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  • The Libertine's Nemesis: The Prude in 'Clarissa' and the 'roman libertin'
  • John Phillips
The Libertine's Nemesis: The Prude in 'Clarissa' and the 'roman libertin'. By James Fowler. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. x + 172 pp.

The beguiling cover of this Legenda volume is well matched by the book's contents. Fowler's thesis is an original and well-argued one: the establishment of a symbiotic relationship between the libertine and the prude in a number of key eighteenth-century texts. His corpus of four novels — Crébillon's Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit, Richardson's Clarissa, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, and Sade's La Nouvelle Justine; ou, les Malheurs de la vertu, suivie de l'Histoire de Juliette, sa sœur — may initially appear too small to justify the conclusions he arrives at, but the argument is persuasive and elegant, and we are swept along by the author's enthusiasm for his subject. Fowler makes a strong case both for his choice of texts, and for a web of influence among the writers concerned. The inclusion of a single English novel, Clarissa, is justified by its demonstrable impact elsewhere in Europe, and in particular in the context of this study, on Laclos and Sade, the latter praising Richardson fulsomely in his Idée sur les romans (1800). Sade, curiously, omits any mention of Laclos in this survey of the French novel and its origins, although, as Fowler rightly observes, it is implausible to think that he had not read Les Liaisons dangereuses. The debt of all to Crébillon is established beyond any doubt. Fowler takes as much care with terminology as with corpus, carefully defining his key terms, the 'roman libertin' and the 'prude', the latter being shown to be unusually mobile. During the course of the eighteenth century, this term, in French at least, appears to become increasingly negative, moving from 'modest' or 'chaste', when applied to a woman, to 'excessively austere or virtuous' (p. 3), so that, as the end of the century approaches, Richardson on one side of the Channel and Laclos on the other are able to 'make the clash between prudery and libertinage [the eighteenth-century novel's] greatest tragic plot' (p. 13), while Sade builds the opposition between the prude and the libertine into the very structure of the Justine-Juliette narratives. Fowler's thesis is at once simple and complex: prude and libertine need each other to define themselves, a symbiosis most graphically enacted in the Sadean orgy, in which the libertine needs the prude's religious faith to excite him, as exemplified by the direct link between sacrilegious acts and sexual pleasure. Fowler stops short of saying this explicitly, but the Sade case is surely the clearest illustration of his argument. With the acuity of an authorial voice, Justine acknowledges her indispensable role in the libertine's orgy: 'Je suis le centre de ces abominables orgies, j'en suis le point fixe et le ressort'. [End Page 402]

John Phillips
London Metropolitan University
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