Play: The Pretentious Young Ladies

Overview

"The Pretentious Young Ladies" ("Les Précieuses ridicules") is a short comic play first staged in 1659 by Molière. It skewers the fashionable affectations of the précieuses, young women who prided themselves on refined speech, elaborate manners and the salon culture of Paris. Delivered as a tight, one-act comedy in prose, the piece uses sharp dialogue and theatrical trickery to expose pretension.
The play moves quickly from setup to humiliation, relying on pointed irony and the contrast between rural simplicity and urban affectation. Its tone is mocking but economical, combining social observation with broad farce to make its critique both witty and immediate.

Plot

Two provincial young women, enthralled by the language and manners of Parisian salons, reject the straightforward country suitors their families arrange for them. Their fathers, frustrated by the daughters' snobbery and inflated expectations, step aside to teach the pair a lesson. Two rustic men, willing to play parts, arrive posing as urbane, literary gentlemen and flatter the girls with exaggerated refinement and absurd compliments.
The ruse escalates as the impostors adopt ridiculous manners and speak in inflated, affected phrases designed to make the girls believe they have discovered true wit. When the charade is unmasked, the young women find their pretensions laid bare: their aspirations to salon sophistication collapse into shame and comic disillusionment, while the elders are vindicated and order is restored.

Main Characters

The central figures include the two pretentious young women, whose obsession with style and novelty drives the plot, and their fathers, who represent common sense and social authority. The two impostors, provincial suitors posing as polished gallants, function as the catalysts of the satire, embodying both gullibility and cleverness.
Supporting roles, servants and acquaintances, help to stage the deception and underline the contrast between sincere feeling and affected performance. The characters are sketched clearly and economically so that their foibles are immediately visible and easily mocked.

Themes and Satire

At its heart, the play ridicules the gap between appearance and substance, especially as it appears in language and manners. Molière mocks the précieuses' obsession with novelty, their inflated rhetoric and their tendency to value form over feeling. The satire is aimed at social climbing and at literary pretension alike, showing how artificial behavior breeds absurdity and vulnerability to manipulation.
The comedy also probes questions of authenticity and performance: who is truly refined, and who merely performs refinement? By having rustic characters successfully mimic urbane manners, the play suggests that pretension is a social costume that can be imitated and therefore exposed.

Style and Reception

The play's language is brisk, its situations compact and its humor direct. Molière blends witty dialogue with slapstick elements, keeping the pace lively while sharpening the satirical thrust. The playwright's ear for comic timing and for the ridiculous turns of fashionable speech makes the mockery feel precise rather than merely mean-spirited.
On debut, the work made a strong impression and helped establish Molière's reputation. Audiences appreciated the timely lampoon of salon affectation, and the play quickly became associated with the broader cultural debate about taste and manners in 17th-century France.

Legacy

"The Pretentious Young Ladies" remains a notable early example of Molière's gift for social satire and dramatic economy. Its critique of linguistic and social pretension continues to resonate in discussions of authenticity, fashion and the theatricality of social life. As an origin point for Molière's later, more elaborate comedies, it shows how comedy can be both a mirror and a corrective to social folly.