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'L'autre chez nous': defining the national body in French literature, 1800-1848

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'L'autre chez nous': defining the national body in French literature, 1800-1848

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Content 1 ‘L’autre chez nous’: Defining the National Body in French Literature, 1800-1848 by Ingrid Leventhal A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (FRENCH) December 2017 Copyright 2017 Ingrid Leventhal 2 ABSTRACT In “‘L’autre chez nous’: Defining the National Body in French Literature, 1800- 1848,” I argue that prose, poetry, and theatrical works from the first half of the nineteenth century in France are haunted by a fear of the return of the ancien régime aristocratic past. France was engaged in the process of defining its post-Revolutionary national identity through discourses emphasizing bourgeois moral hygiene and (re)productivity. Literature expresses anxieties about various perceived threats to this nationalist project, frequently in terms of concerns about the aristocratic decadence and colonial adventures of France’s past. The works in my corpus map French anxieties about interracial and interethnic sexual relations onto the specter of ancien régime aristocratic femininity, to suggest that the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as early nineteenth-century French imperial ambitions in South West Asia and North Africa, threaten to rupture the bourgeois social and economic order. I begin by reading Chateaubriand’s René (1802) and Duras’s Ourika (1823) together to elaborate on Romanticism’s intervention into constructions of the intersection of gender, class, race and colonialism. Known as the father of early French Romanticism, Chateaubriand portrays aristocratic sexuality as potentially sterile, and proposes colonial migration and interracial marriage as means of endowing upper-class French men with reproductive potential. A supposedly fertile indigenous woman is offered as a substitute for the barren sexuality of aristocratic French women. Duras, in contrast, re-mobilizes the typically masculinist genre of Romanticism to reincorporate aristocratic femininity into the French national body. This rehabilitated aristocratic womanhood reaches its limit, however, when it encounters Ourika, a black woman living in France. Ourika echoes 3 contemporary French anxieties about miscegenation following the Haitian Revolution. In reading Duras’s novel in conversation with Chateaubriand’s, we see a shift in French literature’s attitude regarding the compatibility of the colonial Other with the national project. Adaptations of Duras’s work published between 1824-1826 generally call for a resegregation of the races in the name of maintaining France’s racial purity. By the time we reach Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (1831) we see that nostalgia for the aristocratic past risks contaminating the body politic with the effeminizing influence of the “Orient.” Balzac’s work invokes eighteenth-century Orientalist discourse to critique the very attempts of Romantic writers to resituate upper-class masculinity within the national body, as well as to challenge contemporary French imperial interest in North Africa and the Levant. Balzac represents the latter through the homogenizing notion of the “Orient” and suggests that imperial expansion threatens to drain the national body of its vitality. The question of national strength is one that also preoccupies Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille. In its treatment of the Paris-provinces antiquarian debate this short story embodies the threat of the past and the racial and sexual Other in the figure of the statue who brings death and sterility to the core of the nation by way of the marriage bed. Mérimée’s work takes to their logical conclusion the fears about miscegenation and aristocratic masculinity and femininity evinced in René, Ourika, the Ourika Mania corpus, and La Peau de Chagrin, portraying a hybrid aristocratic and racially Other woman as singularly and morbidly driven by erotic desire. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Natania Meeker, who has served not only as my dissertation committee chair, but also as my mentor, my advisor, and my greatest advocate while at USC. Natania, I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you. Your brilliance, dedication to scholarship, and unselfishness with students inspire me. Without your unwavering encouragement and unstinting efforts this project would not have been possible. Thank you for everything. I am also grateful for the feedback, encouragement, and advice of an outstanding committee. To Pani Norindr, your rigor as a scholar continues to motivate me to challenge myself in my own work. I am also so appreciative of all the advice you have provided on how to expand the corpus of my project. Olivia Harrison, your generous feedback and encyclopedic knowledge is a shining example of both scholarly breadth and depth. I hope that some day I can mobilize post-colonial studies in the same way you do. Roberto Diaz, thank you so much for your genuine enthusiasm in my work, and for advising me on how to give my project a truly international scope. This dissertation could not have been completed without the untiring support of Val Stoicescu and Patrick Irish. I also thank the USC department of French and Italian for supporting my nomination for the College Doctoral Fellowship, the Graduate School Endowed Fellowship, and the USC Graduate School Final Year Fellowship, as well as the USC Graduate School for the funding that made all this research possible. To Kate Page-Lippsmeyer and Phillip Lobo, thank you and beyond for reading my work, and for generally urging me on throughout the process. You are brilliant, generous, kind, and compassionate beyond words. To Alex, for always encouraging me 5 to be the best there ever was at my job. I love you. And finally, to my parents, Sabrina, and aunt Sylvia for awlays being so loving and supportive. I would not be here without you! 6 Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 7 Shifting notions of femininity in nineteenth-century France ............................................................ 7 Gender, class, and colonialism ........................................................................................................................ 9 Chapter summaries .......................................................................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER I: Maladie Contagieuse: Migration, Miscegenation, and the Ancien Régime in Chateaubriand’s René (1802) and Duras’s Ourika (1823) ............................................... 26 Impotent men and pathological women: defining the ancien régime in René ........................ 31 Colonial migration and interracial marriage: attempts at rehabilitation ................................. 37 Breakdown of the utopia – attempting (and failing) to save masculinity ................................ 41 Race, medicine, and the law in early nineteenth-century France ................................................ 47 Ancien régime aristocratic femininity and racial assimilation ....................................................... 53 The limits of assimilation: interracial marriage in Ourika .............................................................. 59 Pathology, hysteria, and incestuous desire ............................................................................................ 61 Ourika’s ghost: “Ourika Mania” ................................................................................................................... 69 Ourika, ou la petite négresse (1824) ......................................................................................................... 74 Enlightenment universalism and racial integration in La Négresse (1826) ............................ 75 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................ 76 CHAPTER II: ‘J’ai l’Arabie Pétrée’: Masculinity and Colonialism in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (1831) ................................................................................................................. 79 French colonialism from 1798-1848: Egypt, Syria, and Algeria ................................................... 82 Satirizing aristocratic masculinity and the bourgeois social order ............................................. 91 Tel père, tel fils: hereditary dissipation in the early nineteenth century ................................... 96 The ancien régime: congenital, pathological, and parasitic ........................................................... 100 Woman and the “Orient” as pathological parasites .......................................................................... 102 Despotism and French colonialism ......................................................................................................... 108 Colonialism and pathology .......................................................................................................................... 111 CHAPTER III: ‘Une grande femme noire’: Race, Class, and Gender in Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (1837) ................................................................................................... 123 Antiquarianism, nationalism and regionalism ................................................................................... 127 Parisian vs. provincial antiquarians ........................................................................................................ 130 Revivifying the past: “une grande femme noire,” black femininity, colonial discourse, and the provinces as periphery .......................................................................................................................... 135 Periphery as colony ........................................................................................................................................ 142 White Venus and Black Venus ................................................................................................................... 143 Ancien régime aristocratic femininity ..................................................................................................... 152 Aristocratic woman as racial Other ......................................................................................................... 154 The cost of provincial nostalgia: the monster in the marriage bed ........................................... 156 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 162 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................ 169 7 INTRODUCTION Shifting notions of femininity in nineteenth-century France My project explores literary representations of aristocratic women and of French colonialism in relationship to one another. From the late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, as the new nation was beginning to develop its identity, structures of class and gender underwent large-scale changes. These domestic shifts coincided with the re-configuration of France’s imperial identity, as the nation reconciled the loss of Haiti and began looking toward spreading French culture and ideology first across Europe and then in North Africa and the Levant. The work of this project is to elaborate on how these discourses on gender, class, race, colonialism, and nationalism not only emerged at the same time in France, but also were deeply imbricated with one another, and were inextricably linked to national anxieties about the past as well as the future. To do so I focus on four primary texts: René de Chateaubriand’s René (1802), Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823), Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (1831), and Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (1837). These works respond to (and sometimes shape the narrative of) the manifold political, social, and economic changes occurring at home and in France’s overseas empire between 1789 and 1848, voicing fears that each change would send the French body politic catapulting back to the “debauchery” of the ancien régime. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French literary and visual culture defined aristocratic womanhood and, in particular, women at court and salonnières, as lascivious, promiscuous, and frivolously and excessively materialistic. Authors and artists from across the political spectrum likewise accused aristocratic women of exercising 8 inappropriate intellectual and political power, and of “feminizing” (read weakening) France. 1 Contemporary scholars of the period argue that in response to ancien régime anxieties about aristocratic women, a patriotic, chaste, maternal ideal of womanhood emerged in the decades surrounding the French Revolution (1789), to define the future of French femininity, and of the French nation, more generally. 2 This ideal bourgeois woman, characterized primarily through her relation to the nation’s future, defined norms of French femininity throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Margaret Darrow and Andrew Counter note that in the early nineteenth century upper-class women also emulated bourgeois norms of femininity, as part of a more general effort of the aristocracy to regain some of the power it had lost in the Revolution. 3 1 Joan Landes’s seminal work Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France provides an in-depth study of a wide-range of texts and paintings from the period, which depict ancien régime aristocratic women as corrupting the French court and body politic through their excessive sexual and material desires. Landes argues that authors and artists critique and attempt to circumscribe the behavior of upper-class women. In addition to portraying women’s own impropriety, texts and images of the period also depict upper-class women as feminizing the male body politic through their exercise of sexual and political power. Marie-Antoinette is frequently the subject of such imagery, as is the king’s mistress, Madame la Comtesse du Barry. Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 57-120. Lynn Hunt likewise unpacks the anxieties surrounding the body and political role of the queen around the time of the Revolution in her well-known Family Romance of the French Revolution. Like Landes, Hunt locates the perception of the queen in this period as one of the factors motivating the deification of the maternal in the years preceding the Revolution. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 89-124. Madeline Dobie notes an even earlier example of this genre of critique in Rousseau’s scathing portrayal of the salonnière in Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles. Here Rousseau accuses salonnières of controlling men of the upper classes through their “exaggerated” intellect and their sexual prowess. Madeline Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 97. Stephen Kale explores how the salonnières’ intellectual and cultural power became increasingly more symbolic following the Revolution (1789). Well-known society women continued to host salons in their homes, but their role within them became largely that of organizer and host. As Kale contends, the decline in women’s power in this intellectual space reflected the shift in gender dynamics, which marked France from the decades proceeding the Revolution. Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 2 Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 81-135. 3 Andrew J. Counter, The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also Margaret H. Darrow, “French Noblewomen and the New Domesticity, 1750-1850,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979), accessed December 13, 2014. 9 Building on this body of work, I argue that the Revolution does not mark a neat point of rupture, after which France moved forward and began developing as a nation. Literature of the period suggests that nationalist discourse, from the Revolution through the first Napoleonic Empire, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy, is as much based in anxieties about a return of the past as it is concerned with national development for the future. Texts of the period recall the ancien régime, and in particular, tropes of ancien régime aristocratic femininity and feminized aristocratic masculinity, to express fears of a national return, in the present moment, to the kind of “feminine corruption” supposedly marking France’s recent past. Aristocratic femininity is represented in literature of the period through metaphors of decrepitude and revivification. It is defined through institutions like the salon, as well as through female sexual, economic, and emotional control. When deployed, these authors portrayed aristocratic women and feminized aristocratic men as black or “Orientalized.” Upper-class French femininity is depicted in the literary culture of the period through the confluence of discourses on gender, class, race, and Orientalism, as authors continually recall France’s recent past. Gender, class, and colonialism I focus on how works from 1800-1848 displace anxieties about French colonial projects in the New World, as well as in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria, onto the aristocratic female body, informed by Madeline Dobie’s reading of nineteenth-century French colonialist and Orientalist discourses. In Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism, Dobie explores the intersection of gender, class, and colonialism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French culture. She argues that representations of 10 colonialism at this time were sublimated and displaced. They took a particular form in the eighteenth century: “French interests in the New World [were projected] onto a veritable fascination with things Oriental.” 4 Authors of the period used the “Orient,” a homogenizing term that in France at the time referred to “the whole of Asia from Turkey to Japan,” 5 as a screen upon which to project anxieties about French women’s changing relationship to the public sphere. “ [I]n the nineteenth century, after incursions into Egypt, [Syria], and Algeria in 1798 and 1830, when Orientalist representation and colonial politics became more closely intertwined, [the displacement] involved the consecration of an idea of the “timeless” Orient, that obscured changes occurring in the region as a result of the European presence.” 6 I expand Dobie’s colonial timeline to contend that literature from both the post-Revolution, and the Restoration, is haunted by, and engages with, the memory of France’s colonial projects in Louisiana and Haiti. More specifically, in the works I examine, France’s New World colonial past is invoked to explore questions of class and race following the French and Haitian Revolutions. These fictions are preoccupied with the relationship between (ancien régime) aristocratic and colonized women and aristocratic French masculinity. Early nineteenth-century literary culture likewise used the aristocratic female body as a site for expressing anxieties about French colonialism in South West Asia and North Africa. Works of the period employed a genealogy of French Orientalist aesthetics to voice concerns about the class and colonial politics of French male desire. They characterize “Oriental” femininities, as embodied in upper-class women, through a 4 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 5. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 11 lexicon of sexual and material excess, indolence, and corruption. As such, literary culture of this time suggests that “decadent” aristocratic womanhood, and French colonial projects in the New World, Egypt, Syria, and Algeria, present similar dangers to the health and vitality of the nation. Chateaubriand’s René, Duras’s Ourika and the adaptations of her original work, known as ourikamanie, Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, La Fille aux yeux d’or, Cousine Bette, Théophile Gautier’s La morte Amoureuese, Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille, and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Une Vieille Maîtresse, among other works, all explore fears that French imperial projects and racial miscegenation pose a threat to the “purity” of the nation. In this project, I have chosen to focus on a selection: René, Ourika, and some adaptations of it, La Peau de Chagrin, and La Vénus d’Ille. These are canonical works of nineteenth-century French literature, which were widely read in their day and are still staple texts in twenty-first century courses on nineteenth-century French literature. Their articulations of the intersecting discourses of class, gender, race, and colonialism, however, merit further consideration. In these narratives, the aristocratic female body is exoticized, marked as racially or ethnically Other; her place in the French nation is called into question. At the same time, through the intersection of class and colonialist/Orientalist discourse, black and “Oriental” femininities are doubly inscribed in the French cultural imaginary as “corrupt.” Novels and short stories of the first half of the nineteenth century do not often engage directly with the French invasion of Algeria, or for that matter, with the attempted conquest of Egypt and Syria, despite being written in the wake of these two events. Colonial Algeria only became a central fixture in the French cultural imaginary after 1870, with the end of the war of conquest and the slowing of the large-scale requisition of 12 land. Works of the period instead refer indirectly to French colonial ambitions in North Africa and the Levant through a homogenizing, Orientalist rhetoric. They characterize the “Orient” through a vocabulary of sexual and material excess and exoticism, to voice arguments in favor of (or against) French colonial expansion. La Peau de Chagrin draws on the rhetoric and aesthetics of eighteenth-century literary texts, including Crébillon fils’s Le Sopha, and Antoine Galland’s Mille et une nuits. I situate my discussion alongside those of scholars who, in recent years, have published a substantial body of work investigating the residual effects of Revolutionary- era concerns regarding the aristocratic feminine in early nineteenth-century France from a more strictly historical perspective. For example, in The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830, Jennifer Heuer contends that in the first decades of the nineteenth century, anxieties about aristocratic women are sublimated through the idealization of bourgeois femininity and legal restrictions placed on women by the Code Civil. 7 She likewise argues that during the Restoration, the Bourbons resurrected ancien régime rhetoric portraying the French king as the father of the 7 As Heuer elaborates, while the Revolution granted some important political, social, and legal rights to women, the Code largely reversed this progress by legally endowing men with the most robust definition of patriarchal authority since the ancien régime. It subordinated a woman’s legal identity to her husband’s and re-invested fathers with extensive powers over their children. It also interdicted women from owning property without the consent of a male relative, and prevented them from petitioning for divorce, except in cases where husbands committed adulterous acts in the marital home. The law also re-inscribed French women as the property of their husbands, to the extent that they were forced to adopt their “husband[s’] national status and place of residence.” (197) This meant that a woman was only allowed to maintain her French nationality if her husband was French as well. Under the Code, an adult woman’s place in the French national body was theoretically contingent upon her libidinal investment in the French body politic. This manner of determining women’s nationality persisted throughout the Restoration. The Code, moreover, remained the law of the land in France throughout the nineteenth century, though parts of it were modified with each new government that was instated. The legal restrictions it placed on women remained in full force throughout the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Heuer contends that while the Restoration might have revivified the former metaphor of the king as national patriarch, the conception of the state as family, which was inextricably linked to the Revolutionary reframing of the nation, strongly persisted in this moment. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 121-197. 13 constitutional monarchy, in order to strictly circumscribe femininity in terms of bourgeois heteronormative ideals. 8 I draw on Heuer’s argument to suggest that fears about ancien régime aristocratic femininity were not fully sublimated. Instead, these concerns haunt French literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. I likewise put Heuer’s work in conversation with nineteenth-century literary and recent scholarly explorations of French colonialist and Orientalist aesthetics, to argue that women are articulated as a foreign Other within the nation in French literature of this time. Moreover, my reading of the literary culture is informed by medical discourse of the early nineteenth century that also reflects preoccupations with the so-called dangers embodied by aristocratic and black women. 9 Doctors of the period expressed anxieties about the French social order following the French and Haitian Revolutions. They harnessed the tenets of bourgeois sexual morality to promote the idea that national strength depended on the health, vitality, and (re)productivity of its people. Medical discourse accused black and aristocratic women’s sexuality of threatening the French nation. Literary culture of the first half of the nineteenth century likewise displaced anxieties about French colonialism in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria onto the aristocratic female body. 8 Heuer suggests that under Louis XVIII and Charles X the French nation was defined in terms of the most strictly patriarchal elements of both ancien régime and republican ideology. Commonality was found between these two, opposing modes in the incredibly strict limitations placed on the rights and roles of women. She reads the hyperbolic investment in circumscribing the feminine at this time as inflected by the memory of corrupt and corrupting ancien régime femininity. Ibid., 156. 9 The move towards the scientific study of humans (and of non-human animals) at this time was a logical outgrowth of the more general crystallization of two complimentary epistemologies—scientific rationalism and liberal economics—beginning in the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth-century nationalism also played a major role in supporting these epistemologies and vice versa. The rise of scientific authority in France was a direct result of Enlightenment rationalism beginning to eclipse the overall power of the Catholic Church, starting in the eighteenth century. When the Church did regain some of its power, first under Napoleon, and then under the Restoration and July Monarchies, it had no choice but to accommodate, at least to a certain extent, the moral authority of scientific studies of the body. At the same time, however, (early) nineteenth-century medical notions of the body to a large extent echoed conservative Catholic morality, in particular in its investment in monogamous, reproductive sexuality. 14 Jean-Marie Bruttin and Nancy Rogers locate a link between the renewed interest in female hysteria in the early nineteenth century and French concerns about aristocratic femininity at this time. 10 Bruttin and Rogers cite Etienne-Jean Georget’s work as representative of the scientific discourses on hysteria circulating in France during the period. 11 Bruttin suggests Georget’s treatise discussing the disease, De la physiologie du système nerveux, is haunted by the specter of aristocratic femininity. Accordingly, Georget notes that upper-class women are among those most susceptible to the malady and suggests there is a correlation between aristocratic women’s lifestyle and education and their higher susceptibility to hysteria, defining the typical hysteric as follows: “[e]n résumé, une jeune femme de la bonne société, de constitution nerveuse, n’accomplissant pas de travaux manuels et menant une vie oisive entre les concerts et la lecture des romans, est le sujet ideal, prédisposé à l’hystérie.” 12 For Georget aristocratic women once again symbolize a threat to France’s moral and (re)productive strength with their so-called frivolous pursuits. In his work we see resonances of eighteenth-century fears about sexually assertive and intellectually active women. Moreover, Georget articulates a direct correlation between un-reproductive femininity and hysteria. He states: “…la continence en est la cause la plus ordinaire ; sur dix femmes hystériques, neuf le sont par continence.” 13 As 10 Nancy Rogers, “The Wasting Away of Romantic Heroines,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 11 (1983). As Bruttin elaborates: “on note un nouvel interêt pour l’étiologie de cette maladie [à l’époque]. L’Académie Royale de Médecine offre un prix pour une étude de l’hystérie. See Jean-Marie Bruttin, Différentes théories sur l’hystérie dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Phd diss., Universität Zürich, 1969). 11 Ibid., 9; Rogers, “The Wasting Away of Romantic Heroines,” 250. 12 Bruttin, “Différentes Théories…,” 17. See also Georget, La Physiologie du système nerveux, spécialement du cerveau : Recherhes sur les maladies nerveuses, Tome Premier (Paris: J.B. Baillière, 1821), 241. 13 Georget, La Physiologie…, 669. 15 in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of the salonnières, Georget marks “typical” upper- class women’s intellectual activities—“les concerts et la lecture des romans”— as shallow and socially hazardous. While a few decades earlier, women like Marie- Antoinette and la Comtessse du Barry were being criticized for their sexual assertiveness, Georget is interested in excessively sexual continental women. In both cases, male authorities assert themselves to suggest that women taking control of their sexualities is dangerous for the nation. They claim that, in being un-reproductive, aristocratic women challenge women’s role in the nation. These same male authorities undermine the ethos that affirms that the nation’s strength depends simultaneously on the size and productivity of its population. Through the vocabulary of pathology, Georget’s work thus re-inscribes the supposed dangers embodied by aristocratic women in terms of a biological threat. I explore the imbrication of discourses of race, gender, and class as black femininity is mapped onto aristocratic femininity in literature of this time. Literary culture draws on medical discourse to associate black and aristocratic femininities with the corruption of France’s recent past. Medical discourse at this time responds to changes in France’s imperial situation following the French and Haitian Revolutions, by pathologizing black femininity (albeit very differently from the way in which white femininity is pathologized). Although Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) had officially won its independence from France in 1804, the slave-led Revolution (1791-1804) continued to haunt the French cultural imaginary 14 Moreover, the Haitian Revolution 14 See Robin Mitchell, “Les Ombres Noires de Saint-Domingue: The Impact of Black Women on Gender and Racial Boundaries in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century France” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010). See also T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).; Christopher L. Miller, The 16 fundamentally challenged the racial hierarchy underwriting French colonialism in the New World. To pro-colonialists, the abolitionist movement was thus seen as threatening as they might amplify this racial challenge and mark France as internationally weak. Reading early nineteenth-century medical treatises expands our understanding of how black femininity was conceived in the French cultural imaginary of the first half of the nineteenth century. I add to Robin Mitchell’s reading of the significance of the Haitian Revolution in the French cultural imaginary by putting it in conversation with the works of historians, such as Buffon and Virey, as well as zoologists like Cuvier. 15 Medical professionals represented black women as pre-maturely and excessively sexual, including being supposedly prone to lesbianism and prostitution. They also described black women as stupid and bestial. Men of science marked black women as inherently “deviant” and as biological threats to the French nation. Mitchell contends that in the French cultural imaginary the Haitian Revolution emasculated the nation, as it was primarily fought between black male slaves and white male colonists. The rebellion undermined French masculine, imperial power both literally and figuratively. French colonization at this time was viewed through a gendered metaphor, whereby France was marked as masculine (read dominant) and the colonies as feminine (read subjugated). As Mitchell argues, to re-affirm an image of national and imperial virility, French discourse projected anxieties about violent, sexually inappropriate colonial subjectivity onto black women. Doing so bolstered French white French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).; Marcel Dorigny, “La Société des Amis des Noirs et les projets de colonisation en Afrique,” Annales historiques de la Révolution francaise 293/294 (1993): 421-429, accessed December 18, 2015.; Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 15 See also, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. 17 patriarchal authority, by endowing white men (and women) with the power to define black female bodies. Because of their gender, black colonial women were also understood as a less violent threat to French national prowess than black men. 16 As such, the black female body became a screen upon which to project French anxieties about sexual excess, economic greed, and physical violence within the colonial relationship. 17 French law was also affected by the Haitian Revolution and the pathologization of black femininity; officials banned interracial marriage in France for the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Even after the ban was lifted, racial miscegenation was strongly discouraged in the metropole, for fear that black women were “not fully human, or assimilable into the French nation as a whole.” 18 The law reflects French fears of black women emigrating to the colonies in the wake of Haitian independence and threatening the “racial purity” of the nation. Because of the scientific authority with which Virey’s, Buffon’s and Cuvier’s treatises on race were imbued, the texts were taken as fact. I draw on the work of contemporary historians and French imperial travelogues to articulate French colonial expansion from the Revolutionary moment to the middle of the nineteenth century as critical to our understanding of discourses of gender and race 16 In a very concrete sense, white French masculinity was “threatened” by the Haitian Revolution, as 30,000 Frenchmen died, trying to unsuccessfully defend their ownership of the island colony, and the majority of its black inhabitants, against the nearly all male, (predominately) black Haitian Revolutionaries. White refugees from the colonies “heightened the level of propaganda regarding the brutality of blacks during the insurrection” (Mitchell 14). There was a tendency among white émigrés to exaggerate instances of white women being brutally mugged and raped by the Haitian Revolutionaries, while white men were forced not to intervene in the interest of their own safety. Mitchell recounts a well-cited example of a woman whose home was broken into by a group of Revolutionaries, who then robbed the woman of all the jewelry she was wearing and raped her, while her male companion was forced to hide under the bed to protect himself. As she explains, “tales of racial brutality also intersected with issues of faltering white masculinity. White men could protect neither ‘their’ women nor their property. Not only were they powerless at the hands of the black insurrectionists, but…they were complicit by their inaction” (Mitchell 15). 17 Doris Garraway The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press 2005). 18 Jennifer Heuer, “The One Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriage in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Law and History Review 27 (2009): 523, accessed June 1, 2017. 18 circulating in France at this time. While the Haitian Revolution sparked a host of anxieties about France’s relationship to its colonies and its colonial populations, the spirit of the French Revolution provided the ideological basis for French imperialist interest in Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. It is widely argued amongst historians and literary historians, including Jennifer Sessions, Jennifer Pitts, Pratima Prasad, Jeffrey Ellis, and Marcel Dorigny, that in the wake of the Revolution, many in France saw their nation as the pinnacle of civilization, and sought to spread French republican ideology abroad. Imperial travelogues define French colonialism of the post-Revolution in terms of a vision for the future of France, as well as for the spaces (that would be) affected by French imperial intervention. Literary culture both responds and add nuance to imperial discourse of the period by conflating ancien régime aristocratic and “Oriental” femininites, to re-envision French imperialism in terms of the corruption of France’s past. As an illustration, published two years before the Revolution even broke out, Volney’s Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie inaugurates French imperial interest in Egypt and Syria. 19 He draws on the long-standing French tradition of defining “the whole of Asia,” 20 and now North Africa as well, through tropes of “Oriental” despotism, to justify imperial expansion there. 21 Volney gestures toward the idea of a “benevolent” French imperial intervention in parts of the Ottoman Empire’s North African and Levantine territories. He likewise frames the conquest as ameliorating France’s standing among the empires of Europe. 22 His work serves as a guiding text for Napoleon’s expedition in the region. 23 19 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 81. 20 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 35. 