[In the essay below, Gossman delineates the relations of Marivaux's plays to the social and philosophical views of his day.]

In the last few years there has been a revival of interest in Marivaux, touched off perhaps by Gabriel Marcel's introduction to a 1947 edition of a selection of the comedies. Not much of the new criticism, on the whole, has been concerned with the relation between Marivaux's work and the society in and for which it was written. It is this relation which I should like to explore. Marivaux wrote both plays and novels, but as a novelist he may well have entered into a different relation to his public from that in which he stood to the public of the plays. It seemed prudent, therefore, to approach the plays and the novels separately and I have made no attempt to deal with the latter here.

The son of an undistinguished provincial administrator with aspirations to nobility, Marivaux was one of a large number of young men who climbed on to the band waggon of the Modernes in the early years of the Regency. He became a disciple and friend of Fontenelle and found his way to the headquarters of the Moderne movement in the salons of Madame de Lambert and Madame de Tencin. Although there has been no full study, as yet, of the social significance of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, it does seem, as of now, that the Anciens were in the main those who, while often less than satisfied with existing arrangements, were even more apprehensive of change. They included some members of the old nobility, certain religious groups and above all robins and bourgeois living on rentes. The Modernes, on the other hand, expressed the ideas and sentiments of the most active and advanced section of French society in the early eighteenth century, notably the rich and increasingly influential financiers and fermiers-généraux, who sought to elevate themselves and gain power, not as the robins had done at an earlier stage by purchasing offices and constituting themselves a special privileged class, but by infiltrating the aristocracy, the court and the royal administration. The wealthy bourgeoisie of the first half of the eighteenth century was thus extremely close to and indeed barely distinguishable from the aristocracy, which accepted the influx of new blood and new money with little resistance and in the process adopted many of the ideas and attitudes of its powerful partner. This society of bourgeois aristocrats and aristocratic bourgeois was cultured and generous. It would be hard to exaggerate the cultural role of the fermiers-généraux, for instance, throughout the eighteenth century. Marivaux himself was in receipt of a pension from Helvétius.

The Modernes embraced many new ideas. They set out to free themselves and France from old tyrannies, to explode old myths that they had been taught to take for granted and to reveal the material and conventional nature of all human arrangements and institutions, political, religious and social. Every realm of human thought and activity was de-sacramentalized: in philosophy essentialist doctrines were rejected, in religion the natural origin of all mysteries (the Christian ones being prudently excepted, of course) was exposed, in literature the classics, and even the classics of the age of absolutism, were toppled from their pedestals, in art academicism came under increasing attack.

Nothing was taken for granted by these early enlighteners. They no longer believed, for instance, that reality is immediately accessible to the intelligence and their work is a constant interrogation not only of our total conceptions of reality but of the apparently solid bricks out of which these conceptions are constructed. Social reality was questioned no less eagerly than physical reality and here too not only society as a whole but the individual self was found to be problematic, for how did a series of discontinuous moments of experience constitute a self? Literature itself was thought of as a means of de-mystification and an exercise in reflection and self-awareness. It no longer presented itself to the reader in analogy with a natural object, the meaning of which is immediately apprehensible, since natural objects themselves could no longer be thought of in this way, but as an artefact designed by an author, the meaning of which is uncertain and requires to be prised out of it, or given to it, by the reader. The style of the Modernes is atomic. Causal conjunctions, in particular, are rare with them, and their prose has not the highly articulated architectural quality of their seventeenth century predecessors. They do not construct chains of reasoning. They lay out the observed "facts" and leave it to the reader to evaluate them and put them together as he judges best.

Given their rejection of essentialism in all domains, it is not surprising that the Modernes had an image of society as a comedy in which each man plays out his role before others. "Ce monde est un grand bal où des fous déguisés / Sous les risibles noms d'Eminence et d'Altesse / Pensent enfler leur être et hausser leur bassesse," Voltaire declared in his Discours en vers sur l'homme. The wise man stands back and recognizes the human comedy for what it is: "Les mortels sont égaux: leur masque est différent." Obviously, the acquisition of such lucidity can serve different ends. The Anciens also thought of social life as a theatrical performance and the lines quoted from Voltaire could be matched with similar passages in Pascal, La Bruyère or Boileau. Indeed, this view of social life goes back to Montaigne, and even further. But whereas the Anciens took the masquerade of society as an invitation to seek elsewhere for man's "true" nature, the Modernes denied that there was any "true" nature of man in a religious or metaphysical sense. For the Anciens social life was emptied of significance by the discovery of its inessentiality, for the Modernes on the other hand—since they believed in nothing else—it had to be accepted and grasped in its inessentiality.

For those of them, in particular, who, like Marivaux, lived in close proximity to the wealthy bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and shared in their way of life, irreverence with regard to existing institutions and, in particular, to the social order of the ancien regime in no way implied a radical critique of it. It produced instead a quite distinctive outlook in which intellectual audacity was combined with social conservatism and rationalism with respect for irrational forms. It would probably be vain to look for any revolutionary critique of social institutions in the first half of the eighteenth century—with the possible exception of the late seventeenth century Testament of Jean Meslier, which was much sought after by amateurs of clandestine literature. The financiers them-selves had no thought of attacking the social order at its roots; they owed their fortunes to their skilful exploitation of the fiscal and commercial arrangements of the state. The Modernes did not, therefore, wish to destroy the forms of society. On the contrary, they desired to maintain them; but they wished them to be recognized as forms, so that they might then be opened, without the usual tiresome protests, to new content. Whereas the Anciens opposed all social change on the grounds that social order depends on the respect accorded to age-old customs, the Modernes tended to emphasize the positive value of social arrangements and to justify a certain measure of social change. They admitted that the forms of society do not reflect an essential "nature of things," but since they considered such a "nature" mythical anyway, they could not consider it a useful criterion for judging social forms. The criterion by which they judged was empirical, the correspondence of social forms not to some essential "nature" but to nature as it was observed to be in fact in the world. The Modernes thus rejected the either-or way of thinking which allowed the Anciens to make a blanket condemnation of society while at the same time insisting that all social change be avoided.

