Les Liaisons Dangereuses

This research examines the motivations driving the characters of Mme. Tourvel and Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos. The plan of the research will be to set Tourvel's emotive force in the context of the novel as a whole and then to discuss, with reference to selected letters attributed to Tourvel in this epistolary novel, how Tourvel's thoughts, feelings, and desires manifest the social dynamics of the privileged classes of pre-Revolutionary 18th-century France.

It is impossible to appreciate the motives of characters in Les Liaisons Dangereuses without a sense of the social and cultural context in which the novel is embedded. A major feature of that context is social stratification. Valmont's status as an aristocrat is to be contrasted to Tourvel's status as a bourgeoise matron. Despite the nascent sophistication of the bourgeoisie, there is a divide between bourgeois and aristocrat that inevitably privileges the latter. Tourvel embodies the vulnerability of the former.

The broader context of late 18th-century France must also be taken into account. As of 1782, when Liaisons Dangereuses was published, the Enlightenment was at its height, displacing the gap in philosophical discourse left by the devolution of theological disputation land Europe's religious wars and sharply interrogating established social and moral structures. It would be an overstatement to say that Liaisons Dangereuses anticipated the French Revolution or that it incorporated Enlightenment phi

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doth protest too much, methinks" (III.ii). It is as if she is saying that she will never speak to Valmont again and that she will tell him so every time she sees (or writes to) him. In #50, after declaring herself so dutiful in marriage that a dalliance is unthinkable, Tourvel shows how much she has been thinking about it. She writes alarmingly of the "storms and perils" of an affair. Then she focuses on the emotional hardship a casual affair would have on Valmont and "the immense sacrifices it would entail" (97). That solicitousness, however, is balanced by Tourvel's characterization of Valmont's proposition as "love," which has, figuratively, set her heart atwitter. She seems to be logical when she admits her artlessness and lack of worldliness vis-�-vis what she takes to be his multiple other lovers. However, when she adds that she could probably not hold his love even if she were like the others, she reveals that she has indeed speculated on the shape that a love affair with Valmont might take. More generally--this applies to #56 and #67 as well--maintaining the correspondence is itself problematic. It is either enormously na�ve, in which case the woman is possibly too stupid not to deserve being seduced and abandoned, or th

Category: Literature - L