Woman's inter-mission: Speaking between in L'Ecole des Femmes

Although seventeenth-century French authors praised their heroines as plausible, fictional women such as Chimène, Agnès and Madame de Clèves were often pawns of conservatives' efforts to prevent the second sex from speaking out. That Agnès, the heroine of Molière's 1662 play L'Ecole des Femmes, lies chronologically between the heroines of Corneille and Madame de Lafayette coincides with the between-ness of Agnès's existence in her text as a speaking woman in a difficult place. Her struggle to know and to speak is evidence of a public debate in the seventeenth-century over the boundaries of women's discursive realm.