Fate vs. Free Will in Molière's The School for Wives

Introduction: Cuckoldry as a Lens on Fate

Molière endows his character Arnolphe in The School for Wives with a chauvinism characteristic of many men in seventeenth-century French society. No doubt, his intention is to lampoon this character, as the play's subtitle indicates. Nor must Molière have felt highly of the convent education given to some young women of the time, for this likewise comes under humorous scrutiny in the work. While the play suggests much that falls in line with a type of feminism and can be taken today as an instructive and relevant assertion of such a social critique, this essay contends that these issues are important sidelights to a larger concern. It reads the play as a commentary on the contest between fate and the human will, which strives inadequately to counter this force. The themes of cuckoldry and chauvinistic education are established only so that Molière can call them into question through a representation of aleatory love and, in the final analysis, of the preeminence of fate over human planning.

Arnolphe's Fear of Cuckoldry and His Drive for Control

Molière's Arnolphe seeks control, and what he fears most is cuckoldry. Therefore, it is not difficult to establish the ways in which he tries to order life to his aims. He has devoted twenty years of his life studying other men's marriages, preserving himself from an institution in such shambles. "For twenty years," he claims, "I've sagely contemplated the woeful lives of men unwisely mated, and analyzed with care the slips whereby the best-planned marriages have gone awry" (Molière, IV.7). All he sees around him is the shameless exploitation of men by unscrupulous wives who will not hesitate, if they are educated, to betray their husbands in romantic trysts. His derogatory view of educated women is mirrored negatively in an elevated view of his own untarnished honor, which must be preserved against their treachery. He wishes not to be "duped" like the husbands he mocks (I.1).

Social reputation is the primary frame of reference for his calculated approach to gender relations. He seeks only a woman of senseless virtue who will protect his honor through meek submission and deference to his mastery. Beauty and wit are useless to him, he tells his friend (I.1). He is conditioned by a certain view of marriage that chains women in their place — which is why he later gives Agnès, the young woman in his charge whom he aims to marry, a book to "educate" her in the proper etiquette for a married woman. To preserve himself from being cheated upon, he has "arranged to be secure forever" against this possibility (I.1). This issue of cuckoldry is framed within the question of fate. From the start, Chrysalde asserts the view that "fate gives men horns, and fate can't be withstood" (I.1). Arnolphe wants nothing to do with fate, taking matters entirely into his own hands.

The Seclusion and Deliberate Ignorance of Agnès

To arrange for security against all the "tricks and ruses, shrewd and sly, which wives employ, and cheat their husbands by" (I.1), he secludes Agnès. Carefully he has plotted out her course from its inception, where she is "reared according to my plan" by nuns who are told "to keep her growing mind a perfect void" (I.1). Thus we notice his intention both to control the young woman and to keep her in ignorance. She is to be plain and uneducated. Should she know verse or have too much intelligence, she would lure admirers to the house for parlor entertainments (I.1). He condemns educated women by contrast to the simple peasant girl he wishes to marry: "For all your verse, and prose," he says, ". . . can't match this good and modest ignorance" (I.3). His problem with education is that it may enable a woman to attract paramours. Education, in his view, spawns dishonorable deception. He operates from the assumption that he can "mold her into what shape I like" (III.3). Women, for him, are malleable and must be controlled through their ignorance.

Conclusion: The Triumph of Fate Over Human Planning

So after all his grooming of her for a wife, the play ends with her release from subjection through fate, and with the victory of chance over his plans. His attempts to intercept the young lovers meet with failure. He himself becomes the cuckold before marriage. She betrays him in spite of her ignorance, suggesting that it is not the education of women that is dangerous to the man's world, but the prohibition of education. All of Arnolphe's misogyny finds expression as he prepares to sequester her away for reformation (V.4). His insults summarize his belittling view of women. Even in his final attempts to whisk her away, he is defeated. Chrysalde, the believer in the blows of fate, had already tried to comfort him by saying that "cuckoldry need not be dreaded like some dire monster, fierce and many-headed; it can be lived with, if one has the wit to take it calmly, and make the best of it" (IV.8). But his words fell on deaf ears. It is Arnolphe who proves to be the ignorant one.