The social thinking of the Modernes suited various social groups in the ancien regime rather well. It suited ennobled financiers who wished to base their right to nobility not on their money but on their distinction as human beings and, paradoxically, it also suited the proud aristocracy of the blood which could claim, as Vauvenargues was to do, that its right to nobility rested on its inherent superiority, as a noblesse de race, to other men. "J'appelle peuple tout ce qui pense bassement et communément," declared Madame de Lambert, the patroness of the Modernes; "la cour en est remplie." The refined, cultivated and magnificently married daughters of the Crozats and the Bernards, the financial wizards of the day, could not but have been pleased by this consecration of their newly acquired nobility. But in fact it is not at all clear that Madame de Lambert's barbs were not directed at them. It is never sure in her writings whether it is a certain refinement of sensibility, a certain distinction of soul, that ensures nobility, or whether it is nobility that ensures distinction of soul. Does a person who has the "style" of nobility deserve to be "noble"—that is, to be recognized as noble—or is this style itself a proof of noble blood? Admittedly there are no essential "natures," but is what man is perhaps biologically determined and if so, is the furthest reality to which we can penetrate not race rather than merit? By depriving social forms—institutions, ranks, language, etc.—of any necessary or "natural" relation to "reality," by affirming more-over that "reality" was, if not mythical, then at least unknowable and irrelevant to life, the Modernes had cleared a way for the simultaneous co-existence of various interpretations of the meanings of social forms. The truly enlightened man, of course, was not the dupe of any of these meanings. Knowing that there was no necessary connection between social forms and an "objective" world of things, he bracketed entirely the question of those objective things to which the forms supposedly referred. To him the forms signified by themselves, independently of any reference to an "objective"—that is, socially undetermined—reality.

This way of thinking is nicely illustrated by the mystery shrouding the birth of the heroine of Marivaux's novel La Vie de Marianne. Is Marianne a noble soul because she is in reality the daughter of noble parents, or does she deserve to be treated as a gentlewoman—that is to be one—on account of her delicacy of soul? The answer is never given and never could be, because Marianne's "nobility" is precisely what each must be free to interpret as he chooses, while the truly enlightened will bracket the question of the "reality" on which it is grounded altogether. Such a way of thinking could hardly fail to find favor with a society composed of aristocrats eager to sell their "blood" and of bourgeois eager to be counted on their "merit," that is, ultimately, their wealth. In-deed it is very likely that the phenomenalism of the Moderne movement was essential to its success and its historical role.

Marivaux's work, like that of all the Modernes, is destructive of traditional myths and ideas about literature, about society, about man. Moreover, Marivaux was quite conscious of what, as a writer, he was about. The Prefaces to his plays together with the observations on style in his undeservedly neglected essays—Le Spectateur français, Le Cabinet du philosophe, L'indigent Philosophe—reveal what he thought of literature in general, of his own work in particular and of that of his immediate predecessors.

Just as he rejected the pompous acting style of the Comédie Française and insisted that his actors use a "natural" style, Marivaux saw no sense in continuing academic traditions in literature. These traditions, in his view, were connected with the essentialist way of thinking which, as a Moderne, he also rejected. Neither man himself, nor his passions, nor natural objects can be apprehended as universals or forms, he held, but only in their qualities, as they are observed and experienced. Many of his shorter allegorical plays in particular turn on the contrast between love-passion as it is supposed to be and love as it can be observed in actual social life—and this contrast between Amour and Cupidon was also for him a contrast of styles, as the short comedy La Réunion des Amours makes clear, the style of Amour being pompous, long-winded and cliche-ridden, while that of Cupidon is agile, witty and realistic. Similarly, Marivaux no longer believed in the myth of the hero—one of the favorite whipping horses of the Modernes. "Il n'y a ni petit, ni grand homme pour le Philosophe," he declared. "… Il y a des hommes ordinaires … médiocres, qui valent bien leur prix, et dont la médiocrité a ses avantages. …" The authors of the past have put together words and images which on inspection have turned out to be fraudulent or mythical. There is no point, therefore, Marivaux held, in continuing to string together these meaningless words and images. Only the professional author will do that, because he is paid by some king or court to do so.

Marivaux's unrelenting critique of the status of author is part of his struggle to impose a modern style in place of the semi-official style of classicism. He never tired of emphasizing that he did not want to be thought of as an author. The Spectateur français opens with the statement "Ce n'est point un auteur que vous allez lire ici" and follows it up with a definition of the author as someone who writes about empty ideas. "Un auteur est un homme à qui, dans son loisir, il prend une envie vague de penser sur une ou plusieurs matières: et l'on pourroit appeler cela, réfléchir à propos de rien." As he satirized the "Auteur méthodique" with his "demi-douzaine de pensées dans la tête sur laquelle il fonde tout l'ouvrage." Marivaux was doing for literature what other enlighteners had done for philosophy when they mocked the meta-physicians of the previous century for having drawn out of their heads "le roman de la philosophie," as they liked to put it. Instead of writing as an author, Marivaux proposed to write as a man. "Je veux être un homme et non pas un Auteur."

At the same time as he rejected an earlier notion of the author, Marivaux also rejected an earlier notion of literature. Literature, as he saw it, is not an incarnation of eternal truths and ideal beauty but part of a secular and temporal culture. Marivaux could say in the same breath that he did not write his essays for the "public" in the manner of the classical "author" and that he cannot conceive why he should have written them except for other men to read them: "Cependant pourquoi les ai-je écrits? Est-ce pour moi seul? Mais écrit-on pour soi? J'ai de la peine à le croire. Quel est l'homme qui écriroit ses pensées, s'il ne vivoit pas avec d'autres hommes." To write as a man, in short, means to stop writing as an "author" and to accept willingly the social and historical nature of literature. Literature, for Marivaux, is not made in heaven; it is made by men who do not wish to pronounce as divines or oracles but to communicate with their fellows in their own language, and its subject matter is human experience, not eternal essences. The great writers of the Enlightenment found glory in the humble function they assigned to literature. One recalls Sidrac's words to Goudman as he invites him to dinner in Voltaire's Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield: "Votre faculté pensante aura le plaisir de se communiquer à la mienne par le moyen de la parole: ce qui est une chose merveilleuse que les hommes n'admirent pas assez."