21 Constantin François Volney, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie pendant les années 1783, 1784, 1785, Tome 1 (Paris: Bossange Frères, 1822). 22 Ibid. 23 Said, Orientalism, 81. 19 Napoleon’s entire imperial endeavor across Europe, and into Egypt and Syria, was likewise undertaken in the name of spreading French political and economic systems and culture. 24 Historians also argue that Charles X invaded Algiers in order to try to ensure his continued power in France. 25 The king and his supporters framed the invasion as a divine mission on the part of Charles X, to liberate the people of Algiers from their “oppressive” religion and “despotic” government—the Ottoman emperor and his proxy, the Dey. They aimed to distract from accusations of Charles X’s own domestic repressiveness by rhetorically aligning the French monarchy with the international pursuit of liberty. The king and the promonarchists once again drew on French tropes of Oriental despotism and of religious suppression to distance France from its own absolutist past and present, and in hopes of re-invigorating national enthusiasm for the king. 26 These efforts failed, however, and liberals initially responded to the invasion of Algiers as “militarily risky, diplomatically dangerous, and above all, unconstitutional” 24 Session, By Sword and Plow, 28-31. 25 The official narrative alleges that the initial attack on Algiers took place over a diplomatic incident between France and the Algerine Dey. As the story goes, the French had delayed in repaying some loans to the Dey, which resulted in the latter hitting the French ambassador with a fly swatter. “The French responded first with a naval blockade [in 1827], then, in 1829, a bombardment of Algiers, and finally in May 1830, the seizure of the city’s qasba or fort.” Thus begins the long and violent reality of French imperialism in Algeria. The excessive show of force on France’s part speaks to the insignificance of the actual “fly swatter event,” as it came to known. Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xxxiv. 26 In invading, the monarchy also aimed to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and dedication to spreading French culture, and politics, in other countries. Through this nod to liberal expansionist ideology, the king and his supporters aimed to reduce republican opposition at a time when liberals were beginning to gain significant representation in the Chamber of Deputies. Session, By Sword and Plow, 41. 20 because the government had failed to seek the Chamber’s approval for war-related expenses. 27 After the July Revolution liberals began adopting a pro-colonial stance. Bourgeois republicans supported establishing an agrarian settler colony in Algeria, where working- class families would resettle to live what the former believed to be more properly moral and (re)productive lives. 28 While pro-imperialist arguments pointed to expansion as a way of “civilizing” the world writ large under the banner of French universalism, literary authors of the period nuanced and challenged contemporary colonial discourse by expressing acute anxieties about French men reverting to an aristocratic feminine state by coming into contact with the “Orient.” They put notions of “Oriental” and aristocratic femininities in conversation with one another to express particular anxieties and fantasies about gender and colonialism at this time. Chapter summaries I begin reading René de Chateaubriand’s René together with Claire de Duras’s Ourika, in a chapter entitled “Maladie Contagieuse: Migration, Miscegenation, and the Ancien Régime in Chateaubriand’s René (1802) and Duras’s Ouirka (1823).” Chateaubriand’s René engages Romantic literary tropes to explore the possibility of interracial marriage in France following the French Revolution. René associates ancien régime aristocratic femininity with the “corruption” of France’s past. Chateaubriand likewise depicts ancien régime womanhood, and France’s past more generally, as 27 For liberals, “such disregard amounted to no less than the suppression of representative government and a decisive step” toward arbitrary rule. In large part they rejected the expedition because of their opposition to the king. Ibid.,42. 28 Ibid., 293-306. 21 pathological. The text proposes colonialism and interracial marriage as a means for upper-class French men to recuperate their manhood in the early nineteenth century. In the end however, the failure of colonial intermarriage signals the death of aristocratic masculinity and the destruction of the novel’s colonial utopia. 29 Unlike the other works considered in this project, which were all published in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, René was published prior to Haitian Independence. By exploring this work in relation to later works also concerned with questions of race, class, gender, and colonialism that were written following the French and Haitian Revolutions, I elaborate on a shift in attitudes around interracial marriage in France in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Written during the Restoration, Duras’s novel looks back to the years surrounding the French and Haitian Revolutions to explore the ideological reverberations of these two events in the French cultural imaginary of the early 1820s. Reading it alongside Chateaubriand’s recuperation of aristocratic masculinity, I show how Duras rehabilitates aristocratic womanhood as well as contemporary theories of female hysteria to interrogate race and gender discourses in France at the time. Ourika defines its black heroine through a lexicon of intellectual, emotionally intelligent, and virtuous salon femininity, and thus speculates on the possibility of her integration into the French national body. Duras thereby challenges contemporary scientific theories, which marked all black women as sexually excessive, manipulative, even bestial, and thus a threat to France’s racial purity. At the same time, Duras’s characterization of her heroine calls 29 Chateaubriand’s work inaugurates the early French Romantic obsession with the notion of aristocratic masculinity rendered impotent by a combination of ancien régime aristocratic women, the Revolution (1789), and Napoleon’s rise to power. Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (Rutgers: New Brunswick, 1993), 8-56. 22 into question the vilification of aristocratic, intellectual womanhood. It also portrays the nineteenth-century French miscegenation taboo as cruel, and re-configures contemporary discourses of female hysteria to imbue its socially marginalized black heroine with interiority and pathos. The work re-appropriates the tropes of Romantic literature to tell Ourika’s story. It is the first ever piece of French literature to explore the psychic effects of white racism on a black woman. The empathy we as readers are called upon to express for Ourika is, however, dependent on her assimilation to early nineteenth-century norms of white, European, aristocratic womanhood. Duras’s relationship to questions of gender, class, and race remains deeply ambivalent throughout the work. Her novel re-mobilizes aristocratic femininity as a tool for imagining a more inclusive post-Revolutionary French society. It looks back nostalgically toward the pre-Revolutionary moment, to celebrate the intellectual and emotional capacities of the salonnière. The work also proposes aristocratic femininity as a mode of integrating black women into the French national body, at a time when French anxieties about black femininity were rampant and interracial marriage was illegal. Through the idealization of aristocratic femininity the work continues to mark black femininity as inferior and inassimilable. While the work might be critical of the miscegenation taboo, it ultimately prevents Ourika’s marriage to an aristocratic white man, reaffirming the status quo. Even in recuperating the salonnière, the work re-frames this “inappropriately” public figure as thoroughly maternal. In attempting to maintain the prestige of the upper-class elites in a post- Revolutionary world, the work vacillates between reclaiming the past and re-configuring aristocratic femininity through republican ideals. The aristocratic maternal ideal 23 proceeds into the future through the figure of Anaïs de Thémines, Charles’s wife. In the final section of this chapter I explore other works of literature, theater, and poetry that responds to Duras’s and frequently invoke contemporary desires to re-segregate the races. Chapter two, entitled “‘J’ai l’Arabie petrée’: Masculinity and Colonialism in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (1831)” reads Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin as an intervention into French gender politics and imperial expansion into North Africa and the Levant. Balzac portrays the colonial space through the figure of the wish-granting talisman, the eponymous peau de chagrin. The latter is framed as dangerous to French men because of the (un)reproductive desires it provokes in them. I read Balzac’s work as offering an ironic critique of Romantic masculinity and its relationship to salon femininity, exoticism, and imperialism. Yet, at the same time, as Balzac invites readers to identify with the novel’s male narrator, Raphaël, he encourages us to experience the hero’s dangerous longings and pleasures. What’s more, the novel concludes by invoking our desire for Raphaël himself, who has morphed into a beautiful feminine creature, through his relationship to women and the colonial. I consider this slippage between fantasy and anxiety in Balzac’s work in order to more fully articulate its misogynist, anti- colonial politics. In my third chapter, “‘Une grande femme noire’ 30 : Race, Class, and Gender in Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (1837),” I consider how Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille employs the Paris-Provinces intellectual divide of the early nineteenth century to engage with questions of moral hygiene. Following the Revolution and the end of 30 Prosper Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, Colomba, Mateo Falcone, ed. Patrick Berthier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 50. 24 feudalism, France experienced an increasing centralization of power, which favored Paris over the provinces, creating a center-periphery hierarchy within the nation. This dichotomy was mirrored in the increasing intellectual authority of state-sponsored research, and the diminishing power of regional (provincial) academies and institutes. The restoration of the monarchy in 1814, however, provoked an interest in reclaiming regional memory, culture, and power in a way that challenged the nationalist project. Mérimée engages in particular with provincial antiquarianism, critiquing it by reframing the practice as an effort on the part of upper-class aristocratic provincial men to recuperate the wealth and status they enjoyed during the ancien régime. He links the provincial recuperative project to desires that threaten the resurrection of dangerous elements of the past. Through the figure of the black statue, the text recalls French anxieties about the Haitian Revolution in order to re-figure the periphery as colony, and thus a foreign Other, which menaces the nation. The work also portrays the Venus statue as aristocratic. By equating blackness with the presumed sexual aggressiveness of aristocratic femininity, the work unites numerous anxieties about female sexuality and the danger it poses to the health and vitality of the body politic, and the national body more generally. By bringing together a variety of discourses and analytical lenses, I reconsider these seminal works of French literature and read the understanding of the French cultural discourse of nation and colonies through a mixed methodology of historiographical and formal analysis. Where these texts have been understood as discrete investigations of the politics of class, race, gender, imperialism, and colonialism, my work specifically focuses on the way in which these discourses overlap within the texts. 25 My project is invested in feminist readings of the intersections of gender, race, and class in returning to these critical works of literature, to understand their nuanced contributions to the contemporary nationalist project. My dissertation demonstrates that, even as these works have been read by scholars for decades, they continue to speak to emerging understandings of the way in which fiction forms the cultural imaginary and constructs meaning that holds sway for the future. My research charts how the evolution of France’s relationship to its colonies incorporated divisions and definitions of gender, aristocracy, and natural history that go beyond the colonizer/colony dichotomy, even as they inform it. Specifically, I argue that none of these singular lenses account for the fascination these texts still hold, which must be examined in order to more fully capture the relationship between literature of the first half of the nineteenth century in France and contemporaneous ideologies of nationalism and colonialism that are still with us today. 26 CHAPTER I MALADIE CONTAGIEUSE: MIGRATION, MISCEGENATION, AND THE ANCIEN RÉGIME IN CHATEAUBRIAND’S RENÉ (1802) AND DURAS’S OURIKA (1823) René de Chateaubriand’s René represents a kind of utopian exploration of both the potential and the problems of the colonies. 31 The novel defines heterosexual reproduction as an essential element of French masculinity and of French colonialism. Through the relationship between René and his sister, the novel posits ancien régime upper-class femininity as responsible for the emasculation of aristocratic masculinity. Chateaubriand pathologizes ancien régime aristocratic womanhood and the ancien régime more generally. The novel also presages later theories that diagnosed sexually and/or intellectually (or in this case emotionally) powerful upper-class women as a biological threat to the nation. 32 Chateaubriand also imagines French colonialism and interracial marriage as possible means of recuperating upper-class masculinity. However, in the end, René’s failure to produce offspring in his marriage signals the death of aristocratic French masculinity and the destruction of the colonial utopia in America. Written just two decades after René, Claire de Duras’s Ourika also focuses on questions of aristocratic sexuality and gender, colonial migration, and interracial marriage in the years surrounding the French Revolution. Yet it is an example of the shift in the relationship between sexual and colonial politics in early nineteenth-century French 31 Shaun Irlam and Pratima Prasad both investigate colonialism in Atala. See Shaun Irlam, "Gerrymandered Geographies: Exoticism in Thomson and Chateaubriand." MLN 108, no. 5 (1993): 891. Accessed April 01, 2017, doi:10.2307/2904882. See also Pratima Prasad Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2009), 72-99. 32 I employ Étienne-Jean Georget’s pre-Freudian, medico-scientific definition of hysteria in my reading of this feminine threat, as his work is representative of medical discourse on disease of the period. 27 literature, away from a fetishization of interracial marriage in René and toward anxieties about racial purity and miscegenation. Ourika produces a white-identified black heroine, but one who is ultimately inassimilable to the national body because of the color of her skin. Reading the two texts together creates a space to see the way anxieties about gender, class, and race do not abate, but rather shift focus and target in the cultural imaginary over this period. René takes place in the late 1720s. Scholars, however, have almost universally read the novel as a response to late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century French political, economic, and social concerns. As Susan Weiner points out, even in the early nineteenth century, readers and writers alike recognized Chateaubriand’s novel as a reaction to his contemporary moment. 33 Nonetheless, the novel articulates French colonial Louisiana as a utopia, outside of time and space, that invokes colonial resettlement as a means of normativizing aristocratic masculinity. The work recalls a particular moment in French imperial policy, when, in Louisiana (as in Canada) the French government toyed with the idea of encouraging marriage between indigenous women and French men as a way of enforcing French colonial power and of maintaining French colonists’ economic success and “morality” in the New World. 34 The work reinforces Christian patriarchal authority over both the colonized and the colonizer in French Louisiana. Chateaubriand locates emigration to the colonies as a means of de- feminizing aristocratic masculinity and imagines heterosexual, mixed-raced marriage as 33 Susan Weiner Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in Mass Media in France: 1945-1968 (Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press, 2001), 111. 34 Jennifer M. Spear, “Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 85, accessed June 24, 2017, doi: 10.2307/3491496. 28 one possible means of achieving this. French masculinity is defined here through a denigration of the colonial and the feminine. 35 Eighteenth-century French officials imagined interracial marriage as a means of encouraging indigenous assimilation to French culture and of preventing French assimilation to indigenous cultures and mores. In the end, however, marriage between French and indigenous subjects was never legalized in Louisiana. Unlike colonial officials, Chateaubriand is not concerned with regulating indigenous femininities and instead envisions an idealized colonial situation in which French masculinity is revivified through marriage to colonial women and male homosocial bonding. The text vacillates between two modes of defining upper-class French men: through heterosexual reproduction, and through a complete rejection of the female body. The text likewise articulates French (cultural) imperialism as beneficial to the indigenous peoples of France’s New World colonies. 35 Some scholars have attempted to recuperate René as a feminist work. In her reading of the novel, Doris Kadish reads Amélie as an allegory for the post-Revolutionary republic, and thus asserts that the novel figures her as a political subject 35 . As Kadish rightly notes, despite being aristocratic Amélie is in fact a paragon of republican femininity: generous, virtuous, chaste, and self-sacrificing to the fullest. Kadish further argues that Amélie symbolizes the republic as she functions as a “native land” for René. See Doris Kadish Politicizing Gender: Narrative Strategies in the Aftermath of the French Revolution (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1991), 71. I tend to agree with Joan Landes in her reading of the tendency on the part of (pre)Revolutionary literature and art to allegorize the nation through the female body as objectifying rather than empowering. Especially as we clearly see with Amélie that these allegorical figures were so thoroughly circumscribed by misogynist norms of feminine virtue. See Joan Landes Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Godelieve Mercken-Spaas likewise reads Amélie’s self-exile to the convent and her ultimate death as empowering. As she argues, for Amélie incestuous love represents necessary but impossible desire. Rather than living with prohibition, she instead chooses self-destruction. Mercken-Spaas elaborates that for Amélie “the pain of dying is lessened by the narcissistic pleasure of the love injury inflicted upon the [br]other.” See “Death and the Romantic Heroine: Chateaubriand and de Staël” in Pretext-Text-Context: Essays on Nineteenth-Century French Literature, ed. Robert L. Mitchell (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1980), 82. I concur with Margaret Waller that the heroine’s self-sacrificial love works more in the service of the mal du siècle hero, who enjoys the narcissistic pleasure of narrating himself as the (again impossible but necessary) object of desire. 29 Written twenty years later, Duras’s Ourika tells the story of a young Senegalese woman who is rescued from slavery as a child and brought to live in France. She is placed under the care of an aristocratic woman, Mme de B., who raises her among the French nobility. Mme de B. gives Ourika an education suitable for an aristocratic girl. As a black aristocratic woman, Ourika’s class prevents her from marrying someone of her own race, and her race prevents her from marrying an upper-class French man. Ourika’s marginalization renders her hysterical, and she ultimately retreats into a convent, where she dies of her malady. 36 Ourika looks back to the ancien régime and the years just following the French and Haitian Revolutions, to comment on race, gender, class, and colonial politics in France in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Duras is concerned with representations of ancien régime aristocratic women, as well as French scientific discourses on race, and attitudes towards interracial marriage between blacks and whites at this time. In counterpoint to René’s attempt to recuperate ancient régime aristocratic masculinity, Ourika considers ancien régime aristocratic femininity and employs it as a mode of attempting to assimilate a black woman into the French national body. The work challenges the idea that ancien régime aristocratic womanhood was corrupt and frivolous, and instead recuperates it to celebrate the salonnière as a maternal, intelligent, benevolent figure. More broadly the novel is preoccupied with the memory of the Haitian Revolution, and in particular with the anxieties about black women’s bodies it provoked. The text undermines the notion that black women are inherently hypersexual, stupid, and 36 I use Étienne-Jean Georget’s pre-Freudian, medico-scientific definition of hysteria in order to elaborate on the construction of Ourika as a hysterical subject. 30 bestial. Ourika’s very existence in France represents a challenge to French law against interracial marriage, as well as to more general concerns about racial purity in France. The work, moreover, blames white racism, and specifically, the prohibition of interracial marriage in France, for the protagonist’s hysteria. Hysteria thus becomes a tool for imbuing Ourika with emotional interiority, and for evoking empathy for her, against French anxieties about racial mixing. In spite of this, the novel restages the colonial relationship in France and submits Ourika to a proto-mission civilisatrice. Ancien régime aristocratic femininity is mobilized as a means of “civilizing” black women. Duras’s critique of contemporary configurations of black womanhood depends upon Ourika’s assimilation to upper-class French femininity. The work employs Ourika’s voice to enunciate the superiority of this white femininity. Ourika’s presence in the metropole is contingent upon constantly reiterating that she is a white-identified black woman, as well as upon her pre-pubescence. For all of her assimilation the narrative concludes by upholding the miscegenation taboo, and as she nears the age of marriage, Ourika’s body is marked as inassimilable because of the intersection of her race and class. The work moreover re-writes the cause of Ourika’s malady as the result of her incestuous desire for her stepbrother. The miscegenation and incest taboos are conflated to re-inscribe black femininity as a concrete sexual threat to the French national body. What’s more, Ourika remains subjugated in France even though she is technically a free woman. She is completely dependent upon Mme de B. for her survival in Paris, and she has been groomed solely to believe in and recite the superiority of white, French, aristocratic culture, the beneficence of her benefactress, and the desirability of 31 aristocratic masculinity. The perspective of the French upper class moreover frames her entire perception of herself. She is defined by a total colonization of the mind. Despite Duras’s ultimate excision of Ourika from the French national body, in the years following the work’s publication, the nation’s cultural imaginary remained troubled by the ambivalence her work demonstrates by considering the integration of a black woman into the upper echelons of French society, and by cultivating readers’ sympathy for Ourika’s disenfranchisement within this world. Various works of literature including plays, poetry, and prose were written in response to Duras’s text. This literary trend was known as “Ourika Mania” or ourikamanie. Like the original novel, the works comprising this reactionary corpus also reconfigure aristocratic femininity in terms of bourgeois norms to maintain the legitimacy of the former. At the same time, most of the works insist that resegregation of the races is necessary for the future of France, and conclude by sending Ourika back to Africa. Impotent men and pathological women: defining the ancien régime in René Describing his childhood, René states: “Timide et contraint devant mon père, je ne trouvais l’aise et le contentement qu’auprès de ma sœur.” 37 His timidity in relation to his father signifies his estrangement from the contemporary French patriarchal social order. As the youngest of two sons he is furthermore disenfranchised by the laws of primogeniture. As René explains, upon his father’s death, “il fallut quitter le toit paternal, devenu l’héritage de mon frère. 38 ” In the post-feudal world of post-Revolutionary France there seems to be no place for these second, disinherited sons. The social rules and 37 Chateaubriand, René, 159. 38 Ibid., 162. 32 customs of the ancien régime aristocracy continue to write them out of the heterosexual reproductive economy by refusing them an inheritance. These men are, moreover, unable to find themselves in the bourgeois social order of the early nineteenth century, with no preparation for a career. As René describes himself: “plein d’ardeur, je m’élançai seul sur cet orageux océan de monde, dont je ne connaissais ni les ports ni les écueils.” 39 The ancien régime aristocratic economy is presented as emasculating, because it is incapable of accommodating all of its sons. 40 As such, René seeks refuge in his sister’s warm, maternal presence; “je ne trouvais l’aise et le contentement qu’auprès de ma sœur,” he states. 41 And he continues: 39 Ibid., 163. 40 Margaret Waller likewise notes that the novel’s opening line is meant to characterize the work’s proto- Romantic protagonist in terms of a feminized masculinity. Waller elaborates that the fall of the ancien régime feudal-monarchical social order, and the subsequent rise of Napoleon and liberal economics left many young noblemen in France feeling as though there was no place for them in French society. Young male aristocrats were largely unprepared for economic productivity, or for conforming to the contemporary virile, militarist (read Napoleonic), paternal ideal of masculinity, and thus felt lost in the post- Revolutionary social order. Authors from across the political spectrum, likewise, blamed the influence of aristocratic women for the emasculation of ancien régime upper class masculinity. Waller, The Male Malady, 31. Lynn Hunt makes a similar argument with regards to social and political narratives shaping the Romantic hero. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 89-124. In Sick Heroes Allan Pasco argues against reading French Romanticism as a response to the loss of aristocratic privilege after the 1789 Revolution. He suggests, for example, that rather than reading the trope of the young orphaned male hero as a direct reflection of the revolutionary political situation, we might understand this figure in terms of a growing early nineteenth-century anthropological interest in abandoned children. To comprehend this male trope Pasco also invites readers to look towards the increasing tendency on the part of not only aristocratic but also wealthy bourgeois families to send their children to a wet nurse. He contends that aristocratic authors and bourgeois readers alike experienced themselves as “under nurtured” by their families, and expressed this through the writing and reading of sympathetic young men traumatized by the loss of their parents. Pasco likewise posits that the decreasing prevalence of patriarchal authority in Romantic literature reflected fathers’ increasing absence from the home in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries due to wars and emigration, and for employment. Allen Pasco, Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age (1750-1850) (Exeter: University of Exeter Press 1997). Waller’s and Hunt’s socio-political arguments add depth to the socio- psychological response to the French Revolution Pasco offers in his work. As Waller demonstrates (male- authored) mal du siècle literature is highly invested in recuperating the aristocratic male privilege it represents as in crisis. I elaborate on this argument, in the body of the chapter, later in this section. Given the shifts in class dynamics ushered in by the Revolution, and what this meant for the status of men who were once the most privileged individuals in French society, Waller’s and Hunt’s socio-political readings of early mal du siècle literature informs my own analysis of literature of this period and genre. 41 Ibid., 159. 33 “Une douce conformité d’humeur et de goûts m’unissait étroitement à cette sœur…” 42 This primary identification with his sister serves to further feminize René. Amélie embodies nurturing and comfort for him; René’s use of the negative construction “ne…que” in describing their relationship emphasizes his dependence upon her. As he locates her in this maternal role, and infantilizes himself, he demonstrates the “authority” 43 that Amélie exercises over him. In constructing an infantile René and his sister-as-mother, the text presents a breakdown in post-Revolutionary aristocratic maternity. Chateaubriand does not invoke the typical construction of pre-Revolutionary aristocratic women— “corrupted, degenerate, and bestial” 44 — but instead represents the symbolic death of aristocratic maternity through the literal death of René’s mother. As René explains: “J’ai coûté la vie de ma mère en venant au monde.” 45 The death of the ancien régime aristocratic mother signals another breakdown in the upper-class heterosexual family, which in turn challenges the heterosexuality of the offspring. René reflects a generation of men abandoned by the “proper” mother, and unable to connect to a shifting patriarchal social order. He instead seeks a maternal replacement in his sister Amélie. As René says of her: “c’était presqu’une (sic) mère, c’était quelque chose de plus tendre…je cédai à l’empire d’Amélie.” 46 As he refers to her as “quelque chose de plus tendre,” René alludes to the idea that his feelings for his sister are incestuous and that their relationship further 42 Ibid. 43 I use scare quotes here because the very act of narrating his life story is an act that recuperates René’s white male privilege. See Margaret Waller, The Male Malady, 37. 44 Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 119. 45 Chateaubriand, René, 158. 46 Ibid., 179. 34 alienates him from the (re)productive order and from heteronormative French masculinity. Moreover, he invests the entirety of his libidinal energy in his sister. Thus his love for her is both infantile and erotic. Here again, the text provides further evidence that René and Amélie’s relationship opposes heterosexual gender hierarchies. René articulates himself as subordinated to Amélie’s maternal kindness; upper-class French femininity, in all its different iterations, is represented as overwhelmingly powerful in René, even when it is coded as maternal. The novel on some level idealizes Amélie by inscribing her as emotionally available, nurturing, and even self-sacrificing. But at the same time, her incestuous relationship to René reflects the work’s critique of the “sexually inappropriate” relationship between ancien régime aristocratic masculinity and femininity. The power dynamics of this relationship thus threaten heterosexual gender hierarchies. Their bond echoes the text’s claim about the breakdown in the aristocratic family—initially defined through the failed relationship between father and son—and posits that this failure is also responsible for the feminization of upper-class men. The novel, moreover, marks ancien régime aristocratic femininity, and France’s recent past more generally, as pathological. René’s incestuous desire for his sister is represented as an illness, which he transmits to Amélie, as she realizes that she reciprocates his feelings for her. To be sure, the “disease” originates in René’s body and is passed on to Amélie. From the beginning, however, the work establishes that Amélie, and by extension, aristocratic femininity more generally, is responsible for René’s (read aristocratic men’s) failing heteronormativity in the post-Revolution. The work thus sets the reader up to interpret Amélie as responsible for René’s “malady,” even if she seems 35 to have “caught” it from him. Amélie’s failure to comply with bourgeois norms of femininity manifests in hysteria. In the end, she dies of her “maladie contagieuse.” 47 As René explains: L'hiver finissait lorsque je m'aperçus qu'Amélie perdait le repos et la santé, qu'elle commençait à me rendre. Elle maigrissait ; ses yeux se creusaient, sa démarche était languissante et sa voix troublée. Un jour je la surpris tout en larmes au pied d'un crucifix. Le monde, la solitude, mon absence, ma présence, la nuit, le jour, tout l'alarmait. D'involontaires soupirs venaient expirer sur ses lèvres ; tantôt elle soutenait sans se fatiguer une longue course ; tantôt elle se traînait à peine : elle prenait et laissait son ouvrage, ouvrait un livre sans pouvoir lire, commençait une phrase qu'elle n'achevait pas, fondait tout à coup en pleurs, et se retirait pour prier. En vain je cherchais a découvrir son secret… 48 Amélie’s erotic longings for René emerge in a plethora of symptoms: her entire body appears ravaged, she loses weight, her eyes become vacant, her gait is languishing. She is despondent, unable to focus, and sometimes overwhelmed with fatigue. She is highly sensitive and excessively emotional. Her soul is troubled. In turns she expresses guilt for her sins : “je la surprise en larmes au pied d’un crucifix,” and looks to God for guidance: “[elle] se retirait pour prier.” This depiction of Amélie resonates with the theories of Etienne-Jean Georget. 49 Georget ascribes the following symptoms to hysteria: “la perte plus ou moins totale de l’usage des sens internes et externes…des mouvements convulsifs dans tout le corps, alternant avec des momens de calme des mouvements spasmodiques des muscles,…une fatigue générale excessive, de la pâleur souvent une céphalalgie violente;…de l’insomnie, etc.” 50 Georget’s symptomology, like Chateaubriand’s, undercuts ancien régime aristocratic women’s supposed power, as it defines the hysteric through her loss 47 Ibid., 197. 48 Ibid., 180. 49 Bruttin and Rogers cite Etienne-Jean Georget’s work as representative of the scientific discourses on hysteria circulating in France at the time. See note 10 in Introduction. 50 Etienne-Jean Georget, De la folie, 28. 36 of physical and emotional control. Margaret Waller likewise notes that Amélie’s desire for René and her subsequent hysteria help recuperate René’s masculinity, in that they inscribe him as sexually desirable. In narrating Amélie’s desire, René moreover reconfigures the gender dynamics of their relationship and claims power over Amélie when he speaks for her. In this way, René avoids a direct confession of his own “sins” and instead confesses Amélie’s. Amélie’s hysteria is mobilized for the rehabilitation of aristocratic manhood. Georget, like Chateaubriand, locates a correlation between ancien régime aristocratic women’s lifestyle and education and their higher susceptibility to hysteria, defining the typical hysteric as follows: “[e]n résumé, une jeune femme de la bonne société, de constitution nerveuse, n’accomplissant pas de travaux manuels et menant une vie oisive entre les concerts et la lecture des romans, est le sujet ideal, prédisposé à l’hystérie.” 51 Amélie’s illness is likewise scripted as a direct result of the emotional power she supposedly wields over her brother, and of the incestuous desires she harbors for him. In other words, she too falls ill from her inability to locate herself within the heterosexual reproductive order of the post-Revolution. For Georget these aristocratic women once again symbolize a threat to France’s strength, with their so-called frivolous pursuits and failure to comply with the reproductive imperative. Chateaubriand’s novel does not explicitly cite Georget’s theories of hysteria, which were written approximately twenty years after René. However, the fictional malady with which Amélie is afflicted is imbricated in early nineteenth-century scientific discourses on hysteria. There are strong similarities between the novel’s depiction of 51 Bruttin, Jean-Marie Bruttin, Différentes théories sur l’hystérie, 17. See also Etienne-Jean Georget, La Physiologie, 241. 37 Amélie’s illness and Georget’s symptomology and etiology of it. René prefigures the scientific pathologization of ancien régime aristocratic femininity, namely the idea that the hysteric was plagued by a loss of physical and emotional control. This pathologization means that René’s feminization and infection through his sister can only be fixed by looking outside of the aristocratic family. Colonial migration and interracial marriage: attempts at rehabilitation The novel posits the reclamation of ancien régime masculinity through imperialism, and in particular, through a relationship to France’s colonial past. This is in part achieved through the temporal setting of the text. While the work is in many ways implicated in post-Revolutionary French discourses on race and gender, it is in fact set in 1729, though the only temporal marker in the entire work is the final, vague reference to the Fort Rosalie Massacre: “[René] périt peu de temps après avec Chactas et le père Souël dans le massacre des Français et des Natchez à la Louisiane.” 52 The conflict was a rebellion on part of the Natchez in response to France’s appropriation of Natchez lands to establish tobacco plantations in Louisiana. There were also other violent conflicts between the French and the indigenous people in the Louisiana territory, which often ended in the French enslaving large numbers of indigenous population. A 1716 conflict between the French and the Natchez, for example, ended in 387 Natchez being rounded up and sold into slavery in New Orleans. 