Virginie entre la nature et la vertu. Cohésion narrative et contradictions idéologiques dans Paul et Virginie

Jean-Michel Racault : Virginie between nature and virtue. Narrative cohesion and ideological contradiction in Paul et Virginie. In this novel, which aims to demonstrate that " happiness consists in living according to natural virtue ", the episode of Virginie's bath presents a problem. Behind the apparent impersonality of an objective description, the rigorous organisation of the account in which the external disorder of the physical world is paralleled by the heroine's internal unease, makes us see that the two series of events are the same. Thus Nature, until then a benign divinity, seems to change its character brutally, and the appearance of sexuality, which is incestuous and therefore forbidden, shatters the initial Eden-like world. This leads to a re-working of the novel's ideology, restoring — without perhaps the author being aware — the coherence which the work has often been accused of lacking.