As a writer, the Moderne will not, therefore, withdraw behind his creation but reveal his presence in it; on the other hand, he will not sit down to write on traditional themes, but will wait until some event, some experience or some striking observation goads him to action. About the ideas he used in his works Marivaux declared: "Je n'examine pas si celle-ci est plus fine, si celle-là l'est moins; car mon dessein n'est de penser ni bien ni mal, mais seulement de recueillir fidèlement ce qui me vient d'après le tour d'imagination que me donnent les choses que je vois ou que j'entends." The writer will not invent, in other words, out of his head, or by elaborating some worn literary theme. A picturesque comment by Montesquieu on the Regent reveals how essential the contact with others was held to be for the artist of the period: "Les paroles qu'il a si admirablement dites sont toujours des reparties, comme s'il s'était refusé toutes les choses charmantes qui ne naissent point de l'occasion." It is no accident that the age of Marivaux was also the age of the art of conversation and of those correspondences—Walpole, Madame du Deffand, Voltaire—of which it is impossible to say whether they are documents of social communication or works of art.

Imitation of other writers obviously had no place among those who had denounced the myth of Parnassus and chosen temporality rather than eternity. Marivaux condemns it out of hand. "L'imitation … ne fera qu'un singe." The author Marivaux most admired, if d'Alembert is to be believed, was Montaigne, because his personal style did not lend itself to imitation. Sometimes Marivaux's emphasis on originality strikes a remarkably modern note. "Ecrire naturellement," he declares in the Spectateur, "n'est pas écrire dans le goût de tel Ancien, ni de tel Moderne, n'est pas se mouler sur personne quant à la forme de ses idées; mais au contraire, se ressembler fidèlement à soi-même." "Jusqu'ici," he adds later in the Cabinet du philosophe, "vous ne connoissez presque que des Auteurs qui songent à vous quand ils écrivent, et qui, à cause de vous, tâchent d'avoir un certain style. Je ne dis pas que ce soit mal fait; mais vous ne voyez pas là l'homme qu'il est."

This critique of the classical concept of the author and of literature is surely not fortuitous. It fits too well with the character, the position and the outlook of the social group with which Marivaux and his fellow Modernes were closely associated. Similarly, the new idea of the author and of his relation to society which begins to emerge from the essays reflects the ambiguities of this social group.

The classical idea of the artist rested on the assumption that he shared with the public and, indeed, with reasonable men in all ages certain fundamental principles and values which were true for all time and which could not be changed or improved upon. As a matter of fact, since men in their folly tended, if anything, to be distracted from truth by the flattering images of illusion, innovation was as likely as not to mean degeneration. This view usually went hand in hand, not unexpectedly, with a fairly conservative view of society, for if the ideal of an intimate and secure relation between artist and public was to be maintained, the public of taste and judgment had itself to be maintained. But even in the seventeenth century social change was already undermining the "public" of the classical artists. Boileau and La Bruyère never tire of railing against the financiers and traitants who were upsetting the order of things and taking over positions once occupied by persons of sense and discrimination. By Marivaux's time the author could no longer imagine that there was a homogeneous public in which he was but a special voice. Moreover, many of the newer writers themselves came from less solidly established families than their classical predecessors. The eighteenth century writer was thus less conscious and sure of his relation to society than the classical writer had been and for this very reason he became more aware of and interested in his own individuality. Similarly, what he had to say and how he should say it no longer seemed self-evident to him. Nor could he accept the assent of the "public" as the measure of his success.

Marivaux's refusal of the category of "author" is thus a response to a truly altered social situation. No longer enjoying the independence provided by a private income and the feeling of writing for a public of friends and equals, he and his contemporaries were in fact becoming increasingly alienated from the "public" and the latter was already coming to resemble the market, as the modern writer knows it. They were thereby assuming some of the essential traits of the bourgeois. But they did not clearly recognize or accept this fact, and in this they resembled a large part of the public for which they wrote. It is characteristic of the whole Moderne movement that even in the essays, where he speaks most daringly and provocatively of his relation to the public, Marivaux did not clearly avow—or perhaps fully grasp—the reality of the writer's changed situation and that he expressed it instead in an ambiguous form. The bourgeois author first affirmed his independence by assuming, ironically, the mask of a grand seigneur of letters and his cavalier rejection of the models of antiquity and of the classical relation of artist and public, summarized in the formula instruire et plaire, has an air of aristocratic dilettantism. "Je ne vous promets rien," Marivaux tells his readers, "… Je ne jure de rien; et si je vous ennuie, je ne vous ai pas dit que cela n'arriveroit pas; si je vous amuse, je n'y suis pas obligé, je ne vous dois rien: ainsi le plaisir que je vous donne est un présent que je vous fais; et si par hasard je vous instruis, je suis un homme magnifique, et vous voilà comblé de mes grâces." The acceptance of a traditional form to convey and simultaneously to conceal a new meaning is, as we shall see, characteristic not only of Marivaux's reflections on literature and writers but of his own literary work itself.

Marivaux's insistence on the social nature of literature and on the role of the author's subjectivity in the process of literary creation necessarily excluded the classical ideal of objectivity. While the writer has to write about something, in short, that something, Marivaux held, is not a pure object or essence, but something as the writer sees it or experiences it. Every subject implies an object and every object implies a subject. Man cannot think, feel, indeed he cannot exist, without the world to awaken him and galvanize his faculties into action. "Nous restons là comme des eaux dormantes qui attendent qu'on les remue, pour se remuer," remarks Lélio in the first Surprise de l'amour. The world, on the other hand, can be apprehended only by our reflection upon our experience of it. In a way it too only comes into existence through us. Esse est percipi is a radical formulation of a common attitude. Nothing is for us but what is observed. In all the literature and art of the eighteenth century—in content and in form as well—the point of view plays a crucial role. The epistolary novel presents the point of view of the writer of each letter, the novel in the form of mémoires stresses that it is the work of the hero recalling and interpreting his past in later life, the conte, the fantasy tale and the third person novel have their auctorial interventions, the theatre has the play within the play, the painting viewers and paintings within the painting. The work of art comes to the public openly as a contrivance, pointing to itself by these various devices and saying or asking what it is. And this is one of its most pertinent comments upon reality itself.