53 Christian missionaries likewise sought to dominate indigenous culture through their campaign to convert and/or baptize as many 52 Chateaubriand, René, 199. For more information on Natchez marriage customs see George Edward Milne, Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2015), 36-38. 53 James F. Barnett Jr., The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 123. 38 people as possible. To be sure, there were only a handful of French missionaries in Louisiana during the time France occupied the region, but the desire to proselytize and impose French, Christian authority there persisted nonetheless. 54 The arrival of French colonists likewise brought disease, which would have catastrophic consequences for Southeastern American Indians. 55 France’s claiming of Louisiana as its own, alongside the appropriation of land and disruption of peoples and societies this entailed, was in and of itself a violent gesture. As George Edward Milne notes, moreover, the very name Natchez reflects an act of French cultural domination. Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, was the first to use this name to refer to this particular tribe, in his well-known memoirs of the first French imperial expedition to Louisiana in 1700. “He called the inhabitants “Nadches,” after the name of their principal village, at the time, they referred to themselves as the Théoloëls—the People of the Sun—after their solar deity.” 56 In his account of the indigenous people of the Natchez territory, Iberville thus effaced an important link to the tribe’s cultural history, and instead defined the tribe in relation to the space it inhabited. Tying the people to the land in this way rhetorically re-enforces the subjugation of the Natchez to French colonial authority. 57 In all other respects René essentially glosses over this history of imperial violence. In imagining French colonial Louisiana as outside of time in this way, the text situates the location as a utopic space. The author is free to imagine his own history of French colonialism, with very little regard to the actual history of France’s exploitation of 54 Milne, Natchez Country, 1-106. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 1. 57 The descendants of the indigenous peoples the French referred to as the Nadches today still identify as Natchez. It is for this reason that I use this term, despite its colonialist connotations. 39 the Louisiana territory. The work further entangles the recuperation of aristocratic French masculinity with imperialism by inscribing René in an ahistorical colonial fantasy written by a white French man. The novel enunciates the colonies as a space for aristocratic male dominance as René attempts to recuperate his heterosexual masculinity in this space. Because of René’s status as a European colonial settler, the very gesture of his migration to the colonies reads as a reclaiming of his white male privilege—as does his marriage to an indigenous woman upon arriving in the colonies. As the work opens: “En arrivant chez les Natchez, René avait été obligé de prendre une épouse pour se conformer aux mœurs des Indiens, mais il ne vivait point avec elle.” 58 René, however, fails to rehabilitate his masculinity through this union: “il ne vivait point avec elle,” the text elaborates. Waller moreover notes that in the novel “[c]onjugal union for the hero, is not a freely exercised male prerogative. Instead it is an act imposed from without which forces him into a position of social and sexual submission that, in earlier fiction, was more typical of women than of men.” 59 At the same time that René’s subject position in his marriage affirms his white male privilege, the union itself also underscores his feminized manhood. In this way the work defines aristocratic masculinity through procreation. René’s inability to produce offspring in the colonies signals the death of ancien régime aristocratic masculinity. It also marks the destruction of French imperial power in Louisiana. At first, René echoes the Catholic endorsement of marriage between French men and indigenous women. The text states that René marries specifically “pour se conformer 58 Chateaubriand, René, 153. 59 Waller, The Male Malady, 36. 40 aux moeurs des Indiens,” 60 and the Natchez ad a codified system of marriage long before the French arrived in Louisiana. 61 Given the Church’s tendency to promote (European, Christian) marriage as an important means for imposing France’s imperial will in the New World, it is difficult not to associate René’s consideration of marriage as an endorsement for the imperial influence of Christianity. On the other hand, in practice eighteenth-century secular French colonial officials in Louisiana largely discouraged interracial marriage between French men and indigenous women, arguing that such unions would “de-civilize” French colonists. Yet religious colonial officials “believed that marriage—a relationship sanctified by European Church and state, that was the basic social unit, and in which the wife submitted to her husband—could serve as a civilizing vehicle, leading to the cultural colonization of Indian women and their children, and the subjugation of native society to colonial control.” 62 Chateaubriand also endorses interracial marriage in colonial Louisiana, because it was “a relationship sanctified by the European Church and state…in which a wife submitted to her husband.” 63 Père Souël, the colonial priest, and one of René’s surrogate father figures in America, instructs René to participate in colonial marriage, in order to exonerate himself of his incestuous desires for his sister. Through the figure of Souël, the text reiterates the fantasy of recuperating aristocratic masculinity through a combination of intermarriage and Christian authority. Souël demands of René: “[q]ue faites-vous seul 60 Chateaubriand, René, 153. 61 For a more information on Natchez marriage customs see George Edward Milne, Natchez Country, 36- 38. 62 Jennifer M. Spear, “Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003), 37, accessed June 01, 2017, doi: 10.2307/3491496. 63 Ibid., 86. 41 au fond des forêts où vous consumez vos jours, négligeant tous vos devoirs ?” 64 The priest accuses René of indulging in onanastic fantasies about his sister—“seul au fond des forêts,” rather than fulfilling his heterosexual duties as a man. Chateaubriand is not concerned with “civilizing” the Natchez people through marriage. The novel instead posits interracial marriage in the colonies as a way of rehabilitating aristocratic white men’s privilege following the Revolution. This is not to say that Chateaubriand does not voice support for colonizing indigenous people through Catholicism. The opposite is in fact true. In the novel, the voice of Christianized Natchez Indian Chactas is ventriloquized to echo French Catholic support for interracial marriage in the colonies. Chactas echoes Père Souël in his imperative that René participate actively in his marriage “Mon fils…oui, il faut que tu renonces à cette vie extraordinaire qui n’est pleine de soucis, il n’y a de bonheur que dans les voies communes.” 65 Through Père’s Souël’s own endorsement of the marriage, the union is instantiated as an articulation of Christian colonial influence. As Chactas becomes a mouthpiece for reinforcing Souël’s moral authority, the former likewise situates himself as a docile, Christianized indigenous subject. Breakdown of the utopia – attempting (and failing) to save masculinity And yet, while the text locates interracial marriage as a potential site for rehabilitating aristocratic French men’s masculinity, this heterosexual union is ultimately further evidence of René’s impotence. Even in the colonies René’s memory of his erotic attachment to his sister prevents him from assuming his place in the heterosexual 64 Chateaubriand, René, 198. 65 Ibid., 199. 42 reproductive order. He instead most fully reclaims his manhood in a Christianized, French colonial economy of men. René experiences his most significant recuperation of white male privilege in the company of his surrogate father figures. Ultimately, the novel engages the homosocial to script its colonial ideal in two ways. First, René’s relationship to Chactas and Souël acts as a site for reinforcing Christian morality and male heteronormativity. The homosocial bond becomes a place where aristocratic French men may be convinced to identify with a strictly Catholic, “moral,” paternal order. It is also where they receive guidance to fulfill their conjugal duties, and be (re)productive. In this way homosociality becomes a tool for reaffirming heterosexual reproduction between French aristocratic men and indigenous women, and thus for situating René, qua colonial settler, in a position of dominance. The text locates the French colonies as the site of its masculine fantasy both as idealized space for heterosexual marriage and homosocial recuperation. It imagines re- settlement as a solution to the problem of “feminized” aristocratic masculinity in France at the turn of the nineteenth century. As the novel elaborates: “Hors Chactas, son père adoptif, et le père Souël, missionnaire au Fort Rosalie, il avait renoncé au commerce des hommes.” 66 The repetition of the word père to designate both men in relation to René situates him under their paternal influence in Louisiana. Through his two surrogate fathers, René inscribes himself in a strictly patriarchal, Christian social order in the colonies. The work once again frames colonial resettlement in terms of a recuperation of aristocratic male privilege, this time, through a narrative of male homosociality. As 66 Chateaubriand, René, 155. 43 compensation for his emasculation relative to his own father, and to French society more generally, René gets two dads in America. This relationship between men also serves a site for recuperating aristocratic white male privilege, even when René fails to be biologically reproductive. While Chactas and Souël’s moralizing responses to René’s narrative of incest reflect the patriarchal authority of the Church in the colonies, the text also emphasizes René’s narratorial authority over his surrogate fathers against the backdrop of the colonies. He determines when he will recount his past to them and exactly what details of it he will share. René’s ability to assert his voice likewise comes at the cost of his sister’s life. The aristocratic feminine is again subordinated, and even destroyed, to recuperate aristocratic French masculinity, and to construct the novel’s colonial fantasy. As the text elaborates: Quelques années s’écoulèrent de la sorte, sans que les deux vieillards lui pussent arracher son secret. Une lettre qu’il reçut d’Europe, par le bureau des Missions étrangères, redouble tellement sa tristesse, qu’il fuyait jusqu’à ses vieux amis. Ils n’en furent que plus ardents à le presser de leur ouvrir son cœur ; ils y mirent tant de discrétion, de douceur et d’autorité, qu’il fut enfin obligé de les satisfaire. Il prit donc jour avec eux, pour leur raconteur, non les aventures de sa vie, puisqu’il n’en avait point éprouvé, mais les sentiments secrets de son âme. 67 The passage opens by announcing René’s narrative control over Chactas and Souël— “sans que les deux vieillards pussent arracher son secret.’ The latter are the subjects of the sentence, and René its object, which would normally indicate his subordination to them. But the force of the verb arracher—to wrest [something] out of [someone]— undermines the grammar of the sentence to articulate René’s power here, as he keeps his story to himself. 67 Ibid., 156. 44 Homosocial desire functions as another site for rehabilitating aristocratic masculinity. The harder René denies the appeals of his two father figures, the more they desire him: “ils ne furent que plus ardents à le presser de leur ouvrir son cœur ; ils y mirent tant de discrétion, de douceur et d’autorité, qu’il fut enfin obligé de les satisfaire.” 68 Again, the grammar of the phrase paradoxically affirms René’s authority. The passage once again locates Chactas and Souël as the subjects of the clause, and René as the object. But the rhetoric also affirms René’s narratorial dominance. The words “plus ardents,” “presser,” “ouvrir,” “discretion,” and “douceur” all situate Chactas and Souël as increasingly supplicant to him. It is only at this point that René decides to reveal his past to them. And even so, as he decides to “leur raconteur, non les aventures de sa vie…mais les sentiments secrets de son âme,” 69 the passage concludes by invoking his power over the content of the narrative. René manages to assert himself in this way through the desire of his two paternal interlocutors. The ancien régime aristocratic female body must be excised from the novel for the satisfaction of this homosocial desire and the fullest recuperation of René’s masculinity to take place. The “lettre” to which the passage refers announces Amélie’s death. It is this missive that ultimately catalyzes René’s narration of “les sentiments de [s]on âme.” 70 Her death diminishes the supposed threat posed to René by Amélie’s body, and by their shared desires, permanently prohibiting the possible consummation of their illicit love. As the assertion of René’s narratorial authority coincides with her demise, the 68 Chateaubriand, René, 156. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 45 work gestures towards Amélie’s power over him, at the same time as it signals a break in this power. René’s virility depends on the destruction of the aristocratic feminine. The text likewise plays with the word “secret” in this passage to establish René’s authority. The secret is typically associated with confession. As Michel Foucault articulates in Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir, the confessional narrative helps locate the cause of (sexual) sin in the body of the one confessing. 71 Confession thus disempowers the person confessing, relative to the receiver of the confession, in that the latter obliges the telling of the former’s secret, and stands in moral judgment over it. In René’s case, however, by refusing the imperative to confess for much of the narrative, he shifts the power dynamics of the confession. René calls attention to the power he exercises as the one with something to tell. His story serves as a vehicle for recuperating René’s white, male privilege, even as he refuses to tell it. As Chateaubriand gestures toward a French colonial institution in the passage— “le bureau des missions étrangères” 72 —the text, furthermore, reminds the reader that René’s authority is inextricably linked to colonialism. The space of the colonies allows him to finally inscribe himself in a patriarchal social order, provides him with a site from which to assert his voice. The timidity he feels relative to his father in France is replaced by the power he experiences over his surrogate father figures in Louisiana. Even when Chactas and Souël critique René at the end, they only do so after René has had the opportunity to monopolize the majority of the text. The last two lines of the novel tell us, however, that even in this utopic space aristocratic French masculinity ultimately cannot be recuperated. As the novel states: “On 71 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I, la volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard 1976). 72 Ibid. 46 dit que pressé par les deux viellards [René] retourna chez son épouse, mais sans y trouver le bonheur. Il périt peu de temps après avec Chactas et le père Souël, dans le massacre des Français et des Natchez à la Louisiane.” 73 The text suggests that even in this new patriarchal order René is unable to fulfill his heterosexual reproductive duties. He can only assert his masculinity actively in an all-male environment. The work concludes by marking this strictly homosocial colonial configuration as untenable, through the demise of the characters. On the surface, as I noted earlier, the work gestures toward the 1729 Fort Rosalie Massacre as the immediate cause of the characters’ deaths. But the text also links their deaths to René’s ultimate reproductive failure through the proximity of the above two sentences. Through them Chateaubriand again suggests that interracial marriage between French men and indigenous women is essential to maintaining the colonial ideal and to rehabilitating aristocratic French masculinity. René’s upper-class male sexuality, however, proves to be too affected by his relationship to the aristocratic feminine to ever truly reclaim itself through his marriage. Upper-class masculinity is ultimately portrayed as incompatible with the work’s colonial ideal, even as this ideal is developed specifically for aristocratic men. Chateaubriand’s René established French Romanticism as a genre preoccupied with the reclamation of white male privilege. In response to anxieties about the shifts in class and gender structures ushered in by the French Revolution, Chateaubriand looks back nostalgically toward France’s colonial past in America. He explores settler colonialism and interracial marriage as modes of imbuing aristocratic masculinity with 73 Ibid., 200. 47 sexual potency. His work imagines aristocratic French and indigenous femininities as dichotomous: the body of the indigenous woman is offered to René to replace his inappropriate (sterile) relationship to his sister, and to bring him into the heteronormative fold. Duras reappropriates elements of Romanticism to reconfigure the aristocratic salonnière as intelligent, maternal, benevolent, and generous, which is to say socially acceptable within the new national framework. The limit of this recuperative effort is reached, however, when Duras imagines the possibility of integrating a black woman into French society. Like Chateaubriand, she considers interracial marriage in the context of the post-Revolution, though where his work asks the question can the colonies make aristocratic French men “properly” French again, her novel questions whether performing aristocratic femininity can allow for a black woman’s assimilation to the French national body. Writing in the wake of France’s loss of Haiti, as the reverberations of the colonial revolution were being felt in the metropole, Duras echoes contemporary anxieties about national racial purity. She diverges from Chateaubriand’s optimism for miscegenation and instead affirms the fears of black female sexuality shaping the contemporary zeitgeist. She also challenges the critical view of the French aristocracy he presents, by locating the upper-class couple within the context of heteronormative reproduction. Race, medicine, and the law in early nineteenth-century France It was not long after the French began bringing slaves from Africa to work in the colonies that they started characterizing black women as sexually excessive, immoral individuals whose bodies were potential threats to the health and prosperity of the master class, of the colonies, and of France as a whole. The shift from a vocabulary of 48 immorality to one of pathology, however, is specific to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France. French medical interest in black bodies is imbricated with the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as with the conceptualization of the nation state, all of which informed French racial and sexual anxieties at this time. It had precise implications regarding the inclusion, or more accurately, exclusion of black women from the French national body. French concerns about black femininity at this time develop against the backdrop of changes to the symbolic position and legal status of blacks in the colonies and in the metropole, following the French and Haitian Revolutions. 74 Whiting, Prasad, and Miller all argue that to re-affirm an image of national and imperial virility, French discourse projected anxieties about violent, sexually inappropriate colonial subjectivity onto black women. French scientific and literary discourses of the first half of the nineteenth century lent support to claims about the dangers embodied by black women. Medical and literary 74 Sue Peabody and Jennifer Heuer elaborate on laws regulating the movement of black colonial subjects between France and the colonies, as well as laws on interracial marriage in the late eighteenth century. In 1777, the Déclaration pour la police des noirs was passed, making it illegal for all black people, free or enslaved, to enter France. Those who violated the Déclaration would be sent back to the colonies. Any black person living in France prior to the instatement of this law had to register with their local administration. In 1778 a separate edict was passed prohibiting interracial marriage in France. 74 The Déclaration and the edict were framed as a response to both the impact of the importation of black slaves to France on colonial production, and to the anxieties about racial mixing in the metropole this provoked. The actual number of black people living in France at this time was quite small, as was the number of mixed-raced marriages taking place there. And yet the declaration claimed that the black population in France “y cause le plus grands désordres....” Sue Peabody likewise notes an obsession on the part of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, procureur du roi, with arresting and interrogating black prostitutes in the metropole. His actions reflect a more general fear about racial mixing in France at this time. 74 French racial anxieties of the period focused on miscegenation at home, disruptions to the racial and economic hierarchies in France and in the colonies. The Déclaration was repealed, following the Revolution (1789), when all people living in France, regardless of their race, were declared free. French participation in the slave trade was also outlawed. This legal change, however, did little to ease French anxiety about blacks in France or in the colonies. See Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996). See also Jennifer Heuer, “The One Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriage in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Law and History Review 27 (2009): 523, accessed June 1, 2017. 49 texts re-visited and re-worked early-modern tropes of black femininity. 75 They articulated black women’s sexuality as grotesque and aggressive. Scientists hypersexualized black girls and women from a very young age, exaggerating everything from their libidinal intensity to the size of their secondary sex characteristics. 76 Georges Cuvier’s 1816 treatise on his dissection of Sarah Baartman, the so-called Venus Hottentot, defined black femininity in France through a lexicon of pathology. 77 Prior to the publication of Cuvier’s work, the racial theories of Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, and Julien-Joseph Virey were prominently circulated in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. 78 Their works maintained their popularity even after Cuvier’s came out. Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle was so influential for Virey’s work by the same name that it would be repetitive to speak of each work separately. For Virey, as for Buffon, black women embodied sexual excess. Virey, in his 75 Dorris Garraway explains that manumission laws, as well as the intimate contact between female slaves and their male owners in the Caribbean, provoked French anxieties about racial purity, even before the advent of modern notions of race. In 1680 France established the code noir, the most comprehensive and stringent piece of legislation policing slaves in the French colonies of the New World. Prior to the passage of this set of laws, however, children of white masters and their black female slaves were automatically granted free status. Thus while in reality it was slavers who most often took advantage of their power and sexually forced themselves on their slaves, many Early Modern texts perpetuated a nightmare-fantasy of black women seducing their owners to produce children who would be born free. Authors and artists alike portrayed black women as inherently duplicitous, as well as sexually voracious and irresistible to white men. Because of their reproductive capacities black women were seen as a direct threat to white French economic, political, and moral hegemony in the colonies. This discourse depicted black women as sexually predatory at the same time as it absolved white men of any desires they might express for the former; they were impossible to resist, after all. Even after a law was put in place granting automatic manumission to mixed-race children only in cases where masters married their slaves, black slave women continued to be defined, within French colonial narratives, as lascivious, predatory and a threat to French imperial power. Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 222-223. 76 See T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). See also Deborah Willis, ed,. Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). 77 Georges Cuvier, “Extrait d’observations faites sur le cadaver d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom du Vénus Hottentote,” Mémoires du Musée Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle, iii (1817). 78 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 71. See also J.-J. Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race, trans. J. H. Guenebault. (Charleston: D.J. Dowling, 1837), 8, 25, 89, 96, 111, 161. 50 Histoire Naturelle catalogs the “premature” pubescence of black women, which they in part attribute to the “extreme” warmth of Africa. 79 George Cuvier’s medical treatise on Baartman took the work of Virey and Buffon one step further, enunciating black women’s sexual “deviance” as part of a taxonomy of pathology. Black femininity was thus projected in terms of an eroticism that was always excessive and bestial. In his work, Cuvier prominently displays full body portraits of Baartman that expressly draw the reader’s eye to Baartman’s secondary sexual features—her hips, buttocks, breasts--“to provide more visual clarity so that the gaze can fixate on the body to contemplate its anomalies. 80 ” Baartman had been inscribed in the European cultural imaginary as inhuman since her arrival in England and France, where she was soon displayed in a cage as a spectacle for crowds of white Europeans. At various points in his treatise, Cuvier compares Baartman to both the monkey and the orangutan, encouraging readers to define her not only in contrast to Europeans, but as actually non-human. Cuvier was himself a zoologist; his very interest in and authority over her body served to dehumanize her. 81 As a result of both the Revolution and the discourses of the period that pathologized black femininity, legal restrictions were once again placed on black people’s ability to circulate between the colonies and France. 82 In 1802, Napoleon issued a decree forbidding all people of color from entering France, and in 1803 he issued an administrative proclamation interdicting interracial marriage in France. As Jennifer Heuer 79 Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race, 25. See also Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du roi, tome troisième (Paris: L’impimerie royal, 1776). 80 Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 23. 81 Cuvier, “Extrait,” 295-74. 82 Jennifer Heuer, “The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Law and History Review 27 (2009), accessed February 1, 2017. doi: 10.1017/s0738248000003898 51 explains, the marriage ban was in part motivated by a fear that black women were “not fully human, or assimilable into the French nation as a whole.” 83 In medical discourse, as in the law, black female sexuality was being framed as a biological threat to the purity of France. Colonial officials and doctors alike advocated limiting racial mixing as much as possible. Even when the marriage ban was lifted in 1819, it was only done so very quietly, so as to discourage interracial unions as much as possible. 84 The existence of these laws, and the discomfort around changing them, bespeaks more general anxiety about interracial marriage at this time, even if the laws themselves drew little public attention. As Heuer notes, though the plot of Duras’s novel centers around the question of intermarriage, the author herself “showed no awareness that just a few years before the publication of the book, a real-life black Senegalese woman would not have been allowed to marry a white man in France, regardless of her social position. Contemporary plays based on the story similarly overlooked the recent history of legal restrictions on mixed marriage.” 85 At the same time, the fact that Ourika was published just a few years after the ban was very quietly lifted demonstrates a general concern about miscegenation in France during the Restoration, and a particular concern with race and the national body in the novel itself. By situating Ourika in France, in the years surrounding the French and Haitian Revolutions, the novel undermines legal restrictions on blacks in France at the time. Duras’s obsessive inscription of Ourika as a white-identified black woman, however, also illustrates the racial prejudice underscoring the work. The main character 83 Ibid., 523. 84 Ibid., 535. 85 Ibid., 546. 52 serves a screen upon which to project ancien régime aristocratic femininity, in order to recuperate the latter from negative contemporary stereotypes. In the ancien régime the figure of the salonnière was defined in part by the challenges her intellectual domain represented to class and gender hierarchies of the period. 86 Mme de B. likewise challenges race hierarchies by adopting a black girl into her world. On the one hand, the novel lauds Mme de B. for the “education parfaite” 87 through which she, as aristocratic woman, assimilates Ourika to ideals of pre-Revolutionary, upper-class womanhood. On the other, as David Connell explains, “Ourika is a portrait…of a black person who is crushed not only by the intentional cruelty of a society that has no place for her, but also by the well-intentioned, but perhaps equally cruel condescension of her…benefactress.” 88 Ourika’s assimilated upbringing produces in her incestuous desires that render her pathological in the eyes of the reader, and the medical community, directly represented in the text through the frame narrator/doctor. Through her desire the text moreover conflates the incest and miscegenation taboos, to define black female desire for white masculinity as “deviant” and prohibited. Because Ourika’s education is responsible for her desire, through her character the novel also pathologizes ancien régime aristocratic femininity, and France’s past more generally. The narrative concludes by reconfiguring aristocratic femininity through the role of wife and mother, resonating with Restoration-era tendencies to render aristocratic womanhood nonthreatening by circumscribing it in terms of bourgeois heteronormativity. 86 Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 15. 87 Claire de Durfort Duras, Ourika (Paris: Librarie des bibliophile 1878), 9. 88 David O’Connell “Ourika: Black Face, White Mask,” The French Review (Special Issue) 47 (1974), 53, accessed January 15, 2016. doi: 10.2307/487533 53 Ancien régime aristocratic femininity and racial assimilation The first scene of Ourika renders its black protagonist legible by inscribing her in the norms of ancien régime aristocratic femininity. Moreover, Duras engages directly with contemporary medical theories on black femininity, and re-affirms masculine scientific authority to define black femininity in the opening. She again marks Ourika as different from the stereotypical black woman, at the same time as the narrative upholds racial stereotypes on a more general level. The text, moreover, employs a configuration of the ancien régime aristocrate to portray Ourika and characterize both aristocratic and black femininities through a relationship to France’s past. It reworks aristocratic femininity into the French national body by defining the former through the idealization of sexually muted, intellectually and emotionally intelligent, maternal femininity. In the case of black women, however, assimilating to this republicanized aristocratic configuration of womanhood proves insufficient for allowing for their integration into the nation. The story opens at the end of Ourika’s life. Her narrative is framed by the voice of the doctor who comes to the convent to treat her malady. Their relationship should be read through the lens of the larger relationship between black women and the French medical community at this time. Through this framing, the text vaguely and indirectly gestures toward the contemporary stereotypical black woman, for whom “the time of puberty is very early, and corruption is carried to monstrous excess.” 89 At the same time, the doctor is careful to focus on Orica’s assimilation to white femininity as he depicts her. 89 Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race, 89. 54 As the doctor introduces Ourika he states: “Elle se tourna vers moi, et je fus étrangement surpris en apercevant une négresse!” 90 The “strange surprise,” that the doctor experiences upon perceiving Ourika’s race initially calls into question the legitimacy of her black body’s occupation of the space of the convent. As he refers to Ourika as “une négresse,” he further evokes the trope of the excessively and dangerously sexual black woman. As T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting articulates in her work Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, the word négresse in nineteenth-century France signified lascivious, deviant, and dangerous black femininity. “The lure of the négresse, then, was her adeptness at sexual arts…Her lure was loathed also, for she represented danger, a sexual passion capable of satiation and consumption, the literal siphoning off of life through the draining of precious seminal liquid.” 91 The doctor is surprised to see such a woman in a convent, the space par excellence of white female chastity. And yet, his language suggests that Ourika’s very presence there indicates that she in some way deviates from negative stereotypes of black womanhood. Rather than being prematurely and excessively sexual, Ourika remains in a permanently infantilized state in the convent. Depicting her in these terms challenges scientific claims about black women’s supposedly inherent sexual deviance even as it evokes them. The doctor’s description of Ourika begins to mark her as exceptional, because she is a chaste black woman. It reinforces the idea that the trope of hyper-sexualization still applies to the majority of black women, just not to Ourika. He alludes to her education as he further develops Ourika’s unique status: “Mon étonnement s’accrut encore par la 90 Duras, Ourika, 6. 91 Whiting, Black Venus, 56. 55 politesse de son acceuil et le choix des expressions dont elle se servait.” 92 His words resonate with contemporary claims that black women were “very stupid; their minds incapable of the smallest conception; [and that] they are more lazy and careless than any other human species.” 93 And at the same time he gestures toward the idea that Ourika’s education, that is, her immersion in white aristocratic culture, has “civilized” her, rendering her polite and articulate. He validates contemporary anxieties regarding black femininity at the same time as he suggests that even more surprising than a chaste black woman is a well-educated one. He deploys white femininity as the standard against which all womanhood is evaluated, and inscribes black women as legible only to the extent that they assimilate to norms of whiteness. By situating the doctor as frame narrator for Ourika’s story, the work also persists in its validation of the authority of white men of science to define, evaluate, instruct, and observe black women. Dobie notes that during the ancien régime the salonnière was represented as particularly threatening to the body politic because of the various ways in which she challenged gender and class hierarchies at the time. The very fact of being a woman who participated in intellectual life meant that the salonnière troubled the gendered divide separating the public and private sphere. 94 Moreover, “the Enlightenment salon was governed by principles of reciprocity and equality that stood in marked contrast to the hierarchial values at court.” 95 The salon thus disturbed old and new ways of thinking French society. Salonnières were also accused of sexual impropriety and material 92 Duras, Ourika, 3. 93 Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race, 10. 94 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 50. 95 Duras, Ourika, 96. 56 excess. 96 To men of letters across the political spectrum, they embodied the corruption of the ancien régime. Ourika argues against this construction and tries to recuperate the salonnière. The migration of a black colonial subject to France is mobilized to portray Ourika’s benefactress, Mme de B., as maternal and generous. To do so, however, the work exploits the voice of its black heroine. The very circumstances of Ourika’s arrival in France are meant to foreground the magnanimity and “enlightenment” of the salonnière, and of the aristocracy more generally. As Ourika elaborates: “me sauver de l’esclavage, me choisir pour bienfaitrice Mme de B., c’était me donner deux fois la vie.” 97 As the family de B. liberates Ourika from slavery, the novel links the ancien régime aristocracy to the anti-slavery movement, although as Christopher Miller points out, this link is incredibly tenuous. There are just two references to slavery in the entire work, and thus Miller argues convincingly that the novel should not be read as abolitionist. 98 At the same time, this tenuous relationship to abolitionism, as well as the adoption of a young black girl, is fundamental for defining the ancien régime aristocracy as generous and compassionate. Mme de B.’s inclusion in Ourika’s resettlement in France defines her as “la personne la plus amiable de son temps.” 99 Ourika is objectified to prove “la bonté la plus touchante” 100 of the salonnière. Ourika becomes the mouthpiece for articulating the superiority of the ancien régime aristocracy and of the ancien régime aristocratic feminine in particular. She declares herself utterly grateful to Mme de B. for adopting her, claiming that her life 96 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 50. 97 Duras, Ourika, 7. 98 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 158-173. 