French Dressing

French Dressing looks at the ancien rgime'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.