Tartuffe, Frankenstein, and Candide: Religion vs. Reason
This essay examines three landmark works — Molière's Tartuffe, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Voltaire's Candide — as Enlightenment critiques of religious dogma and societal convention. The paper argues that all three texts privilege rationalism and natural common sense over blind religious faith, while also acknowledging the limits of pure reason. Molière's comedy shows instinctive common sense defeating religious hypocrisy; Voltaire's satire deploys both narrative and philosophical rationalism to expose Pangloss's optimism; and Shelley's Romantic novel goes furthest, questioning whether science alone can answer the deepest human questions about suffering, identity, and moral responsibility.
- Overview: Enlightenment Critiques Across Three Works: Thesis: all three works champion rationalism over religious dogma
- Natural Common Sense vs. Religious Hypocrisy in Tartuffe: Common sense and instinct expose Tartuffe's manipulation
- Philosophical Rationalism and the Defeat of Pangloss in Candide: Narrative and philosophical reason undercut Pangloss's optimism
- Science, Faith, and Moral Ambition in Frankenstein: Frankenstein's science overreaches moral and natural limits
- Conclusion: The Limits of Reason and the Claims of Nature: Shelley questions whether science answers humanity's deepest questions
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The essay constructs a clear comparative framework, grouping three texts under a single unifying thesis about rationalism versus religious faith, while carefully distinguishing how each author deploys that critique differently.
- It moves from the simplest case (Molière's common-sense comedy) to the most complex (Shelley's Romantic ambivalence), giving the argument a logical arc that builds in sophistication.
- The paper identifies a nuanced tension within Shelley's work — that she critiques both religion and science — setting Frankenstein apart from the other two texts and demonstrating close analytical reading.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses comparative literary analysis to show how a shared thematic concern — the Enlightenment challenge to religious authority — manifests differently across genres (comedy, satire, and the Romantic novel). By contrasting Molière's stock parody with Shelley's realistic novelistic characters, the essay demonstrates genre-awareness as an analytical tool.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a three-work thesis, then proceeds through each text in turn: Tartuffe (common sense defeats hypocrisy), Candide (philosophical and narrative rationalism defeats optimism), and Frankenstein (science overreaches and nature reasserts itself). A brief comparative moment between Voltaire and Molière in the middle section adds connective tissue before the discussion deepens with Shelley. The conclusion synthesizes Shelley's position as the most complex of the three authors on the question of reason's limits.
Overview: Enlightenment Critiques Across Three Works
Molière's comedic play Tartuffe, Mary Shelley's science-fiction Romantic novel Frankenstein, and Voltaire's allegorical political satire Candide all function as Enlightenment critiques of their authors' contemporary religious and societal norms. These works uphold rationalism as the most natural and beneficial foundation of human belief, in contrast to primitive or absolute trust in religious creed. However, all three works also suggest that natural human instinct — trust in common sense and sensibility — is equally required for living a full human life, alongside a rigorously rational and scientific apprehension of nature.
Natural Common Sense vs. Religious Hypocrisy in Tartuffe
Molière's Tartuffe portrays a religious hypocrite in the form of its title character, a man who makes his living by sponging off the family of a bourgeois gentleman. Crucially, it is not the most academically educated characters who disabuse the householder of his belief that Tartuffe is a pious man. Rather, it is the natural, instinctive reason and commonsensical impulses of the man's wife and his lower-class maid who first see through Tartuffe's manipulation. Tartuffe exploits religious fear to maneuver the householder out of his hard-won earnings and insinuate himself into the man's home, pockets, and even the affections of his wife and daughter. In Molière's world, natural common sense — not formal learning — is the faculty that defeats religious artifice.
Philosophical Rationalism and the Defeat of Pangloss in Candide
Human, commonsensical reason also exposes Professor Pangloss's philosophy — that humans dwell in the best of all possible worlds — as untenable in Voltaire's Candide. Voltaire, in contrast to Molière, is more inclined to use both philosophical and narrative rationalism to prove Pangloss wrong. Rather than simply having minor characters mock Pangloss, Voltaire also depicts the absurdity of the teacher's rhetorical maneuverings to justify his ideas: characters frequently argue about moral philosophy while suffering horrific perils.
The naive faith of believers is undercut by the Pope's fathering a child and by the evils of the Spanish Inquisition, but equally by Pangloss's sloppy intellectual logic whenever he justifies each catastrophe as having occurred "for the best." Thus, in Voltaire's Candide, both nature and natural common sense defeat intellectual as well as self-interested deceit, while in Molière merely natural common sense suffices to defeat Tartuffe's insincere philosophy. Neo-Classical intellectual rigor and the Enlightenment conviction that truth sets one free are evident in the resolution of Molière's comedy, as well as in the continual subversion of Pangloss's idealism throughout Voltaire's satire. More philosophical "evidence" was perhaps required to defeat Pangloss than Tartuffe, because Pangloss — unlike Tartuffe — actually believes what he preaches.
Conclusion: The Limits of Reason and the Claims of Nature
However, Shelley suggests that Frankenstein's ability to understand the physical, natural world does not penetrate deeply enough into the nature of the being he has created. Here, the reader glimpses the beginning of Romanticism and its insistence on soulful as well as scientific understanding of what it means to be human — even in the absence of conventional religious doctrine. Unlike Voltaire and Molière, Shelley does not deploy stock, stereotyped figures of parody to advance her more complex message. Instead, she uses the realistic elements of novelistic fiction to question both conventional religion and science's ability to answer every human's philosophical queries about evil. Both Frankenstein and his creature ask: "Why are we put on this earth to suffer and to be rejected?" Unlike Pangloss, neither has a religious answer to provide comfort, and the material world alone is insufficient to satisfy them or grant them happiness, as it ultimately is for the characters in Molière.
Ultimately, Shelley suggests that science can give humans unnatural power — power that defies what is natural to the human condition — but that nature itself also has the capacity for perversity, given the profound sense of alienation that Frankenstein experiences even before he sets out to create his own alienated being. Of the three authors, Shelley offers the most ambivalent and searching verdict: reason is indispensable, yet insufficient on its own to comprehend the full weight of human suffering and moral responsibility.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.