99 Duras, ibid. 100 Ibid. 57 depends on her benefactress who is able to, “me donner deux fois la vie,” 101 as she puts it. As such, she serves as the voice for defining black colonial subjects in a relationship of dependence on the French national body. As Ourika’s voice is ventriloquized to express gratitude to Mme de B. in this way, the novel produces a black character who identifies with white femininity and is complicit in her own denigration, and the debasement of black people more broadly. Ourika’s description of her childhood education helps develop our understanding of how the novel engages ancien régime aristocratic femininity to create a white- identified black character. Ourika is figured as an artistic creation, envisioned by Mme de B., and sculpted by the hands of private tutors and her benefactress alike. She portrays herself as clay molded into a fine work of art. Ourika in fact explicitly refers to herself as “Galatée,” 102 underscoring the idea that she has been molded in the image of her benefactress. 103 Through this reference to the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, Duras’s novel also gestures toward the fact that Ourika’s existence in France is meant to reaffirm certain normative hierarchies. In the original myth, Pygmalion sculpts Galatea, and prays for her vivification, because he is horrified at the “unruly” behavior of the 101 Ibid. 102 Duras, Ourika, 7. 103 Linda Marie Brouillard and Damon Daimuro interpret this description of Ourika’s education as portraying her as a black Galatea figure. Rouillard contends that while Ourika is ultimately silenced by her exclusion from French aristocratic society, we are meant to read the suppression of her voice as a critique of the hypocrisy of aristocratic claims to sympathy with the anti-slavery movement. Daimuro also reads the protagonist’s death in terms of a critique of the dominant race and gender discourses circulating in France at the time. Linda Marie Rouillard “The Black Galatea: Claire de Duras’s Ourika,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 32 (2004): 207-222. Daimon Dimauro “Ourika, or Galatea Reverst to Stone,” Nineteenth- Century French Studies 28 (2000): 187-211, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23538222. For other recent feminist readings of Duras’s novel, see also Mary Ellen Birkett and Christopher Rivers, ed. Approaches to Teaching Ourika (New York: MLA 2009). Chantal Bertrand-Jennings “L’alterité même: trois romans de Claire de Duras” in Un autre mal du siècle (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires de Mirail 2005) 69-85; as well as Doris Y. Kadish “Voices of Daughters and Slaves: Claire de Duras” in Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves: Women Writers and French Colonial Slavery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2012) 103-126. 58 women of his time. 104 The statue represents the artist’s ideal construction of woman. As Venus answers his prayers, the statue’s body grows soft under the artists touch: “Thrice on the alter, and Pygmalion came//Back where the maiden lay, and lay beside her,//And kissed her, and she seemed to glow, and kissed her//And stroked her breast, and felt the ivory soften//Under his fingers, as wax grows soft in sunshine,//Made pliable by handling…” 105 The image of the statue coming to life at Pygmalion’s hands as well as the rhetorical emphasis on the softness of her body both serve to reaffirm male dominance, which is presented as in crisis at the beginning of the poem, through the “shameful lives” and “vices” that “Nature had given the female disposition.” 106 When Ourika calls herself Galatea, she alludes to the fact that she too was formed in Mme de B.’s image, to reaffirm race, gender, and class hierarchies of the ancien régime. The work makes the case for the beneficence of the salonnière, salvaging aristocratic femininity, and the aristocracy more generally, from ancien régime stereotypes. At the same time, the text rehabilitates pre-French and Haitian Revolutionary race and class hierarchies, through Ourika’s relationship to Mme de B. As Ourika elaborates: [Mme de B.] voulut que j’eusse tous les talens : j’avais de la voix, les maîtres les plus habiles l’exercèrent ; j’avais le gout de la peinture, et un peinture célèbre, ami de Mme de B., se chargea de diriger mes efforts. J’appris l’anglais, l’italien, et Mme de B. elle même s’occupait de mes lectures; elle guidait mon esprit, formait mon jugement. 107 The grammar of the first sentence of the passage sets the tone for conveying the authority Mme de B. exercises over Ourika. Ourika is speaking here, but her voice is undercut as 104 Ovid, “Book X,” in Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1986), 241-259. 105 Ibid., 258. 106 Ibid., 257. 107 Duras, Ourika, 9. 59 she articulates Mme de B. as the subject of this narrative and herself as the object. Mme de B. shapes Ourika in her own image, through the latter’s formal education and Ourika’s exposure to the former’s salon. Each time Ourika foregrounds one of her skills or intellectual interests, she then delineates how it is shaped into a “talent” by one of her tutors: “j’avais de la voix, les maîtres les plus habiles l’excercèrent; j’avais le goût de la peinture, et un peinture célèbre, ami de Mme de B., se chargea de diriger mes efforts.” Her words foreground the way that ancien régime aristocratic femininity is invoked to “cultivate” or “civilize” her black body. Ourika’s voice is mobilized to laud the superiority of ancien régime aristocratic culture, and of white aristocratic femininity specifically, and constantly celebrates her own assimilation to ancien régime aristocratic girlhood. She sings the praises of her tutors, of her education in general, and of her benefactress, who provides her with the access to this knowledge in the first place. The work elaborates Ourika’s denigration of (her own) blackness. Moreover, on the rare occasion that Ourika speaks about other black people in the work, she refers to them as “barbare,” and “sauvage.” 108 She suggests that she is an intellectually outstanding young woman because of having been immersed in ancien régime aristocratic culture. Her sense of self (worth) depends on the intervention of upper-class white French femininity. The limits of assimilation: interracial marriage in Ourika Because of her upbringing and education, Ourika even perceives herself as white, until she nears the age of puberty. The text demonstrates the fact that beneath the surface 108 Ibid., 25. 60 of her benefactress’s “benevolence” is a host of racial prejudices. Ourika alludes to the social “désavantage” of being “une négresse.” 109 In this scene she is called upon to enunciate the inferiority of black femininity. She likewise provides further evidence of the power of upper-class French society to define her. Finally, she gestures toward the miscegenation taboo, as she notes that her race only becomes salient to her as she nears the age of puberty. As Ourika explains: “J’arrivai jusqu’à l’âge de douze ans sans avoir eu l’idée qu’on ne pouvait être heureuse autrement que je ne l’étais. Je n’étais pas fâchée d’être une négresse; on me disait que j’étais charmante; d’ailleurs rien ne m’avertissait que ce fût un désavantage.” 110 The text illustrates that racial difference is socially constructed, at the same time as it makes clear that for all of Ourika’s assimilation she can never efface her racial difference. As she nears puberty Ourika is violently awakened to the fact that the intersection of her race and class make it impossible for her to truly integrate into French society; ancien régime society will not allow for interracial marriage under any circumstances. Ourika learns that the combination of her race, class, and gender have made her existence in the ancien régime aristocracy impossible. The word “négresse” is synonymous with disdain and social marginalization. As Ourika explains: “…je me vis négresse, dépendante, méprisée, sans fortune, sans appui, sans un être de mon espèce à qui unir mon sort, jusqu’ici un jouet, un amusement pour ma bienfaitrice, bientôt rejetée d’un monde où je n’étais pas faite pour être admise.” 111 Ourika’s typical litany of gratitude for her assimilated upbringing is interrupted by a lament of her experience as a 109 Ibid., 8. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 11. 61 black woman in a racist society. She demonstrates self-awareness of her objectified state, and of the fact that her existence in France has primarily been for the benefit of ancien régime aristocratic femininity—“jusqu’ici un jouet, un amusement pour ma bienfaitrice” — pointing to the hypocrisy defining Mme de B.’s adoption of her. 112 In this scene of Ourika’s racial awakening, the text moreover engages tropes of Romantic literature —namely through the use of highly sentimental and emphatic language, that demonstrates the protagonist’s emotional aptitude— to evoke readers’ sympathy for a black woman’s experience of racial marginalization in upper-class French society. At the same time, because the novel had previously established Ourika as white- identified, our sympathy for her is dependent upon her assimilation to aristocratic French culture. Ourika’s own sense of social marginalization is, moreover, inextricably linked to the fact that she is white-identified. The realization that she is black and that she is denigrated are one and the same thing. The work’s critique of ancien régime aristocratic culture is undermined by the fact that Ourika must first be steeped (or rather bleached) in French culture in order to speak in the first place. The text creates a double bind wherein Ourika’s education both should allow —and also can never allow— for her full integration into French society. Pathology, hysteria, and incestuous desire As Ourika becomes hysterical upon learning that she is black and disenfranchised, the work reconfigures a medical discourse aimed at circumscribing the behavior of upper- class white women and engages it to critique the social marginalization of a white- 112 Ibid., 9. 62 identified black woman. On the one hand, the text pathologizes ancien régime aristocratic femininity, and the ancien régime more generally, for situating Ourika in an impossible subject position, as a black aristocrat. On the other, by engaging a vocabulary of hysteria in portraying Ourika’s malady, the text further whitewashes her. The novel continues to simultaneously critique and endorse ancien régime aristocratic culture. Ourika’s malady is not the result of some innate feminine “perversion,” but rather of the inherent violence of racism. As she elaborates upon the moment she realizes that she is “seule, pour toujours seule dans la vie,” 113 Ourika explains, “Une affreuse palpitation me saisit, mes yeux s’obsurcirent, le battement de mon coeur m’ôta un instant la faculté d’écouter encore; enfin, je me remis assez pour entendre la suite de cette conversation.” 114 Her symptoms resonate with Georget’s symptomology of the disease: anxiety, blindness, bodily fear. Seized by anxiety, Ourika is overwhelmed by her deafeningly quickened heartbeat and her temporary loss of sight. Eschewing the language of inherent pathology, however, the text frames her malady as an immediate response to her exclusion from aristocratic society. Hysteria was often invoked to circumscribe women, to police their emotional state and intellectual behavior, and to define them within a male dominated social and economic order. Georget’s own treatises make clear that a woman could be marked as hysterical if she was too intellectual, or too lazy and extravagant in her lifestyle; if she was too sexual or too celibate; if she was consumed by emotion or was immoral. Ourika instead re-mobilizes the misogynist rhetoric of hysteria to garner compassion for the heroine’s critique of white racism. 113 Ibid., 11. 114 Ibid., 47. 63 Through the discourse of hysteria, the novel also calls into question the dominant contemporary conceptions of black femininity circulating in France. Scientists portrayed black women as corporeally excessive to emphasize the so-called danger they embodied. Virey comments at length on black women’s breasts no less than nine times in his 172- page Histoire Naturelle. 115 Duras is careful to avoid depicting Ourika in the grotesque(ly) sexualized vocabulary popularized by the likes of Buffon, Virey, and Cuvier. In fact, Duras provides very little in the way of physical description of Ourika, perhaps so as to limit readers’ opportunities to sexualize her. The one time we do get a physical portrait of Ourika, it serves primarily to illustrate her malady: “…sa maigreur était excessive, ses yeux brillants et fort grands, ses dents d’une blancheur éblouissante, éclairaient seuls sa physionomie: l’âme vivait encore, mais le corps était détruit, et elle portrait tous les marques d’un long et violent chagrin. 116 ” This portrayal of Ourika draws our attention to the physical effects of her “long et violent chagrin,” which result from the trauma of being racially and sexually alienated in French society. Duras depicts Ourika as physically withered (maigreur excessive) to emphasize the violence of the miscegenation taboo, and thus heightens readers’ sympathy for the heroine’s situation. In trying to distance Ourika from negative stereotypes of black femininity, Duras characterizes her heroine through a rhetoric of whiteness and sexual purity. She reaffirms white femininity as the standard against which all women must measure themselves. Despite Duras’s troubling of the innateness of hysteria, the particular disease with which Ourika is afflicted reflects her assimilation to ancien régime aristocratic femininity. Early nineteenth-century medical professionals believed hysteria only affected women “of the 115 Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race. 116 Duras, Ourika, 13. 64 leisure classes.” 117 As Nancy Rogers elaborates, they contended that “…the delicate and vulnerable qualities praised in nineteenth-century women naturally led to a rise in hysteria among them…it was considered a function of a nervous temperament and the heightened emotions of which only [white] women were capable.” 118 Thus at the same time as a diagnosis of hysteria would have marked white women as “abnormal,” as scientists located the cause of this “abnormality” in inherent heteronormative femininity, they also re-affirmed white women’s sexual “normality.” At the end of the novel, the aristocracy is reconstituted as racially pure through the heterosexual, reproductive union between Charles and Mlle de Themines. “L’enfant de Charles était beau comme Anaïs.” 119 In contrast, black female sexuality’s “abnormality” was articulated in a much more grotesque and aggressive vocabulary. Ourika, however, is a victim of hysteria, a malady expressly associated with genteel white women, and which served as much to re- inforce heteronormative femininity as to call it into question. The compassion we as readers are meant to feel for Ourika is, moreover, dependent upon her sexual virtue. As we read the medicalization of Ourika’s mal du siècle we are reminded once again of Chateaubriand’s novel, and of Amélie’s illness. Amélie and Ourika are physically ravaged and psychologically distraught as a result of their malady. In the case of each, excessive weight loss (“maigreur excessive”), loss of senses, and emotional distress are listed among the most prominent signs of ill health. As René notes: “…Amélie perdait le repos et la santé…elle maigrissait, ses yeux 117 Nancy Rogers, “The Wasting Away of Romantic Heroines,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 11 (1983). 118 Ibid., 251. 119 Ibid., 34. 65 creusaient…D’involontaires soupirs venaient expirer sur ses lèvres…” 120 Unlike René, Ourika re-mobilizes hysteria as a vehicle for critiquing French aristocratic racism and sexism. The work locates the cause of Ourika’s malady outside of her body, and in ancien régime aristocratic society. The aristocracy gestures toward including Ourika, by adopting and assimilating her, but ultimately deems her inassimilable because she is black. However, as Prasad notes, in the second half of the novel the meaning of Ourika’s secret changes, and is re-signified to refer to her “incestuous” desires for her step- brother Charles. 121 To readers the prohibition placed on Ourika’s desires for Charles appears as much a result of their legal sibling relationship as of her race. The novel marks interracial marriage as similarly impossible to marriage between blood relatives, and the incest taboo and the miscegenation taboo are conflated through this never- realized relationship. The narrative of incestuous desire is another point of intersection between Duras’s Ourika and Chateaubriand’s Amélie. Just as Amélie’s hysteria is caused by her erotic longings for her brother, as the meaning of Ourika’s secret changes so too does the immediate cause of her hysteria shift to her amour interdit for Charles. Ourika, like Amélie, exiles herself to a convent to die of her “illness.” By shedding light on the similarities between these two characters, I illustrate how the slippage in the meaning of the secret in Ourika, between racial discrimination and incestuous desire, further undercuts the critiques of racist French nationalism that Duras offers in her novel. 120 Chateaubriand, René, 180. 121 I mark incestuous with scare quotes here to signal that Ourika and Charles are in no way blood related; he is the grandson of Ourika’s benefactress, and adoptive mother figure. He is also white. 66 Vous assurez que vous n’avez point de secret, eh bien ! Ourika, je me chargerai de vous apprendre que vous en avez un. Oui, Ourika, tous vos regrets, toutes vos douleurs, ne viennent que d’une passion malheureuse, d’une passion insensée, et si vous n’étiez pas folle d’amour pour Charles, vous prendriez fort bien votre parti d’être négresse. 122 This passage introduces a conversation between Ourika and the anonymous marquise that mirrors the earlier one between the marquise and Mme de B., wherein Ourika first learns of her race and her racially marginalized position in French society. Here again the marquise declares the impossibility of Ourika’s desire. This time, however, Ourika is directly present for the conversation. Aristocratic racism is thus portrayed as both a shameful secret, too painful to state directly to the black women victimized by it, and as something Ourika attend to She is given no choice but to directly confront the painful “reality” of her feelings for Charles. As the marquise addresses Ourika she forces her to come face to face with an inner “truth” that Ourika kept hidden even from herself. The marquise tries to overwrite the narrative of Ourika’s hysterical state, claiming that the cause of it had always been her fraternally inappropriate love for Charles, and not her experience of aristocratic racism. She concludes with the following statement: “si vous n’étiez pas folle d’amour pour Charles, vous prendriez fort bien votre parti d’être négresse.” 123 As the meaning of Ourika’s secret shifts in this scene, so too does the voice of the one interpreting it. The marquise begins to speak for Ourika, pronouncing her illicit desire as the “real” cause of her malady. As she interpolates Ourika as “une négresse,” the marquise delineates the latter, qua white-identified black woman, as different (read other) from Mme de B. and herself. The marquise instantiates hers as a more “authentic” performance of white, upper-class French femininity than Ourika’s, presumably because 122 Duras, Ourika., 156. 123 Ibid. 67 it is rooted in the color of her skin and her place of birth. The marquise’s white, aristocratic perspective intervenes to recast Ourika’s narrative as one based in clandestine, prohibited desire. Ourika’s desire for Charles is, however, inextricably linked to her education. Her upbringing produces in Ourika a race-based self-hatred, which make it impossible for her be attracted to a black man. Describing her response to the realization that she is black Ourika states: “j’avais ôté de ma chambre tous les miroirs, je portais toujours des gants; mes vêtements cachaient mon cou et mes bras, j’avais adopté pour sortir, un grand chapeau avec une voile, que souvent même je gardai dans la maison.” 124 Raised in a world where she was taught to idealize and idolize upper-class French society, Ourika internalizes contemporary hatred of blackness. She echoes medical claims that black women’s bodies are “grotesque” as she tries to hide hers even from her own view. Her self-loathing, like the theories of Virey, Buffon, and Cuvier, develops in direct relation to fears about racial mixing in France. It is no wonder that such a character would develop a libidinal investment in white masculinity. Marrying Charles would function as yet another way for Ouirka to whiten herself, so to speak. 125 Through the conflation of the incest and miscegenation taboos, the novel demonstrates that Ourika’s education is responsible for her malady, as it creates in her an impossible identity and desires which can never be realized. Thus, at the same time as the work specifies the source of Ourika’s malady to be her desire, the work also continues to pathologize ancien régime aristocratic femininity and the past more generally. The work’s recuperation of the past is responsible for Ourika’s hysterical state. 124 Ibid., 25. 125 See Connell and Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions de Seuil 1952). 68 Moreover, the novel develops its pathologization of ancien régime femininity, and of France’s past, through the depiction of the convent where Ourika retreats at the end of her life. The text reiterates the idea that Ourika’s education is responsible for her illness. By adopting and educating Ourika in the way that Mme de B. does, she creates a potential risk to the French national body. Ourika’s exile to the convent signals the work’s desire to excise both ancien régime aristocratic femininity and black femininity from the French national body. The convent stands in metonymically for ancien régime aristocratic femininity more generally. Convents had been a pillar of the ancien régime patriarchy, and were integral to shaping aristocratic femininity before the Revolution. This one, however, is in ruins, and stands in for the decrepit state of the ancien regime, and of ancien régime femininity specifically following the Revolution. As the text explains, [l]a Révolution avait ruiné une partie de l’édifice, le cloître était à découvert d’un côté par la démolition de l’antique église, dont on ne voyait plus que quelques arceaux. Une religieuse m’introduisit dans le cloître, que nous traversâmes en marchant sur de longues pierres qui formaient le pavé de ces galléries. Je m’aperçus que c’étaient des tombes... 126 Ourika, “une jeune religieuse malade,” 127 is situated in the middle of this devastation. The state of the convent reflects and emphasizes Ourika’s illness. The graveyard foreshadows her eventual death from her malady as well. By employing the state of the convent to reflect Ourika’s illness, the novel problematizes its adulation for ancien régime aristocratic femininity. The work portrays ancien régime upper-class womanhood, and France’s past more generally, as decrepit institutions. As the work locates Ourika in the middle of this devastation Duras emphasizes the extent to which 126 Ibid., 3. 127 Ibid. 69 ancien régime aristocratic femininity is responsible for Ourika’s pathology. Ourika’s confession and subsequent death in this destroyed convent are meant to symbolize both the demise of ancien régime aristocratic femininity, and the expulsion of black femininity from the French national body. Ourika’s ghost: “Ourika Mania” Despite the novel’s final excision of Ourika from the national body, authors and readers of the Restoration remained perturbed by Duras’s very entertainment of the idea of bringing a black woman to France. This final section considers works from the “Ourika Mania” corpus, including two Ourika plays, Ourika, ou la négresse (1824); Ourika, ou la petite négresse (1824); and one short story, La Négresse (1826), to demonstrate these works’ virulent rejection of the possibility of racial integration in France following the Haitian Revolution. Each of the texts speaks directly to the racial anxieties that arose in France in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in particular, to concerns about racial mixing. While the works are eager to exaggerate the “benevolence” of the French for adopting Ourika, they all conclude by sending her back to Africa, and by declaring France as a space for whites only. Ourika, ou la négresse (1824) Ourika, ou la négresse (1824), by Ferdinand de Villeneuve and Charles Dupeuty, re-writes the narrative of Haitian Independence. The play describes Ourika as a Senegalese woman who has been enslaved in Saint-Domingue. During the Haitian Revolution, her father risks his life to save two white French colonists, Elise and Edouard 70 Belfort. Ourika, now orphaned, accompanies Elise and Edouard as they repatriate to France. The Belfort family has, however, lost their wealth as a result of Haitian Independence, and so Edouard plans to move to Senegal to regain their fortune. Ourika gives up her own financial freedom so that Belfort may stay in France and marry Elise. She finally exiles herself to Senegal. The work is an apologia for slavery and portrays the Haitian Revolution as an act of senseless violence against innocent French settlers. The loss of Haiti is also represented as a threat to the heteronormative family, and by extension to the French nation. In the end the white French family/nation is restored, as Ourika pays reparations for the Haitian Revolution, and returns to Africa. The work begins by re-imagining slavery as a benevolent institution. As it celebrates Ourika’s father’s prioritizing of white lives over his own, and foregrounds the “magnanimity” with which the colonists respond to his self-sacrifice, it reads as a tacit apologia for slavery. As Elise explains to Ourika: “Ton père ne perdit-il pas la vie en sauvant la mienne (sic), dans les colonies, de la fureur de tes compatriotes?...C’est à son dévouement seul que nous devons la fortune qui nous reste.” 128 The Haitian Revolution is reduced to a tragic massacre of white colonials—“la fureur de tes compatriotes”--and the slave who sacrifices himself for the well-being of the white settlers is depicted as heroic. Ourika is doubly “rewarded” for her father’s loyalty. Her master, who dies during the slave revolt, leaves his fortune to Ourika. She is also adopted by Elise and Edouard’s family, and raised in an upper-class French home. However, this so-called compensation re-enslaves her, as it renders her utterly dependent upon the generosity of white French people. 128 Ferdinand de Villeneuve et Charles Dupeuty, Ourika, ou la petite négresse (Paris: Pollet, 1824), 4. 71 Speaking about her former master, Ourika states: “M. Olivier, notre ancien maître, mourant à Saint-Domginue, sans enfans, a bien voulu penser à la pauvre Ourika, à la fille de son fidèle esclave…qu’il lui a laissé tout son bien.” 129 Her voice is ventriloquized to eulogize the man who enslaved her entire family, and to lament the loss of French life in the Haitian Revolution. She is made to portray slavers as generous, thoughtful, paternalistic figures who take care of their slaves, even in death. Her gratitude inscribes Ourika as a docile colonial subject. Like Duras, Villeneuve and Dupeuty engage a lexicon of exceptionalism to portray the compliance of certain slaves to France’s colonial interest. M. Olivier’s generosity, moreover, reinforces Ourika’s complete reliance upon the charity of white French people for her survival. She reaffirms her total lack of freedom in relation to French colonists as she says to Elise: “J’étais seule, j’étais sans appui sur la terre…vous m’avez tenu lieu de tout.” 130 Reiterating her own subjugation, Ourika frames her position as evidence of the beneficence of whites. Even as an emancipated woman, Ourika remains enslaved, but her voice is usurped to depict her oppression as good fortune. She exists solely to reinforce the colonial hierarchy between blacks and whites. In the play, as in the novel, Ourika’s life in France also causes the central tension in her life, her impossible love for her step-brother, Edouard Belfort. Ourika is made to confess her desires to Edouard, only to have them be misunderstood by him and forever foreclosed. His misapprehension is invoked to enunciate the impossibility of interracial marriage in nineteenth-century France. Ourika: …j’ai seize ans 129 Ibid., 9. 130 Ibid., 4. 72 Belfort: Et à cet âge les femmes de ta patrie… Ourika: ont déjà senti qu’elles pouvaient aimer… Belfort: Comment ! Est-ce que ton cœur ?... Ourika: Mon coeur…oui, je crois que mon cœur m’a dit cela. Belfort: Ainsi tu consentirais donc à nous quitter ? Ourika: Au contraire, ce serait pour ne pas être séparée de vous...sans cela je ne voudrais jamais changer de mon sort. Belfort: En vérité, je ne te comprends pas. Ourika: C’est dommage!... 131 The work marks Ourika’s black body as a sexual threat to the nation, as Edouard defines her though African girl’s supposedly premature pubescence: “et à cet âge les femmes de ta patrie.” At the same time, the work precludes the possibility of any sort of real discussion of interracial marriage. Ourika is only permitted to gesture toward her desire for Edouard—“pour ne pas être séparée de vous.” 132 As he awkwardly replies to her amorous overture by claiming not to understand what she is referring to—“en vérité, je ne comprends pas”—he concludes the conversation by pronouncing a union between a black man and a white woman as incomprehensible. The work frames Haitian independence, and French colonialism more generally, as a threat to the future of the French family (read white, bourgeois, heterosexual), and of the nation. Elise and Belfort stand in for France. The loss of their family’s fortune as a result of the slave rebellion represents the financial loss France suffered after losing its most lucrative colony. As Belfort considers postponing his marriage to Elise and moving to Senegal to regain their wealth, the text gestures toward early nineteenth-century French enthusiasm for shifting French colonial interests away from slave colonies in the Caribbean and to settler colonies in Africa. It also voices disapproval for such imperial endeavors, suggesting that they rob the nation of its “good men” and of its future. As 131 Ibid., 8. 132 Ibid. 73 Edouard explains: “…là les négocians, moins nombreux, peuvent avec de l’activité, du travail, acquérir une fortune plus rapide, et je braverai tout pour y parvenir” 133 The text foregrounds his bourgeois work ethic, and his devotion to his (future) family—“avec de l’activité, du travail, acquérir une fortune…et je braverai tout pour y parvenir” 134 —at the same time as it suggests that colonialism challenges the stability of the French nuclear family and the nation. Ourika, however, intervenes, sacrificing her own fortune and happiness so that Edouard and Elise may be together: “Vous vous aimez; vous pouvez encore être heureux…je vous donne [ma fortune]…quant à moi, je fuis un monde, une société qui me repousse…” 135 She reaffirms the colonial hierarchy between blacks and whites, as she too acknowledges her inassimilability to the French national body—“un monde qui me repousse.” Replacing Edouard and Elise’s lost colonial fortune with the money she inherited from M. Olivier, Ourika’s gesture reads as symbolic of reparations paid by former slaves to their masters for the financial losses they experienced as a result of Haitian Independence, something many former French colonists in Haiti desperately wanted. 136 As she boards the ship Edouard was originally meant to take to Senegal, she facilitates the restoration of the heteronormative French family and by extension the stability of the nation. She furthermore articulates the re-segregation of the races. 133 Ibid., 16. 134 Ibid, 17. 135 Ibid., 26. 136 Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2000). 74 Ourika, ou la petite négresse (1824) In their version of the Ourika story, Mélesville and Carmouche use allegory to explore the place of the black female body in French society. The nation state (patrie) is represented through the figure of the patriarch, aptly named Franville. The latter portrays himself as a wealthy colonialist in Senegal: “un homme qui a quitté le Sénégal, ses plantations, son sucre, et son café…” 137 The tripling of the possessive adjective here gestures toward the generally exploitative nature of (French) colonialism; he claims as his own resources that were stolen from the indigenous Senegalese populations. Through him, colonialism is represented as a lucrative (read successful) endeavor, without much thought for how such a practice harms the colonized subjects. When the play opens, Franville has returned to France from Senegal to take care of his other patriarchal/patriotic duty, arranging the marriage between his aristocratic nephew, Charles, and his equally noble finacée, Anaïs. In other words, he is managing the national body. It is he who states the impossibility of Ourika’s marriage, despite her innocence and virtue, and he who reveals to her love for Charles. He invokes the unfaltering miscegenation taboo, suggesting that even young, naïve Ourika represents a threat to France by virtue of her blackness. In the end, Franville offers to maintain Ourika in his paternal care for the rest of her life. Such a plan promises to reduce her to a permanently infantilized position. Within this allegory, the only viable position for the black protagonist is as a colonial ward of the state. She rejects this option, and instead flees on her own to Senegal, where she will ultimately live as a colonial subject anyway. 137 Villeneuve et Dupeuty, Ourika, ou la négresse 9. 75 The only way for a black woman to exercise the freedom to even make what is effectively a false choice is by accepting the illegitimacy of her body in France. Enlightenment universalism and racial integration in La Négresse (1826) Adèle J. Ballent and J. Quantin’s novella, La Négresse (1826), 138 is the only adaptation of Duras’s story that promises a successful marriage between a black woman and white man. The work also responds directly to the Haitian Revolution. Like Ferdinand and Villeneuve, Ballent and Quantin re-imagine Ourika as a Haitian migrant woman in France, following the former colony’s independence. The authors propose their short story as a means of rectifying the aristocratic racism plaguing the original version, by infusing the story with a more thoroughly Enlightenment universalist politics, which allows for the incorporation of people of color into the French body politic. As the work opens: “Il y a trente ans donc, on nous aurait offert Ourika, avec son excellent cœur, ses talens, comme très-susceptible de rendre heureux un honnête (honorable) blanc.” 139 At the same time, to allow for Ourika’s integration, the work defines her as white-identified. The text echoes contemporary anxieties about miscegenation in the metropole and cites assimilation as necessary for integrating France’s former slave populations. While, unlike Ferdinand and Villeneuve’s play, the text gives no indication of a pro- or anti-colonial ethics, saying nothing of French colonial settlements in Africa, La Négresse does position black girls as benefitting from the influence of white culture. Ballent and Quantin re-write the Ourika character with a French name, Marie, which recalls “le Marion,” and as such simultaneously frames her in terms of French 138 Adèle J. Ballent and J. Quantin La Négresse, in Amour, ourgeuil et sagesse (Paris: Noël Lefèvre, 1826), 169-218. 139 Ballent et Quantin, La Négresse, 171. 76 Revolutionary ideals and white, heteronormative femininity. Like Duras’s novel, La Négresse responds to contemporary fears about black female sexuality and the French national body by inscribing Marie as a priori virtuous, maternal, and self-sacrificing. The work goes further than the original, aligning Marie with the nationalist project. It continues to define black women against white women, as it compares Marie to her stepsister, Lise. As the text states: “Si la tendresse maternelle faisait pencher quelquefois la balance du côté de Lise, les excellentes qualités de Marie rétablissaient insensiblement l’équilibre. Ce n’est point que Lise fût un enfant haïssable ; au contraire, c’est que Marie possédait dans un degré supérieur, les vertus, les avantages qui déjà s’annonçaient en toutes deux.” 140 The work reaffirms white virtuous femininity as the standard against which all women are to be measured. At the same time, the text suggests that Marie’s integration is made possible by the fact that she is more virtuous (in other words acts as if she were white) than her French sibling. It is careful to assert that only black women who conform to republican ideals of womanhood are welcome in the national body. Conclusion For Chateaubriand, the incest plot in René symbolizes the breakdown of the ancien régime aristocratic family, and specifically of the sexual, political, and intellectual corruption of aristocratic womanhood of the period. He looks nostalgically back to French colonial Louisiana as a space for recuperating ancien régime aristocratic masculinity through interracial marriage. The novel defines upper-class French manhood through the sexual and racial alterity of colonized women. In the end, the 140 Ibid., 176-177. 77 heteronormative failure of the hero signals the demise of aristocratic masculinity and of the work’s colonial utopia. The incest plot is likewise invoked in Ourika to justify the prohibition of interracial marriage between a white-identified black woman and a white aristocratic man. In the twenty years between René’s and Ourika’s publication France acutely experienced the effects of the loss of Haiti, its most lucrative colony in the New World. The circumstances of the Haitian Revolution challenged French colonial race and gender hierarchies, as enslaved men (for the most part) defeated their masters. As French scientific culture projected anxieties about race and gender onto the bodies of black women, we see a shift in the way that literature engaged with the question of miscegenation in the years following the Haitian Revolution, from a means of rehabilitating white male privilege to a threat to the purity of the body politic. Ourika’s death signals the expulsion of black and aristocratic femininities from the French national body. Duras’s novel and the subsequent adaptations of it speak to specific racial anxieties in France in the early nineteenth century. Despite the relatively small number of blacks actually living in France during the Restoration, approximately 700 in total, these works gave voice to concerns about racial mixing in the metropole. They illustrated a rhetoric of racial purity that defined the new and still in many ways unstable nation. At best these texts imagine the possibility of integrating white-washed black women into the French national body through marriage to white men. At worst they deem this union impossible from the start and excise the black female body from France to be re-located in Africa. All of these works are responding to scientific theories that hypersexualized 78 black women. In one way or another, each of these iterations of the Ourika story seems to agree that there is no place for black femininity in France. The aristocratic female body on the contrary is reformed, so to speak, to reflect the republican idealization of sexually reserved, maternal, and generous, womanhood. Through Charles’s marriage to Mlle de Themines, the work reconfigures the aristocratic family as a uniquely white institution, but one that fits comfortably into the new national narrative. 