Intermedial Approaches to Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne: Text, Illustration, Film

Abstract

Using the theoretical framework of ‘intermediality’, this article examines the ways in which Marivaux's novel La Vie de Marianne (1731‐42) has been pictured through time. It explores the relationship between text and image in various illustrations and in Benoît Jacquot's film adaptation Marianne (1995), focusing on episodes involving Marianne and her benefactor M. de Climal. Not only do these transpositions suggest complex forms of reception of Marivaux's text, but in their anticipation of and engagement with other media (theatre, painting, cinema) they also provide a richly suggestive interrogation of the conditions of theatricality and of what it means to become a ‘spectacle’.