Francine du Plessix Gray’s: At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life :: Biography Family Papers

Francine du Plessix Grays At Home with the Marquis de Sade A LifeIn 1998, Francine du Plessix Gray, prolific author of novels, biographies, sociological studies and frequent contributions to The new-fangled Yorker, published her most acclaimed work to date At Home with the Marquis de Sade A Life. A Pulizer Prize finalist that has already appeared in multiple English-language editions as well as translated ones, Du Plessix Grays biography has met with crowning achievement and recognition on all fronts. Accolades have accumulated from the most acclaimed of eighteenth-century luminaries, such as Robert Darnton, in a lengthy review in The New York Review of Books that compares her biography with Laurence Bongies Sade A Biographical Essay, to the list of scholars whom she thanks in her acknowledgements for having read the manuscript Lynn Hunt, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, and Marie-Hlne Hut. Surely, any scholar can appreciate the vast amount of research that undergirds Du Plessix Grays narrative, and indeed, she takes great perseverance to meticulously inform the reader who might care to look at her sources and read her acknowledgements that she has done her homework and knows every inch of the scholarly terrain. Du PlessixGray wisely begins her acknowledgements with a debt of gratitude to Maurice Levers studies, which rest on years of archival research.However, what really frames Francine du Plessix Grays biography is not so much the fin du dix huitime sicle but the fin du vingtime sicle and the reality material from Sades life that made it possible to represent the Marquis, his sons, his wife, mother-in-law, father-in-law, and uncle as so many of the throng who populate the running narrative of criminals, deadbeat dads, incestuous relatives, date-raping playboys, and battered women that fill soap operas, day-time talk, womens magazines, talk radio, and the tabloids. This paper, then, explores Sades biography not as a narrative of (the Marquis de Sades) his l ife, but as a narrative that pleases todays reader because it serves up a voyeurs view of (in) his dysfunctional family life at home that we are all too familiar with. This becomes abundantly apparent when du Plessix-Grays rendering of the Marquis and the marquises lives are superimposed over the rcit of lives that we read about all the time in the popular press and observe in idiot box soaps and other series. Ultimately, we are interested in what such a reading, writing and representation of Sades life does to Sades persona and status, both in the world of letters, but more importantly, in the world at large.