The variety of points of view and the absence of any absolute standard are essential elements of Marivaux's work. While others continued to use the stock characters of courtly comedy—the financier, the fop, etc.—as comic heroes, Marivaux recognized that the norm of nature or reason supporting this kind of comedy is simply the expression of a point of view, that of la cour et la ville, which is unaware of itself as a point of view, and that the comic type himself reflects a view of man out of tune with contemporary experience and contemporary thought. Marivaux was conscious of his esthetics. "Il avoit le malheur de ne pas estimer beaucoup Molière," d'Alembert relates. In effect, a good deal of his work is a response to Molière's. Les Sincères, as has been frequently pointed out, is Marivaux's answer to Le Misanthrope. (The point of the play is that all social behavior is behavior for others, so that sincerity is itself a mask, and a more dishonest mask than most, since it refuses to accept its own nature.) So too the first scene of La Double Inconstance, one of the earliest comedies, should probably be read with Molière in mind. "Ne faut-il pas être raisonnable," Trivelin enjoins Silvia, who has been abducted by the Prince from her village and brought to the court. "Non, il ne faut point l'être et je ne le serai point," Silvia answers, overturning what Marivaux took to be Molière's fixed categories of nature and reason. Reason in this scene is simply the perspective of the court, and Silvia has her own reason. "Moi, je hais la santé et je suis bien aise d'être malade," she cries, again pointing up against the author of Le Malade Imaginaire that the norm of so-called health is simply that of a social group unaware of the relativity of its own position. "Je ne veux qu'être fâchée," she adds in the next sentence, and the audience must certainly have recalled Alceste's "Moi, je veux me fâcher."

While Marivaux wished to give his audiences a point of view—that of servants, rustics, etc.—from which they could grasp their own conventionality he did not, however, intend them to settle down into this point of view. The point of the comedy would be lost if it were not grasped that all forms are conventional and that none, therefore, not that of urbs but not that of rus either, can be taken as absolute. What we have to do, Marivaux implies, is to assume this conventionality with complete lucidity, to play out our part as prince, duke or valet, remembering that it is only a part and that as wearers of the mask to which history or accident has assigned us, we are all equal. There is, in Marivaux's view, no escape from this situation. Those who are unaware of it are nevertheless in it. They may not think they are actors—like the children raised in isolation in La Dispute and then thrown together by the Prince—but they are actors even if they do not know it: the Court is present watching the so-called children of nature as they awaken to themselves and to each other—and we, of course, are present as spectators watching the play. "Nous sommes tous des tableaux, les uns pour les autres," in the words of the Spectateur Français. Everyone is always an actor for someone. Madame Argante in Les Acteurs de Bonne Foi will not give her consent to a play, and she is punished for her refusal by being made an unconscious actress in a dramatic situation devised by her friend Madame Amelin. If she will not assume the comedy, she will not escape it. Ergaste and La Marquise in Les Sincères, who reject social forms as false, are the most vain, hypocritical and deceitful of all the characters in that play. Let us recall once more the words of the Indigent Philosophe. He likes best, he tells us, those who "ne portent point leur masque; ils ne l'ont qu'à la main, et vous disent: tenez, le voilà, et cela est charmant. J'aime tout à fait cette manière-là d'être ridicule; car enfin, il faut l'être et de toutes les manières de l'être, celle qui mérite le moins à mon gré, c'est celle qui ne trompe point les autres, qui ne les induit pas à erreur sur notre compte." The only honesty and the only freedom, in short, lie in a willing assumption of our social condition and of the conventionality of social arrangements.

The meaning of Marivaux's plays is conveyed not only at the level of dramatic action, but at the level of the very material with which the writer works, at the level of language. Marivaux was acutely conscious of the social nature of language, and a great deal of the apparently innocent word play in the comedies is designed to emphasize it. Again there is an unreflecting realist stage at which words are assumed to be, as if by some divine or natural institution, the direct images of things. Arlequin the rustic in La Double Inconstance who is unaware of himself as an actor is also unaware of the nature of language. "A vrai dire, Seigneur," Flaminia reports to the Prince about him, "je le crois tout à fait amoureux de moi, mais il n'en sait rien. Comme il ne m'appelle encore que sa chère amie, il vit sur la bonne foi de ce nom qu'il me donne, et prend toujours de l'amour à bon compte" (III, 1). It is the writer's aim to give the audience a perspective on this realist view of language and thus to lead it to the second stage, at which it becomes aware that words are no more made in heaven than literature itself is, that they are not images of things but signs which depend for their meaning on a code and that the code itself is conventional. "Eh bien! Infidèle soit, puisque tu veux que je le sois," exclaims the Countess in L'Heureux Stratagème to her servant Lisette. "Crois-tu me faire peur avec ce grand mot-là? Infidèle! ne diraiton pas que ce soit une grande injure? Il y a comme cela des mots dont on épouvante les esprits faibles qu'on a mis en crédit, faute de réflexion, et qui ne sont pourtant rien" (I, 4).

Marivaux's word play, like all word-play, is an interrogation of language and meaning. The simple characters in La Double Inconstance, Silvia and Arlequin, constantly question the words and phrases used by the courtly characters. Expressions like honnête homme, votre grandeur are revealed for what they are. But the rustics are not right. We are not intended to identify ourselves with their position which, in the end, is as realist as that of the courtly characters. Quite simply their questioning shows that words are used in social contexts and that they are meaningful only within the social group that uses them. Again folly does not lie in speaking the language of the Court but in imagining that it is the language of universal reason. Significantly the Prince himself does not make that mistake, only his creatures do. Arlequin unnerves Lisette, the servant of the Court, by turning her conventional flatteries into nonsense (Double Inconstance, I, 6), but she is unnerved only because she fails to realize that language does not signify to those outside the group using it. Trivelin is similarly nonplussed when he finds that he cannot justify the Prince's abduction of Silvia. "C'est votre souverain qui vous aime," he tells the young peasant girl. But to somebody who is not used to the language of the Court and who does not share the values it conveys this explanation is meaningless. "Je ne l'empêche pas," Silvia retorts. "Mais faut-il que je l'aime, moi? Non … un enfant le verroit et vous ne le voyez pas." Trivelin tries again: "Songez que c'est sur vous qu'il fait tomber le choix qu'il doit faire d'une épouse entre ses sujettes." Again Silvia demurs: "Qui est-ce qui lui a dit de me choisir? M'a-t-il demandé mon avis … Point du tout, il m'aime, crac, il m'enlève, sans me demander si je le trouverai bon." Trivelin tries to justify the Prince's abduction on the grounds that "il ne vous enlève que pour vous donner la main." But he continues to use phrases that are meaningful within his own courtly context only. "Eh que veut-il que je fasse de cette main," Silvia retorts, "si je n'ai pas envie d'avancer la mienne pour la prendre?" In a society where the Prince's absoluteness is accepted, "donner la main" is doubtless explanation enough. The other party to the act is presumed to have no independent will, but to Silvia it is not an explanation. She and Trivelin simply do not speak the same language, and like those comedians who play their parts without realizing that they are doing so, Trivelin uses language without understanding what he is doing.

