"Tu l'as voulu, George Dandin." My first desire to read Molière's George Dandin arose from encountering a couple references to it in Tolstoy's War and Peace. More of a problem play than his other comedies, this story is about a rich farmer (George Dandin) who marries the daughter of an impoverished country nobleman and his wife, M. and Mme. de Sotenville, with hilarious, but devastating results. His parents-in-law have mismanaged their own finances and have arranged for their daughter to wed Dandin, a marriage that one assumes would have never been arranged under different circumstances, as the parents are obsessed with their noble rank:
MME DE SOTENVILLE. Will you never rid yourself of such a familiar greeting as 'mother-in-law'? Can't you get used to calling me 'Madame'?
GEORGE DANDIN. Hell! If you call me son-in-law, it seems to me that I can call you mother-in-law.
MME DE SOTENVILLE. There's a great deal to be said against it: things are not equal between us. Please take note that it is not for you to use such a form of address with a person of my rank; and that though you may be our son-in-law, there is a great gulf between us, and you should know your place.
The position of Mme. de Sotenville is soon taken up by her husband who insists that Dandin call him 'Monsieur' for the same reason.
And when Dandin insists to his parents-in-law that their daughter Angélique and her lover, Clitandre, are trying to make a cuckold of him, the parents naturally deny that their daughter could ever do anything of the sort, for such behaviors are not to be found among the nobility (with Molière revisiting two favorite themes, devotion and hypocrisy throughout):
MME DE SOTENVILLE. Enough! Be careful what you say. My daughter is from a far too virtuous line ever to allow herself to do anything which is an affront to decent manners; and in the Prudoterie family, for the last three hundred years, no wife, thank God, has ever been the subject of gossip.
As the play unfolds, with comedic elements not dissimilar to a modern sitcom, Dandin continuously tries to arrange it so that the Sotenvilles catch their daughter in her indiscretions with Clitandre, and he repeatedly fails (sometimes for reasons quite obvious to the reader, as in Act III). Each act ends with the parents evermore proud of their daughter's noble virtue, with Dandin the fool.
And yet, though we are not situated to identify with the Sotenvilles, we are not positioned in a way to side with George Dandin either, for as suggested at the beginning, he has brought this upon himself. He lacks basic commonsense and has entered a marriage fixed purely on finances and social status, love being absent as it so often is in arranged marriages, and he finds himself attached to an attractive woman who repeatedly attests that she wants to enjoy her youth (it's not her fault that she is young and beautiful, she so often argues). And so the play ends on the same note that it begins. Nothing is resolved. Dandin regrets the day he married his bride and he suggests that "jump[ing] into the lake" would be the easiest way out.