Pétrus Borel: l'univers caréral de Madame Putiphar

Incarceration pervades all aspects of Borel's novel that describes a Manichean world of sublime victims relentlessly persecuted by heinous tyrants. Virtue is systematically oppressed by power and vice. The sexual aggressions against the two protagonists are a premonition of the multiple types of imprisonment to follow (prisons in a romantic retreat, a royal harem, a madhouse, a fiendish pit, culminating in insanity). Highly influenced by Sade's writing, Madame Putiphar differs from it through its point of view, that of the victim. The narrator expresses his indignation at the mistreatment of his protagonists and announces retributive Justice by the 1789 Revolution. (In French) (C-LT)