Occasionally in Marivaux's work there occurs a kind of flight or absence even of the self-conscious actor, who refuses temporarily to accept his role and tries to imply that he is a "natural." This "bad faith" has a linguistic corollary which takes the form of an attempt to act as if words naturally signified, so that instead of presenting them explicitly as taking their meaning from a code, the character acts as if they were the transparent reflection of some state of mind or soul. This is what happens in Les Serments Indiscrets (II, 5) when Lucile tries to stop the marriage to which she herself in pride has pushed her lover, on the grounds that she would feel eternally guilty for having caused the unhappiness of two people. Lucile believes her own story, she takes her meaning from her mask and her language, denying their true nature.

If language is a cultural phenomenon, as Marivaux's plays urge, no language, not even the language of the great writers of the grand siècle, is sacrosanct. Marivaux did in fact take "liberties" with what had become standard literary language. In the milieux he frequented the language of the seventeenth century had given way to one that, within set limits, was adventurous, experimental, attuned to novel and striking configurations, one in which the individual had or felt he had a greater degree of freedom. Marivaux introduced this language into literature, for which the rearguard of the Classical Establishment understandably never forgave him. For the Anciens styles, genres and languages were as fixed as the meanings they convey: for each subject matter there was always an appropriate language, an appropriate genre, an appropriate style. Marivaux tried to free the writer and, indeed, the individual from this tyranny of universal laws supposedly inherent in the nature of things. But he did not imagine that freedom was possible except within fairly clearly defined limits. He would probably have agreed with those presentday writers who hold that man can be himself only through language, that is, by appropriating a linguistic system which he did not himself create or will and by participating in social life. Man, in this view of him, has no identity until he has learned to speak. He becomes himself through society, through others, and his being is one with its social and linguistic expression. "Hors de la parole," as one writer puts it, "la subjectivité reste ineffable." There is likewise for Marivaux no escape from linguistic systems or social forms and we achieve our identity as human beings not by discovering our absolute "nature" but by assuming a mask and accepting the rules of the game. Marivaux did not question the rules of the game, however, or indicate that they might be changed. Rather he believed that social life brings out certain characteristics of human beings—vanity, competitiveness, dependence on others and desire to make others dependent on us—and that any social institution reflects these "natural"—in the sense of empirically observed—characteristics. The distinction of ranks is thus, in a sense, "natural." Nevertheless Marivaux held, along with many of his contemporaries, that in the very understanding of this situation the enlightened man or woman achieves a limited freedom. We are never free, in short, of the rules imposed by linguistic systems or by social forms or, indeed, by our own natural constitution, but we are, to some degree, free within them and among them. The actor, for instance, as he renews and improvizes his parts—and we should not overlook Marivaux's long association with the Italian players who were accustomed to improvizing within the framework of their scenario—using now the language of the valet, now the language of the master, now that of the pedant, now that of the fop, combines in the highest degree the two conditions of freedom and identity or social and historical existence.

In the figure of the actor, therefore, the enlightened men and women of Marivaux's world discovered what they thought they were. The actor, as they understood him, is not identical with a role or a language, but he is inconceivable without a role and words to speak; he is at once distinct from his part, creating it in accordance with the rules of the social game and observing and guiding his performance of it, and at the same time he is it, so that the mask is the man himself and the individual is identical with his language. In a somewhat similar way, the enlightened aristocrat or bourgeois of the early eighteenth century transcended on one level the social conventions of his time, since he recognized them as social conventions, while on another level he accepted them, not too unwillingly, one may surmise, as an inevitable condition of human existence. It is not surprising that the upper classes of eighteenth century society were mad about the theatre—or that Rousseau defended the ban on it in Geneva. Moreover, the theatre provided an occasion for reconciling "bourgeois" humanitarianism and sentiment with acceptance of the existing social order. By essaying the role of valets, one could, as it were, experience in play what it was like to be one and this, it was thought, should teach one to be kinder to one's servants in that other play in which one happened to perform the role of the master. Besides his best known play, Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, several short works by Marivaux, well adapted to performance in private theatres (L'Ile des Esclaves, L'Ile de la Raison, La Colonie), turn on this theme of the interchange of roles by masters and servants.

Marivaux expressed in his novels and his comedies, as in his reflections on literature, not only the self-awareness of his society but its ambiguities and its hesitancies. He himself seems to have shared both the nostalgia of his audiences for a no-longer believed-in age of innocence and noble virtues (one might call it the golden age myth of the nobility) before the social comedy (that is, the court) began and their presentiment of a new world of individual experience. His parodies of the heroic love-passions of old may well have been the more cutting as he had not completely stifled within himself a certain longing for the immediate, the generous, the "natural." Nor should we forget his youthful fondness for Corneille and his own early attempts at romance writing. But this nostalgia for the past was closely allied in his thought and feeling to the modern experience of a private individual self with its own particular desires and longings and to the modern "bourgeois" dream of intimate and inward communication. In the circle of Madame de Lambert, as among earlier précieux, it was not uncommon to believe in elective affinities, in the possibility of immediate communication between persons of delicate sensibility. "Il y a des amitiés d'étoile et de sympathie," Madame de Lambert declared, "des liens inconnus qui nous unissent et qui nous serrent; nous n'avons besoin ni de protestation, ni de serment: la confiance va au-devant des paroles." Marivaux's heroine Marianne also believes in this immediate communication: "Les âmes se répondent," she declares. Almost all Marivaux's comedies close with a "marriage" which puts an end to the play not only for the spectators but also for the actors, as though the world of words had been transcended in a higher and more immediate communication. This evasion from the social comedy, from the world of words, can be viewed as the attainment of genuine love, a meeting of hearts. Alternatively, however, the embarcation for Cythera can be viewed as the culmination of an erotic adventure, a meeting of bodies, though no one to my mind has yet offered this rather obvious reading. But neither interpretation would be adequate on its own. If we are to probe the ambiguity of Marivaux's plays further we must recognize that his heroes are not only actors in their mode of being but—whether masculine or feminine in gender—women; and we must inquire into the significance of this concrete reality lurking behind the abstract figure of the actor-character.

