ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the different permutations of the responses a series of situations and scenes in La Vie de Marianne in which they are foregrounded. Traditionally, literary criticism has affirmed Marivaux's association with eighteenth-century sensibility and sentimentalism straightforwardly, particularly in relation to La Vie de Marianne and Le Spectateur francais , and even claiming him as a 'founding father'. Jamieson's book is devoted entirely to situating Marivaux's work in the context of the 'movement of sensibility'. Leo Spitzer, Mario Matucci, and David Culpin, for example, have broadly argued that the language of Marivaudian psychology has been understood anachronistically. Whereas Spitzer considers Poulet's reading of Marivaux's vocabulary anachronistic in its projection of a twentieth-century understanding of such terms, Matucci opposes Marivaux's use of le sentiment to the meaning of sensibilite. La Vie de Marianne's credentials as a novel of sensibility have also been challenged more directly at the level of genre.