There are many conflicting tensions within Moliere’s social satire, The Misanthrope. While we find tensions between emotion and restraint, religion and sin, movement and stasis, and a variety of others, this analysis will focus on the tensions exhibited between self-integrity and social acceptance and honesty versus hypocrisy. At the opening of the play we quickly discover that the main character, Alceste, finds social interaction false, filled with intrigue, dishonest, and unjust. He finds that the structure of society makes a man who is honest an outcast. Alceste’s internal struggle comes from his desire to be honest in his social interactions in a dishonest social structure. We see him indignant and disgusted over false and hypocritical social interactions early in the play when Philinte is affectionate and polite with a stranger who in reality he is quite indifferent too:
Alceste: My God, you ought to die of self-disgust.
I call your conduct inexcusable, Sir,
I see you almost hug a man to death,
Exclaim for joy until you’re out of breath,
And supplement these loving demonstrations
With endless offers, vows, and protestations;
Then when I ask you, ‘Who was that?’, I find
That you can barely bring his name to mind!
Once the man’s back is turned, you cease to love him,
And speak with absolute indifference of him!
By God, I say it’s base and scandalous
To falsify the heart’s affections thus;
If I caught myself behaving in such a way,
I’d hang myself for shame, without delay.
Thus, we see that Alceste has to struggle between being honest in order to keep his self-integrity versus being hypocritical in order to gain social acceptance. We see Alceste’s dilemma repeated throughout the play where the tension between honesty versus hypocrisy and self-integrity versus social acceptance are concerned. Alceste is in love
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