79 CHAPTER II ‘J’AI L’ARABIE PÉTRÉE’ 141 : MASCULINITY AND COLONIALISM IN HONORÉ DE BALZAC’S LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN (1831) Like René, Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin focuses on the fate of aristocratic masculinity in France following the 1789 Revolution. Balzac invokes Romanticism to challenge the recuperation of aristocratic masculinity that the genre offers with René’s celebration of (the genius of) sensitive masculinity. Instead, La Peau de Chagrin mocks its hero’s long-winded, hyperbolic, self-pitying tale. In it, Balzac proposes that upper- class men are hereditarily “corrupt” and effeminate, marking the (extravagance) of the past as a malady that ancien régime fathers passed on to their sons. The text posits that the presence of ancien régime masculinity in early nineteenth-century France weakens the body politic. Profligate, irresponsible (upper-class) masculinity is one of Balzac’s primary concerns. Yet women and French colonialism are likewise portrayed as detrimental to the national body, as they also reawaken in upper-class men the opulent, lascivious desires associated with the corruption of France’s recent past. 142 141 Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin (Paris: Charpentier, 1845). 142 Scholars have interpreted La Peau de Chagrin in a variety of ways. Bettina L. Knapp and David F. Bell, for example, are interested in the development of the protagonist throughout the text. Focusing on the motif of gambling in the novel, Knapp reads this work by Balzac as founded upon a continuous tension between the individual and his destiny, wherein destiny always prevails. Bell explores the relationship between silences and “the act of speaking” in the novel, to suggest that “Raphaël’s transition into the enunciative role is…an emblematic moment that is linked in many ways to his education in the world.” He argues that through this narratorial role, Raphaël distinguishes himself from his father, and is able to articulate his own subjectivity. David Bell “Epigrams and Ministerial Eloquence: The War of Words in Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 15 (1987): 252-264, accessed December 1, 2015. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/23532114. Bettina L. Knapp, "Balzac's La Peau De Chagrin: The Gambler's Quest for Power," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 27, (1998): 16- 37. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/23537555. Lewis Kamm offers a literary historical analysis of the text, locating “points of contact,” as he refers to them, between Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin and Zola’s Germinal. He reads each novel as fundamental to understanding its author’s later oeuvre, and cites parallels between the narrative trajectories of Balzac’s and Zola’s protagonists. Kamm concludes by suggesting that there are similarities in how both novels engaged 80 The anxieties about class, gender, and colonialism expressed in La Peau de Chagrin springs from the intertwined legacy of changing French colonial impulses and literary responses to those changes. The imperial travelogues that sought to define French colonialism of the post-Revolution in terms of a vision for the future of France did so through a conflation of ancient régime aristocratic and “Oriental” femininities, in order to re-envision French imperialism in terms of the corruption of France’s past. As an illustration, published two years before the Revolution even broke out, Volney’s Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie inaugurates French imperial interest in Egypt and Syria, 143 and serves as a guiding text for Napoleon’s expedition in the region. 144 By inscribing France in a genealogy of republicanism that stretched back to Greece (and Rome), Volney tried to distance the nation from its ancien régime past. Moreover, Napoleon’s entire imperial endeavor across Europe, and into Egypt and Syria, was likewise undertaken in the name of spreading these republican French political and economic systems and culture. 145 In the years following Napoleon’s failed intervention in Egypt and Syria, Chateaubriand and Lamartine both express nostalgia for French imperialism in the region. Balzac, in La Peau de Chagrin, however, describes French imperialism in North Africa and Asia as threatening to bring the body politic to an ever-greater level of corruption and “effeminacy” than that which characterized the ancien régime. His novel proposes that French imperialism will cause the body politic to revert to the feminized corruption of France’s recent past. Geoffrey Baker’s is the only other interpretation of with nineteenth-century discourses on labor and capital. "Balzac's La Peau De Chagrin and Zola's Germinal: Points of Contact,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 19 (1991): 223-30. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/23532150. 143 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 81. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 81 Balzac’s novel that considers it in the context of nineteenth-century French Orientalism and imperialism. His chapter in Realism’s Others, “A Vision of Realism: Empiricism and Empire in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin,” argues that the text reflects a tension in the early nineteenth-century arts between “enchantment” and “empiricism.” He contends that we can see evidence of this tension in the shift from personal collections of curios and works of art to museums, and in the literary turn toward realism. He likewise posits that the tension between fantasy and scientific rationalism reflects the paradox at the foundation of Orientalism as “driven by impulses both secular, empirical, enumerative, and non-secular, non-historical, paranoid.” 146 Baker thus reads the arts, and especially La Peau de Chagrin, as reflective of the state of French imperialism in the early nineteenth century arguing that both were structured by a conflict between fascination and desire for scientific knowledge. 147 While Balzac is part of the shift from enchantment to empiricism, he must also be understood as continually articulating French colonialism as having an “Orientalizing,” pathologizing effect on the French body politic. His anti-colonial stance could not be more clear, and transforms how we understand this work within the context of the literary contributions to the national imaginary and its articulation of the relationship of France to its colonies. By employing eighteenth-century Orientalist tropes, which also recall anxieties about ancien régime aristocratic decadence, Balzac portrays French colonialism as not only pathological but also retrogressive. Or, to put it more precisely, he frames colonialism as pathological because it is retrogressive. The medicalization of the body in 146 Geoffrey Baker, “Empiricism and Empire: La Peau de Chagrin,” in Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009), 1 147 Geoffrey Baker, “Empiricism and Empire,” 1-27. 82 the nineteenth century in France grew out of a national narrative that defined contemporary France against its past. Intellectuals characterized ancien régime society as immoral and unhealthy, in order to emphasize the so-called health and vitality of the modern French nation state. As nineteenth-century authors framed French imperialism in the Orient in terms of a mission to spread progress, they situated the colonialist project as proof of the nation’s own health and vitality. Eschewing this narrative of Western progress, Balzac instead suggests that French colonialism would revert the national body politic to the despotism, corruption, and debauchery of the past. He depicts imperialism as weakening France, rather than as part of its national strength. French colonialism from 1798-1848: Egypt, Syria, and Algeria Balzac’s work is embedded in a larger history, both of changing discourses on the colonies as well as of the expansion of the Empire. This section articulates the relationship between Constantin François Volney’s Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie and other events that materially affected the definition of colonialism during 1798-1848. 148 Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie was written thirteen years prior to the Napoleonic expedition and inspired the Emperor’s invasion there from 1798-1801. The work paints the entire Ottoman Empire with a few wide and reductive brushstrokes, which were meant to inspire a “benevolent” imperial intervention in the region on the part of France. Defining the Ottomans as despotic and incompetent in their imperial leadership, Volney’s Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie invites France to intervene in Egypt and Syria to save the “future” of the region from further decay. Volney prefaces his description of Alexandria 148 Constantin-François de Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785. Tome I. (Paris: Desenne et Voland, 1787). 83 with the following maxim: “l’esprit turc est de ruiner les travaux du passé et l’espoir de l’avenir, parce que dans la barbarie d’un despotism ignorant, il n’y a point de lendemain.” 149 He elaborates his portrait of Alexandria, focusing on the supposed decrepitude of the port city “…l’on est frappé de l’aspect d’un vaste terrain couvert de ruines. Pendant deux heures de marche on suit une double ligne de murs et de tours, qui formaient l’enceinte de l’ancienne Alexandrie. La terre est couverte de débris de leurs sommets, des pans entiers sont écroulés les voûtes enfoncées, les créneaux dégradés, les pierres rongées et défigurées par le salpêtre.” 150 Volney uses the generalizing subject pronoun “on” to convey the idea that he is being objective in his portrayal of Alexandria, suggesting that what he claims to have seen is a truthful rendering of the space. This pronouncement of objective knowledge is crucial to the text’s later role in inspiring French colonial intervention there. Napoleon’s entire imperial endeavor across Europe, and into Egypt and Syria was undertaken in the name of spreading French political and economic systems and culture. Sessions makes clear the extent to which post-Revolutionary imperial projects were imbued with France’s sense of national superiority and with the arrogant desire to implement republican ideology worldwide. As Sessions notes: In November 1792, the Edicts of Fraternity pledged France to liberate the peoples of monarchical Europe and to bestow upon them, by force if necessary, the gift of republican liberty and equality. Imperial expansion remained a cornerstone of revolutionary ideology as the Republic’s fortunes ebbed and flowed over the ensuing years. When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and declared himself the ‘savior of the Revolution’ in 1799, he also assumed the torch of universalist republican imperialism…[His] army of administrators and savants [were] 149 Ibid., 8. 150 Ibid., 4-5 84 dedicated to the institution of Enlightened ‘progress’ and French ‘civilization’ in the backward regions of Europe and the Middle East. 151 She also highlights the spirit of violence underlying these expansionist undertakings. Most important is the cruel irony of this liberal ethos, which vowed to decimate cultures and peoples in the name of spreading freedom. In the cases of Egypt and Syria, from Volney’s treatise to Napoleon’s expedition and beyond, Frenchmen also called for colonization in the name of freeing the region from Ottoman “tyranny.” Volney’s work reflects how Revolutionary ideology was mobilized as violent rhetoric: a violent rhetoric with which French writers re-scripted history in order to justify imperial projects. They drew on the long-standing French tradition of defining “the whole of Asia,” 152 and now North Africa as well, through tropes of Oriental despotism, to justify imperial expansion there. In describing the Port of Alexandria, for example, Volney states “l’esprit turc est de ruiner les travaux du passé et l’espoir de l’avenir parce que dans la barbarie d’un despotisme ignorant il n’y a point de lendemain.” 153 Volney here defines Egypt and Syria as ruins because of the supposed greed of the Ottoman imperial regime and their Mameluke proxies, who governed at the local level. He frames the Ottoman Empire in terms of ignorance, despotism, and barbarism. He characterizes the government as having no interest in the material or ideological progress of its lands and peoples—“il n’y a point de lendemain”—he bemoans. In the same gesture, he indirectly posits France in opposite terms— enlightened, free, benevolent, and progressive. 151 Session, By Sword and Plow, 18. 152 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 35. 153 Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, 8. 85 Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourienne, personal secretary to Napoleon for the expedition to Egypt and Syria, echoes Volney in his memoirs, calling attention to the “denigration” of the region under Ottoman rule. As he notes upon landing in Egypt: “…[it] was no longer the empire of the Ptolemies covered in populous and wealthy cities, it now represented an unvaried scene of devastation and misery.” 154 Bourienne’s and Volney’s works have something else in common, they both define Egypt and Syria in relation to their pasts as well, and in particular, through their pasts under the Greek Empire. This is what Volney is referring to when he gestures toward “les travaux du passé;” 155 Bourienne invokes this period more directly through his reference to Ptolemy. Their works illustrate the contemporary republican tendency to fetishize ancient Greece (and Rome) as the birthplace of liberal democracy and thus to locate them as the predecessors to France’s own republican, imperial, present and future. By inscribing France in this genealogy of republicanism, many tried to distance the nation from its ancien régime past. This goal is also achieved by scripting the Ottoman Empire as tyrannical, greedy, and uninvested in the future of its own people. By framing the Ottoman regime in terms reminiscent of French portrayals of the ancien régime monarchy, Volney and de Bourienne mark both the Ottoman Empire and France’s own past as Other. In this fashion colonialism helped define contemporary France against its recent past. As I demonstrate further in this and the subsequent chapter, authors from the first half of the nineteenth century elaborated on an eighteenth-century French tradition of defining the “Orient” through a vocabulary of despotism, material and sexual greed 154 Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourienne, “The French View of the Events in Egypt: Memoirs by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourienne, Private Secretary to General Bonaparte.” In Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation: 1798 Napoleon in Egypt, ed. and trans. Shmuel Moreh (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009), 149. 155 Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, 7. 86 and excess, indolence, and regression, in arguing both for and against French colonialism in North Africa and the Levant. The works of Volney and Bourienne are exemplars of how this rhetoric was invoked in the name of French colonialism in Egypt and Syria. Five years after the failure of Napoleon’s expeditions in Egypt and Syria, François René de Chateaubriand wrote a travelogue based on his voyage from Paris to Jerusalem, in which he expresses nostalgia for French imperialism there. Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem echoes the enthusiasm for colonialism expressed in René, however, it lacks the latter work’s interest in interracial marriage. This move away from locating miscegenation as part of colonial fantasy is perhaps a reflection of heightened anxieties about racial mixing after the Haitian Revolution. His enthusiasm for French imperialism in North Africa and South West Asia echoes the pro-colonial stance he takes in René. 156 As he states: “je ne trouvais digne de ces plaines magnifiques que les souvenirs de la gloire de ma patrie; je voyais les restes des monuments d’une civilisation nouvelle, apportée par la génie de la France sur les bords du Nil.” 157 He employs the highly descriptive, highly sentimentalized, and effusive voice of a Romantic literary author to convey nationalist, imperialist pride in his travelogue. In Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem Chateaubriand, moreover, fetishizes Egypt as a geographic space—“je ne trouvais digne de ces plaines magnifiques…”—to justify French colonialism there, his logic being that only French “civilization” is a match for such a “magnificent” place. His work presents an early eugenicist argument for 156 There is, however, a conspicuous silence regarding interethnic marriage in Chateaubriand’s travelogue. This is perhaps a reflection of French conceptions of “Oriental” femininity of the period, defined as salacious, opulent, and indolent. 157 René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem (Paris: Bernardin-Béchet, 1867), 181. 87 colonialism, the “génie” of French civilization apparently entitling the nation to forcefully impose its rule and culture in Egypt. He additionally draws our attention to the ruins of France’s imperial intervention in Egypt. He echoes Volney’s xenophobic claim that the Ottoman empire was allowing the territories under its control to fall into total degradation. According to Chateaubriand, just a few short years after Napoleon was forced out of Egypt, the marks of France’s imperial intervention there had been reduced to “restes.” By the same token, he situates France as the embodiment of civilization itself— “une nouvelle civilization,” as he refers to it. His work reflects how early notions of French nationalism were deeply embedded in pro-colonial rhetoric. In a similar but even more forceful vein, Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1832-1833) directly advocates French colonialism in the Orient. In the beginning of the second volume of the work the author waxes poetic about: …le jour où [l’Europe] voudra porter [à l’Orient] ses regards et rendre à ces pays, qui touche à une transformation nécessaire et inévitable, la liberté et la civilisation dont il est capable et si digne; il est temps selon moi, de lancer une colonie européenne dans le cœur de l’Asie, de reporter la civilisation moderne aux lieux d’où la civilisation antique est sortie; et de former une empire immense de ces grands lambeaux de l’empire turc qui s’écroule sous sa propre masse. 158 Like his contemporaries, Lamartine suggests that Ottoman rulers were incompetent in running their empire, and thus inscribes the Orient as a space in explicit need of a European imperial intervention—“une transformation nécessiare et inévitable”—as he refers to it. He echoes earlier French travel writers in both his nostalgia for Greco-Roman influence in the Orient, and in suggesting that contemporary Europe take on the imperial role once occupied by the empires of antiquity. He implies the superiority of Western culture under whose control the East stood to benefit greatly. His work, like that of his 158 Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient 1832-1833 (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1843), 17. 88 contemporaries, articulates France, as the European nation state par excellence, as offering to enlighten, modernize, and overall liberate the Orient from the backwardness and decrepitude of centuries of Ottoman rule under which it was suffering. Chateaubriand’s work gestures toward a simultaneous personal and national desire for the revitalization of a French colonial project in the Orient. Lamartine goes further, explicitly calling for a civilizing European colonial intervention there. His dream would be realized over the next hundred years. To be sure, not all liberals in France at the time voiced pro-colonial sentiments. Chateaubriand’s fellow Romantic writer, Benjamin Constant, for example, was among the most outspoken anti-imperialists of the period. As Jennifer Pitts notes, “Constant single[d] out as particularly hypocritical and delusory the ‘export’ of the French revolution, when French conquests were disguised as benevolent liberation and aggression was masked by moralistic language…” 159 He argues that the subjugation of other peoples and societies is antithetical to French republican ethics of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Pitts points out Constant draws on the Montesquieuian tradition of comparing the French king, or in this case, emperor, to an Oriental despot to critique his own country’s practice of conquest: “il y avait quelque chose d’oriental dans son génie,” Constant declares vis-à-vis Napoleon. 160 Even Constant’s anti-imperial arguments are expressed in terms of the false dichotomy between “European civilization” and “Oriental savagery.” This false binary, as well as the tenets of republican ideology, continued to shape French imperial politics through the Restoration and July Monarchy. 159 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 192. 160 Ibid., 195. 89 In this vein, Pitts and Sessions both cite a desire to ease liberal unrest at home as the primary motivation for France’s invasion of Algeria at the end of the Restoration. 161 The official narrative alleges that the initial attack on Algiers took place over a diplomatic incident between France and the Algerian Dey. As the story goes, the French had delayed in repaying some loans to the Dey, which resulted in the latter hitting the French ambassador with a fly swatter. “The French responded first with a naval blockade [in 1827], then, in 1829, a bombardment of Algiers, and finally in May 1830, the seizure of the city’s qasba or fort.” 162 Thus began the long and violent reality of French imperialism in Algeria. The excessive show of force on France’s part speaks to the insignificance of the actual “fly swatter event,” as it came to be known. Historians largely argue that Charles X actually invaded Algiers in order to ease wide-spread electoral and public opposition in France to his increasingly absolutist regime. The king and his ultraroyalist and clerical supporters constructed a narrative of Charles X on a divine mission to liberate the people of Algiers from their oppressive religion and despotic government—the Ottoman emperor and his proxy, the Dey. They aimed to detract from accusations of Charles X’s own domestic repressiveness by rhetorically aligning the French monarchy with the international pursuit of liberty. The king and his supporters drew on French tropes of Oriental despotism and religious suppression to distance France from its own absolutist past and present, in hopes of re-invigorating national enthusiasm for the king. These tropes likewise served as a justification for France’s disproportionately violent response to the fly swatter incident; the king and his supporters claimed that 161 Ibid., 23. See also Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow. 162 Alexis de Toqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: The John’s Hopkins University Press, 2001), xxxvii. 90 France was saving Algiers from the even greater violence of repressive government and religion. By invading the monarchy also demonstrated the nation’s military strength and dedication to spreading French culture and politics in other countries. Through this nod to liberal expansionist ideology, the king and his supporters aimed to reduce republican opposition at a time when liberals were beginning to gain significant representation in the Chamber of Deputies. 163 These efforts failed, however, and liberals initially responded to the invasion of Algiers as “militarily risky, diplomatically dangerous, and above all, unconstitutional because the government had failed to seek the Chamber’s approval for war-related expenses. For liberals, such disregard amounted to no less than the suppression of representative government and a decisive step” 164 toward arbitrary rule. In large part they rejected the expedition because of their opposition to the king. Unlike his contemporary travel writers, Balzac frames French colonialism as a danger to the national body, as he draws a parallel between the “Orient” and ancien régime feminine decadence. La Peau de Chagrin begins its anti-expansionist argument with the portrayal of the “maîtresse,” whose extravagant desires for “Oriental” fabrics bankrupt her lover. Through her, the text represents “the whole of Asia” 165 in terms of extravagant predilections that drain the vitality of French men. In addition to linking the mistress and the Orient, this characterization once again renders the other as parasitic as well. Additionally, the text likens Raphaël to the mistress, further suggesting that French colonialism is motivated by equally opulent desires and is equally threatening to the 163 Session, By Plow and Sword, 35-96. 164 Ibid.,43. 165 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 35. 91 body politic. It projects contact with North Africa and the Levant as triggering in men ancien régime-esque desires, a process that degrades and feminizes the male body, rendering it parasitic, and leading to men’s ultimate demise. La Peau de Chagrin’s stand on imperialism is very different from René’s. Chateaubriand fantasizes about a colonial utopia in America, where aristocratic masculinity is recuperated through heterosexual union with an indigenous, colonized woman. The myth of the bon sauvage inflects René’s colonial ideology, as Chateaubriand imagines that corrupt French masculinity can be rehabilitated through a heterosexual, reproductive life in the colonies. Written almost thirty years later, Balzac’s work responds to the increasing popularity of French colonial interest in North Africa and the Levant. The novel is influenced by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Orientalist discourse, which equated the so-called corruption of the “Orient” with the dissipation of the ancien régime. Satirizing aristocratic masculinity and the bourgeois social order Raphaël, like René, is alienated from the contemporary (bourgeois) paternal order. However, opposed to René’s father who represents ancien régime paternity, Raphaël’s father stands in metonymically for the shift in norms of French masculinity that took place over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before the Revolution, Raphaël’s father ascended to the extravagant life enjoyed by men at court. As Raphaël explains: “mon père, chef d’une maison historique à peu près oubliée en Auvergne, vint à Paris pour y tenter le diable…[où] il était parvenu sans grand appui à 92 prendre une position au cœur même du pouvoir.” 166 Bored of the life of a country aristocrat, the father inserts himself into the extravagant world of ancien régime Parisian society—“pour y tenter le diable.” However, “la revolution renversa bientôt sa fortune.” 167 Unlike René’s father, who makes no preparations for his youngest son’s future, Raphaël’s father tries to carve out a place for him in the new bourgeois social order. He represents a small demographic of aristocratic men who, following the Revolution, attempted to reconstruct their former power in the context of the new nation. Thus they “learned to live in a bourgeois manner, valorizing the qualities of work, thrift, and merit.” 168 The logic behind the strict circumscription of Raphaël’s adolescence resonates with early nineteenth-century anxieties about a return of the decadence of the ancien régime in the contemporary moment. As Margaret Waller explains: During the Revolution and its aftermath, countless writers of widely varying political stripe, from republican revolutionaries to ultramonarchists, attributed the decadence of the eighteenth century to the corrupting influence of aristocratic women and feared a recurrence of the direct and sometimes violent political activism that women of all classes engaged in during the French Revolution. Their remedy to this ‘unnatural’ situation was to reestablish a patriarchal order in which men would have a place in the public sphere while women would know that their place was in the private sphere. 169 The father tries to recuperate upper-class manhood through the performance of bourgeois masculinity. As he elaborates: “je ne veux faire de vous ni un avocat, ni un notaire, mais un homme d’état qui puisse devenir la gloire de notre pauvre maison.” 170 He seeks to 166 Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin (Paris: Charpentier, 1845), 101. 167 Ibid. 168 Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 35. 169 Waller, The Male Malady, 31. 170 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 101. 93 reframe Raphaël in terms of bourgeois masculinity, preparing him for a prestigious position within the new government, to reconstitute the family’s status in the nation. The predominance of Raphaël’s own narrative voice in this context, which is meant to signal at least some degree of power on his part, paradoxically cannot help but replicate his father’s patriarchal authority. As Raphaël recounts his youth, he recalls the strict bourgeois upbringing to which he was subjected, focusing on the paternal authority overseeing his education: “Quand je sortis du collège…mon père m’astreignit à une discipline sévère, il me logea dans une chambre contiguë à son cabinet, je me couchais dès neuf heures du soir et me levais à cinq heures du matin; il voulait que je fisse mon droit en conscience, j’allais en même temps à l’École et chez un avoué…” 171 The father determines what time Raphaël wakes up and when he goes to sleep. He chooses what Raphaël studies and how many hours he devotes to his education each day. Raphaël elaborates on the panoptic surveillance that his father exercises over him as the latter places the former’s work space in the room directly next to his own. The father’s authority is always felt to be proximate regardless of his actual presence. The passive voice dominates Raphaël’s description of his relationship to his father: for example, in his repetition of the indirect object pronoun me/m’ in the opening sentence of the passage “mon père m’astreignit à une discipline sévère, il me logea dans une chambre contiguë à son cabinet” (emphasis mine). When he switches to the active voice in the second half of the sentence—“je me couchais dès neuf heures du soir et me levais à cinq heures du matin”—the proximity of the homonymous indirect object ‘me,’ in the first half of the sentence (m’astreignit…me logea…) and the reflexive ‘me,’ creates a visual slippage in 171 Ibid., 94. 94 the text between the active and the passive voices, further reinforcing the father’s authority. The father likewise circumscribes Raphaël’s freedom by refusing him the money necessary for even small, personal pleasures, until he is an adult. As Raphaël elaborates, he uses the hyperbolic, highly emotive language of the Romantic hero to express his desires. “Si mon père ne me quitta jamais, si jusqu’à l’âge de vingt ans, il ne laissa pas dix francs à ma disposition, dix coquins, dix libertins de francs, trésor immens dont la possession vainement enviée me faisait rêver d’ineffabales délices, il cherchait du moins à me procurer quelques distractions.” 172 With alternating long and short clauses, the sentence conveys an excess of emotion on Raphaël’s part, as he bemoans his total lack of freedom under his father’s rigid authority. The repetition of the amount of money comprising the small sum denied to Raphaël—“dix francs…dix coquins, dix libertins de francs”—as well as his characterization of the money as a “trésor immens,” emphasizes the parsimoniously strict way in which the father regulates Raphaël’s access to pleasure. The repetition also highlights Raphaël’s longing for this modicum of autonomy and amusement, even as he recalls the memory of his adolescence. Through the particular adjectives that he uses in describing the money—coquin and libertin—Raphaël, furthermore, parrots his father’s anti-pleasure stance in a way that reads as sarcastic and bitter. The highly emotive, passionate, and plaintive rhetoric Raphaël deploys here is reminiscent of the Romantic language of René. Whereas Chateaubriand in René is both highly critical of the state of upper-class manhood in the post-Revolution and celebratory 172 Ibid., 95. 95 of the poetic genius and sensitivity of the Romantic hero, in La Peau de Chagrin Balzac ironizes the figure of the Romantic hero, portraying his hyperbolic, highly emotive narrative as self-indulgent and feminizing. In René, Chactas and Souël practically have to beg the protagonist to share his past with them. The suspense invites an a priori investment in René’s narrative from his interlocutors as well as the work’s readers. We see additional praise for René’s intellectual abilities in the letter Amélie writes to him, as she decides to exile herself to a convent to save her brother from their illicit love for one another: Peut-être trouveriez-vous dans le mariage un soulagement à vos ennuis. Une femme, des enfants occuperaient vos jours. Et quelle est la femme qui ne cherchait pas à vous rendre heureux ! L’ardeur de votre âme, la beauté de votre génie, votre air noble et passionné, ce regard fier et tendre, tout vous assurerait de son amour et de sa fidélité. 173 She refers to her brother as a “génie,” further validating the quality of his narrative. Amélie echoes the work’s pro-reproductive stance, but at the same time re-frames the terms of René’s “effeminacy”—represented here through his passion, pride, tenderness, and emotional acuity—as desirable traits in a husband and father. As she encourages him to channel his sensitivity into marriage and reproduction, she recuperates Romantic masculinity under the umbrella of heteronormative masculinity. Where the compassion and interest in René’s narrative his interlocutors and readers express for him bolster his masculinity, Raphaël’s interlocutor Emile undercuts Raphaël’s narrative authority as he exclaims his waning interest in the story of the “lente douleur qui a duré dix ans,” 174 which the latter wishes to tell. Through their identification with Émile, readers are also invited to approach Raphaël’s story with a bit of irony. Émile 173 Chateaubriand, René, 183. 174 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 93. 96 interrupts Raphaël at various points to express light-hearted boredom at his narrative, exclaiming things like “[T]u est ennuyeux comme un amendement” 175 and “Arrive au drame.” 176 He ironizes the sympathy Raphaël seeks from him, declaring: “Joliment tragique ce soir!” 177 René’s sensitivity makes him a bore rather than a “génie,” and Émile’s cajoling derision of Raphaël’s story undercuts the latter’s masculinity. At the same time, Balzac gives Raphaël over 200 pages to indulge in lamenting the various episodes of his tragic existence. His narrative is in fact almost five times as long as René’s. While La Peau de Chagrin mocks the Romantic hero to highlight the so- called effeminacy of upper class men in the post-Revolutionary moment, it also adheres to the tendency among Romantic works to rehabilitate the white male privilege of its pathetic hero by imbuing him with the central narrative voice in the text. Tel père, tel fils: hereditary dissipation in the early nineteenth century Naturalizing Raphaël’s extravagant yearnings, La Peau de Chagrin frames ancien régime corruption in two ways: in terms of a discourse of biology and in terms of a kind of architectural inheritance. Suggesting a parallel between the past desires of the father and the current desires of the son, the work proposes that the debauchery of the ancien régime is natural and hereditary and has been passed on to the generation of men comprising France’s early nineteenth-century body politic. Moreover, La Peau de Chagrin uses gambling and, specifically, the space of the Palais Royal to symbolize the remnants of ancien régime aristocratic decadence in post-Revolutionary France. Echoing 175 Ibid., 94. 176 Ibid. 177 Ibid., 108. 97 Chateaubriand and Duras, Balzac calls upon a vocabulary of decrepitude to portray the palace and the decay of those within it. Raphaël inherits his effeminacy from ancien régime aristocratic masculinity. Despite his father’s efforts to prepare Raphaël to respond to the political, economic, and social shifts ushered in by the Revolution, the son is ironically plagued by desires reminiscent of the ones that drew the father to Paris and to court during the ancien régime. As Raphaël states: “amoureux de mes rêves, sensuel, j’ai toujours travaillé me refusant à goûter les jouissances de la vie parisienne…Parfois mes goûts naturels se réveillaient comme une incendie long-temps couvé.” 178 Balzac highlights the tension between Raphaël’s strict bourgeois education, represented through the imperative to productivity—“j’ai toujours travaillé”—and his inherent ancien régime aristocratic desires (“goûts naturels”) to taste “les jouissances de la vie parisienne.” While Raphaël attempts to repress his decadent desires through the imposition of a stringent middle-class work ethic instilled in him by his father, the repressed always returns. In the nineteenth century scientists and physicians studied heredity, defined as “the organic reproduction and transmission of physical and mental characteristics and dispositions,” 179 with a particular interest in maintaining the health and strength of the new nation. But whereas medical discourse engaged heredity to “avoid a repetition” of France’s recent past, Balzac invokes it to serve as proof of the continued presence of ancien régime decadence and male effeminacy in the body politic of the early nineteenth century. Scientific discourse pathologized the monarchy as doctors claimed that the 178 Ibid., 121. 