45 pages • 1 hour read
MoliereThe Imaginary Invalid
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1673A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Manifestations of Illness
During his last performance as Argan in The Imaginary Invalid, Molière began to cough up blood, contradicting the play’s premise that Argan’s sickness is in his imagination. Of course, Molière’s tuberculosis was not imaginary, and he died a few hours after that performance. This unintended performance of real illness creates an interesting dichotomy between embodying genuine symptoms and embodying false ones. Certainly, a performance of Argan requires the actor to strike a balance in the humorous visibility of his symptoms. The performer must determine how consciously Argan is faking, what feels real to him, what he gains from faking illness, and what he thinks will happen if he stops. Perhaps his hypochondria reflects his intense respect for doctors, manifesting in his body as a way of reinforcing and proving his stubborn faith in them. Argan wants treatments and remedies, but he doesn’t want to be healed. When Cléante meets Argan, he attempts to compliment him by saying, “Sir, I’m delighted to see that you’re up and about and obviously so much better” (39). Toinette interjects on Argan’s behalf, preemptively feigning anger and exclaiming that Argan is most certainly not looking better: “He may eat, drink, walk and sleep like anyone else. But don’t be fooled, he’s ill” (40). Argan agrees. If his illness isn’t real, it must be performed, and he wants to believe his own performance.
Argan struggles to negotiate the mimicry of outward symptoms, sometimes forgetting that he supposedly needs his cane or that he shouldn’t be able to chase Toinette around the room. At the beginning of the play, he tries to quantify his illness and its severity by the number of treatments he paid for this month. Although his fakery seems humorously obvious to the audience, the only two characters who fully recognize and acknowledge that he isn’t sick are Toinette and Béralde. Toinette often uses his fake illness to tease him, and Béralde endeavors to convince him that his only symptoms are those that are caused by side effects of unnecessary treatments. Béline seems to believe that Argan is at death’s door, as she readies herself as the vulture to pick his bones, but Béline is crafty, and her actions can’t be taken at face value. Angélique humors her father blandly, remaining neutral on the subject of illness. Perhaps Argan is simply a gullible silly man who trusts his doctors, and he’s the only character who truly believes that he is ill. In this interpretation, every character is performing around him as he attempts to find the theatricality to outwardly manifest the illness he doesn’t have. This heightens the irony of Molière’s last performance, in which coughing up blood—undoubtedly unwanted and distressing for an actor who was just trying to finish his performance—is the exact outward symptom that would terrify and delight Argan as material proof that his sickness is real.
Theatricality and Metatheatricality
In an odd, metatheatrical moment in Act III, Béralde and Argan discuss a currently running play by Molière that gives commentary about doctors and the practice of medicine. Argan finds it exceedingly offensive that an “arty-farty” (75) type like Molière would dare to “ridicule his betters” (75). Moreover, medicine should not be a topic in the theater at all. Of course, Argan is a character in just such a play, endlessly serving at Molière’s whim in a mocking commentary about medicine, whether he likes it or not. If he were a doctor himself, Argan continues, “I’d soon sort out that Molière. I’d let him die slowly if he were ill. He could plead for medicines, treatment, but let him whistle” (75). But this metatheatrical moment is less a criticism of Molière and more a criticism of the medical profession. Argan imagines himself as a doctor, and in his formulation of the profession, a doctor isn’t simply a person who studied to acquire the necessary skills to save lives and preserve health. A doctor is a person of power who can smite his enemies like a god and cause a man to wither away at his command. The use of metatheatricality—stepping outside the theatricality of the play to remind audiences that they are watching a performance in a theater—serves to blur the lines between the world of the play and the world of the audience. It emphasizes that the issues raised in the play bleed into the real world and are significant to the audience beyond their potential for soliciting laughter. Of course, the ultimate metatheatrical moment was one that couldn’t be planned, staged, or repeated. In Molière’s fated final performance as Argan, he humorously described what he would do to Molière (himself) if he ever became a doctor. Then, Argan becomes a doctor—it’s a charade, but no more a charade than an actor putting on a costume each night—and Molière is promptly struck down, dead within hours.
On a theatrical level, the characters blur the lines of reality within the world of the play, remaking reality to deceive each other. Argan is the only character who is entirely earnest. Whether he suspects on some level that his symptoms are manufactured or fake, his deference for doctors means that he believes. And the remedies are physical, not theoretical. The enema produces, the sedative sedates, and the purgative purges, all physical manifestations that seem to prove that a body is ill. Argan is gullible, but he is not lying. Conversely, the characters around him use that gullibility and susceptibility to theatricality to perform and manipulate Argan. Béline gives a convincing performance of a loving wife as a cover for her attempts to siphon away his fortune. Cléante performs the role of Angélique’s music teacher, even blurring the lines between lies and truth by leading her in a song. Toinette performs support for Argan and Béline over Angélique to manipulate Argan into accepting Cléante. Thomas spouts his memorized lines in his attempt to perform eloquence and intelligence to win Angélique’s favor. Even eight-year-old Louison, called in to give her childish perspective on Angélique’s transgressions with Cléante, playfully deflects and manipulates by pretending to fall dead from Argan’s punishment, demonstrating that the practice of acting and deceiving is an art learned early. Argan’s brother, Béralde, is the only character who approaches him with full earnestness, but he brings with him acting troupes to serve theatricality alongside his reasoning.
