The ancient Greek ideal of kalokagathia used to equate beauty, goodness and truth, and early to mid-18th-century novelists in France upheld this norm in their construction of fictional characters. In their novels, a beautiful character would inevitably be a good person, while, conversely, an ugly physical appearance would betray an evil nature. In both instances, their portraits, i.e. a sum of physical and moral descriptions, would convey this reliable information to the readers.  

And yet, there were cases in which beautiful - and most often feminine - exteriors hid dark pits of duplicity. The writers would therefore introduce these characters through what I call the “divergent portraits,” which were used as teachable moments, or better yet, as pedagogical tools to warn their readers not to trust appearances and alert them that evil was afoot.

However, as the century advanced, writers such as Jacques Cazotte, Choderlos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade, and others, not only understood the potential and the transgressive power of playing with appearances, but also fully embraced the divergent portrait as their sole mode of portraiture. In this way, their writings created a new and original sense of suspense that was absent from earlier novels. They also played with stereotypes and reader expectations, transforming traditional respectable and trustworthy figures (noblemen, noblewomen, priests, officials, etc.) into deviants, criminals and depraved entities.

Following my dissertation research, my paper will explore the early use of portraiture as a proleptic mode of narration and its later reshaping, when unprincipled libertine immorality and Gothic obscurity shattered Enlightenment certainties and cast a shadow over the Lumières of the era.