French Dressing

Novelists in pre-Revolutionary France were fascinated by what has come to be called `compulsory heterosexuality', ritualized public performances of male/female relations as the ultimate human bond. Plots of seduction and betrayal glamourized by the "Liasons Dangereuses" demonstrate how complicated and treacherous these performances were. "French Dressing" scrutinizes the ancien regime's practices of unsafe sex, the scenarios of libertinage in which both sexes were equally stylish antagonists. It also shows that women paid unequally, sometimes fatally, for the power games of libertine experiments. In the works of male writers - Laclos and Sade, Duclos and Prost - the shape of narrative requires the staging of sexual conquest, rhetorical and literal undressing. The works of the women novelists who were their contemporaries - Tencin, Graffigny, Riccoboni, Charriere - also configure the social relations between the sexes but shift the emphasis to the aftermath of sexual plot: the emotional and physical consequences of a power-driven economy.