Why Tartuffe?

    So I was pleasantly surprised today to find out that, as the officer who we thought was originally going to arrest Orgon, lock him up, and exile the rest of his family, I was actually the messenger of a happy ending of justice (taking away Tartuffe instead!) rather than the executor of a tale of injustice (though it was partly brought upon by human foolishness/stubbornness).  In the play, although, many times while we were reading it, we would laugh at Orgon’s blindness and half obstinately tenaciously stubborn, half comically frustratingly gullible reactions to Tartuffe’s interactions with his family, after reading through the whole play, I have to wonder, if I was in that situation, would I have acted as Orgon and his mother, Madame Pernelle did? If I had only seen one deceptive side of a person’s character, would I have been able discern their true nature? Stepped back a bit and seen their actions from the bigger perspective? And whether or not they matched up with my initial perception of them? In a way, I think Orgon and his mother may have been so stubborn about sticking to their glorified view of Tartuffe’s (really more of holier-than-thou) nature because they built up their own rather enlightened, all-knowing, glorified (can we say even a bit euphemistic?) image of him in their own minds.  And because they were so focused on that image of Tartuffe and kept clinging to their original beliefs about his “pious” nature, they refused to even consider the possibility that he might in reality be more like a lecherous con artist, as most everyone else in the household knew him to be already.  So I guess you could say that they perhaps suffered from what we call in Psychology as the “Primacy effect”—where the first impression that you make of someone is the one you tend to keep.  And you can also use it to judge the person’s later actions; it really influences the way you perceive the rest of what they do (for example: if you had a positive first impression of someone, you may overlook their later negative actions or attribute it to situation circumstances rather than the fault of their personality, which is partly what Orgon did when he sided with Tartuffe and disowned his own son for accusing Tartuffe of something Orgon didn’t think he was capable of committing).  But then again, Orgon and Madame Pernelle’s fervent belief in Tartuffe’s innocent holy motives, and unwillingness to listen to the objections of any of the other family members could also be due to the basic capability of any human being to be deceptive when one has the reason to.   It gets back to the question of how do you know what’s right? Who to trust? “Et tu brute?”  I can’t recall if this was exactly in the text, but perhaps Orgon refused to first trust Damis because he thought Damis was accusing Tartuffe because Damis was afraid Orgon would give his inheritance to Tartuffe—which he ended up doing anyways.  When we read Orgon’s with-smoke-coming-out-of-his-nostrils-in-the-heat-of-the-moment decision to give everything to Tartuffe, a lot of us may have reacted with a “face-palm” or thought he was acting really ridiculous, but I think that may be having a bit of hindsight bias because we do get everything about Tartuffe, before we actually meet him, from the characters that see his true side (not the people with the most power in the household, Madame Pernelle & Orgon, that he targets his fake act to) so we’re able to see the full picture rather than the shining surface that those two only see.  Another aspect I was wondering a bit about was, why did Moliere name the play after the lecherous con artist character of the play, Tartuffe?