Merteuil and Mirrors: Stephen Frears’s Freudian Reading of Les Liaisons dangereuses
Alan J. Singerman, Davidson College
Volume 5, no. 3, April 1993
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Choderlos de Laclos’s notorious epistolary novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), portrays the agonistic relationship between two master libertines, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, and the catastrophic consequences of their efforts to dominate each other while pursuing their sadistic games of seduction and humiliation against lesser opponents. The libertine character, as mythically incarnated by Don Juan, has been subjected to extensive psychoanalytical study, including well-known analyses by Jean-Pierre Jouve and Otto Rank, as well as the more recent “Oedipal reading” by Peter Gay. Don Juan’s comportement has been cited, for instance, as a striking example of the unconscious workings of a repressed, unresolved “Oedipal fixation” (Gay, p. 76); that is, his repeated seductions of women are interpreted as phantasmal “repetitions” of the child’s primal wish, buried deep in the psyche, to possess again the Mother from whom he was traumatically separated as a child. In the same Freudian context, Don Juan has been described variously as an impotent, a homosexual, and a narcissist. Surprisingly, very little reflection of this kind has been accorded Laclos’s libertine protagonists, despite the obvious identification of the Don Juan and Valmont characters, widely recognized by readers from Baudelaire to Malraux and, more recently, by Peter Brooks, Henri Blanc, Bernard Bray, and Marina Warner.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Laclos” include:
A Tale of Two Tactics: Laclos’s Novel Approach to Military Crisis and Reform
by JULIA ANNE OSMAN (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
Dangerous Liaisons 2: The Riccoboni-Laclos Sequel
by JANIE VANPÉE (ECF 9.1, October 1996)
Geo-Ethnicity, Epistolary Affect, and Reception in French Prose Fiction of the Enlightenment: An Experiment in Data Analysis
by RICHARD L. FRAUTSCHI (ECF 7.3, April 1995)
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