179 Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 27. See also Carlos López Beltrán, “The Medical Origins of Heredity” in Journal of The History of Biology 37 (2004), 39-72. 98 commonality of consanguineous marriages among the royal family was the cause of their “corruption.” “Medical study of historical genealogy was the best argument against the possibility of a return to the French royal family in republican France.” 180 Balzac likewise portrays Raphaël as having inherited his father’s taste for the “ancienne splendeur” 181 of the aristocracy. In fact, La Peau de Chagrin opens by situating Raphaël in the corrupt royal spaces where his father made a name for himself among the Parisian nobility. We meet the protagonist in the “maisons de jeu” 182 of the Palais Royal, where he is gambling away the very last of his money. The Palais Royal serves as an example of the presence of the ancien régime past persisting in post-Revolutionary Parisian society; it was a symbol for the profligacy of the former monarchy. Locating Raphaël there both recalls the continued physical presence of France’s past decadence in the contemporary moment and defines the main character in terms of dissipation inherited from the ancien régime. In the eighteenth century, the palace had been home to the family of Louis Philipe, duc d’Orléans. Louis Philipe was the second richest man in France, after King Louis XVI. Despite his incredible wealth, the former was constantly living beyond his means and was known to be a consummate gambler. In 1771, Louis Phillipe turned the Palais Royal into a commercial enterprise to prevent from going bankrupt. The basement floors of the palace were opened for public gaming. 183 180 Stahuljak, Zrinka. Pornographic Archaeology, 52 181 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 101. 182 Ibid., 3. 183 Russel T.Barnhart, “Gambling in Revolutionary Paris: The Palais Royal 1789-1838” in Journal of Gambling Studies 8 (1992): 151-166. doi 10.1007/BF01014633. . 99 Prior to the Revolution, gambling was frequently associated with the “effeminate” extravagance of the upper class. Public gambling was illegal under the monarchy, and so it predominantly took place in the “royal palaces, where only the gentry and aristocracy were invited to play for money and cards.” 184 The bourgeoisie was both disgusted and envious of the enormous sums spent at the tables at Versailles. 185 When the maisons de jeu of the Palais Royal were opened to the public, envy won out over disgust, and the middle classes began flocking there. The establishment only became more popular among the bourgeoisie following the revolution. Though gambling was illegal until 1806, in the last decades of the eighteenth century the Paris police turned a blind eye as the bourgeoisie and the Revolutionary government alike reveled in this leisure activity which was previously strictly the domain of the aristocracy. 186 As gambling grew in popularity throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century, so too did anxieties that it was corrupting the middle class as it had done to the aristocracy in the recent past. Anti- gambling forces gained increasing momentum and “on June 17 [1836] the Chamber of Deputies extended the legality of the Palais Royal gambling house to only 1837.” 187 In the novel, the physical state of the Palace mirrors the so-called moral depravity of France’s recent past. As the text elaborates: “Le parquet est usé, malpropre. Une table oblongue occupe le centre de la salle. La simplicité des chaises de paille pressées autour de ce tapis usé par l’or annonce une curieuse indifférence du luxe chez ces hommes qui viennent périr là pour la fortune et pour le luxe.” 188 In place of the palace’s former 184 Ibid., 153. 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid., 151-152. 187 Ibid., 165. 188 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 7. 100 opulence, 189 the work presents the “maisons de jeu” as worn out and dirty, employing the adjective “usé” twice to describe both the floor and the card table. The furniture is likewise simple and made of straw. The text sardonically notes the “indifférence du luxe” in this space where men “viennent périr” in search of fortune and opulence. The palace is a husk of its past sumptuousness, but the desire for the wealth and luxury, which once drew the likes of Marie Antoinette, continues to attract Parisians to its casinos in the early nineteenth century. The ancien régime: congenital, pathological, and parasitic The desires of the aristocracy indeed live on in the post-Revolutionary world of the novel through Raphaël. Aristocratic men are then congenitally marked by the “effeminacy” and “debauchery” of the previous generation. More specifically, the memory of the ancien régime has a parasitic effect on nineteenth-century French masculinity. Unable to suppress his desires to “vivre avec excès,” 190 Raphaël is drawn every night to the gambling houses of the Palais Royal, where he loses all of his money. The text troubles the boundary between self and other:. Raphaël’s face is marked by his compulsion for gambling, which drains him of his economic resources, his time, and his energy. Typically, a parasite is represented as another, which threatens the self as it 189 Prior to the Revolution, the Palais Royal was renowned for its decadent sumptuousness. As Russell T. Barnhart elaborates in his article on gambling in Revolutionary Paris: “Just a few score yards across the Rue de Rivoli, north of the Louvre, stands the gracious, four-story Palais Royal, occupying a roughly six- acre, oblong block. Entering through the main south gate, one soon finds oneself in a quiet, four-acre courtyard beautified by alleys of trees, flowerbeds, benches, and fountains. By 1800, the formal, central garden alone—always beloved by sitters and strollers—was 700 feet long and 300 feet wide. The upper three stories of the surrounding building, faced with fluted pilasters, look like apartments—which they once were…” He focuses on the opulence and beauty of this institution of the ancien régime lingering over the enormous, beautified grounds, and the magnificent architecture of the palace itself. Barnhart, “Gambling in Revolutionary Paris,” 152. 190 Ibid., 31. 101 invades the body of the latter and consumes it. In Raphaël’s case he is consumed by hereditary inclinations that he tries and fails to suppress. “Gourmand, j’ai été sobre…enfin ma vie a été une cruelle antithèse, un perpétuel mensonge.” 191 The past is portrayed as a hereditary parasite, which always already invades the bodies of the sons of the ancien régime. Balzac marks the ancien régime as a congenital, parasitic disease that threatens the French national body in the post-Revolutionary era. Describing Raphaël’s gambling addiction the text asks: “était-ce la débauche qui marquait de son sal (sic) cachet cette noble figure jadis pure et brûlante, maintenant dégradée?” 192 The hypothetical nature of the question means that it reads as more statement than query. The fiction defines the protagonist, and by extension France’s recent past, through a lexicon of decrepitude (“dégradée”). It describes Raphaël’s once fresh and passionate face as haggard from dissolution, as he succumbs to his “inherent” vices in the gambling houses the marks being a reflection of his “paresse naturelle.” 193 Gambling triggers the symptoms of Raphaël’s hereditary debauchery. The corruption of the past is portrayed as a pathogen that infects France’s (male) population in the post-Revolutionary era, draining its financial security and life force. La Peau de Chagrin frames the discourse of hereditary dissipation in terms of a vocabulary of pathology, as it portrays extravagant desire as an illness that threatens the health and well-being of the body politic. Describing the motivations behind Raphaël’s gambling, the text states “Les médecins auraient sans doute attribué à des lesions au coeur ou à la poitrine le cercle jaune qui encadrait ses paupières, et la rougeur (sic) qui marquait les 191 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 121. 192 Ibid., 8. 193 Ibid., 23. 102 joues…Mais une passion plus mortelle que la maladie, une maladie plus impitoyable que l’étude et le génie, altéraient cette jeune tête…” 194 The text explicitly frames Raphaël’s state of being in terms of medical discourse. It draws attention to the corporeal symptoms of his debauchery, as they manifest on his face. He is sickly, jaundiced, and feverish. The cause of his illness, however, is not a medical condition—neither heart or chest lesions-- but rather passion for pleasure itself. The pathological parasite of the past “feminizes” Raphaël as it incites in him the frivolous extravagance of the ancien régime. Balzac portrays aristocratic fathers as weakening the national body as they reproduce effete, debauched sons. At the same time, the text’s commentary on femininity also speaks to a conception of women as troublesome and dangerous. By virtue of its construction of male effeminacy, the novel marks women as decadent and pathological. Chateaubriand and Duras both try to resuscitate the upper class through an idealization of bourgeois femininity. Balzac, on the contrary, represents the female body as inherently pathological because it is naturally dissipated. Woman and the “Orient” as pathological parasites La Peau de Chagrin depicts an irreconcilable tension between “Oriental” desire and bourgeois masculinity, challenging the contemporary assertion that republican values would conquer the despotism, greed, and salaciousness (all crimes were attributed to Ottoman rule in North Africa and the Levant) of the colonial Other . It gestures toward an anti-colonial stance through xenophobic discourse of Orientalism. 194 Ibid., 8. 103 Balzac draws parallels between Raphaël and women, to suggest that his “paresse orientale” further feminizes him. In this way, the work invokes the construct of the Orient to further demonstrate the dissipation of ancien régime aristocratic masculinity. It proposes that French masculinity would be enfeebled by contact with North Africa and the Levant. Raphaël is plagued with Oriental desires, which he constantly yet unsuccessfully fights, in order to live up to the expectations of normative manhood in the early nineteenth century. As Raphaël describes himself: “[a]mant efféminé de la paresse orientale, amoureux de mes rêves, sensuel, j’ai toujours travaillé, me refusant à goûter les jouissances de la vie parisienne.” 195 Balzac continues to denigrate pre- Revolutionary aristocratic masculinity by defining Raphaël’s debauchery as “feminized” and “Orientalized.” As such he also characterizes French aristocratic manhood as foreign by virtue of its desires. Raphaël’s struggle to carve out a place for himself in the national body is metaphorized, as his performance of bourgeois masculinity struggles against his so-called inherent “paresse orientale.” Through the character of Raphaël, La Peau de Chagrin contends that republican values are ineffectual for conquering “Oriental indolence.” The narrative challenges the legitimacy of France’s early nineteenth-century imperial projects, which were inspired by an interest in spreading French politics, economics, and culture abroad. The fiction reframes French colonialism of the early nineteenth century as a quest to recuperate the extravagant life once enjoyed by the ancien régime aristocracy, which Balzac proposes would ultimately lead to the destruction of French masculinity. La Peau de Chagrin challenges the idea that colonialism would prove the superiority of French 195 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 121. 104 universalism. It also calls into question the idea that colonial expansion could serve as a way of re-writing French history to cultivate an ideological link among post- Revolutionary France and the republics of antiquity, and obscure memory of France’s recent past. Balzac instead contends that colonialism would cause France’s body politic to regress to the level of “feminized debauchery” of the ancien régime. Contact with the Orient reawakens Raphaël’s supposedly hereditary, pathological, and debauched desires. He is influenced by the Orient and not the other way around. Balzac represents colonialism as a threat to the strength, “purity,” and vitality of the French body politic. As La Peau de Chagrin defines its protagonist through his relationship to a precious “amulette Orientale,” 196 the text draws a parallel between Raphaël and the women at court. The text further equates the Orient with ancien régime aristocratic femininity. It imagines French imperial expeditions in North Africa and the Levant as triggering hereditary, pathological desires for dissipation, desires that according to the Balzac, plague aristocratic masculinity in the nineteenth century. The novel draws a comparison between the casino and the female body, further linking ancien régime debauchery to women as well. First defining all women in terms of the lavish and expensive desires for (sartorial) fineries typically associated with the “decadence” of pre-Revolutionary upper-class women, Balzac further invokes ancien régime gender anxieties by contrasting them with their weak contemporary male lovers. La Peau de Chagrin ultimately characterizes all women as a threat to the French nation, as it marks them as foreign. As the text elaborates: “L’amoureux veux mettre sa maîtresse dans la soie, la rêveter d’un moelleux tissu d’Orient, et la plupart de son temps la possède 196 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 50. 105 dans un grabat…En fin, existe-t-il chose plus déplaisante qu’une maison de plaisir?” 197 This hypothetical, fictional couple functions as a stand in for all heterosexual couples of the period. The definite article “l(e)” through which the text generalizes the experience of the male lover also generalizes the behavior of the mistress. Her lavish desires are the obvious cause of their paltry living conditions. Through this dangerous figure, the work also portrays women in general as malignantly parasitic. The structure of the sentence likewise emphasizes men’s culpability in causing their own financial ruin, as the lover prioritizes the extravagant desires of his mistress over his own financial security. The specific reference to “Oriental” fabrics—“tissu d’Orient”— facilitates the characterization of all femininity in terms of ancien régime womanhood. Balzac draws on the intersection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Orientalist and gender discourses in defining femininity. La Peau de Chagrin echoes French characterizations of “the whole of Asia” 198 as a space of feminized, sumptuous material luxury. In the ancien régime, aristocratic women were associated with a passion for Oriental exotica. The instant success of Antoine Galland’s translation of Les Mille et Une Nuits with women at court illustrates the popularity of these texts, and also sparked a trend of “Orientalist” sartorial fashion among upper class women at this time. Ancien régime authors likewise defined aristocratic femininity, in part, through a relationship to “Oriental” furnishings, which grew in popularity in France between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Madeline Dobie notes that the growing popularity of this “new type of chair—the armchairs, sofas, and chaise longues that…introduced a new level of comfort in the homes of the upper classes—and more importantly 197 Ibid., 5. 198 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 35. 106 convey[ed] the correlation between these pieces of furniture, which were given Oriental feminine names [i.e. “divan,” “turquoises,” “ottomane,” “bergère,” etc.], and several different, although overlapping, perceptions of women’s place in French society.” 199 The desire for comfortable chairs reflected a relaxing of the social atmosphere at court at this time; such furniture more easily accommodated intimate conversation. “The fact that these new chairs were given feminine names testifies to the prominent role of women in shaping the Enlightenment salon with its ideals of sociability and intellectual exchange.” 200 Through the names given to the furnishings, which were associated with feminine sociability, women at court were also Orientalized. The Orientalized names of the furnishings “reflected a growing association of the Muslim Orient with traits such as sensuality and indolence.” 201 Authors like Rousseau likewise evoked the lexicon of Orientalism to critique the intellectual power exercised by aristocratic women in the salons of the period. Rousseau compares the salonnière to the sultan in his harem, accusing her of emasculating and sexually exploiting the men in her social circle. 202 Libertine fiction, such as Choderlos de Lacos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, is an “abundant literary source of references to Oriental furniture…[which] consistently depicted comfortable lounging chairs in an erotic light.” 203 Crébillon fils’ Le Sopha likewise links Oriental furniture to upper class feminine sexual excess. 204 199 Ibid., 91. 200 Ibid. 201 Madeline Dobie, “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 13-35. 202 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1889). 203 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 99. 204 Crébillon, fils, Le Sopha, conte morale (Paris: Flammarion, 1894). 107 As such, Enlightenment French Orientalist vocabulary marks aristocratic femininity as a “foreign threat” to France, and to French masculinity in particular. As Balzac calls upon this vocabulary of material sumptuousness, he both further defines the “Orient” in terms of feminine extravagance and greed and characterizes the feminine itself as “Oriental” (read foreign) and thus a threat to the national purity of France. Because the text characterizes feminine depravity as a parasitic pathology, it also marks the “Orient” in terms of a malady, which threatens to consume the body as a whole. In this way Balzac’s novel links its discussion of gender to colonialism, as it invokes Orientalist discourse to define the mistress’s desires. From the last decades of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth, France proposed to “liberate” first Egypt and Syria, and later, Algeria, from the “despotism” of the Ottoman Empire and the “oppressiveness” of Islam. France turned to this particular region not only to expand its empire and its power on the international stage, but also to efface the memory of the ancien régime by drawing an ideological connection between (post)-Revolutionary France, and the empires of Greece and Rome. The latter were idealized for their contributions to republicanism and for the strength and longevity of their imperial rule (in North Africa and the Levant). Napoleon, as well as travel writers and explorers, projected France as the “civilizing” power that would return Egypt, Syria, and Algeria to the glory of their Greco-Roman past. The narrative of “rescuing” North Africa and the Levant from the “despotism” of their Ottoman rulers also allowed the new nation to further distance itself from its own recent despotic past. Imperialism, à la Greece and Rome, was framed as imperative to separating France’s present from the ancien régime. This was especially important in the case of the initial invasion of Algeria. In hopes of 108 diminishing accusations of Charles X’s own repressiveness, the king and his clerical supporters framed the Algerian expedition as a mission to rescue Algiers from “Oriental tyranny.” Balzac’s decision to represent the Orient through a rare object—the magic skin— recalls eighteenth-century French Orientalism, and adds to the narrative’s feminization of Raphaël. The talisman also recalls the tradition of representing aristocratic femininity through comfortable, ornate, “Orientalized” furnishings. The magic skin is fundamental to Balzac’s characterization of North Africa and Asia in terms of dissipation and feminized, enfeebled (aristocratic) masculinity. It grants Raphaël’s every wish, but with each desire it satisfies the magic skin subtracts time from Raphaël’s life. Despotism and French colonialism The “amulette Orientale” that Raphaël receives just after losing “sa dernière cartouche” 205 at the Palais Royal stands in metonymically for North Africa and the Levant. The text does not name the region directly, but rather continues to refer to it obliquely through the construct of the “Orient,” and then through the vocabulary of ancient Roman imperialism. Raphaël frames his relationship to the talisman, the eponymous “peau de chagrin,” in terms of conquest. Describing the talisman to Émile, Raphaël exclaims: “J’ai l’Arabie Petrée. L’univers à moi!” 206 L’Arabie Petrée refers to a province in modern day Jordan, established, under the former name, by the Roman Empire in 106 AD. It was an important region for facilitating Roman control in Egypt 205 Ibid., 10. 206 Ibid., 217. 109 and Syria. 207 By thus referring to the magic skin, the work frames its representation of French colonialism as an act of conquest aimed at recuperating the “glory” of Greco- Roman antiquity. To be sure, this framing is ironic; Raphaël’s relationship to the “Orient” is based uniquely in a desire to recuperate the extravagant lifestyle of the ancien régime aristocracy. He explicitly expresses this sentiment upon deciding to take the talisman: “Je veux un dîner royalement splendide, quelque bacchanale digne du siècle où tout s’est, dit-on, perfectionné.” 208 Raphaël’s use of the adverb “royalement” and his reference to the splendors of the past—“[le] siècle où tout s’est perfectionné,” situates his relationship to the talisman in terms of a nostalgia for the “gaieté soucieuse” 209 of the ancien régime. Balzac likewise frames French colonialism in North Africa and Asia as a desire for absolute power. Raphaël mistakes the wish-granting capabilities of the talisman for control, when in fact the magic skin controls him. He echoes this despotic sentiment as he declares “l’univers à moi,” in relating the acquisition of the talisman to Emile. As the inscription 210 on the talisman reads “si tu me possèdes, tu possederas tout. Ta vie 207 Michèle Picccirillo, L’Arabie Chrétienne (Clio, 2003). 208 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 45. 209 Ibid., 57. 210 In the 1835 edition of the novel, Balzac printed the French translation of the talisman’s second inscription in the form of an inverted triangle. In doing so, he cites the format Antoine Galland used for the preamble to the Sixième Voyage de Sinbad le Marin, from his translation of Les Mille et Une Nuits. This gesture further locates the magic skin within the legacy of an eighteenth-century French Orientalist aesthetic. First, the particular conte oriental Balzac cites with this stylistic choice recalls the function of the talisman, which satisfies extravagant material desires. Sinbad discovers a city where the rivers and valleys are filled with precious gems, after being shipwrecked, in Galland’s version of the story of his sixth voyage. From this opulent city, Sinbad receives a series of gifts to bring back to his caliph, Haroun al- Rachid. The eighteenth-century Oriental tale and Raphaël’s amulet both defined the East for the French cultural imaginary in terms of sumptuous material luxury. Galland’s tales appealed to a decadent, eighteenth-century aristocratic readership, which related easily to the sumptuousness and excess described in the works themselves. Both in terms of their construction and in terms of their consumption, Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits reinforced similarities between the French aristocracy and the Orient. See Marcel Bouteron, “L’Inscription de La Peau de Chagrin et l’orientaliste Joseph de Hammer,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 2 (1950), accessed December 1, 2016, 160. By citing the aesthetics of Galland’s tale 110 m’appartiendra. Dieu l’a voulu ainsi. Désire et tes désirs seront accomplis. Mais règle tes souhaits sur ta vie. Elle est là. A chaque vouloir je décroitrai comme tes jours. Me veux-tu? Prends. Dieu t’exaucera. Soit! 211 The work defines French imperial conquest through a rhetoric of totalizing possession, via both the use of the word “tout” and the repetition of the verb “posséder.” The incredible potency of the magic skin further articulates French colonial interest in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria as motivated by megalomaniacal desire. The engraving scripts a binding contract between the talisman and its owner, in this case, Raphaël, wherein the latter’s life belongs to power of the former. It addresses Raphaël using the imperative form; the grammar of the text underscores his subordination to the talisman, and by extension defines France as subjugated to its colonies. The satisfaction of Raphaël’s desires and the evisceration of his life exist in direct proportion to one another, also suggesting that colonialism would threaten the vitality of the body politic. Balzac, in La Peau de Chagrin, echoes eighteenth-century French Orientalist discourse, which invoked the metaphor of Oriental despotism to critique the totalitarianism of the ancien régime. Montesquieu is well known for using the “whole of Asia from Turkey to Japan” as a screen upon which to project anxieties about the power of the French monarchy. As Madeline Dobie notes, in both Esprit des Lois and Lettres Persanes, he engages the trope of the harem 212 to represent despotism and slavery in in La Peau de Chagrin, Balzac inscribes his novel within a genealogy of pre-Revolutionary French Orientalist aesthetics. He provides evidence that French colonialism is also haunted by the memory of France’s decadent past. 211 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 41. 212 As Yeazell explains: “strictly speaking…there is no such place as “the” harem, though collective fantasizing often proceeds as if there were; there are only various as the individual households, of many different countries and times, in which separate quarters have been set said for the seclusion of women. Montesquieu’s work contributes significantly to the homogenizing French construct of the “the” harem. Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 1. 111 France (and France’s colonies) as well as in the Orient. 213 He uses harems as a metaphor for slavery, to illustrate that the master is also, paradoxically, controlled by his subjects. He suggests that the despotic ruler is ironically weakened by his own overzealous claim to power. Montesquieu also engages harems to express anxieties about women’s encroachment on the nascent bourgeois public sphere. “…The Esprit provid[es] one of the strongest early illustrations of the metaphor by which the Orient is made to appear feminine in relation to a more masculine European counterpart, and by which European women are “Orientalized,” stamped as outsiders, or others, “an alien presence within the body politic.” 214 La Peau de Chagrin portrays Raphaël as feminized by his relationship to the talisman because of the promise of absolute power which draws him to the magic skin in the first place. Through Raphaël’s relationship to the talisman, the text further suggests that colonial expansion in North Africa and the Levant would feminize French masculinity. Colonialism and pathology In nineteenth-century France, medical discourse framed the nation as an organic body whose vitality and (re)productivity was contingent upon the physical health and moral rectitude of its individual citizens. Those whose physical and moral hygiene were believed to threaten the overall well-being of the nation were marked as pathological and contagious. This included anyone: from women who channeled their sex drives into non- reproductive intercourse to the lower classes in their entirety. Scientists from a variety of fields dedicated their lives to “curing” the pathological and “ensuring” the health and 213 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 35. 214 Ibid., 36. 112 longevity not just of individual but of the nation. In reality, medical professionals were fundamentally invested in regulating people according to contemporary French norms of physical and moral comportment. Balzac extends the metaphor of health to his conception of French colonialism. He adopts a medical lexicon to adapt eighteenth- century tropes of the “Orient” as a materially and sexually extravagant space to the nineteenth century and to express anxieties about French imperialism in North Africa and the Levant. He frames the contemporary colonial encounter through the rhetoric of contagion to discourage French colonialism. To be sure, Balzac was not the first of his contemporaries to characterize the region in terms of disease. In his Voyages en Egypte et en Syrie, Volney dedicates an entire section to enumerating the “maladies de l’Egypte.” He characterizes Egypt as diseased, infantile, and irrational, and cites illness as further physical proof of the supposedly decrepit state of Egypt under Ottoman rule. By contrast, he portrays France as rational and healthy. He again gestures toward the idea that Egypt would benefit from French imperialism: une grande partie des cécités en Egypte est causé par les suites de la petite-vérole. Cette maladie, qui y est très-meutrière, n’y est point traitée selon une bonne méthode; dans le trois premiers jours on y donne aux maladies du debs ou raffiné, du miel et du sucre, et dès le septième on leur permet le laitage le poisson sale comme en pleine santé; dans la dépuration, on ne les purge jamais; et l’on évite sur-tout de leur laver les yeux, encore qu’ils les ayant pleins de pus, et que les paupières soient collées par la sérosité desséchée; ce n’est qu’au bout de quarante jours que l’on fait cette opération…Ce n’est pas que l’inoculation y soit inconnue, mais on s’en sert peu. 215 Volney assumes the paternalistic role of the doctor as he diagnoses Egypt. He enumerates the symptoms of the disease through the steps of the French treatment for it—what he 215 Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, 222. 113 refers to universalizingly as “la bonne méthode.” He claims the superiority of French medical knowledge and portrays Ottoman Egyptian doctors as irrationally ineffectual. It is not that they are unaware of “la bonne méthode” for treating small pox, they simply do not seem to employ it, according to Volney. He likewise implies that France would “save” Egypt through spreading French medical norms there. He pathologizes Egypt and represents French colonialism as the cure. Balzac, on the other hand, posits French colonialism as having an “Orientalizing,” pathologizing effect on the French body politic. Through the relationship between Raphaël and the talisman, the work portrays North Africa and the Levant as contaminating the French body politic, suggesting that the contact with the region infects French men with material excess and physical degeneracy. Balzac frames colonialism as inextricably linked to the dissipation of pre-Revolutionary France. In the novel, colonialism incites the so-called hereditary, pathological desires plaguing the sons of the ancien régime. For Balzac, French colonialism threatens the nation with a return to the pre-Revolutionary degeneracy. Balzac amplifies his characterization of the colonial encounter as rendering the French body politic “Oriental” and lavishly decadent (like the ancien régime aristocracy) when he portrays Raphaël surrounded by sumptuous luxury, and in a state of indolence and frailty after experiencing the talisman’s power for some time: …enveloppé d’une robe de chambre à grands dessins et plongé dans un fauteuil à ressorts, [il] lisait le journal…Une calotte grecque, entraînée par un gland trop lourd pour le léger cachemire dont elle était faite, pendait sur un côté de sa tête…sur ses genoux était la bec d’ambre d’un magnifique houka d’Inde dont les spirales émaillés gisaient comme un serpent dans sa chambre, et il oubliait d’en sucer les frais parfums. 216 216 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 235. 114 Raphaël here presents the very image of Oriental indolence. We find him wearing an extravagant dressing gown, reclining in a sumptuous armchair. While there is nothing to suggest that this specific fauteuil à ressorts was itself designed à l’Orientale, its leisurely aesthetic recalls the comfortable furniture decorating the salons and seraglios of Rousseau’s and Crebillon fils’ works. Raphaël’s hat represents yet another piece of expensive, Orientalized exotica; made from fabric from Kashmir, the calotte grecque was modeled after the fez. 217 The largesse of the hat’s tassel reinforces the aesthetic of excess through which Balzac characterizes Raphaël. The magnifique houka, which lies in disregard at the latter’s knees, further marks Raphaël’s life in terms of Oriental excess. The hookah itself was an emblem of Eastern idleness in the French cultural imaginary. The doubtlessly expensive amber mouthpiece and serpentine, silver body of Raphaël’s particular hookah further mark it as a luxurious(ly) Orientalized object. Balzac here begins to elaborate on his earlier claim about a French encounter with the Orient having a contagious effect on the body politic. The specific items Raphaël acquires through the magic skin’s power emphasize this point. Beyond its aesthetic trappings, this process of Orientalization feminizes Raphaël, again recalling eighteenth- century anxieties about excessive luxury and the destabilization of gender. Raphaël leads a life of excess and leisure and he is physically enfeebled by his relationship to the talisman. Surrounded by his plethora of extravagant exotica, Raphaël is in a prison of his own making. His body has begun to deteriorate from utilizing the skin’s wish-fulfillment capacity. He barely leaves his own home, or allows anyone to visit him, for fear of activating his desires, and further enervating himself. 217 Clove Lamarre and Queux de Saint-Hilaire, La Grèce et l’Exposition de 1878 (Paris: Delagrave, 1878), 225. 115 He recalls Montesquieu’s image of the sultan, depleted by his wives’ hypersexuality. Both Raphaël and the sultan are weakened by the very excess of possessions that is meant to empower them. Rather than projecting an image of French colonialism as enlightening the so-called primitive civilizations of the Orient, as his contemporaries do, Balzac frames colonialism in the exact opposite terms. He imagines French masculinity becoming infected with Oriental indolence through a colonial encounter with the East. Balzac elaborates his portrayal of Raphaël’s effeminacy through the vocabulary of ailing aristocracy. Raphaël bears striking resemblance to the figural aristocratic woman of the ancien régime: his delicate white hands, his coquettishly and carefully curled hair, his air of womanly grace. The symptoms of his illness are aristocratic effeminacy itself. As the text states, Raphaël is marked by: “une sorte de grâce effeminée et les bizarreries particulières aux malades riches distinguait sa personne. Ses mains, semblables à celles d’une jolie femme avaient une blancheur molle et delicate. Ses cheveux, devenus blonds, se bouclaient autour de ses tempes par une coquetterie recherché.” 218 Eighteenth-century artists and authors defined aristocratic femininity as corrupting. In the years leading up to the Revolution, men of letters from across the political spectrum reframed this conception of the aristocratic feminine in a morbid vocabulary, to signal the corruption among the nobility, or at least certain parts of it, in their time. Joan Landes notes the proliferation of representations of King Louis XVI at this time, “looking ridiculous and effete, 219 ” diminished by the supposedly exaggerated power Marie-Antoinette exercised over him in 218 Ibid. 219 Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 69. 116 running the country 220 . Landes likewise reads the engraving “The Aristocratic Body with a Face of a Woman Dying in the Arms of the Nobility [as driving] home the extent to which the revolutionaries were intent on excising the excessively feminized and feminizing dimension of the old body politic.” See Figure 1: 220 See, for example, The Stride of the Holy Family from the Tuilleries to Montmédy (Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 70). 117 Fig. 1 Le Corps Aristocratique sous la Figure d’une Femme expirant dans le bras de la Noblesse &c. 1790. 118 As its title clearly states, the image feminizes the aristocratic body (politic) by representing it through the figure of a woman dying in the arms of her fellow noblemen. She physically resembles the men who surround her; her face and curled hair look nearly identical to their visages and powdered wigs. Through this likeness the painter emphasizes the feminization of ancien régime aristocratic masculinity. Though she bares no physical marks of ailment, she is clearly dying. She reclines with her eyes closed as one of the men takes her pulse and signals, with his open palm, that her heartbeat is weak. Her sickness, and in fact the ailment of the aristocratic body politic per se, is thus represented through feminization itself. In other words, the painting represents the aristocratic body (politic) as morbid because it is feminine. Femininity itself is portrayed as an illness that cannot be recovered from. 221 Balzac re-mobilizes Revolutionary imagery like this and applies it to the context of French colonialism. Through the metaphor of Raphaël’s relationship to the talisman, he imagines imperialism marking French masculinity with a pathological, aristocratic femininity, like that which brought down the ancien régime. As we saw above, Raphaël is slowly but surely enervated by his metaphorical encounter with the East. The symptoms of his ailment manifest themselves in the progressive feminization of his body. Balzac explicitly defines the Raphaël’s malady in terms of aristocratic effeminacy when he states: “une sorte de grâce effeminée et les bizarreries particulières aux malades riches distinguait sa personne” (emphasis mine). 222 He thus imagines colonialism as a threat to 221 Doctors located the antidote to malignant femininity in another kind of femininity-virtuous, maternal, patriotic womanhood. See, for example, the works of Joan Landes and Lynn Hunt for elaborations of the development of this paradigm of femininity, in relation to the Revolution (1789). 222 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 236. 