Already in the late seventeenth century a code of behavior had begun to evolve for life at court with the purpose of maintaining smooth social relations and a semblance of order and harmony among people who were no longer inwardly convinced that there was a natural order and who were, indeed, in constant competition with each other. The newness of this code is brought out—despite Marivaux!—in Moliére's Le Misanthrope, where the court no longer stands as an absolute order but is itself shown in its relativity. Alceste, the champion of an earlier and more heroic age protests at the perversion of language by his courtly friends. The latter, however, are not all deceived by the deceits Alceste complains of. They understand their language very well. Alceste, in short, takes the old language of pre-courtly days to be "natural" and cannot adapt to the new one. Molière also shows how the new language works to maintain both social order and individual freedom by disposing of the myth that words signify "naturally" and by making explicit the role of all parties in communication. In certain extremely favorable circumstances, indeed, the language allows communication to occur without reference to anything outside of the communication itself. The object of the communication seems identical with the act. There is communication and interrelation, in other words, but as there are no solid bodies, so to speak, there is no problem of friction. This is the language spoken by Philinte and Oronte in the first act of Le Misanthrope. Philinte praises Oronte's sonnet. Oronte answers: "Vous me flattez." Philinte protests: "Non, je ne flatte point." But neither party communicates anything in this exchange except a general readiness to abide by common rules, while avoiding any open confrontation of the desire, the being, the language of the one with the desire, the being, the language of the other. This is likewise the language that Célimène claims to speak when she protests to Alceste that it is not her fault if different men sometimes think she favors them: she favors all equally and she is not responsible for the interpretations that can be put on her behavior. Signs are only signs and the reading of them, the constituting of a message, as well as all suppositions about the intentionality of the subject behind them are, she claims, the responsibility of the interlocutor. There are phenomena, in other words, but what "reality" they point to, if any, the see-er decides for himself.

Yet Célimène recognizes that pure communication is achieved only in rare circumstances. The needs and desires of individuals have not been cancelled out, and below the level of polite conversation about nothing there are often real struggles of power between individuals, as Célimène's own lawsuit indicates. Célimène herself explains that she seeks to maintain Clitandre's interest in her because of his influence in high places and his usefulness to her. While it may still be true, therefore, that there is no particular intentionality in her words and gestures, Célimène admits that there is a general one.

Far from being pure and an end in itself—a mere sociableness—communication here has a practical purpose for the individual in that through it he avoids making enemies and seeks the goodwill of others. For women in particular it is important to have powerful protectors. Like several of Marivaux's heroines, Célimène is a veuve, which is to say that she is equally free from the tutelage of her family and from the tyranny of a husband. As her freedom is limited, however, by the social code, no matter how clearly conventional the latter is recognized to be, she must find gentlemen willing to take up her defense on those occasions when she needs help. In the end, her freedom rests entirely on the goodwill of men. She is not, therefore, without responsibility for her suitors' persistent hopes. Yet she does not deceive them. On the contrary, she is contrasted with Arsinoë who does. In Molière's vision all those who oppose the court and the code on which it is based are either dupes who do not understand social rules (Orgon, Alceste) or hypocrites who understand them but refuse to play according to them (Tartuffe, Arsinoë). The hypocrite is thus by definition anti-social and it is, indeed, Arsinoë who destroys the fragile balance in which Célimène has reconciled the goals of individuals and the general requirements of social harmony. In many ways, therefore, Célimène represents the ideal order of courtly society. In her the positive content of particular needs and desires is brought into harmony with the code on which the very possibility of society is based.

Marivaux also sees woman as the characteristic figure of the social order of his time. Like Célimène many of his heroines are "widows," free agents, yet free only on condition that they observe the social code in all its aspects. For them too the only source of strength and influence lies in making themselves attractive to men. "Nous nous entêtons du vil honneur de leur plaire," Arthenice, the leader of the women's revolt in La Colonie, charges. "Est-ce notre faute?" the women answer. "Nous n'avons que cela à faire" (Sc. 9). Not surprisingly, vanity plays a predominant role in Marivaux. "Notre vanité et notre coquetterie, voilà la plus grande source de nos passions," Lucile muses, as she discovers her interest in Damis growing in proportion as his in her is, as she believes, declining (Les Serments Indiscrets, V, 2). The vanity of woman is one of the great themes of Marivaux and is intimately related to his interpretation of her social condition. "… Voir sans cesse qu'on est aimable: "ah! que cela est doux à voir! Le charmant point de vue pour une femme! En vérité, tout est perdu quand vous perdez cela," Hortense confesses in Le Prince Travesti (I, 2). In a much discussed second stage of Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, which prolongs the play by an act, Silvia, not content with extracting a declaration of love from Dorante while the latter still believes she is a servant, announces to her family that she will not be satisfied until he has asked for her hand in marriage. Although, of course, Silvia and Dorante are socially compatible, Silvia's enterprise underlines the social significance of female vanity. In the man's pursuit of her, Silvia is saying, woman reverses the position to which she is assigned in social life.

In Marivaux's world, however, general triumphs are no longer enough. Desire has become more pressing, more individual, less easily contained and controlled than it was in the world of Le Misanthrope. It is Arsinoë the hypocrite, as we mentioned, who disrupts Célimène's universe; Célimène herself suffers, apparently, from no inner conflicts. The heroines of Marivaux's world, on the other hand, have to struggle hard to maintain that identity of person and persona which Célimène achieves so effortlessly. This struggle is, indeed, one of the principal motifs of his comedies. Characteristically, his heroines are not, like Célimène, engaged only in a kind of generalized coquetterie. The action of Marivaux's comedies concerns usually two lovers, not a court; the problem is not how to harmonize different personae, but how to harmonize the person and the persona; and the happy denouement, together with the consequent release of dramatic tension, is achieved when this problem is resolved.

