— How is the institution of marriage treated in Tartuffe? What are some of the models or ideals of marriage that are raised by Moliere or his characters?
Throughout the play, Moliere brings up multiple examples of how institutional marriage was in his time. To simply word it, the husband was the king of the family, and decided everything. One example of this would be when Orgon was to choose who his daughter, Mariane, would marry. To continue on the thought of Orgon’s daughter, Orgon decided to break his promise to marry Mariane to Valere, the man she loved, and offered her to Tartuffe, a man hated by everyone else in the family. The second example would be when Mariane didn’t fight Orgon’s decision to marry her and Tartuffe. She simply said that her father was the shot-caller and then basically told her lover she hates him and never wants to see him again. The third example was during the scene when Orgon and his wife Elmire made a plan to expose Tartuffe. The deal was that Elmire had to flirt with Tartuffe and make him advance on her. Shortly after, he did, but Orgon didn’t stop them. The only thing that pissed him off was when Tartuffe said Orgon would do anything he wishes. This showed how a wife was portrayed in the 17th century.
All of these examples perfectly painted what a marriage was back then, and in addition showed how the words of the man of the land were godly, and couldn’t be disputed.
