SOURCE: Maclean, Marie. “The Sword and the Flower: The Sexual Symbolism of Lorenzaccio.” Australian Journal of French Studies 16, no. 1 (January-April 1979): 166-81.

In the following essay, Maclean probes the masculine and feminine symbolism of Musset's drama Lorenzaccio in relation to its tragic theme of sexual defilement.

The world of Lorenzaccio is a world of striking, almost stylized contrast. Night and day, male and female, purity and debauchery, are shown in a type of Manichean opposition. These basic oppositions are, however, subject to a pattern of reversal. In Musset's Florence, under the corrupt Alexandre de Medicis, an inversion of values appears to have become the norm. Musset often deliberately negates or perverts the traditional meaning of symbolism and imagery in order to impress on his audience this distortion of values. For the Medici court:

Faire du jour la nuit et de la nuit le jour, c'est un moyen commode de...