Les femmes savantes

A family is torn apart over a proposed marriage. On one side is mother Philaminte, her sister-in-law Bélise and daughter Armande. All three, enamored of art and science, wish to see Henriette, the youngest of the family, marry the poet Trissotin. On the other hand, father Chrysale and his brother Ariste, good bourgeois with their own interests at heart, want Henriette to marry Clitandre, a young aristocrat well introduced at Court. Behind this comedy of marriage, two conceptions of life, a priori irreconcilable, are revealed and clash.

It has long been thought that in Les Femmes savantes, Molière was wickedly mocking women's desire for emancipation, with a very misogynistic brutality. Yet the play is infinitely more complex and ambiguous, and first and foremost lets us hear all the perversity and violence of family quarrels, between patriarchal oppression, bourgeois order and dreams of other possible lives.