Documents found
-
93.
-
97.More information
The theme of innocence threatened or corrupted by seduction recurs in the novels of Prévost. The story appears both in his Mémoires d'unhonnête homme (1745) and in le Monde moral(1760), recounted respectively by the victim of seduction and the seducer. These two, apparently complementary, versions correspond to two ways in which Prévost grasps the phenomenon of the libertine at different moments of its emergence. A comparison of the texts reveals the characteristics of Prévost's oblique discourse on libertinism, with its unuttered motives, slippages and resistances, particularly by the virtuous narrators who set themselves up as moral arbiters of the action. Prévost uses terms of seduction and censure to put forward a critical vision of libertinage touched, as it were, by moralism. The two episodes are notable also for their underlying fantasies: the figure of the libertine father, the incestuous seducer, in Mémoires d'un honnête homme, and the bankruptcy of all-devouring libertinism in le Monde moral, where Prévost evokes some of the psychic aspects of phallic exhibition. Our interpretation should shed new light on the immature libertinage of des Grieux, as well as on its wavering pursuit by the ambassador in l'Histoire d'une Grecque moderne. After 1740, seduction appears in Prévost's novels in the guise of more or less inhibited obsessions and desires for sexual violence.