ABSTRACT
In La Vie de Marianne, Pierre Carlet de Marivaux adopted the voice of a female narrator and an eighteenth-century version of a female writing style.1 He attributed the unique style of the novel to the narrator’s femininity; Marianne purportedly expressed the quintessence of femininity: she was ‘furieusement femme’2 (furiously female). Staging an ‘ecriture de femme’ (a woman’s writing) that resembled the language of worldly conversation and cultivated sociability, Marivaux privileged the female art of conversational brilliance practiced in salons.3 Because this art was usually excluded from the domain of literary criticism, Marivaux used a female conversational style as a mask for his own literary non-conformity.4 Behind the provocative, studied disarray of Marianne’s memoirs, Marivaux refused to be subjugated by an imposed literary order.
