ABSTRACT
With Molière we have reached the threshold of contemporary history: from now on every authentic writer will face the problem of the integration of the individual into society. The keynote of this problem has already been sounded by Alceste; conformity, we see, involves severe limitation. We have come a long way from Cervantes and his Knight, to whom the very notion of conformity was alien as an ideal and as a norm of behavior. Molière’s individual operates more or less unwittingly within a middle-class frame of reference and avails himself of middle-class metaphors; in short, what we looked for and found expressed in Molière was the manner in which he manages to codify man’s relationship to modern civilization.
