The Libertine's Progress: Seduction in the by Pierre Saint-Amand

By Pierre Saint-Amand

Ecu; France; French; French fiction; heritage and feedback; Literary feedback; Non-Fiction; Seduction in literature; Semiotics & thought; intercourse in literature

Show description

Read Online or Download The Libertine's Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel PDF

Similar french books

Additional resources for The Libertine's Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel

Example text

22 When Baudrillard takes the other into account, he or she exists only as a power to be ravished. "23 In contrast to Baudrillard, I would say, rather, that a sort of mimesis of fear takes place in seduction. The reversibility of seduction, the aestheticization or spiritualization that Baudrillard seeks as the ultimate step in seduction, takes place only in the camouflaged glow of imitation. Seduction tries to operate as a sort of exorcism of fear. But to do this, it ends up rivalling (imitating) the seducer's own terror of fascination.

And to attain this, she must read the souls of men, that she may prefer what will gain her the most, rather than what will only gain her much: and this is immense! (47) With an almost satanic flourish, Marianne thus reveals the secrets of the coquette's trade and her tools of seduction. The spectacle of coquetry is always at the other's disposition, it is always dedicated to the other. In her "read[ing] the souls of men" there is something of Pascalbut it has taken a diabolical twist. 9 In a crucial episode in the novel, when Marianne is due to make a spectacular entrance into Parisian society, she is taken into a church.

If the coquette believes that she escapes political or social tyranny, it is only to annihilate herself in an even more tyrannical lie, an internalized one, which enslaves her to the desire of the other and forces her to disguise, to veil her true self. If she manages to "cut a figure," as Marivaux puts it, this representation takes place only for the other. All cosmetic contrivances ritualize this failure, this defeat of the subject. There is an undeniably funereal component in the guises the woman adopts to give herself to the other.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.05 of 5 – based on 36 votes