119 French national identity, and one which would have retrogressive and morbid effects on the body politic. As the inscription predicts, Raphaël ultimately expires from his engagement with the talisman. Balzac presents the following image of Raphaël on his deathbed: [Il] resplendissait de beauté pendant son sommeil. Un rose vif colorait ses joues blanches. Son front gracieux comme celui d’une jeune fille exprimait le génie. La vie était en fleurs sur ce visage tranquille et reposé. Vous eussiez dit d’un jeune enfant endormi sous la protection de sa mère. 223 Raphaël’s mortality manifests itself as he is transformed into a beautiful young girl. He appears paradoxically healthy for a person so close to death. His face is characterized by a striking feminine vivacity, from his rosy cheeks to the metaphorical flowers of life blooming upon them. That Balzac uses the adjective “vif” to define Raphaël’s complexion embellishes the latter’s appearance of vitality here. Balzac likewise explicitly analogizes Raphaël to a young girl, suggesting that his body has become youthfully feminine rather than decrepit. However the language of the passage, at the same time, recalls for the reader the fact that the novel has established a paradigm that equates (male) effeminacy itself with malady. The invocation of the term “gracieux” to describe Raphaël’s forehead recalls the malignant femininity, the “sorte de grâce effeminée,” by which Balzac characterizes him in the previous passage. There Raphaël’s feminine grace signifies the ailing state of his Orientalized masculinity. By echoing the vocabulary of the earlier passage, Balzac again frames Raphaël’s effeminacy as a manifestation of debilitating malady. This is compounded by the fact that Raphaël’s physicality has completely feminized in the final fatal moments of his life. 223 Ibid., 346. 120 Through this image Balzac portrays French colonialism as having a fatally feminizing effect on the body politic. He challenges the discourse of his contemporaries, who framed imperialism within a vocabulary of patriotic virility. Volney, Napoloen, and his team of savants, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine all conceived of colonialism as a means of affirming French superiority over the civilizations of the East. They represented French imperialists reclaiming the glory of the Greco-Roman Empires by venturing into the Orient and re-establishing Western cultural domination, where it had been replaced by Ottoman rule. They imagined that like the Greeks and the Romans, the French would prove the preeminence of their culture by imposing it on other societies. As Said established in Orientalism, within this paradigm, the Orient is read (though not uncomplicatedly) as the feminine Other. Volney, in his work, represents the Orient within this rhetorical framework, in part by recalling eighteenth-century tropes of Oriental decadence in his characterizations of the Ottoman army. He also portrays the Ottoman infrastructure in ruins, and the people as impoverished, to construct the Orient in terms of feminine alterity. Those whose works came after his followed suit. His work also meant to distance France from the Orient and affirm the masculine potency of France (and thereby the West). Chateaubriand explicitly frames imperialism in the Orient in terms of French national virility. As he refers to the traces of Napoleon’s expeditions still visible in Egypt as “la gloire de ma patrie” and “une nouvelle civilization,” he defines French patriotic and patriarchal influence as the re-civilization of Egypt. Lamartine also echoes the nationally othering, feminizing language of his predecessors, as he depicts French colonialism as bringing progress to a space supposedly evacuated of civilization since the Ottoman conquest. 121 Balzac’s narrative counters this dominant discourse surrounding French colonialism in early nineteenth-century France. He employs a more opulent, eighteenth- century Orientalist rhetoric to situate French imperialism in the East in terms of an excessive desire for power and material luxury, which is itself Oriental in nature. In other words, he frames French colonialism as motivated by an Orientalized economy of desire. He goes on to situate Oriental culture as a contagious threat to the French body politic, suggesting that rather than imparting French culture in the Orient, French colonizers would lose themselves in their greed and be infected by the local culture. He defines the Orient as contagiously opulent, and he imagines a conflation of France with the East. Balzac elaborates his anti-colonial argument by projecting colonialism as having a morbidly effeminizing effect on the French body politic. Raphaël’s body ostensibly degenerates from his indulgence in the wish fulfillment capacity of the talisman; such is the logic of the skin’s contract. And yet the only physiological manifestations we find of his so-called enfeeblement are the gradual feminization of his body. When his desires have nearly sapped his life, he is even more girlishly beautiful than Dorian Gray at the beginning of Wilde’s novel. Balzac’s work perpetuates French tropes that denigrated the East and the feminine by defining both in terms of greed, corruption, and now ailment. Or, more precisely, he imagines the so-called contagion of Oriental culture causing French masculinity to become girlish. Balzac, like the eighteenth-century men of arts and letters whose ideology he cites, also invokes Orientalism to critique the ancien régime. While the former were preoccupied with the contemporary political moment, Balzac levels himself against early nineteent-century nostalgia for the past, equating it with an Oriental and Orientalizing decadence which he paints as aristocratic and feminine. The 122 novel may be anti-colonialist but it conveys that ethos by re-configuring eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French Orientalist and medical discourses to pathologize both the Oriental and the feminine. In Mérimée’s 1837 La Vénus d’Ille anxieties about the aristocratic past and the colonial other converge around the threat of active female sexuality. By staging the uncovering of a mysterious statue of a beautiful black and aristocratic woman by provincial antiquarians, Mérimée shifts focus from the deathly passivity of feminized mal desire to the actively deadly female libido, which is overdetermined by medical and colonial discourse as an “Other” at home, so to speak. 123 CHAPTER III ‘UNE GRANDE FEMME NOIRE’ 224 : RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN PROSPER MERIMEE’S LA VENUS D’ILLE (1837) Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille is a gothic short story that recounts the murder of a young man, Alphonse de Peyrehorade, on his wedding night. While many have read this as a fantastical and scurrilous mystery, La Vénus d’ille re-stages the Parisian- Provincial intellectual divide as a space for engaging with numerous anxieties about the health and vitality of the nation circulating in the first half of the nineteenth century. Seemingly disparate fears of the threat of the periphery to the center, of the ancien régime past to the national future, of aristocratic excess to bourgeois moral hygiene, and of black colonial bodies to white national bodies, all converge in the specter of aggressive female sexuality; like a terrifying stranger in the marriage bed. The work is, in part, a critique of French aristocratic provincial men: Mérimée characterizes them as motivated by a desire to reclaim the customs, prestige, and extravagant wealth of their ancien régime past, which threatens the vitality of the nation. The story also reflects a larger (intellectual) power struggle between Paris and the provinces in the first half of the nineteenth century, and especially after the Bourbon Restoration. The Revolution brought about the end of feudalism and ushered in an era of increasing centralization of power, which privileged Paris over the provinces. The authority of state-sponsored research, combined with the diminishing intellectual clout of local (provincial) academies and institutes, is evidence for this center-periphery hierarchy. With the re-institution of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, however, the 224 Prosper Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 50. 124 academies, educational societies, and independent savants of the provinces sought to reclaim the memory, and in some cases, the power of their localities’ ancien régime past. 225 Their aim was to carve out a local intellectual space for themselves in opposition to the authority of Paris. Moreover, the work critiques this trend of provincial historical recuperation via M. de Peyrehorade and the eponymous Roman Venus statue. The particle “de” preceding his surname indicates descent from an aristocratic family, and he refers to himself as an “un vieil antiquaire de province.” 226 Through M. de Peyrehorade’s ignorance of local history the work suggests that this regional rehabilitative project threatens to unearth dangerous elements of France’s past and unleash them on the present. The text marks the Venus statue, excavated by the provincial antiquarian, as a symbol of so-called destructive black female sexuality because she is described in dangerous and raced terms. In addition, the unearthing of this figure recalls the specter of the Haitian Revolution, even though not ever mentioned in the text. The work contrasts the Vénus d’Ille to traditional Greco-Roman goddess statuary, which was re-appropriated by French republican visual culture in the (pre)-Revolutionary moment to represent French national values and ideals of femininity simultaneously. It furthermore invites a reading of the Venus against Mlle de Puygarrig, who, like the republican goddess figure, physically symbolizes ideals of bourgeois femininity. Significantly, we need to consider the ways Mérimée re-imagines the periphery as colony and marks the provinces as an Other within the French national body. By framing the regional recuperative project in terms of the 225 Robert Fox, The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 66-68. 226 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 56. 125 revivification of violent, racially Other femininity, I argue the text characterizes the desires of provincial aristocratic men as a threat to the nation. The statue is initially discovered buried on the grounds of the de Peyrehorade estate. Alphonse’s father, the elder M. de Peyrehorade, is overjoyed by the discovery, believing her to be a relic of classical antiquity, of great financial worth and cultural value. Early on the day of his wedding, Alphonse places his fiancée’s wedding ring on the Vénus’ finger, so that he may play a tennis match unencumbered by the costly and delicate piece of jewelry. Just before the ceremony, when he tries to take back the ring, the Vénus refuses to return it. Believing that by placing the ring on her finger Alphonse proposed marriage, she falls in love with the young M. de Peyrehorade. The marriage between Alphonse and his fiancée, Mlle de Puygarig, takes place regardless, though later that evening, after everyone has gone to bed, the Venus statue self-animates, sneaks into the newlyweds’ bedroom, and strangles her “lover” for having betrayed her. The fiction defines the Venus through a vocabulary of ancien régime aristocratic femininity, thereby projecting yet another set of contemporary anxieties about female sexuality onto this figure. Mérimée’s work echoes literary and visual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which portrayed upper class women as erotically assertive and insatiable, and thus a moral threat to France and a menace to masculine authority. Montesquieu and Rouseau also accused aristocratic women of being consummate adulteresses. 227 They worried that their promiscuity would prevent reproduction within marriage, at the same time as they feared that upper class women 227 Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1755). See also Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Diana J. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). 126 would challenge the financial stability of the family through illegitimate reproduction. 228 By recalling concerns about upper-class female sexuality, La Vénus d’Ille further defines the desires underlying provincial antiquarianism in terms of nostalgia for the past, which threatens the stability of the nation. While Mérimée contrasts the Venus to Mlle de Puygarrig, he also draws a connection between them via their shared aristocratic associations. Mlle d Puygarrig might in many ways resemble a beacon of bourgeois femininity, but the particle “de” in her surname likewise indicates descent from an aristocratic family. Her aristocratic past is part of what makes her desirable as a marriage partner. Despite the hopes raised by this marriage, the union proves fatal when Alphonse is killed in his marital bed on his wedding night. While Mlle de Puygarrig insists that the murder was committed by the black Venus statue, the text creates ambiguity by leaving it unclear as to which of these two representations of femininity is responsible for the crime. The condition of the corpse suggests that the peripheral desire for the past threatens to render provincial men the equivalent of the racial Other. There are resonances between the short story by Mérimée and Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, especially as the former condemns aristocratic masculinity as driven by desire to recuperate the lavishness of the ancien régime past, and as it portrays these desires as hereditary and thus a threat to the nation. Balzac is concerned with the corruption of the early nineteenth-century Parisian aristocracy, and anchors them to the center of ancien régime aristocratic power to articulate a lineage between the two. Mérimée locates traces of ancien régime culture in the provinces, and portrays Paris, by 228 Blum, Strength in Numbers, 152-193. 127 contrast, as a center of rational, scientific bourgeois masculinity. Mérimée also echoes Duras as he engages with contemporary French concerns about black and aristocratic femininities. Duras partially recuperates ancien régime upper-class womanhood, to posit the (im)possibility of integrating a white-identified black woman into the national body, whereas Mérimée explicitly responds to and reproduces the notion that black and upper- class female sexualities represented a challenge to the body politic and to reproductivity. Antiquarianism, nationalism and regionalism Independent savants from the provinces were fiercely resistant to the centralization of power, including intellectual authority, ushered in by the Revolution. 229 As Robert Fox elaborates, “the resulting tension was a prominent leitmotif of French science for much of the nineteenth-century…The conflict turned on political and social cleavages running far deeper than the struggle for cultural authority that was their outward manifestation.” 230 This divide was especially pronounced in the field of archaeology and antiquarianism, 231 and came to a head of sorts following the restoration of the monarchy in 1814. From the years following the Revolution to the fall of Napoleon in 1814, French antiquarian projects had largely been focused on collecting artifacts from Greece and Rome. This was part of the effort to connect contemporary France to the republics of antiquity, and to obscure the ancien régime from the French genealogical (master) narrative. 232 229 As Robert Fox notes “educational administrators always aspired to central control, even if they never wholly achieved it. See The Savant and the State 51. 230 Ibid. 231 See Fox, The Savant and the State,13. 232 As Margarita Diaz-Andreu explains, from the years following the Revolution through the first Napoleonic Empire: “the past was selectively chosen and appropriated, and was mainly appreciated as the 128 In the early nineteenth century, antiquarians also began looking toward local and regional artifacts, and in particular to relics from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Mérimée’s narrator echoes this interest as he explains his purpose in Ille: “Or je comptais sur [M. de Peyrehorade] pour visiter les environs d’Ille, que je savais riches en monuments antiques et du Moyen Âge.” 233 In the centralized educational institutions of Paris, the inclusion of regional history in the genealogy of the development of French civilization reflected a growing interest in constructing a more particularly national historical narrative. 234 In the provinces, however, the Bourbon Restoration evoked a nostalgia for the ancien régime past and a desire for “both financial and psychological compensation” 235 for the Revolution. 236 For provincial men of noble lineage, antiquarianism represented a way to resurrect their status by resurrecting the past. It was also a means of constructing a regional cultural identity in an era of increasing centralization. 237 Fox notes that in some cases, regional interest in artifacts from the Middle Ages reflected a longing for the golden age of monarchy and Catholic piety, as well as “regional loyalty that spilled over into a commitment to the broader cause of source of civilization that led to the apogee of the French nation…antiquities and works of art played a role in the formation and enactment of the newly formed French nation, helped to create an image of progress linked to ancient civilizations, and to ratify French territorial claims…in Paris antiquities and works of art symbolized France’s role as the home of freedom and civilization. Housed in museums, they served to educate the public and gave continuity to the civilizing process.” See A World History of Nineteenth- Century Archeology: Nationalism, Colonialism and the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 61. 233 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 48. 234 “The interest in classical archaeology was in some ways directly influential in stimulating an interest in national antiquities.” See Diaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archeology, 50. 235 Andrew Watts, Preserving the Provinces: Small Town and Countryside in the Work of Honoré de Balzac (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 40. 236 Fox notes that while the provincial interest in local relics “built its foundations in the resurrection of academies and societies during the consulate and the First Empire, the events of 1814-15 gave it unprecedented strength.” The Savant and the State, 67. 237 Ibid., 68. 129 decentralization.” 238 Provincial antiquarians sought to “resuscitate the local past, instill affection for one’s pays (or locality), and hence produce a sense of place, a deep emotional and intellectual attachment combining territorial identification with membership in a social or political community.” 239 They represented a challenge to French nationalism through both their nostalgia for the ancien régime and their commitment to decentralization. These provincial antiquarians depended on the endorsement of other local elites for the legitimation of their work. As such, they often integrated opulent theatricality and leisure activities into more formal academic meetings. Performances by local regimental bands, firework displays, and elaborate meals regularly followed these meetings of regional elites, or “Congresses.” Parisian savants mocked regional antiquarian societies, accusing them of privileging the recuperation of ancien régime decadence and sensual pleasure, as well as their past status, over the pursuit of scientific knowledge. 240 In a cruelly satirical cartoon and accompanying article on the Congress of 1842 in Strasbourg the author notes, “the inevitable wine-laden banquet was caricatured as a scientific investigation of the qualities of the flesh of the chickens, ducks, and turkeys. When the gastronomic merits of the three birds had been examined and confirmed…‘the results were henceforth acquired for science.’” 241 Given the gendered terms in which both 238 Fox, The Savant and the State, 67. 239 Stéphane Gerson, Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3. 240 Fox, The Savant and the State, 71. 241 Ibid. As Fox elaborates: “Certain very special excursions earned an indelible place in congress lore. One was the outing, during the Lyon congress of 1841, that took the participants in two boats from Lyon to Vienne, thirty (sic) kilometers away, to the sound of cannon and accompanying bands and choirs and amid such popular curiosity that crowds over ten thousand in Vienne and twenty thousand in Lyon were said to have witnessed the event. Although the outing was described as ‘a scientific excursion,’ the visits to the archeological, scientific, and industrial curiosities of Vienne were certainly overshadowed by speeches and an open-air banquet for eight hundred persons. Three years later, at Nîmes, a specially chartered train 130 discourses of science and of decadence were articulated in the early nineteenth century that I have discussed in earlier chapters, Parisian antiquarians also characterized their provincial counterparts as nostalgic for the “effeminacy” of the past. Parisian vs. provincial antiquarians Through its engagement with the antiquarianism debate, La Vénus d’Ille associates Paris with contemporary nationalist values embodied in the narrator: a methodical manner and erudition, which suggests hard work and ambition, a direct link to the centralized reserved desire, and rationalism. On the other hand, M. de Peyrehorade, who stands in for provincial aristocratic masculinity, represents an opposition to the contemporary nationalist project with his nostalgia for the ancien régime, subtle longing for the monarchy, and participation in the regional recuperative project. La Vénus d’Ille establishes a hierarchy privileging Parisian bourgeois over provincial aristocratic masculinities through their relationship. La Vénus d’Ille evokes contemporary caricatures particularly sharply in its portrayal of the veritable feast that M. de Peyrehorade has set for the arrival of the narrator. As such, it situates M. de Peyrehorade, and the peripheral intellectual project, in terms of “effeminate” desires for sensual pleasure and material excess. Having already prepared enough food for two more people than the four present for the meal—M. et Mme de Peyrehorade, their son, Alphonse, and the narrator—Mme de Peyrehorade has additional animals killed and fine meats prepared, and adds more bottles of wine and pots of jam to the already delicacy-laden table: carried members the more than eighty (sic) kilometers to Alais. On a line of the PLM railway company that had been inaugurated as recently as 1840, the journey itself was a novelty. But the highlight was the banquet that awaited in Alais” (70). 131 …il m’avait installé devant une table bien servie…Bien que le souper fut suffisant pour six personnes au moins, [Mme de Peyrehorade] courut à la cuisine, fit tuer des pigeons, frire des milliasse, ouvrit je ne sais combien de pots de confiture. En un instant la table fut encombrée de plats et de bouteilles…On craignait que je ne me trouvasse bien mal à Ille. Dans la province on a si peu de ressources, et les Parisiens sont si difficiles. 242 The de Peyrehorade’s table is also reminiscent of the excess of the “dîner royalement splendide” that Raphaël conjures upon receiving the talisman in La Peau de Chagrin. The narrator in Balzac’s novel describes the dessert course of Raphaël’s banquet as follows: “des buissons de fraises, des ananas, des dates fraîches, des raisins jeunes, des blondes pêches, des oranges arrivées de Sétabul par un pacquebot, des grenades, des fruits de chine, en fin toutes les surprises de luxe, les miracles de petit-fours, les délicatesses les plus friandes, les friandises les plus séductrices.” 243 The thematic overlap between La Vénus d’Ille and La Peau de Chagrin demonstrates the persistence of anxieties about male desires for excess, which are equated with effeminacy. In this scene, contrasting with de Peyrehorade, the narrator is reserved and “rationally scientific,” invoking the superiority of Parisian bourgeois masculinity. The jest the narrator makes regarding the quantity of food at the dinner— “et je serais certainement mort d’indigestion si j’avais goûter seulement à tout ce qu’on m’offrait” 244 —characterizes him in terms of a kind of (gastronomical) reserve unknown to the gluttonous provincial aristocracy. The narrator’s embodiment of bourgeois masculinity is echoed in the largely observational tone he sustains while describing the table, which characterizes him as “objective” and “rational.” The text bears repeating: “Bien que le 242 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 53. 243 Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin, 50. The specific foods the narrator enumerates also reflect Balzac’s critique of early nineteenth-century exotisme, which is not present in Mérimée’s portrayal of the de Peyrehorade table. 244 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 53. 132 souper fut suffisant pour six personnes au moins, [Mme de Peyrehorade] courut à la cuisine, fit tuer des pigeons, frire des milliasse, ouvrit je ne sais combien de pots de confiture. En un instant la table fut encombrée de plats et de bouteilles…” 245 He does not describe the scents, tastes, textures, or colors of the foods; says nothing of the pleasures of eating and drinking, but instead provides a catalogue of each of the items present on the table. The work frames the narrator in terms of the ideals of bourgeois heteronormativity—reserved (heterosexual) desire and scientific observation--contrasting him against opulent, status-driven, “effeminate” provincial masculinity. The work portrays M. de Peyrehorade, qua hobbyist, as prestige-driven; his interest in the narrator is framed by a desire to acquire status for his small town. M. de Peyrehorade inscribes the narrator as a professional antiquarian, and signals himself as an amateur, when he refers to the narrator as “un archéologue illustre, qui devait tirer le Roussillon de l’oubli où le laissait l’indifférence des savants.” 246 Moreover, M. de Peyrehorade’s deference to the narrator further affirms the authority of Parisian bourgeois masculinity and suggests the “effeminacy” (because it is subservient) of provincial aristocratic masculinity. Whereas in the first decades of the nineteenth century the provinces sought to define themselves against the Parisian intellectual establishment, Mérimée’s work instead ridicules provincial aristocratic masculinity through M. de Peyrehorade’s exaggerated reverence for the Parisian narrator. Mérimée further mocks provincial aristocratic masculinity as it portrays M. de Peyrehorade as lacking in scientific rigor in his pursuit of rehabilitating Roussillon’s past. It suggests that regional antiquarian projects challenge the ideal of the pursuit of 245 Ibid. 246 Ibid., 52-53. 133 intellectual truth which framed scientific study in the nineteenth century. By marking M. de Peyrehorade as “poudré,” 247 the work associates him, and by extension provincial antiquarians in general, with the ignorance and superstition of the ancien régime. Because of the relationship between hair or headdress and head in the nineteenth century—“so closely associated with…the seat of both wisdom and folly”—M. de Peyrehorade’s nostalgic powdered hair associates him with a kind of irrationality rooted in France’s ancien régime. He also recalls ancien régime fashion, and the privilege it signified for upper-class men. 248 Finally, his coiffure announces his identification with the authority of the old regime aristocracy and monarchy. It suggests a desire to reclaim the aristocratic extravagance as well as the class structures and absolutism of the past. The text gestures toward the idea that provincial antiquarianism bespeaks a desire to return to the pre- Rrevolutionary order. We see further evidence of M. de Peyrehorade’s ignorance in an exchange between the narrator and him, regarding an inscription on the Venus statue the latter has found on his land. As the narrator explains: [M. de Peyrehorade] me montrait le socle du statue, et j’y lus ces mots: CAVE AMANTEM --Quid dicis, doctissime? me demanda-t-il en se frottant les mains. Voyons si nous nous rencontrerons sur le sens de ce cave amantem! --Mais, répondis-je, il y a deux sens. On peut traduire : “Prends garde à celui qui t’aime, défie toi des amants,” Mais dans ce sens, je ne sais si cave amantem serait d’une bonne latinité. En voyant l’expression diabolique de la dame, je croirais 247 Ibid. 248 As Nicola J. Shilliam explains: “In the Revolutionary period in France, the extravagant clothing of the upper classes...—hand-made laces, silk brocades and velvets, powdered hair and wigs--were signaled out by opponents as identifiable traits of privilege. Simple, less ornate clothing made of cotton, linen, and wool, hair au naturel, and lace-up shoes were considered sufficiently humble to be patriotic…Hats and headdresses, in particular, because they were so closely associated with the head, and the seat of both wisdom and folly, have always indicated status, or the lack of it, and were symbols of authority and power.” “Cocardes Nationales and Bonnets Rouges: Symbolic Headdresses of the French Revolution,” in Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts 5 (1993): 106. 134 plutôt que l’artiste a voulu mettre en garde le spectateur contre cette terrible beauté. Je traduirais donc: “Prends garde à toi si elle t’aime. --Humph! dit M. de Peyrehorade, oui, c’est un sens admissible; mais, ne vous en déplaise, je préfère la première traduction, je développerai pourtant. Vous connaissez l’amant de Vénus? --Il y en a plusieurs. --Oui, mais le premier, c’est Vulcan. N’a-t-on pas voulu dire: Malgré tout ta beauté, ton air dédaigneux, tu auras un forgeron, un vilain boiteux pour un amant? Leçon profonde, monsieur, pour les coquettes! Je ne puis m’empêcher de sourire, tant l’explication me parut tirée par les cheveux. 249 The two men take very different approaches to deciphering the inscription that reflect their positioning in the text: the romantic rustic and the rational cosmopolite. M. de Peyrehorade ignores the scientific method all together. He projects meaning onto his object of study rather than drawing meaning from it. He eschews physical verification, and instead offers a translation based on how he “prefers” to understand the engraving. To develop his unsubstantiated theory, he cherry picks a random piece of “proof” from ancient Roman mythology, which is to say from outside the physical evidence available on the body of the statue. He likewise aggressively offers a post-hoc conclusion to his theory— “n’a-t-on pas voulu…” —and M. de Peyrehorade’s lack of rigor and “rationalism” reads as effeminizing him. The narrator’s interpretation of the inscription, however, is clearly produced via the scientific method. The work invites us to identify with him in finding M. de Peyrehorade’s translation absurd—“tirée par les cheveux.” It encourages us to read along with the narrator for the rest of the text, and lends further support to bourgeois masculinity, and to the French nationalist project. In deciphering the inscription, the narrator is methodical, recognizing the nuances in the phrase’s potential meaning: “il y a 249 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 65-66. 135 deux sens,” he notes. This acknowledgement also reflects a working knowledge of Latin and thus a certain erudition on his part. His use of the verb “pouvoir,” in rendering a possible translation of the phrase—“on peut traduire” (emphasis mine) —suggests a tentativeness, which bespeaks his reliance upon concrete evidence before drawing conclusions. Unsatisfied with his ability to decode the language itself, he looks to other physical evidence on the statue’s form to try and understand the inscription’s meaning. After performing a reading of the relevant marks on the statue—the cave amantem; “l’expression diabolique de la dame”—he offers a theory: “je traduirais donc…” The narrator’s use of the conditional here echoes his earlier rational skepticism regarding the first translation he offers. The work thus establishes the center’s (masculine) intellectual authority over the periphery. Revivifying the past: “une grande femme noire,” black femininity, colonial discourse, and the provinces as periphery Mérimée furthermore suggests that through their ignorance and desire for status, provincial aristocratic men threaten to resurrect dangerous elements of France’s past through their desire for, and attempt to celebrate, unproductive femininity in the form of the statue. Unlike the traditional figure of Venus, who embodies generous, reproductive, maternal female sexuality, the statue symbolizes a kind of selfish femininity who takes her life force from the nation. In this section I use Whiting’s argument that the master narrative defining the black female body in France was constructed by Cuvier to combat anxieties around the black body’s presumed illegibility to demonstrate the peril Mérimée’s Venus represents. While Cuvier, Virey, and Buffon went to great lengths to 136 pacify the “threat” of black femininity, objectifying it through invasive explorations and renditions, Mérimée provides a representation of black femininity which evades the interpretive authority of the scientific community. He imagines black female sexuality, because not fully legible, as even more dangerous and disruptive than doctors of the period did. As the worker who discovers her explains: M. de Peyrehorade nous dit, il y a quinze jours à Jean Coll et à moi, de déraciner un vieil olivier qui était gelé de l’année dernière, car elle a été bien mauvaise, comme vous savez. Voilà donc qu’en travaillant, Jean Coll, qui y allait de tout cœur, il donne un coup de pioche, et j’entends bimm…comme s’il avait tapé sur une cloche. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ que je dis. Nous piochons toujours, nous piochons, et voilà qu’il paraît une main noire qui sortait de terre. Moi la peur me prend. Je m’en vais à monsieur, et je lui dis: ‘Des morts, notre maître, qui sont sous l’olivier. Faut appeler le curé.—Quels morts?’ qu’il me dit. Il vient, il n’a pas plus tôt vu la main qu’il s’écrie: ‘un antique! un antique! vous auriez cru qu’il avait trouver un trésor. Et le voilà avec la pioche, avec les mains, qu’il se démène et qui faisait quasiment autant d’ouvrage que nous deux. 250 The repetition of the word “morts,” as well as the reference to her black (read necrotic) hand, marks the finding as a disinterment, or re-vivification. It also presages the destruction the statue will eventually cause by murdering Alphonse de Peyrehorade, as it depicts the injury she inflicts upon Jean Coll, who, as the strongest athlete in Ille, stands in for national vitality. This warning is echoed in the fear the unnamed worker expresses at encountering the statue: “moi la peur me prend.” More specifically, this passage frames the Venus as a symbol of violently un-reproductive femininity, as it links her to the frozen olive tree. The worker provides a “logical” explanation for the tree’s failure to fruit—the past cold winter—but the statue’s physical proximity to it suggests that she is more likely responsible for its sterility. The text emphasizes the danger she represents, as 250 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 50. 137 it situates her rejuvenation as a direct result of the failure of the olive crop. The work gestures toward the idea that she symbolizes a sexual threat to the nation, represented through the land, and to its futurity, represented through the “olivier gelé.” The work emphasizes the threat the statue represents to the body politic when she breaks Jean Coll’s leg. As the statue seems to struggle against the men trying to unearth her, the text further paints her in terms of feminine resistance. The worker recounts: Avec bien de la peine nous la mettons droite. J’amassai un tuileau pour la caler, quand patatras! la voilà qui tombe à la renverse tout d’une masse. Je dis “gare dessous! Pas assez vite pourtant, car Jean Coll n’a pas eu le temps de tirer sa jambe…cassé net comme un échalas, sa pauvre jambe…le médecin dit qu’il ne marchera jamais de cette jambe comme de l’autre. C’est dommage, lui qui était notre meilleur coureur… 251 In crippling the body of one of the town’s strongest athletes, she performs a symbolic act of violence against the vitality of the nation. Moreover, by falling on this particular man, whose initials, J.C., signal a reference to Jesus Christ, the work orients the Venus’s body as a menace to Christian morality, which underscores the discourse of national moral hygiene. At the same time that the Venus’s “main noire” 252 marks her as an undead presence, it also serves to characterize her as a symbol of black femininity. The worker subsequently refers to the statue as “une grande femme noire.” 253 As he personifies her, referring to her as a woman and not a statue, he emphasizes the fact that she represents black womanhood. The novel affirms contemporary French racial discourse as it depicts the Venus as an aggressive threat to white male sexuality. As I have noted in earlier chapters, medical discourse of the period provided scientific proof of the ways that black 251 Ibid., 52. 252 Ibid., 50. 253 Ibid. 138 women threatened the national body. Doctors framed black femininity through a lexicon of hypersexuality, which brought about the birth of (many) children, whose very existence threatened the financial stability of the nation. Finally, by virtue of their race, black women were seen as a threat to a nation, which was increasingly defining itself as a space of white racial purity. The statue’s “expression diabolique,” 254 as well as her “air méchante;” 255 the engraving on the her arm “CAVE AMANTEM” 256 —which we are meant to read through the narrator’s interpretation, and which cautions men against falling in love with her —“prends garde à toi si elle t’aime” 257 —all further illustrate that she symbolizes toxic and sexually aggressive femininity, indissoluble from contemporary medical discourse around black female sexuality and the danger it posed to the national body. At the same time, the work compounds the danger the statue represents through the ultimate illegibility of the inscription. In Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics, Judith Butler argues that being socially “legible” 258 or recognizable within “the limits of established norms” 259 is a necessary condition for subjectivity, both in the sense of holding a legitimate place in society, and in the sense of being circumscribed by the very norms that allow for one’s social existence. The indecipherability of the statue’s engraving suggests that she symbolizes both non-normative femininity and opens the possibility of feminine resistance to subjugation. 