At no point, however, whatever the mental anguish of the hero or heroine, is the persona, or the social code, actually abandoned. "Assurément," the Marquise declares in the second Surprise de l'Amour, "ce n'est pas que je me soucie de ce qu'on appelle la gloire d'une femme, gloire sotte, ridicule, mais reçue, mais établie, qu'il faut soutenir, et qui nous pare; les hommes pensent cela, il faut penser comme les hommes ou ne pas vivre avec eux" (II, 6). Rather than face a break between the person and the persona, rather than confront their own desire, Marivaux's characters will resort to mental breakdown—whence the frequently heard cry: "Je ne sais où je suis" (first Surprise de l'Amour, III, 4)—and they will recover as soon as they discover a means of reconciling their desire with their social role—the occasion of the equally characteristic: "Ah! je vois clair dans mon coeur" (Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, II, 12). In the last resort, therefore, their own desire is subordinated to the maintenance of the social order. There is a point beyond which they cannot go, most amusingly presented perhaps in Act III, scene 8 of Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard.

At the same time, the bare fact that woman does feel and pursue desire, however deviously, is not without significant consequences. To the degree that men recognize her as a creature of desire, they are inevitably prepared to interpret her words and gestures as covert expressions of desire. The code to which these words and gestures refer thus becomes ambiguous—and highly flexible. A word or gesture can be interpreted with reference to the original code by which women were protected from the advances of enterprising males or it can be interpreted according to another code in which desire is only formally denied. In either case the vocabulary remains the same and the burden of interpretation is on the interlocutor. The interlocutor is not always willing to assume this responsibility, however. Whence the exasperation of the Countess in La Fausse Suivante. "Il n'y a rien de plus désagréable que votre obstination à me croire polie," she tells the Chevalier; "car il faudra, malgré moi, que je le sois … Y a-t-il rien de plus haïssable qu'un homme qui ne saurait deviner" (II, 8). The reticence of the interlocutor indicates a further consequence of woman's pursuit of desire. As a protective device the code of modesty and gallantry had a proper place in a world in which each social group—class or sex—had or was supposed to have its own particular nature. There was a way of being for men, and a way of being for women, as there was a way of being for barons and a way of being for serfs. In Marivaux's world the difference between the sexes, like all other social hierarchies, has become blurred and remains only in form. The behavior of many of his male characters is scarcely different from that of his female ones. Almost all are women in these plays. Rosimond, the hero of Le Petit-MaÎtre Corrigé, is only the most explicitly designated of a gallery of similar figures. We need merely think of some of the scenes in which the lovers try to bring their enterprises to a successful conclusion to realize that male and female no longer have their respective roles but behave in exactly the same manner.

Generations of critics have thus done well to emphasize the central role of woman in Marivaux. But Marivaux's theatre is not only predominantly about women, it is also, despite its exposure of her wiles and her vanity, a glorification of woman, and not of the free woman Laclos was to evoke at the end of the century in his book De l'Education des femmes, but of the very woman whose secret humiliations Marivaux understood so well.

Woman, as Marivaux presents her, incarnates the highest qualities of civilized life—charm, wit, taste, intelligence, sensibility—and these qualities are the result of a combination in her of desire and inferiority. Where there is only need, there is, in Marivaux's view, no refinement or delicacy of sentiment. The Countess in Le Legs is shocked on discovering the naked selfishness of her maid, but the valet Lepine tells her a few simple truths: "Cette prudence ne vous rit pas; elle vous répugne; votre belle âme de Comtesse s'en scandalise; mais tout le monde n'est pas comtesse … la médiocrité de l'état fait que les pensées sont médiocres. Lisette n'a point de bien, et c'est avec de petits sentiments qu'on en amasse" (Sc. 21). It is only when need is transformed into desire, when necessity becomes luxury, that refinement of manners and feelings is possible, for desire, unlike need, is itself a social phenomenon, not an individual one, and it brings with it a heightened awareness of others. The less need and the more desire, the more refinement there will be. At the same time, desire destroys all "objective" values. Desirability becomes the sole measure of everything and all traditional values are gathered up in the all-embracing web of exchange value. Sometimes this situation is presented explicitly, as in those comedies where money plays a central role, but it is manifested in all of them by the women characters as they measure themselves exclusively and explicitly in terms of their desirability. The traditional essentialist order of things is thus deeply undermined by a rival order, entirely man-made and without any transcendental foundation.

Nevertheless, the attempt to counter the authority of men, which has produced the characteristic qualities of women, stops short at revolt. The established order of male or parental authority is not to be overturned. Angélique in Marivaux's Ecole des Mères differs from her predecessor in L'Ecole des Femmes in that she does not reject her mother. The latter is not reasonable; "je ne l'en aime pourtant pas moins," says Angélique (Sc. 18). There is an attempted revolt of the women in La Colonie, but it fails because, as Marivaux presents it, it is the "nature" of women, the ruled, to rule by charm and guile, while it is the "nature" of men, the rulers, to be ruled by their inferiors. Civilization, in other words, is a humanly contrived space of freedom and equality, which the inferiors carve out within a structure of inequality that is thereby softened or even suspended, but neither denied nor abolished. Some lines which are recited in the Divertissement at the beginning of La Colonie to console the women for the failure of their revolt sum up this position, though they are probably not from Marivaux's own pen:

      Si les lois des hommes dépendent,
Ne vous plaignez pas, trop aimables objets:
Vous imposez des fers à ceux qui vous
 commandent,
    Et vos maÎtres sont vos sujets.

Marivaux had not lived through the Law affair and burned his own fingers in it without learning anything. The scope of desire, as he saw it, was expanding and possession could not still it. On the contrary, it was among those who already possessed much that it was strongest. The entire social order was thus being reduced to a shadow by the growing intensity of individual desire as it levelled all traditional distinctions before it and reduced them to measurable quantities. Yet there seems to have been no question in Marivaux's mind that the social order might actually be overturned in favor of another, just as in the minds of his heroines there is no question of abandoning the formal social code. Even when he argues against "prejudice" Marivaux does so with respect for traditional forms. Angélique in Le Préjugé Vaincu must overcome her distaste for the "bourgeois" Dorante, but Dorante, we are reassured, "n'a pas fait sa fortune; il l'a trouvée toute faite" (Sc. 8). Although he is "sans noblesse," in other words, he lives "nobly."

