike Tartuffe, Mascarille (Les Précieuses ridicules), or Sganarelle (badly disguised as a doctor in Le Médecin maigre lui), they remain quite in character. The gods have created a new reality, accepted by all the characters save Amphitryon. The general's inability to accept the new reality leads to his ridiculous posture in the scenes forming the second half of Act III. It is Jupiter himself, the master illusion maker, who tries to re-establish the boundaries between the old reality and the new. In his attempt to appropriate some of Alcmène's love, he tries to force her to distinguish between her husband (Amphitryon) and her lover (Jupiter). But Jupiter's illusion is perfect, and Alcmène refuses to make a distinction which seems to her unrelated to any needs her husband might have. Jupiter, in the unusual role of both magician and iconoclast, is unable to re-establish a reality which he has definitively altered by the injection of imperceptible illusion.

It is, unsurprisingly, in Le Misanthrope that the fusion between illusion and reality is most complete. Like Amphitryon, Alceste is ridiculous because he refuses to accept illusion as reality. Here, the illusion is much more universal, for it includes the very foundations of human society. As Philinte says: "Tout marche par cabale et par pur intérêt; / Ce n'est plus que la ruse aujourd'hui qui l'emporte" (V. 2). Philinte also suggests the necessity of accepting illusion and hypocrisy as a reality forming the basis for social existence:

Lorsqu'un homme vous vient embrasser avec joie,
Il faut bien le payer de la même monnoie,
Répondre, comme on peut, à ses empressements,
Et rendre offre pour offre et serments pour serments.
(I. 1)