Wise Women

Taking as its title the title chosen by the translation/adaptation of Molière\u27s Learned Ladies (Les femmes savantes) into the Croatian of eighteenth-century Dubrovnik, this contribution is devoted to all the wise women of Molière\u27s opus that managed to climb onto the Dubrovnik stage, and thus to challenge the existing gender norms which made Dubrovnik one of the most conservative milieus in eighteenth-century Europe. The extant analyses of the phenomenon of dramatic francesarie – 23 translated comedies by Molière, a number unparalleled by the current translations of his comedies into modern Croatian – have so far pointed to the connections of adaptations to the local literary tradition, as well as to their dependence upon the local urban setting and its economic, social, and governmental policies, including its gender norms. This contribution, however, focuses on the ways the authors of adaptations still managed to preserve the traces of préciosité that Molière built into his numerous outstanding female characters, regardless of the fact that Dubrovnik new no such female alternative to the dominant patriarchal gender code. Préciosité was namely a culture of love which implied significant liberties of female behaviour during courtship, as well as within and outside marriage, just as it voiced a demand for the right to education and to the authority knowledge provides. Countering the insistence of our theatre historians on the fact that Dubrovnik adaptations do not include the version of The Ridiculous Maidens (Les Précieuses Ridicules), this essay explains why The Learned Ladies, which deal with the same “protofeminist” pronouncements, do count among the adapted titles. Discussing both the major and the minor lexical and dramaturgical interventions into the selected original comedies, the essay endeavours to demonstrate that Dubrovnik’s young noblemen used the project of adaptation not only for sheer amusement of their peers, but also as a means to test how the ongoing European Querelle des femmes would unfold against the backdrop of Dubrovnik conservatism