Review article
Performativity and the body in Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons
Petra Požgaj
; University of Zagreb
Abstract
Two and a half centuries after its initial publication, Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons continue to attract attention, as evidenced by numerous film adaptations of the novel and even more abundant critical discussions. The latter tend to focus on the opposition between the libertine pair, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, and their victims. Typically, it is the former’s awareness of performance as a means of controlling others that is seen as the key characteristic that unites them and sets them apart from others. However, emphasizing their unity and uniqueness, many fail to explore the differences in Valmont’s and Merteuil’s respective attitudes towards performance, while also reducing the exploration of performativity to an analysis of these two characters as literary illustrations of the theatrum mundi trope. This paper, on the other hand, focuses on an examination of the differences in Valmont’s and Merteuil’s attitudes towards performance, approaching these characters as discursive nodes at the intersection of eighteenth-century notions of acting and gender, in order to show how literary figurations of performance in the novel undermine them. Specifically, it demonstrates how the performances of the Marquise the Merteuil as a seemingly perfect actress, both on the level of the story and the level of the discourse, complicate the gender and gender-political propositions of the eighteenth-century notions of acting, and subvert their rationalist foundations.
Keywords
Dangerous Liaisons; Diderot; performance; the body; gender
Hrčak ID:
333986
URI
Publication date:
24.7.2025.
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