From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century Literature

This article proposes the view that during the course of the seventeenth century the concept of fortune in the Boethian mode, dominant in French literature during the Middle Ages, yielded to a new manner of conceiving the fortuitous. This new conception, still sometimes called 'fortune' but increasingly known as 'hasard', took the form of what we would call randomness. However, both the older and the newer ways of representing the fortuitous require awareness of individual human desire. In this study, Molière's L'École des femmes and two narratives by Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Zayde and La Princesse de Clèves, are considered with regard to the way the texts display chance either directly or indirectly. In conclusion, the article proposes the hypothesis that the shift from fortune to randomness in French literature is related to an increasing emphasis on what we call the reader's 'identification' with fictive characters.