The theatricality and deceptive performances by the characters are designed to point to what Molière is identifying as the greatest theatrical deception—the authority of doctors. The doctors, who rarely, if ever, do the dirty work of actually touching a patient, perform authority through language. They use an incomprehensible mixture of Latin and Greek to bolster their authority. Even while trying to woo and impress Angélique, Thomas gives speeches constructed of dense language that sounds more impressive than sincere or even lucid. Their credibility, which isn’t bolstered by the results of their treatments, is its own tenuous performance that crumbles in the absence of absolute faith. Of the characters, only Argon feels the kind of uncritical faith that allows him to believe unwaveringly in the unique capabilities and powers of doctors. The title of doctor carries significance to Argan, even if the doctor is the bumbling Thomas, himself, or eventually Cléante. Toinette, dressed in a ridiculously flimsy disguise, commands his full respect, even with her absurd suggestions about amputations. When Argan dares to refuse a single treatment, Dr. Purgeon’s curse terrifies him, despite Béralde’s reassurance that the doctor doesn’t have the power to manifest curses. By the end of the play, Argan clings to his belief in doctors, but the most significant performance that needs to be questioned and disrupted is by the two women who are supposed to love him. A simple test—convincing both women that the audience for their contested performances is dead—immediately proves that Béline is an actor and Angélique’s love is real.
Scenes of the Pastoral
Molière essentially created a new genre with his comédies-ballets, an iteration of musical theater that predates The Black Crook (1866)—the production that is widely recognized as the first musical—by about two centuries. The unification of music, dance, and drama in Molière’s comédies-ballets is perhaps more sophisticated than The Black Crook’s hasty merging of independent artistic elements. The primary world of the play is trapped in the claustrophobic space of Argan’s room. Given the gravity of Molière’s real-life illness, it makes sense that he wrote this vehicle role for himself as a character who spends much of his time sitting or lying down. But Molière also creates an entire world outside Argan’s sickroom that exists in interludes, pastoral settings populated by commoners to contrast with the complex absurdity of the main characters’ city lives. The romanticizing of the pastoral in art was popular during the Renaissance across Europe, as artists depicted rural life as simple, nostalgic, peaceful, and idyllic. The pastoral represented the Enlightenment ideals of balance, harmony, and reason. In Molière’s Eclogue for the play, set in “a delightful, rural setting” (1), nymphs and shepherds dance, sing, and praise the king but stop themselves with the promise that the players waiting to perform the main entertainment will do a much better job. In an alternate prologue, a shepherdess expresses disdain for doctors, whose crude treatments do nothing for the poetry of her feelings. Then, as a contrast to these idyllic scenes, Argan launches into the details of the corporeal purges and scourings that he demanded and the practicalities of draining his wallet, none of which is romantic or simple.
Argan’s house is a house of enemas, not romantic love. His daughter finds her pastoral love outside the house—notably at the theater, where actors speak poetry—when Cléante leaps to her defense from another theatergoer’s rudeness like a heroic young gallant. As a match for a woman of Angélique’s station, Cléante is a perfectly acceptable suitor. But a relationship based on pastoral romantic love doesn’t fit in a house of enemas. Argan already matched his daughter with a man who can provide endless enemas, so he has little interest in romance or his daughter’s happiness. Even his relationship with his wife, Béline, focuses on her as a mothering caretaker rather than as a loving or sexual partner. Cléante brings the pastoral before Argan, posing as a music teacher and sharing an improvised duet with Angélique in which they express romantic sentiments straight from their hearts. But as the shepherdess explains in the play’s Prologue, the gross purgation of body does nothing for the heart, and Argan is unmoved.
Molière pokes fun at the pastoral as well, disrupting the dichotomy that places idyllic rural settings on a pedestal of profundity. For instance, in the first interlude, Punchinello’s romantic serenade is interrupted by other musicians and dancers, and finally he must contend with the police, who beat him until he gives them a bribe. In the second interlude, the performers sing about how youth fades and men take advantage of them. Even romantic love isn’t perfect. The play sets up the dual philosophies of science and romance as if they’re going to duel for significance, but neither proves worthy of idealization.
