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.