The Imaginary Invalid

Overview

About a hundred pages, Molière’s comedy, first performed in 1673. Argan is a healthy man convinced he is dying, surrounded by doctors and apothecaries who profit from his fear. He wants to marry his daughter Angélique to a young physician so that he can have medical care in the family.

His second wife waits for him to die and leave her everything. The servant Toinette and Argan’s brother Béralde expose the wife by having Argan play dead, and the play ends with a burlesque ceremony in which Argan is made a doctor himself. Molière, playing Argan, collapsed during the fourth performance and died the same night.

What happens

Argan’s imaginary illness. Argan, a genuinely healthy man convinced he is dying, sustains an elaborate household economy of doctors and apothecaries who profit directly from his fear, treating imagined symptoms with expensive and unnecessary remedies.

The marriage scheme for Angélique. Argan wants to marry his daughter Angélique to a young physician, reasoning that having medical care in the family will serve his own hypochondriac needs, disregarding her own romantic wishes entirely.

The second wife’s mercenary waiting. Argan’s second wife waits for him to die so she can inherit everything, a competing self-interested scheme running alongside his own medical obsession within the same troubled household.

Toinette’s interventions. The servant Toinette works throughout to protect Angélique’s genuine interests against Argan’s scheming, using wit and disguise to counter both his hypochondria and his wife’s mercenary patience.

Béralde exposes the wife. Argan’s brother Béralde, together with Toinette, exposes the second wife’s true mercenary motives by having Argan play dead, revealing her actual indifference to his welfare once she believes him gone.

The mock doctoral ceremony. The play ends with a burlesque ceremony in which Argan himself is made a doctor, a satirical resolution that lets him keep his medical obsession while finally seeing through the profession’s pretensions.

How to read it

Read Argan’s imaginary illness as staging medicine itself as an institution with its own economic incentive toward perpetuating rather than curing patient anxiety, a satirical target Molière developed across several late plays but nowhere more directly than here.

Pay close attention to how Argan’s marriage scheme for Angélique treats marriage as instrumental family policy rather than personal choice, setting up the comedy’s central conflict between his hypochondriac self-interest and his daughter’s own genuine romantic wishes.

Notice how Toinette and Béralde’s exposure of the wife’s mercenary motives, staged through Argan playing dead, demonstrates theatrical deception used for genuinely corrective purposes, restoring household truth through calculated falsehood rather than direct confrontation.

Consider the play’s biographical shadow, Molière himself playing Argan and collapsing during the fourth performance before dying that same night, which gives the mock doctoral ceremony ending an afterlife of genuine poignancy its own text could never have anticipated.

Read this play alongside Molière’s own Tartuffe to compare two studies of household deception, one centered on a hypochondriac’s medical fixation, the other on a family’s vulnerability to a false devotee’s calculated religious performance.

Questions it raises

• Does Argan’s imaginary illness function primarily as personal psychological comedy, or does the play’s satire extend more broadly to medicine as an institution whose practitioners profit from sustaining rather than curing patient anxiety and fear?
• How does Argan’s marriage scheme for Angélique, arranging her match purely for his own medical convenience, complicate any simple reading of him as merely comically foolish rather than genuinely harmful to his daughter’s actual interests and wishes?
• What does the second wife’s mercenary waiting reveal about marriage within the play’s broader household economy? Does her exposure through Argan’s staged death suggest marriage itself, beyond Argan’s hypochondria specifically, operates on calculated self-interest?
• How should a reader weigh the play’s biographical shadow, Molière’s own collapse and death during a performance as Argan, against its purely theatrical content? Does this history change how the ending’s satirical humor actually lands?
• Given that the play ends with Argan made a doctor himself rather than cured of his hypochondria, what does this resolution suggest about the play’s ultimate attitude toward his condition? Does comedy here correct folly or simply accommodate it?
• What does Toinette’s persistent cleverness on Angélique’s behalf suggest about the servant’s role in Molière’s household comedies more broadly? Does her practical wit function as the play’s actual moral center against Argan’s self-absorption?