ABSTRACT
In the discussion ahead, I will be using the 'exchange of women' paradigm taken from Claude Levi-Strauss and, for example, Rene Girard
and Gayle Rubin, to focus on the changing meanings of the bonds between men in a seventeenth-century play and an eighteenthcentury novel.1 These dis-cussions are part of a book-length study of what I am call ing 'male homosocial desire' - the whole spectrum of bonds between men, including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional
subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic exchange - within which the various forms of the traffic in women take place.
