DEALING WITH LIBERTINISM THE ENGLISH WAY: THE CASE OF SADE AND FRANCES BURNEY

Abstract

In Idée sur les romans, Sade defends the argument that English novelists – more precisely Richardson and Fielding – give lessons to the French since they were the first to have privileged access to the human heart, to its vices and passions. Through the analysis of the characters Granwel and Clement Willoughby, this article aims at comparing Miss Henriette Stralson, ou les Effets du désespoir – probably written by the marquis de Sade in the Bastille and published in 1926 by Maurice Heine in Les Crimes de l’amour – and the novel Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778), by Frances Burney. The purpose is to identify common elements between the image of the rake such as it is configured in Burney’s novel and the one that is revealed in the narrative à l’anglaise imagined by the marquis: which vices and passions guide the conduct of these characters throughout the respective plots? Having Lovelace, Clarissa’s seducer, as a reference, how does the figure of the English rake develop within the comparison of the two works?