French Dressing

This study scrutinizes the ancien regime's practices of unsafe sex, and the scenarios of libertinage in which both sexes were equally stylish antagonists. It also shows that women paid unequally, sometimes fatally, for the power games of libertine experiments. French Dressing looks at the ancien régime's scenarios of libertine seduction--unsafe sex and its consequences for women's lives. It places the gender performances of male and female-authored novels in dialogue in order to recover the complexity of a century obsessed, as we are today, with writing and living plots of desire. FrenchDressing exposes the erotic anxieties behind a national culture of sexual self-display--French undressing.