Blindness In The Play Tartuffe

The play Tartuffe by Moliere is a play with many underlying complicated themes, and one of them might be the way it mocks the weaknesses of the characters. The play exaggerates the human folly of characters like Orgon and their inability to see beyond their narrowed perspective and believing everyone else to be following the same train of thought. Also, the play highlights the strict conduct blindly followed by french society like gender norms and religious affiliation and puts them out of context, highlighting the human weakness of seeing the world through a tunnel vision. In the play, this blindness is not only seen in the characters’ attitudes, it is also seen the aforementioned conduct of the french society followed by the characters of the play, making the audience think and laugh at the blindness of the characters and themselves.
In the play, the antagonist Tartuffe manages to trick his way into Orgon’s household and gets him to think that he has the welfare of the family in his mind and the rest of his family try to get Orgon to see the error of his ways. According to the article “On the Pleasures of Imagination” by Joseph Addison, this is very hard to practically achieve because in the article Addison said “It (sight) is the sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the pleasures of the imagination, or any, (which …show more content…
Throughout the play, Tartuffe seems to place Orgon in a pedestal and inflate his pride, deceiving him and bringing out his narcissism and this is seen in the scene where Orgon tries to save himself from Damis’s attempt to tell Orgon of his (Tartuffe) confession to Elmire by referring himself as someone lower and someone who cannot be trusted, making Orgon feel like helping him (Tartuffe) is a great service to a man in need, making him feel like a devout christian and a man of high