Heroines under Patriarchy: a analysis of Abbe Prevost’s Manon Lescaut and Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie

Abbe Prevost’s Manon Lescaut depicts a passionate, yet tragic love story of Manon Lescaut and Des Grieux, as narrated by the latter. We have no knowledge of Manon Lescaut herself, besides what Des Grieux tells us. Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie is the love story between two childhood friends on a desolate land, who struggle to keep their love alive due to societal pressures. Both these texts have a tragic ending – a key feature of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels.  

These texts can be stated as novels of sensibility, exploring human emotions and experiences of passion and love.  Such themes open a passage for a gendered readership suggesting that although they appear to engage with gender inequalities, they both ultimately reinforce patriarchal authority by denying their heroines narrative autonomy and reduces them to symbolic figures of punishment and virtue through male-dominated narratives. 

The male narration of both Manon and Virginie’s death highlight the reinforcement of patriarchal norms in the texts as Manon’s death in poverty reflects the consequences of unrestrained female passions, while Virginie’s modest death is an idealised symbol of feminine virtue. Though their fates differ in context, both are ultimately framed through patriarchal ideas: Virginie’s choice of choosing modesty over survival, presents her as complicit with virtues imposed on women, whereas Manon’s tragic demise is portrayed as a punishment for her uncontrollable desires. Furthermore, through the male-dominated narrative voices, deception becomes key in justifying inequality. From the start of Manon Lescaut, Des Grieux is presented as someone whom the reader should pity, as the narrator couldn’t help but feel “disposed to wish him well,” even before Manon is introduced. Such narrative framing positions Des Grieux as a victim of passion, showing how deception is used to justify male vulnerability. When Des Grieux narrates his first encounter with Manon, he implicitly places the burden of their circumstances on Manon, by casting her as a female fatale – the initiator of their doomed affair because she was “much more experienced” – subtly constructing a narrative of masculine vulnerability. By using the “language of patriarchy” Des Grieux’s presents his grief and sense of betrayal by distorting Manon into a destructive figure rather than a woman of her own complexities. In this sense, Manon becomes a narrative object rather than a subject, her identity being shaped by what Des presents her as.

Likewise, Paul et Virginie, through its layered narrative structure of male voices, it idolises female submission, ultimately restricting Virginie to be defined by her compliance in patriarchal norms. For instance, when the escaped slave asks Virginie’s help, Virginie decides to give her back to her wicked master, and thereafter exclaims, “Oh, how hard it is to do good!” - it creates this momentarily disillusionment – that although she is a literal symbol of virtue, she is still powerless. The novel places her in a world where female agency is ineffective in action – hence her death was a mere performance. Later, when Virginie does not send a letter directly to Paul, he critiques her that her apparent “love of riches has ruined her like many others” as he assumes that Virginie has become corrupted by French society, despite knowing that she was sent to France against her will, and seems to be pressured into society as inferred from her letter. Through this we see how the male narrative is a form of deception; we are only given a male perspective, and Virginie’s experience in France is not documented besides what she sends to the island. Hence, both Manon and Virginie become “the finest of metaphors,” as they are denied full personhood and instead become symbolic vessels for patriarchal interpretation.    

Both texts induce symbolism to implicitly mention gender inequalities, yet ultimately, reinforce the same disparity that they appear to acknowledge. Typically, women are expected to embody virtue and purity, which we see through Virginie, who is the embodiment of it. Simultaneously, we also see the consequence of not adhering to, through Manon. Both female characters are symbols of the entrapped womanhood within a patriarchal society, as they both are constricted by a condition which society imposes on them. Manon, through the biased narration of Des Grieux, becomes a figure of suffering for following her passions; even though he describes her an “extraordinary character” it devalues her as a woman as the tone suggests an irony, and not a sincere praise, which then further reduces Manon to an object, which he can subject his anguish to as a way to justify the pain of rejection. On the other hand, the old man narrating Paul and Virginie’s story, states that at Virginie’s birth, her mother, Madama de La Tour, prophesised that Virginie “will be virtuous” – a statement that predetermines Virginie’s key characteristic: that her restraint will be portrayed as a moral and virtuous strength. However, the use of the verb, ‘will’ removes any sense of choice, suggesting that Virginie’s life is not of her own, but as an inherited obligation to uphold the symbol of restraint and sacrifice. This is true till the very end, where her refusal to undress in order to survive, becomes the reason of her demise, yet the old man narrates that she remained “noble and assured” illustrating that although her virtue is preserved, it is only at the cost of her life. Ultimately, neither Manon nor Virginie are granted narrative autonomy as they both are filtered through the male perspectives that determine their symbolism within their texts – showing how gender inequality is fundamentally rooted within the narration.    

To conclude, while Manon Lescaut and Paul et Virginie appear to acknowledge gender inequalities as they are texts of sensibility, they ultimately reinforce patriarchal authority. Through male-dominated narration and the symbolic reduction of women, both texts deny their heroines of true agency and hence, are an exposure of how eighteenth-century fiction would sentimentalise female virtue and suffering while ultimately upholding the very structures that restrict women.