Илюзиите на любовта в пиесите на Пиер Мариво: социални контекст
The Illusions of Love in Pierre Marivaux’s Plays: Social Contexts

Summary/Abstract: The article intends to follow the homological correlation between the images of love during the formation of loving sociability in Pierre Marivaux’s comedies “The Double Inconsistency” and “The Triumph of Love” and socioeconomical changes in France during the first 20 years of 18th century. In the focus of the study appears the influence of transformational processes in the understanding of real and illusive value as a result of financial turmoil of John Law’s economical system and its impact upon social relationships. Hence, the socioeconomical atmosphere in France during the period of Regency is depicted in detail as a historical context of large-scale changes in understanding the value of love, manipulation of characters, profit and loss in love. Using the tools of the new historical critics, the article offers a survey of the two comedies by Pierre Marivaux as a trajectory of real and illusive relationship in the economy of love exchange in the context of radical sensible-semiotic transformation. The embodiment of love sociability in Pierre Marivaux’s comedies “The Double Inconsistency” and “The Triumph of Love” illustrate different forms of love exchange, in which real and illusory value, security and risk, winning and losing in love consistently interact. In “The Double Inconsistency” Marivaux builds a literary representation of a mechanism in which the renunciation of the absolute value of moral values such as unconditional love and real goods can be freely and safely transformed into a newly acquired absolute value of new love and a series of symbolic goods – prestige, noble status, wealth. In the comedy “The Triumph of Love” this process is complicated by the division of the characters into winners and losers, disappointed and rewarded. The study summarizes the role of Marivaux’s comedies and their influence upon social imagination.

• Details
• Contents