Justice & Law Quote by Moliere

Moliere slips a dagger of comedy into the corset of 17th-century respectability: the line crackles because it treats marriage with the disposable logic of laundry. The “Ah!” is doing more than sighing; it’s stagecraft, an audible wink that signals frustration while inviting the audience to enjoy the scandal of a woman voicing it. The joke isn’t merely that she wants out. It’s that she frames the desire in consumer terms, exposing how marriage in his world often functioned less like romance than like contract, property, and social management.

The subtext is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a naughty complaint against legal constraints. Underneath, it indicts a system that makes women’s lives hinge on permanence when men’s appetites, reputations, and freedoms can be far more mobile. The shirt comparison is pointedly domestic: she’s speaking in the language women were expected to inhabit (clothes, household routines), then weaponizing that language to argue for autonomy. That inversion is classic Moliere, who loved letting “improper” truths slip out of mouths society tries to police.

Context matters: Moliere wrote inside a tightly regulated culture, where the Church and monarchy treated marriage as moral infrastructure. Direct polemic would get you punished; farce could smuggle critique past the gatekeepers. So the line works as both pleasure and provocation: it gives the audience the thrill of transgression, then leaves them with an uncomfortable aftertaste. If swapping husbands sounds absurd, Moliere hints, maybe what’s really absurd is a law that makes escape from a bad marriage harder than changing your clothes.