Perhaps Marivaux's unwillingness to draw the revolutionary conséquences of widespread individual desire, as he revealed it in his comedies, can be understood if we recall the peculiar balance which sustained the society he lived in and wrote for. The activities of the bourgeoisie in the early eighteenth century were still intimately bound up with the structure of the feudal-absolutist state, the whole order of which these very activities contradicted. Similarly, the power, wealth and market value of the aristocracy were entirely dependent on a hierarchical order which was flatly contradicted by the outlook and by the behavior of the aristocracy. Bourgeoisie and aristocracy alike, therefore, had an interest in upholding the existing order and seeking the satisfaction of their desires within it, for if the social order and the rules that sustained it were obstacles to individual desire, they were also the conditions of its fulfilment. Desire, in short, could not be avowed; it could be pursued only within the space that could be won for it from a code that officially ignored its existence. Similarly, equality could not be avowed; it could only be realized inside a framework which officially denied it. The celebration of woman by Marivaux is thus a celebration of the whole mode of life of the aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie of his time.

If desire itself is unavowable in Marivaux's work, the nature of desire is shrouded in ambiguity by his art, and this ambiguity is also socially significant. Old-fashioned seduction gives way, as we saw, in many of the comedies to the aventure galante, in which both partners seduce and are seduced according to a loosely prescribed ritual. But this ritual is not easily interpreted. The mystery of Watteau's fêtes galantes—uncertainly sentimental and erotic at the same time—should be enough to give us pause. It is not in fact at the level of their content that we can best interpret Marivaux's comedies. To say that they are about "l'amour naissant," the traditional view of them, is to say something of what they are about, but not, perhaps, enough. Just as the words and gestures of Marivaux's heroines do not signify directly in the plays but are offered deliberately as a set of signifiers which the interlocutor has to interpret, so the plays themselves do not signify directly but offer a coherent structure which can be diversely interpreted according to the audience's wish. We can see them as configurations of erotic adventures or as configurations of sentimental ones; the initial desire may be the anonymous desire of a body or it may be "l'amour naissant," the desire of a real individual; the marriages at the end may be taken as the culmination of erotic encounters or as the true meeting of subjects in love. The "aristocratic" reading and the "bourgeois" one both fit. Yet many of the plays would be destroyed if we plumped for one or the other, for they depend on nothing so much as the bracketing of any single "real" meaning. This is not to say that they have no meaning, but that ambiguity is built into their structure, so that their lack of precise meaning becomes itself part of their meaning. Even the most "bourgeois" of the comedies participates in this ambiguity. The problem in La Mère Confidente, according to all commentators the most larmoyante of Marivaux's comedies, is a typical bourgeois one: firstly, how to be sure of the love of a young man, and secondly, how to marry him with the consent of a parent who is afraid of penniless adventurers and eager to see her child make a solid and appropriate match. The problem is fully resolved at the end, when Ergaste makes Dorante, the young man, his heir—"Ne vous ai-je pas promis qu'Angélique n'épouserait point un homme sans bien." But Marivaux's audiences could, if they liked, view the play as an unusual variation on the familiar theme of the woman who wishes to live la vie galante without sacrificing her reputation or flouting social conventions. From this point of view the bourgeois of the comedy are like the shepherds and shepherdesses of the pastoral, and the bourgeois background and sentiments serve only to give a new and piquant flavor to a ritual that otherwise tends to become tedious. One recalls how a sentimental intrigue revived the flagging erotic interest of Laclos' hero at the end of the century. Marivaux does not suggest that the second reading is the "correct" one, but knowing his audiences as he did, he knew that it was possible, and the special charm even of his most "bourgeois" comedy resides in his willingness to leave the interpretation open, so that the audience can move back and forth at its pleasure, allowing itself to be absorbed by the action at one moment, and seeing it as a masquerade at the next.

Along with many of his contemporaries, Marivaux held that whatever might be imagined about a nature of things behind the world of phenomena, the only nature which men could study usefully was the order of the observable world itself. In many respects this was a liberating attitude. Montesquieu's politics and the economics of Galiani and the Physiocrats are but two of the new sciences that rest on it. But there was a danger that the observed order of things might itself be naturalized, so that it became identified as the fundamental and ineluctable order of the world, a second nature as potent as the first had been to those who had believed in it. This is in fact what happened. Human nature and the fundamental structures of human relations as they could be observed in the world of the ancien regime were taken by Marivaux and by many of the Modernes to be fixed and unchanging. Time, indeed, they conceived of as no more than a succession of discontinuous instants constantly vanishing and being renewed, while novelty was simply the repetition in different instants of time of age-old rituals. "Toutes les âmes sont du même age," Phocion tells Leontine in Le Triomphe de l'Amour (I, 6). Not change, then, but only variety was real, and indeed variety is a key word in the esthetics of the Modernes. By change the Modernes could mean no more than a constant re-shuffling of roles, an eternal passing back and forth between fixed categories of masters and servants, of mistresses and soubrettes.

Marivaux's comedies, inevitably, are repetitious, variations on a few simple themes, and this repetitiousness is as appropriate to the view of the world that underlies them as that of Lancret is, for instance, in painting. What Marivaux explores in play after play is the relation between the actor and the role, between the performance and the scenario, what he celebrates is the peculiar freedom which the skilful and self-conscious performer finds in it. It is a freedom in many ways similar to that which Montesquieu was to celebrate when he turned L'Esprit des Lois into a eulogy of the "temperate monarchy."

But this conception of freedom as something to be realized within a given framework of relations and rules rather than as a condition of action prior to these relations and rules is not, surely, fortuitous. It is too well suited to the situation and the needs of the society with which Marivaux was intimately associated, allowing as it did both for aristocratic libertinage and for bourgeois individualism, on condition that neither upset the apple-cart. A different conception of freedom, turned toward making the future rather than transfiguring the past, is not to be found in Marivaux's comedies, or, if found, turns out to be a vain and in the end playful gesture, such as the women's revolt in La Colonie. We shall not find such a conception of freedom in literature until the second half of the century. Significantly, both Rousseau and Laclos, however differently they portray the ideal woman, agree in their disparagement of the type of woman who is the heroine under a multitude of names and guises of almost every one of Marivaux's comedies.