SOURCE: "Literature and Society in the Early Enlightenment: The Case of Marivaux," in MLN, Vol. 82, No. 3, May, 1967, pp. 306-33.

In the essay below, Gossman delineates the relations of Marivaux's plays to the social and philosophical views of his day.

In the last few years there has been a revival of interest in Marivaux, touched off perhaps by Gabriel Marcel's introduction to a 1947 edition of a selection of the comedies. Not much of the new criticism, on the whole, has been concerned with the relation between Marivaux's work and the society in and for which it was written. It is this relation which I should like to explore. Marivaux wrote both plays and novels, but as a novelist he may well have entered into a different relation to his public from that in which he stood to the public of the plays. It seemed prudent, therefore, to approach the...