254 Ibid., 66. 255 Ibid., 51. 256 Ibid., 65. 257 Ibid., 66. 258 Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics.” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4 (2009), iii. 259 Ibid. 139 This is particularly significant in the case of black womanhood in nineteenth- century France. As we saw in the works of Buffon, Virey, and Cuvier, doctors exercised their scrutinizing gaze to render black women as legible as possible, in order to understand and control their bodies. 260 Another example from Cuvier’s treatise on Sarah Bartmann provides evidence of this white, male, scientific desire for mastery. He attempts to cement the distinctions he makes between European and African women’s sexualities as he depicts what he refers to as Bartmann’s “Hottentot apron.” The so-called apron was in fact simply a prolongation of Bartmann’s vaginal lips, a feature that Cuvier attributed to all Hottentot women, suggesting that it resulted from the “hot climates in Africa.” 261 As Whiting elaborates, because Bartmann refused to show Cuvier her vaginal lips, and because they did not conform to European standards of beauty, “Cuvier racially naturalizes [the apron’s] existence, suggesting primitivity, and consequently a difference in comparison to European women’s sex.” 262 Again Cuvier gestures toward black women’s “primitivity” by comparing their supposedly enlarged pelvic bones to those of female monkeys. Cuvier refuses Bartmann’s attempts at sexual privacy by shedding light, so to speak, on the form of her vaginal lips. He further affirms his sexual control over her by assigning a narrative to her body. Whiting argues that through the proliferation of Cuvier’s work his depiction of Bartmann became the basis for the master narrative defining the black female body in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a 260 see my discussion of Cuvier in Chapter 1. 261 Whiting, Black Venus, 29. 262 Ibid. 140 narrative constructed so as to combat anxieties around the black body’s presumed illegibility. 263 The archeologist’s relationship to the statue parallels the medical doctor’s relationship to the black female body. M. de Peyrehorade appears unfazed by the danger the statue represents, and is instead overjoyed at finding this relic of the past. Upon discovering it: “Il vient, il n’a pas plus tôt vu la main qu’il s’écrie: ‘un antique! un antique! vous auriez cru qu’il avait trouver un trésor.” 264 The ignorance of peripheral desire is once again framed as threatening the nation. In his fervor to employ the statue in the service of the provincial aristocratic project, M. de Peyrehorade produces a tortured interpretation of the second inscription on the Venus and of her alleged origins. As he explains: ...je vais vous expliquer CE TURBUL…Écoutez bien. À une lieue d’ici, au pied de la montagne, il y a un village qui s’appelle Boulternère. C’est une corruption du mot latin TURBULNERA. Rien de plus commun que ces inversions. Boulternère, monsieur, a été une ville romaine. Je m’en étais toujours douté, mais jamais je n’en avais eu la preuve. La preuve voilà. Cette Vénus était la divinité topique de la cité de Boulternère, que je viens de démontrer d’origine antique, prouve une chose bien plus curieuse, c’est que Boulternère, avant d’être une ville romaine, a été une ville phénicienne!...En effet, poursuivit-il, TURBULNERA, et pur phénecien, TUR, prononcez TOUR…TOUR et SOUR, même mot, n’est-ce pas? 265 The basis for his positing the statue as a local antiquity is the inversion between TURBULNEA and BOULTERNÈRE, “rien de plus commun que ces inversions,” he claims. Yet he offers no proof of this linguistic slippage between Latin and French. He again resorts to post-hoc logic, admitting that his theory predates his so-called evidence. He reads the statue’s existence as proof that Boulternère was a Roman village, and then 263 Ibid., 16-31. 264 Mérimée, La Venus d’Ille, 50. 265 Ibid., 68-69. 141 makes the circular conclusion that she was the local deity of the town. His primary motivation is localizing Roman culture, which the state was employing as part of the nationalist project. The work marks M. de Peyrehorade’s antiquarian interest as contrary to national interests. He then further overdetermines her locality, contradicting his previous translation of Latin by posting that the inscription is instead from the Phoenician. In this way, he posits the origins of provincial history before Roman history, which is central to the national narrative. The mental gymnastics M. de Peyrehorade performs to situate the statue as a local relic also reads as prioritizing regional culture over state culture. His efforts to situate the statue at home in regional culture result in a farcical rendition of her history, attempting to circumvent what the statue’s illegibility and blackness make all too clear: that she does not belong here. Again, in contrast to M. de Peyrehorade’s exuberance, the narrator attempts a more conservative (but no less foreboding) reading. He reads the engraving— TURBUL—as the first six letters of the word “TURBULENTA,” 266 meaning “Venus qui trouble, qui agite.” 267 As he elaborates “Vous vous appercez que je suis toujours préoccupé de son expression méchante.” 268 His interpretation, which is tentative, but based in the limited physical evidence available on the statue’s form, once again signals the destruction, sexual aggressiveness, and illegibility projected onto black femininity. 266 Ibid., 68. 267 Ibid. 268 Ibid. 142 Periphery as colony Through its representation of violent, black female sexuality, La Vénus d’Ille invokes the memory of the Haitian Revolution. Although the text has no direct relationship to Haiti, or to the Caribbean for that matter, French literary culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries employed the black female body as a screen upon which to project race and gender anxieties following the Haitian Revolution. 269 By incorporating this symbol of black womanhood in the space of the provinces, the work instead re-figures the periphery as a stand in for the colony. Mitchell argues that France re-scripted the narrative of black male revolutionary violence through the threat of black female sexuality. As such, the former imperial power symbolically reasserts its racial and gendered domination over the lost colony (or in this case, over the province). 270 The gendered terms in which the work frames the Paris/provinces dichotomy echo contemporary colonialist discourse, wherein the nation was figured as masculine and the colony as feminine. I do not mean to suggest that the work in any way draws parallels between peripheral regionalism and the cultural impetuses fueling the Haitian revolution. Just the opposite in fact: M. de Peyrehorade has far more in common with the “plantocracy” who emigrated to France following the Haitian Revolution, in that both were nostalgic for the wealth and status enjoyed by the upper class before the French (and Haitian) revolutions. 271 Instead, La Vénus d’Ille invokes the memory of Haiti in the space of the provinces to mark it as a foreign space, characterized by desire, which threatens the national body. As the provinces are physically proximate to the capital and 269 see my extended discussion in Chapter 1. 270 Mitchell, Ombres Noires, 1-24. 271 Mitchell, Ombres Noires, 14. 143 are not an overseas territory, however, the work reads as positing the periphery as a kind of “Other” within the national space. White Venus and Black Venus By using the figure of the Roman goddess Venus to represent black femininity Mérimée further highlights the extent to which the latter diverges from contemporary French national ideals of womanhood, creating an anti-symbol of potent dangerous sexuality. Through parallel descriptions of the Vénus d’Ille and Mlle de Puygarrig, both voiced through the bourgeois, masculine perspective of the narrator, the text aligns the idealization of white, young, maternal, passive femininity with the nationalist narrative. Moreover, as the symbol of destructive black femininity, Mérimée’s Venus is an iteration of what Whiting refers to as the Black Venus in other texts of the time. In Revolutionary French visual culture, ancient Greek and Roman goddesses were re-mobilized to symbolize the new nation and its ideals, as well as norms of republican femininity. As Landes elaborates: In revolutionary iconography, the traits of proper, chaste, natural womanhood are transposed onto a larger canvas that is populated by a series of antique goddesses representing woman’s natural goodness…As a result, motherhood is magnified and glorified—stripped of its mundane, ultimately conventional character—by its association with the antique past and a future, regenerated Republic. Classical female bodies bore the names of Liberty, Republic, Victory, Philosophy, Reason, Nature, and Truth. They functioned to instruct all of the public on the cardinal virtues of republican France: unity, fraternity, equality, and brotherly love…They [also] attested to the special virtues of women: modesty and chastity. 272 Goddesses were also portrayed as ideally beautiful and sexually desirable and available. Their physiognomy, corporeal form, and dress reflected the ideals of republican 272 Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 102. 144 (bourgeois) femininity. They often had their breasts exposed, symbolizing “an enticement to sexual desire, but also the most vital instrument for infant citizen’s survival.” 273 As Landes reads Republican France/Opening her Breast to All the French (see Figure 2 below), for example, “[she] is young and virginal, her most prominent features are her breasts, and the engraving’s title merely anchors the singular meaning of the image: she presents herself as an offering. She offers her bosom to all Frenchmen.” 274 This iconography aimed to circumscribe women by re-defining them in opposition to the sexual and political freedom of ancien régime aristocratic femininity. It also invited a libidinal investment on the part of men in both the republican ideals of womanhood and in the new nation. 275 273 Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 151. 274 Ibid. 275 Ibid., 81-133. 145 Figure 2. Alexandre Clément, after Louis-Simon Boizot. La France Républicaine ouvrant son sein à tous les Français. 1792. 146 The novel explicitly invites a reading of the Vénus d’Ille statue against (re- appropriated) Greco-Roman statuary that was so fundamental to shaping late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gendered discourse. As the narrator elaborates: “Ce n’était point cette beauté calme et sévère des sculpteurs grecs, qui, par système donnaient à tous les traits une majestueuse immobilité.” 276 He draws attention to the calm, severe beauty signifying moral rectitude and passivity, which Greek sculptors tended to inscribe on the faces of their works of art. We see evidence of this aesthetic in La France Républicaine. Her expression is simultaneously serene and serious. She looks off into the distance as though she is looking toward the future. Her averted eyes situate her in terms of re- productivity, but also mark her as submissively feminine as she does not confront the viewer. She does not return the viewer’s gaze, but rather looks away, allowing her body to be viewed and ultimately penetrated. On the other hand, Mérimée’s Venus statue has life-like eyes that recall her animus, which, as we saw with Jean Coll, is symbolic of the racial and sexual threat that it was believed that black women posed to the nation. She symbolically inverts the racial and gender hierarchies between black femininity and medical science/white masculinity, by forcing the narrator to avert his gaze. As the narrator explains: “Ces yeux brillants produisaient une certaine illusion qui rappelait la réalité, la vie. Je me souvins de ce que m’avait dit mon guide, qu’elle faisait baisser les yeux à ceux qui la regardaient. Cela était presque vrai, et je ne pus me defender d’un moment de colère contre moi-même en me sentant un peu mal à mon aise devant cette figure en bronze.” 277 Here, she returns the narrator’s gaze, the “brilliance” of her eyes rendering her regard that much more 276 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 64. 277 Ibid., 65. 147 penetrating. She symbolically inverts the racial and gender hierarchies between femininity and medical science/white masculinity, by forcing the narrator to avert his own gaze. He is aware of the challenge she poses, and attempts to reassert (his) scientific authority over her, through the rational observation that the Vénus d’Ille’s power is an illusion, as she is a “figure en bronze,” and not a real woman. He echoes contemporary attempts to pacify black femininity through objectification. The very act of doing so, however, affirms the tenuousness of his scientific, racial, and gendered authority over the Venus qua symbol of black womanhood. Whereas the classical goddess’s exposed breasts signified maternity and female sexual availability in a Revolutionary French context, this Venus’s nudity further marks her as sexually inappropriate. As the worker describes her: “Une grande femme noire plus qu’à moitié nue, révérence parler.” 278 His prudish interjection of “révérence parler” defines her breasts a symbol of sexual excess, associated with black femininity, rather than maternity, which characterized ideal, white, French femininity. The work continues to employ racial and sexual metaphors to associate the center with the nationalist agenda, through its portrayal of Mlle de Puygarrig, who in many ways evokes or resembles the figure of the white Venus. The work defines the Vénus d’Ille through a lexicon of race as it names her as “noire” 279 and compares her to Mlle de Puygarrig, who is explicitly interpolated as “blanche.” 280 Whereas the Vénus d’Ille symbolizes sexual threat, Mlle de Puygarrig is depicted through the ideals of contemporary normative bourgeois femininity. As the archeologist elaborates: “Pour elle, 278 Ibid., 50. 279 Ibid., 84. 280 Ibid. 148 elle ne levait guère les yeux, et chaque fois que son prétendu lui parlait, elle rougissait avec modestie, mais lui répondait sans embarrass. Mlle de Puygarrig avait 18 ans; sa taille souple et délicate contrastait avec les forms osseuses de son robuste fiancée. Elle était non seulement belle, mais séduisante. J’admirais le naturel parfait de toutes ses réponses, et son air de bonté…” 281 While the work marks the Venus with a fixed, incisive stare, which reflects her sexual danger, it characterizes Mlle de Puygarrig through a downcast gaze, which bespeaks feminine subservience. Her tendency to “ne levait guère les yeux” allows the narrator/scientist to assert masculine visual authority over the white, female body. As he situates her as object of his desire—“elle était non seulement belle, mais séduisante”—the archeologist, moreover, claims male sexual power over her. The work likewise frames Mlle de Puygarrig in terms of feminine subjugation as it highlights the modest manner in which she engages with her fiancé, suggesting that she will be a properly submissive wife. Whereas the story associates the Venus with the past, death, infertility, and the physical destruction of the body politic, it signals Mlle de Puygarrig as young—“elle avait dix-huit ans”—and supple (souple) a potential vessel for new life and the reproduction of the nation. The latter’s soft, delicate body moreover compliments her future husband’s robust, athletic build, suggesting that the couple embodies national ideals of masculinity and femininity, on a physical level at least. As this symbol of destructive black femininity, Mérimée’s Venus is an iteration of what Whiting refers to as the Black Venus in other texts of the time. Whiting argues that this figure was invoked to represent white, male, racial and sexual anxieties throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she is characterized as hypersexual. While the 281 Ibid., 74. 149 Roman goddess Venus was generally associated with fertility and beauty, the Black Venus was typically linked to the goddess’s secondary function as protector of prostitutes. “It is the latter image of prostitution, sexuality, and danger that reproduced itself in narrative and was projected onto black female bodies.” 282 As Whiting elaborates: “Blackness and beauty were [constructed as] antithetical in nineteenth-century France. Accordingly, the négresse was generally stereotypically conceived of as not aesthetically pleasing, with her ‘dark skin’, ‘large lips,’ ‘flat nose,’ and ‘frizzy hair.’” 283 The lure of the négresse was instead her adeptness at sexual arts. Her desirability was also loathed, “for she represented danger, a sexual passion capable of satiation and consumption, the literal siphoning off of life through the draining of precious seminal liquids.” 284 Scripting black women as “lubricious [and] venal” 285 allowed French writers to reaffirm white femininity (read, passive, bourgeois femininity) as the standard of sexual conduct and beauty, while at the same time maintaining their own “position of moral, sexual, and racial superiority.” 286 Gaspard de Pons’s lyrical re-writing of Duras’s Ourika is a prime example of the figure of the Black Venus. De Pons modifies the original title from Ourika to Ourika, l’Africaine to immediately draw (even greater) attention to the protagonist’s race. He signals his poem as a modification to Duras’s portrayal of Ourika’s Africaness. He ventriloquizes his protagonist so that she understands her own desire in racialized terms. De Pons re-scripts Ourika as an aggressively lascivious woman who brings with her the 282 Whiting, Black Venus, 7. 283 Ibid., 56. 284 Ibid. 285 Ibid. 286 Ibid., 7. 150 “fiery” desires of Africa. As she declares in his poem: “j’ai porté cet amour [dont il subit les fers] dans ces climats glacés. 287 ” She makes eager sexual advances on her love object, Charles: “Connais-tu nos faveurs que ton orgueil refuse?//Nous Savons…//Des feux tels que jamais tu n’en as soupçonné;//Ils feront ton bonheur ils feront mon excuse.” 288 She is exciting, even overwhelming, and all too willing to satisfy Charles’s every desire, but also to seek retribution when he rejects her for a white woman. As she warns him: “Garde-toi d’éveiller des douleurs africaines!//Tu parles d’amitié, de ce fable lien//qui brise un cœur jaloux si mal connu du tien !// Le sang des Othello bout toujours dans mes veines.” 289 Her desires are always violent, always dangerous, and always the direct result of her Africanness. In his adaptation, de Pons furthermore evacuates Ourika of all sympathy, re- writing her love for Charles as explicitly erotic, obsessive, and violent. As she declares to Charles in the final stanza: “que ne puis-je égorger l’objet de tes amours!” 290 Unlike in Duras’s novella, where Ourika removes herself from French society as soon as she becomes a direct threat to the heterosexual couple, in de Pons’s version Ourika threatens to take her revenge on the aristocratic familial unit for thwarting her desires, menacing to strangle her rival. De Pons here inscribes black femininity with an unalterably salacious and threatening nature. Baudelaire’s La Belle Dorothée also belongs to the tradition of the Black Venus narrative. As Whiting elaborates “unlike de Pons’ work, Baudelaire’s prose poem is more than a case of waxing rhapsodic on the black female as venal, savage, and exotic; 287 Gaspard de Pons Ourika, l’Africaine, in Inspirations poétiques (Paris: Urbain Canel, 1825), 226. 288 Ibid., 229. 289 Ibid., 231. 290 Ibid. 151 La Belle Dorothée invites serious inquiry into questions of identity and the effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized.” 291 The impossibility of her Frenchness is ultimately the impossibility of her freedom. Her failed assimilation into the culture of the mother country as a free woman is also reflected in her profession: she is a prostitute. Baudelaire marks sex work as a condition of black women’s so-called freedom in France, as he gestures toward the idea that Dorothée sells her body in order to buy her sister’s freedom and inscribes black women more generally within an economy of prostitution. “Dorothée est admirée et choyée de tous, et elle serait parfaitement heureuse si elle n’était obligée d’entasser piastre sur piastre pour racheter sa petite sœur qui a bien onze ans, et qui est déjà mûre, et si belle.” 292 He, moreover, echoes contemporary racial discourse, as he defines Dorothée’s sister as prematurely pubescent—“qui a bien onze ans et qui est déjà mûre.” As Virey claims in his Natural History of the Negro Race: “in several countries in Africa, the time of puberty is very early, and the corruption carried to a monstrous excess.” 293 While Dorothée may no longer be a slave from the French perspective, the color of her skin marks her as a sexual Other who can never truly assimilate to the national body. 291 Whiting, Black Venus, 67. 292 Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poèmes en Prose, ed Melvin Zimmerman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 41. 293 Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race, 89. Baudelaire marks Dorothée with physical traits associated with the so-called grotesqueness of the black female body, drawing attention to “ses hanches si larges” and “le poids de son énorme chevelure.” But he also characterizes her as a distinctly attractive woman, noting that she is a sought-after prostitute “admirée et choyée de tous.” He likewise refers to her sister as “si belle.” Baudelaire, Petits Poèmes en Prose, 41-42.The poem highlights the tension between desire for and disgust with the black female body, which underscored late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century race discourses in France. 152 Ancien régime aristocratic femininity While, unlike Baudelaire, Mérimée does not link his “Black Venus” to prostitution, he does mark her as a symbol of black female sexuality, which violently resists white male authority and threatens the national body. He likewise compares the statue to embodiments of white, bourgeois feminine norms, to affirm the so-called superiority of the latter and to maintain Parisian bourgeois masculinity’s “position of moral, sexual, and racial superiority.” 294 Mérimée’s statue, however, is distinct from the figure of the Black Venus, in that she is marked as aristocratic. The narrator characterizes her through a vocabulary of nobility, noting that there was: “rien de plus élégant et de plus noble que sa draperie” (emphasis mine). 295 Her hair is reminiscent of a faded, gilded crown, which likewise gives her an air of regality: “La chevelure, relevée sur le front, paraissait avoir été dorée autrefois” (emphasis mine). 296 Her face is defined by the haughty elitism and so-called castrating power attributed to upper-class womanhood. “Dédain, ironie, cruauté, se lisaient sur ce visage…” 297 In the case of critiques of aristocratic women some of the strongest examples come from (pre)-Revolutionary visual culture. Marie Antoinette’s supposedly insatiable and depraved sexual appetites and power over Louis XVI were often depicted as responsible for the fall of the monarchy. As early as the mid-1780s Marie-Antoinette began to be depicted in text and images as a lascivious female harpy. As Landes notes, “the attacks on the queen are striking examples of the vigorous assaults leveled against…all female aristocrats. Because…hers was [considered] a corrupted, degenerate 294 Whiting, Black Venus, 7. 295 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 64. 296 Ibid. 297 Ibid. 153 and bestial female body, it is not surprising that representations of aristocracy easily appropriated attributes of monstrous femininity and of course, the queen herself was not the only female target of the pre-revolutionary liberals.” 298 Aristocratic women, associated with erotic pleasure and material wealth acquired without hard work, were moreover accused of posing a threat to the French body politic as they aroused in men desires antithetical to those circumscribed by dominant notions of masculinity. Les Fastes de Louis XV, for example, depicts Louis XV’s mistress, Mme de Pompadour, as reigning over “an abyss for innocence and simplicity which swallowed up throngs of [male] victims and then spat them back into society, in which they carried corruption and the taste for debauchery and vice that necessarily infected them in such a place.” 299 In another extremely popular text, Anecdotes sur Mme la Comtesse du Barry, the kings mistress’s is likewise attacked for “having slept her way from the brothel to the throne,” contributing, in the process, to the corruption of the monarchy. 300 We see evidence of this in late eighteenth-century literary culture as well, in works like Le Sopha and Lettre à d’Alembert sur le théâtre, which conflate female sexual and intellectual power to suggest that upper-class women posed a threat to the French class and gender hierarchies. In the early nineteenth century, Chateaubriand re-configures the so-called danger of aristocratic womanhood through Amélie’s emotional hold on René. Duras carefully responds to these fears in her recuperation of the figure of the salonnière. Balzac projects concerns about aristocratic femininity onto the body of an upper-class man to critique the Parisian aristocracy following the revolution. 298 Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 119. 299 Ibid., 120. 300 Ibid. 154 Aristocratic woman as racial Other Mérimée, by inscribing the Venus’s aristocracy on her face, the site of her penetrating gaze, echoes contemporary discourse as it links aristocracy to threatening female sexuality. By employing the statue, who is directly associated with the regional recuperative project, as a screen upon which to project anxieties about ancien régime female sexuality, the work further frames provincial nostalgia for the past in terms of female desire that threatens the nation. Because the Venus also symbolizes black femininity, the work likewise gestures toward the idea that ancien régime aristocratic womanhood represents a foreign Other within the national body. We can see resonances between Mérimée’s work and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of mapping Orientalist discourse onto upper-class femininity to define the latter as “an alien presence within” 301 the national body. Like I argued Balzac does in Chapter 2, Mérimée invokes (the memory of) colonialism to warn against aristocratic male nostalgia for the ancien régime. La Vénus d’Ille conflates race and class discourse to suggest that the regional antiquarian project threatens to also render the provinces foreign and Other. We see further evidence that the story characterizes the provinces as haunted by the specter of old regime femininity as the text elaborates the parallel between Mlle de Puygarrig and the Venus statue. As the narrator develops his description of the former’s face he states: “[P]ourtant, [elle] n'était pas exempt d'une légère teinte de malice, qui me rappela, malgré moi, la Vénus de mon hôte.” 302 Underneath her delicate, modest, blushing, bourgeois mien lurks a certain malice, which recalls the Venus statue’s “air 301 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 36. 302 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 74. 155 méchant” 303 and “dédain.” 304 This malicious expression functions as an outward manifestation of Mlle de Puygarrig’s aristocratic lineage. While she might in many ways resemble the ideal bourgeois woman, she too comes from a long line of provincial nobility. Like the de Peyrehorades’ her surname is also marked with the aristocratic particle “de.” She is further characterized in terms of the provincial desire to recuperate ancien régime customs as well as wealth and status, as M. de Peyrehorade chooses her to be his son’s bride because of her inheritance: “et il marie son fils à plus riche que lui encore.” 305 By this logic, the work suggests that Mlle de Puygarrig’s bourgeois mannerisms and features reflect a performance of normativity underscored by an aristocratic and sexually aggressive nature. Through M. de Peyrehorade, who is entirely focused on his daughter-in-law’s fortune, the work represents provincial aristocratic masculinity as unaware of, or at the very least unconcerned with, the threat of old régime, upper-class womanhood, in its efforts to rehabilitate the past. Through the association between the statue and Mlle de Puygarrig, the work posits aristocratic femininity as a racial other that threatens the nation through the shared sexual aggressiveness projected onto upper-class and black femininities of the period. In fact, the work suggests that all women who fail to comply fully with republican norms of womanhood represent a foreign menace to the nation. In this way the text echoes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary and visual culture as it locates bourgeois, maternal femininity at the center of the nationalist project. 303 Ibid., 51. 304 Ibid., 64. 305 Ibid., 48. 156 Mérimée illustrates the nature of provincial ancien régime aristocratic desire as Alphonse places his fiancée’s wedding ring on the Venus’s finger. This gesture on the part of the younger de Peyrehorade demonstrates that provincial nostalgia for the past signifies union with a sterile, violent, obdurate, illegible, and racially Other femininity. The work conflates arranged and interracial marriage to suggest that Alphonse’s union with Mlle de Puygarrig will contaminate him with a racial alterity, marking provincial masculinity as an “alien presence within the body politic” as well. The cost of provincial nostalgia: the monster in the marriage bed The final event of the story, the moment when the Vénus seduces and strangles Alphonse, crystalizes the anti-black sentiment coloring Mérimée’s text in a violent and yet ambiguous conclusion. He depicts the scene of erotic encounter between the white male body and this representation of black femininity in terms of a nightmare, the “villain” of this might well be the desiring black Venus. The core mystery of the work is not who killed Alphonse, but rather, how the racial Other gets transferred to the space of the nation. The culprit is the restoration of the ancien régime. As the narrator presents Mlle de Puygarrig’s account of the crime: Elle était couchée, dit-elle, depuis quelques minutes, les rideaux tirés, lorsque la porte de sa chambre s'ouvrit, et quelqu'un entra. Alors madame Alphonse était dans la ruelle du lit, la figure tournée vers la muraille. Elle ne fit pas un mouvement, persuadée que c'était son mari. Au bout d'un instant le lit cria comme s'il était chargé d'un poids énorme. Elle eut grand ‘peur, mais n'osa pas tourner la tête. Cinq minutes, dix minutes peut-être… elle ne peut se rendre compte du temps, se passèrent de la sorte. Puis elle fit un mouvement involontaire, ou bien la personne qui était dans le lit en fit un, et elle sentit le contact de quelque chose de froid comme la glace, ce sont ses expressions. Elle s'enfonça dans la ruelle tremblant de tous ses membres. Peu après, la porte s'ouvrit une seconde fois, et quelqu'un entra, qui dit: Bonsoir, ma petite femme. Bientôt après on tira les rideaux. Elle entendit un cri étouffé. La personne qui était dans le lit, à côté d'elle, 157 se leva sur son séant et parut étendre les bras en avant. Elle tourna la tête alors… et vit, dit-elle, son mari à genoux auprès du lit, la tête à la hauteur de l'oreiller, entre les bras d'une espèce de géant verdâtre qui l'étreignait avec force. Elle dit, et m'a répété vingt fois, pauvre femme!… elle dit qu'elle a reconnu… devinez-vous? la Vénus de bronze, la statue de M. de Peyrehorade…elle [vit] le fantôme, ou le statue, comme elle dit toujours, immobile, les jambes et le bras du corps dans le lit, le buste et le bras étendus devant, et entre ses bras son mari, sans mouvement. 306 The scene begins with the entrée of a stranger into the martial bedroom. This gesture blurs the lines between the familiar and the foreign, between (white) self and (racial) other. As this representation of black femininity is introduced into the space of white, heteronormative union, legitimate and illegitimate bodies become confused, and chaos ensues. The conflation of Alphonse with the Venus further feminizes aristocratic male sexuality. The size of the Venus and her coldness defines her as monstrous, and thus add to the scene’s nightmarish aesthetic. The Venus’s size can be read as a physical manifestation of her libido, as Cuvier imagined to be the case with Sarah Bartmann’s supposedly enormous hips, buttocks, and breasts. Additionally, as Mitchell explains, coldness, in a physical or metaphysical sense, was often articulated as a standard trait of black femininity in the nineteenth-century French cultural imaginary. Physical coldness signified black women’s supposed emotional coldness: their lack of sentiment and their calculating greed, which were believed to be vital for manipulating and seducing white men to exploit their financial and racial power. Coldness also defined black women as unfeminine within the parameters of nineteenth-century French standards of bourgeois femininity, which was defined as maternal, generous, sentimental, and, as we saw with Mlle de Puygarrig, physically soft. In contrast Black women’s supposed coldness marks them as un-maternal and unfit for marriage. The work takes contemporary anxieties about 306 Ibid., 92-93. 158 black female sexuality to their logical conclusion, as it portrays Alphonse dead in the arms of the statue. Her desire manifests in the figurative death of the provincial body politic. The terror Mlle de Puygarrig expresses here—“elle s’enfonça dans la ruelle tremblant de tout ses membres” 307 —contrasts black and white femininities in a way that renders the former that much more frightening. At the same time, the text frames her fear through a lexicon of hysteria, further coding Mlle de Puygarrig through symptoms of aristocracy. The narrator refers to her as “la malheureuse folle” 308 and echoes Étienne- Jean Georget’s etiology of hysteria, as he suggests that she loses consciousness upon realizing that the Venus is in the bed: “À ce spectacle, elle perdit connaissance, et probablement depuis quelques instants elle avait perdu raison. Elle ne peut en aucune façon dire combien de temps elle demeura évanouie.” 309 Georget lists fainting as one of the primary symptoms of the malady. 310 As such, Mlle de Puygarrig’s fear in this scene reflects the slippage in her character between bourgeois and aristocratic femininities. Georget likewise locates sterility as the primary cause of hysteria, marking the aristocratic female body as a biological threat to the future of the nation. 311 The work echoes medical discourse, rendering Mlle de Puygarrig hysterical at the exact moment of the dissolution of her marriage. Through the invocation of pathology, the doctor attempts to assert ostensibly rational, masculine control over the irrational and even violent female body. The work’s investment in scientific authority and the maintenance of national 307 Ibid., 92. 308 Ibid., 93. 309 Ibid. 310 Georget, Physiologie, 670. 311 Ibid., 669. 159 moral hygiene is emphasized as Mlle de Puygarrig’s narrative is mediated through the voice of the narrator. And at the same time, the text frames her explanation for the crime as a plausible one, underscoring the precarity of scientific control over women. The work defines the scientific relationship to femininity in terms of a constant push and pull between circumscription and excess. The text further invites an ambiguous reading of the crime, as it implies that Mlle de Puygarrig’s account might be a screen for deflecting her own guilt. As she is the only witness to the murder, the work gestures toward the idea of her own complicity in the act. She is even given a motive: the loveless nature of her arranged marriage. Alphonse de Peyrehorade’s desire for Mlle de Puygarrig, like his father’s, is primarily motivated by a longing to increase his wealth and status in Ille. As he describes his fiancée: “…tout le monde ici à Perpignan la trouve charmante. Le bon c’est qu’elle est fort riche. Sa tante de Prades lui à laissé son bien. Oh! je vais être fort heureux.” 312 He cares nothing for love, gentility, or offspring. He is primarily interested in Mlle de Puygarrig’s money; even the way he describes her physical beauty is detached and reflects little in the way of erotic desire: “tout le monde ici à Perpignan la trouve charmante.” 313 He instead frames her as a recognizably attractive and expensive object whose purpose is to increase his status and fortune. Via Alphonse’s marriage the text establishes a genealogy of desire connecting the provincial aristocratic father-son pair. Alphonse echoes both M. de Peyrehorade’s avarice and his desire to rehabilitate a social practice that was already starting to be regarded as archaic in the early nineteenth century. Mérimée echoes Balzac as he describes the 312 Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, 72. 313 Ibid., 72. 160 (provincial) aristocratic desire to recuperate the customs of the ancien régime as hereditary. As the Venus invades the space of the marriage bed, the work suggests that the regional recuperative project presents a threat to the future of the nation. The father’s desire for the statue and the rehabilitation of the past she represents produces the death of the son in his marriage bed, the very site of reproduction and futurity. Her sterile desire for Alphonse renders the union of the white, French couple sterile as well. While the text remains ambiguous as to who killed Alphonse, statue or woman, it makes clear that his death is the result of that which the two of them share: an aggressive, aristocratic female desire, which is seen as a threat equivalent to racial miscegenation. The already feminized body of Alphonse is finally rendered “black”: the narrator describes “sa figure noircie.” 314 In La Vénus d’Ille we see at last the embodiment of the monstrous threat alterity poses to the nationalist project. The statue is both black and aristocratic, both foreign and lurking in the very soil of France, both beautiful and monstrous, a relic of the past that endangers the future. Through this figure the work unifies diverse but interrelated anxieties of post-Revolutionary France around the shared quality of an excessive female sexuality. Mérimée’s work takes to their logical conclusion the fears about miscegenation and aristocratic masculinity and femininity evinced in René, