Entertaining modernity: How four eighteenth-century heroines romanced social change (Madame de La Fayette, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, France, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson)

This dissertation analyzes four eighteenth-century novels, claiming that the novelistic form developed in England and in France to mediate social change. It also claims that female characters were particularly suited to this task. Novels and the female characters who inhabited them made possible a public discourse about the shift toward modern consciousness; for example, changes associated with social class, gender, economics, religion, morality, crime, education, writing and publishing, and ultimately epistemology are entertained in these fictions. Mme de Lafayette's novel La Princesse de Clèves (and public reaction to it) is discussed in terms of interpretive power and vraisemblance, and how these issues might be related to its social context. Samuel Richardson's Pamela and its parody, Henry Fielding's Shamela, made visible various sites of social and epistemological bad faith. Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, in writing La Vie de Marianne, explored social and literary legitimacy, but in his work we see that neither the character nor the novel can escape ideology. Finally, in Moll Flanders Daniel Defoe, in an apparent criminal biography, undercut the moral force of Moll's narration, thus transforming the “moral of the story” into a story about the discursive nature of the moral.