Abstract

This article demonstrates that the woman's spying gaze in Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves and Tencin's Mémoires du Comte de Comminge has a different narrative function from that ofthe conventional male hero in the novel of the turn of the eighteenth century. While the man's gaze serves to satisfy his desires and move the plot along in a linear trajectory, when the woman spies in these two works, what she sees leads her to experience an epiphany, a moment of self-knowledge that radically changes the direction of the plot. The epiphanies experienced by the Princesse and Adélaüde help explain the unconventional "unhappy" endings of these two works.

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