SOURCE: “Resistance and Retreat: A Laclosian Primer for Women,” The University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 391-408.

In the following essay, Diaconoff compares Laclos's essays with Les Liaisons dangereuses, arguing that his views on feminism lacked vision and did not call for fundamental change.

In the past ten or fifteen years the assessment of Choderlos de Laclos's treatment of women has undergone significant revision. For if during decades he was celebrated as the first feminist writer and continues to be so called by some critics, male especially,¹ in recent years an increasing number of others have asserted new judgments. Various critics now suggest that, far from being feminist, Laclos's work in toto reveals a misogynist mentality (arising out of the imaginaire viril,² a sort of ambivalence towards women best defined as ‘reductive misogyny,)’³ the kind of writing that poses as femino-centric but whose ideological subscript is...