Thomas Wynn

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.

Manon Through the Lens of Clouzot (1948): ‘images troublantes et précises’

If cinema may potentially recast what is most fundamental to literature, Henri-Georges Clouzots version of Prévosts Manon Lescautassumes its duty to show the once hidden heroine by transferring the novel to the early days of post-war France. Following an analysis of Maupassants critique of the novel, in which he proposes the heroine as a disembodied and mythical seductress, this article examines how eighteenth-century illustrations offer an alternative narrative to the texts monological account of infidelity. Hair emerges as a sign of desire and specularity, a combination that Clouzots film develops at the level of both narrative and image. Profiting from the demands of the mainstream cinematic apparatus and his modern mise-en-scène,the director uses his heroines hair to signal her metamorphosis from collaborator to prostitute to victim. Clouzots adaptation is seen not as a betrayal of Prévosts novel, but as an example of the mythology of its heroine.