Compare & Contrast Three Enlightenment-era, Neo-Classical works With Romantic Overtones
"Tartuffe," Candide, and Frankenstein all use unnatural forms of character representation to question the common conceptions of what is natural and of human and environmental 'nature.' Moliere uses highly artificial ways of representing characters in dramatic forms to show the unnatural nature of an older man becoming attracted to a younger woman. Voltaire uses unnatural and absurd situations to question the unnatural belief of Professor Pangloss that this is the best of all possible worlds. Mary Shelley creates a fantastic or unnatural scenario to show the unnatural nature of a human scientist's attempt to turn himself into a kind of God-like creator through the use of reason and science alone. "Tartuffe" is the most obviously unnatural of the three works in terms of its style. It is a play, and the characters do not really develop as human beings because of the compressed nature of the plot. The characters talk to the audience, and speak in rhyme. It is obvious, because of the constructed and comedic nature of the play, that the hypocrisy of the title character will eventually be revealed and the man he is taking advantage of is a fool. The character of Tartuffe is unnatural, not simply because of his religious pretensi
ons, but also because of his designs upon his host's daughter and wife. Only through a distrust of social hierarchies does this comeuppance take place, however. Here, the Enlightenment trust in reason and democracy is clear, because the maid is actually wiser than the man of the house, and the woman is wiser than her husband. Women were presumably 'lower beings' in conventional understandings of the relationship of men and women, but in Moliere's understanding, the most reasonable rather than the most traditionally powerful should hold sway in a positive, natural, democratic governance of a household. In Candide, the Neo-Classical aesthetic of 'constructed' narrative and character, as was typical in Moliere, is evidenced in the cold, rationalistic way that the author Voltaire regards his characters as moral exemplars, rather than characters the reader 'feels' for, as human beings. The reader does not feel sad when Candide loses his fortune after going to El Dorado, or when he learns that a character has only one buttock because the characters are regarded with such cool detachment and used as 'teaching' tools about the falseness of Panglossian philosophy. Although both low and highborn characters may be wise, unlike in Moliere, this does not mean that wisdom will triumph. One could say that Candide evidences some Romantic or anti-Classical sentiments when at end of the work, the main characters, now humble and cast off, are only improved by a better
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Approximate Word count = 987
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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