I didn’t really get to finish everything I wanted to say in my last post. Sure, Dorine is an amazing character, and yes she is my favorite character, but we can’t forget Elmire. Elmire is the wife of Orgon, and another strong female lead. Unlike Dorine, who is the leading voice of reason at the start, Elmire shines during the second half of the play. It’s almost as if she sees Dorine’s failure in convincing Orgon through reason, so she decides to follow a different route. She is obviously well aware of her own existence as a beautiful woman, and what that means in society – a dangerous temptation. She is cunning enough and proud enough to use her ax-like beauty to do what Dorine could not. She seduces Tartuffe in front of her husband in an attempt to show him the truth. Even though she has the intelligence and the evidence, she needs to use more if she wants to get past the societal wall labeled “woman”.
In the end she succeeded in revealing Tartuffe’s true nature, but the credit was not given to her. This really made me think of how mothers work so hard for their family and are just taken for granted without proper appreciation. She, the mother of the house, offered up her body to save her family, and yet all the thunder is given to the prince.
It got me thinking of how patriarchal our society is and brings to mind the ending of Lu Xun’s “Medicine” where the mother of the revolutionary and the mother of the sick child meet. Even though they were complete strangers and one of them had even used the death of the other’s child to save her own, somehow a bond between the two of them formed. They were connected simply from their mutual existence as mothers. It was as if Lu Xun was saying that only mothers could achieve such a kind of togetherness in times of strife and violent revolution.
Both cases also really call my attention towards the fact that in both works, the women do not involve themselves in the violence or greed that men seem to engage in. Elmire acts with the family’s safety in mind while Orgon acts out of vanity. The mother acts to save her son while the men are enthralled by the revolution.
I like how you go back to the origins to discuss what called your attention at the beginning of class. I was consider transforming this into a page on the origins of this blog: how you came to choose this assignment option and this theme, your interest and investment in this topic. Include the bit on Tartuffe, but also develop how the topic correlates to your interests more generally. It would be a good way to set up the context for the blog.
Multiple pages, links, design elements all count here. You need a blog that’s more than a list of posts. And def. think about ways to bring the posts up to the present in terms of class materials.