Sade’s novels sustain a constantly reinvented relationship to gothic motifs: if a late novel like La Marquise de Gange seems to apply the program of a gothic novel without the supernatural, the different versions of Justine destroy the gothic topos from the inside by means of the famous mechanism of the dissertation and the orgy. Even more clearly, in Juliette, the “noir” becomes, in a carnivalesque mode, the hyper-theatricalized, macabre décor of the Sadean orgy.
CLIL theme: 4027 -- SCIENCES HUMAINES ET SOCIALES, LETTRES -- Lettres et Sciences du langage -- Lettres -- Etudes littéraires générales et thématiques