Everyone else in high school was obsessed with Ophelia. I…
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Everyone else in high school was obsessed with Ophelia. I was fixated on Bélise in Les Femmes Savantes!
When people discuss memorable women in literature, the same names tend to come up: Ophelia, Emma Bovary, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina. I have always been more interested in the women who fall outside that conversation — characters the text, the other characters, or the audience are invited to treat as ridiculous, undesirable, foolish, or simply unimportant.
One of those women, for me, is Bélise in Molière’s Les Femmes savantes. I have not forgotten her since I first read the play in high school.
Bélise is the easy target. She is vain, eccentric, soaked in novels, and convinced that men are secretly in love with her. She is Chrysale’s sister, Henriette’s aunt: the woman of the older generation who never married and has built a private theatre in which she is still the object of every glance. She is a passionate, romantic woman, but in her case, romanticism is mocked. The more firmly a man says he does not love her, the more refined she finds his homage.
How can she not? In this society, women like her were brought up from a very young age to be pleasant. As a girl, she has been fed with dreams of suitors and love. But then the years pass, no one comes towards her, and she sees her friends, her cousins, and now the younger generation being courted and proposed to, while for her there is a terrifying void. There is no one.
The scene that makes her famous is Act 1, Scene 4. Clitandre comes to her for help. He loves Henriette and wants an ally in the house. He barely begins before she stops him. She has already put him on her list of lovers. He may adore her, she says, but he must not speak it:
Aimez-moi, soupirez, brûlez pour mes appas ;
Mais qu’il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas.
It is a perfect précieux law: desire is permitted only if it remains unspoken. When Clitandre names Henriette, Bélise is delighted at what she views as a clever detour. She blushes, congratulates her own modesty, and refuses to hear another word. Left alone, he gives the audience its cue: “Diantre soit de la folle avec ses visions !”
The joke is that she is deluded. No suitors come. Time has already chosen other women. But I keep returning to a simpler question: why is that funny? Why is a woman’s torture a joke to be laughed at?
There is something unprotected about a woman who cannot bear to live in a world where she is not desired. We sympathize, almost automatically, with the heroine who loves and is refused. Bélise’s case is the reverse. She invents love because she cannot survive its absence. There is no one to choose her, not even to look at her. The fantasy is not arrogance first. It is a shelter.
Unlike the conventional romantic heroine, she gets no resolution. She does not receive the man, the declaration, or the last-act correction that would let her step back into reality with dignity. Henriette will be loved in the ordinary way. Armande, who once had Clitandre and sent him away, at least possessed something she can lose. Bélise remains Bélise: unloved, untouched, watching love settle on her generation and then on the next, still translating every room she enters into a novel in which she matters.
I do not think Molière wrote her as a tragic heroine. The comedy needs her ridiculousness, and her chimères are part of the play’s larger satire on women who prefer systems to the world in front of them. But a modern reader is allowed to see what the laughter uses up. Under the visions is a woman who wanted to be desirable and found no safe way to say so. A fragile feminine soul who does not understand rejection and, to survive it, creates an imaginary world where she is the desired one. That is more than delusion. It is herself balancing her soul against the immense pain and suffering inside her.
That is what interests me about overlooked women in literature. Who are we instructed to laugh at, dismiss, or look past — and what happens if we stop laughing long enough to look at them?
For me, Bélise is one of them. I do not believe she ever set out to be a laughingstock. Around her, love is being arranged, refused, bargained over, fulfilled. She stands in the same house and keeps building a secret court of suitors, because the alternative is to admit that the court is empty. No one came for her. A whole life devoid of love, of male interest, just scorn and mockery.
If that is comedy, it is comedy with a huge grief inside it. I read her as a tragic figure wearing the mask the play handed her, whose only curse was to want love. And that is why her story has stuck with me ..
#entertainment
When people discuss memorable women in literature, the same names tend to come up: Ophelia, Emma Bovary, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina. I have always been more interested in the women who fall outside that conversation — characters the text, the other characters, or the audience are invited to treat as ridiculous, undesirable, foolish, or simply unimportant.
One of those women, for me, is Bélise in Molière’s Les Femmes savantes. I have not forgotten her since I first read the play in high school.
Bélise is the easy target. She is vain, eccentric, soaked in novels, and convinced that men are secretly in love with her. She is Chrysale’s sister, Henriette’s aunt: the woman of the older generation who never married and has built a private theatre in which she is still the object of every glance. She is a passionate, romantic woman, but in her case, romanticism is mocked. The more firmly a man says he does not love her, the more refined she finds his homage.
How can she not? In this society, women like her were brought up from a very young age to be pleasant. As a girl, she has been fed with dreams of suitors and love. But then the years pass, no one comes towards her, and she sees her friends, her cousins, and now the younger generation being courted and proposed to, while for her there is a terrifying void. There is no one.
The scene that makes her famous is Act 1, Scene 4. Clitandre comes to her for help. He loves Henriette and wants an ally in the house. He barely begins before she stops him. She has already put him on her list of lovers. He may adore her, she says, but he must not speak it:
Aimez-moi, soupirez, brûlez pour mes appas ;
Mais qu’il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas.
It is a perfect précieux law: desire is permitted only if it remains unspoken. When Clitandre names Henriette, Bélise is delighted at what she views as a clever detour. She blushes, congratulates her own modesty, and refuses to hear another word. Left alone, he gives the audience its cue: “Diantre soit de la folle avec ses visions !”
The joke is that she is deluded. No suitors come. Time has already chosen other women. But I keep returning to a simpler question: why is that funny? Why is a woman’s torture a joke to be laughed at?
There is something unprotected about a woman who cannot bear to live in a world where she is not desired. We sympathize, almost automatically, with the heroine who loves and is refused. Bélise’s case is the reverse. She invents love because she cannot survive its absence. There is no one to choose her, not even to look at her. The fantasy is not arrogance first. It is a shelter.
Unlike the conventional romantic heroine, she gets no resolution. She does not receive the man, the declaration, or the last-act correction that would let her step back into reality with dignity. Henriette will be loved in the ordinary way. Armande, who once had Clitandre and sent him away, at least possessed something she can lose. Bélise remains Bélise: unloved, untouched, watching love settle on her generation and then on the next, still translating every room she enters into a novel in which she matters.
I do not think Molière wrote her as a tragic heroine. The comedy needs her ridiculousness, and her chimères are part of the play’s larger satire on women who prefer systems to the world in front of them. But a modern reader is allowed to see what the laughter uses up. Under the visions is a woman who wanted to be desirable and found no safe way to say so. A fragile feminine soul who does not understand rejection and, to survive it, creates an imaginary world where she is the desired one. That is more than delusion. It is herself balancing her soul against the immense pain and suffering inside her.
That is what interests me about overlooked women in literature. Who are we instructed to laugh at, dismiss, or look past — and what happens if we stop laughing long enough to look at them?
For me, Bélise is one of them. I do not believe she ever set out to be a laughingstock. Around her, love is being arranged, refused, bargained over, fulfilled. She stands in the same house and keeps building a secret court of suitors, because the alternative is to admit that the court is empty. No one came for her. A whole life devoid of love, of male interest, just scorn and mockery.
If that is comedy, it is comedy with a huge grief inside it. I read her as a tragic figure wearing the mask the play handed her, whose only curse was to want love. And that is why her story has stuck with me ..
#entertainment
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