On the Hardness of Virtue, or Fetishizing Disinterest in Beaumarchais' Les Deux amis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10612199 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Caroline Weber (0000-0001-7751-3523), Caroline Elisabeth Weber (0000-0002-6772-7410, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 119 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 800-818 |
| Publication date | 2004-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modern Language Notes (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0149-6611 • E-ISSN: 2326-1978 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/mln.2004.0138 |
| OpenAlex | W1982057227 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 1 |
An exploration of the self-delusional structures in Beaumarchais's bourgeois drama Les Deux amis, that support the iniquities engendered by commerce in mid-eighteenth-century Lyon. At the dawn of capitalistic enterprise, the protagonist of the drame bourgeois suspends knowledge of his own rapaciousness by emphatically cultivating a stance of selfless virtue as he pursues his commercial interests. It is the paradox of the genre that the very attempt to depict the nascent merchant class in France as a salutary alternative to a lazy and selfish nobility reveals the mechanisms of disavowal upon which the businessman's "disinterested" virtues are predicated, and gestures toward the unseemly economic realities from which its heroes avert their eyes
Aesthetics · Art · Bourgeoisie · Drama · Epistemology · Literature · Nobility · Political science · Virtue · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Law · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
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