The Intelligence of Mind and Heart: Reconnaissance in La Vie de Marianne
Patrick Coleman, University of California
Volume 18, no. 1, Fall 2005
©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
Marivaux’s great achievement as a creative writer lies in the delicacy with which he dramatizes the interplay of self-consciousness, sociability, and sentiment in the lives of his characters. This interplay also informs the formal dynamic of his novels and plays, and it may be epitomized in the various actions covered by the French word reconnaissance. Acknowledging a child, a debt, or a truth; recognizing a person’s true identity; feeling gratitude for benefits received, including that most precious benefit, an enhanced capacity to think or feel for oneself — in one combination or another these are the key moments in Marivaux’s work as it rings many variations on the “recognition scene.” … By highlighting the relationship between different kinds of reconnaissance, such scenes also illustrate some underlying tensions in eighteenth-century French culture.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Marivaux” include:
L’Individualité romanesque au XVIIIe siècle: une lecture foucaldienne
by CARSTEN MEINER (ECF 18.1, Fall 2005)
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)
Les Parures de Marianne
by PIERRE SAINT-AMAND (ECF 4.1, October 1991)
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