Elmire and the Erotics of the Ménage à Trois in Molière’s Tartuffe

Abstract

At first sight, the character of Elmire in Moliere's Tartuffe appears to have much to commend her, and modern critics and theatergoers generally warm to her: she is attractive, stylish, independent, smart, resourceful, in many ways a modern woman. (l) Even older, more patriarchally inclined critics have generally been slow to condemn her, (2) yet I would like to argue that rather than being a female exemplar who helps resolve the Tartuffe situation as is often stated, her function within the play is in many ways a disruptive one; she is a catalyst to the disintegration of the Orgon household and in practice contributes little toward the resolution of a plot that teeters on the brink of a tragic outcome. Here, I would like to restore some of the shock value to the character of Elmire, a shock value that has become lost over the centuries, overshadowed in particular by the even greater shock value of the provocative religious dimension to the play. Yet it is surely no coincidence that the anonymous author of the Lettre sur la comedie de L'Imposteur (1667) defends the play against the twin accusations of attacking true religion and of promoting adultery. But the second of these continues to be overlooked in favor of the first. I shall insist on the extraordinary daring of Elmire's plan to trap Tartuffe in the famous table scene of which I shall propose a new reading. In particular, I would like to investigate the complex erotic overtones in the Elmire-Orgon-Tartuffe triangle, (3) and to suggest that Elmire would be very well-equipped to embark on an extramarital affair with a suitor whom she found more attractive than Tartuffe. We must begin by asking the question who and what is Elmire? She is something of an anomaly in Moliere's theater. There are famously few mothers or mother-figures in Moliere; (4) and Elmire is one of only two noteworthy step-mothers in his corpus, the other being Beline in Le Malade imaginaire, who is straightforwardly and stereotypically grasping. Elmire is not the wicked stepmother in any obvious sense, neither is she the sensible bourgeois wife or the henpecking domineering wife, still less a shrew. Nor is Elmire a femme savante or a precieuse (indeed she explicitly rejects the precieux ethic). Rather, she is a mondaine who enjoys an unusual degree of latitude from her thanks, in large part, to Orgon's displaced obsession with Tartuffe. It is worth noting that Orgon does not expect Elmire to become a devote; rather, his extreme and blinkered form of devotion has taught him not to pay much attention to his wife.s And this seems to suit her perfectly, as it brings with it many attendant freedoms, including relative independence of action and the ability to have and keep secrets. One of the keys to Elmire's enigmatic character may lie with how her role was rewritten in the years between the original 1664 version of the play and the 1669 version that has made its way down to us. (6) It is thought that the original may have been closer to a typical tale of cuckoldry, i.e., that the Tartuffe figure and the Elmire figure did indeed--or were at the very least sorely tempted to--have a sexual relationship. (7) Michaut attributes Elmire's ambiguity precisely to the changes that the play underwent: il y a eu deux Elmire, l'Elmire coupable, ou au moins tentee, du premier Tartuffe, l'Elmire irreprochable du dernier (124). But even in the final version, she is far from irreproachable, for, as Eustis comments: having started out seduced (or willing to be) in the original version, she remains somewhat brazen in the midst of her new, self-proclaimed virtue, which is at odds with the situation that Moliere finally creates for her and in which, constantly declaring that one should not trouble a with complaints of galants (3.4.1032-35, 3.5.1067-72; 4.3.1335-36), she offers herself to Tartuffe in order to disabuse her husband (149). In order to pursue this line of inquiry further, we must now turn to the 1669 published version of the play. …