What happens when a man tries to make love safe?
In The School for Husbands and The School for Wives, Molière gives us two wonderfully comic experiments in marriage. One man trusts freedom. Others prefer supervision, ignorance, and control. And, with impeccable comic timing, nearly everything goes wrong.
More than 360 years later, the questions underneath the laughter remain surprisingly alive. Can virtue be manufactured by removing temptation? Is innocence the same as ignorance? Can education protect us from making bad choices without also preventing us from learning how to make good ones? And can love mean anything if the beloved is not free to say no?
In this episode of The Common Room, we put Molière’s two closely related comedies side by side and discover how the second deepens the first. We meet Sganarelle and Ariste, Arnolphe and Agnès, and watch supposedly sensible men construct elaborate systems for managing human nature—only to discover that human beings stubbornly refuse to behave like mechanisms.
There is something wonderfully Chestertonian in the paradox at the center of it all: perhaps freedom is not the enemy of fidelity. Perhaps freedom is what makes fidelity meaningful.
Come into The Common Room for Molière, marriage, education, jealousy, a little philosophy—and a great deal of laughter.
From the little station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas — Chesterton Radio.
Stories • Ideas • Wonder
