Depictions of the Family

The family is the most civilized form of social existence; it is both the foundation and the most precious product of society. In everyday life, we perceive the family as something we know well from experience and relate to our own lives, without giving much thought to the many semantic and practical variations it entails. The family is one of the most ubiquitous themes in literature. What is intriguing is to observe the extent to which the concept of family is malleable and flexible over time, and what specific family characteristics can be discerned in the literary works of a given period. Many works from the Enlightenment, for example, readily explore the function of the family, the role of the father or mother, the relationships between spouses and between parents and children, the upbringing of children, and so on. The trend toward an increased presence of family themes in 18th-century literary works can be confirmed by examining the two novels we propose to analyze in this study: Marivaux's *Le Paysan Parvenu* and Madame de Genlis's *Les Mères rivales*.