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Image and Imaginaire in Molière's Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christopher Braider
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Abstract

The miniature portrait in Molière's Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire is a memento the romantic heroine preserves in token of her absent love. Fainting under the strain of resisting her tyrannical father's efforts to compel her to marry another man, she loses the miniature, which falls into the hands of Sganarelle's wife. Mme Sganarelle's possession of the portrait provokes jealous suspicions in Sganarelle, and the comic fallout challenges the classical theory of images and the theory of signs to which classical culture assigns images. More specifically, in subjecting the portrait to the thingly logic of comic theater, the miniature's circulation explodes the dualist premises on which French classicism depends. Analysis of the farce's plot mechanics thus occasions critical meditations on classical semiotics (in Pascal's Pensées and Arnauld and Nicole's Logique de Port-Royal), classical aesthetics (in the writings of Piles), royal portraiture, and classical theology.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 5 , October 2002 , pp. 1142 - 1157
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002

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