Excerpt by Term Newspaper:
Misanthrope- Honesty
With the best performs of Moliere, The Misanthrope, we run into honesty as the main idea, which has been thoroughly incorporated showing the adverse effects of tactless honesty plus the consequences of complete insufficient honesty. The play was written inside the 17th century and the world it describes is the one that likes flattery to honesty and conceit to modesty. While the enjoy was intended for audiences of 17th century, it amazingly retains a universal charm because of the treatment that Moliere extends to the central theme of honesty in the play.
The play involves four significant characters, Alceste, Celimene, Philinte and Eliante. It is through the characters of Alceste and Celimene the author conveys his views on honesty. Philinte serves the important purpose of handling honesty and deceit by adopting a middle route, which is equally sensible and practical. Alceste is the leading part of the play who is a male of rather unfriendly personality and t5his unfriendliness emerges from his desire to be full and even bluntly honest about everything.
When honesty is significantly appreciated everywhere, it is important to use tact while being genuine or else a person dangers alienation by society. This can be the message of the play and Alceste continues to be used to show that a person’s obsession with honest can easily backfire if it is not protected with particular degree of courtesy and diplomacy. A man must handle real truth delicately but this is what Alceste refuses to appreciate. The result is a disaster as during the enjoy, he wins more foes than close friends because not really everyone can find him because an honest person and most consider him a great insensitive misanthrope. On one event, he communicates his thoughts about the culture that thrives on deceit and conceit in these words and phrases:
All are corrupt; there’s nothing to appear
In courtroom or town but exacerbates my spleen.
A fall in deep gloom and despair
When I review the landscape of human folly
Finding on every palm base flattery
Injustice, scams, self-interest, treason….
Ah, is actually too much; human beings has grown so base, imply to break with all the whole people.
I. i. p. 20)
Although credibility is what Alceste desires and promotes, the man is incapable of mixing genuine opinion with a little tact and doesn’t realize that his genuine views are seen as insensitive remarks that really hurt others. To contact Alceste a misanthrope can be utterly wrong because he can be not ‘an enemy in the mankind’ in different sense in the word (Rousseau, 37). He doesn’t hate others yet only detests the wicked in them. His just flaw is the fact he is des tolerant of other people’s shortcomings than Philinte who luckily understands that we have a delicate range between integrity and rudeness.
Rousseau asserts that Alceste’s brand of credibility is grounded in a genuine desire to remove evil in the society. Alceste is a genuine man who is disliked by many people because