James Fowler

Handsome, Gallant, Gentle, Rich: Before and After Marriage in the Tales of Charles Perrault

Seven of Charles Perrault’s eight fairy tales involve marriage. On one level the tales can be read as having been written for children; but their seeming naivete is undercut by irony, especially when we attend to the worldly-wise morals attached to each tale. This chapter shows how, in stories including ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Bluebeard’, Perrault deploys irony in order to explore the stakes of marriage in the economic, cultural and social conditions of ancien regime France. In the process, he draws out tensions between an ideal of marriage built on dynastic alliance and the radically different notion of ‘companionate marriage’. Dedicated to a niece of Louis XIV, the tales comfortingly suggest that royal brides at least might not need to sacrifice love to dynastic duty.

Sade's Theatre: Pleasure, Vision, Masochism

This first full-length study in English to examine the marquis de Sade’s theatre will be of interest to all those working in eighteenth-century drama and theory of spectatorship. Attentive to eighteenth-century dramatic theory and practice, this book also borrows from psychoanalysis and film theory to argue that his plays offer a model of visual pleasure that is masochistic in nature.