Selfhood in the Early Finance Capitalism of Manon Lescaut

Abstract

Prévost’s memoir-novel, L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, engages with the challenges of deploying traditional modes of literary description (characterology and allegorization) in the nascent reign of finance capitalism. This article examines the interrelationship between abstraction and material existence in the early eighteenth-century French bestseller Manon Lescaut. By underscoring the ambivalences of class ideology via the context of financial revolution, I argue that Prévost experiments with a new moral economy of selfhood that grapples with, and perhaps ultimately loosens itself from, the strictures of ancien régime social identity.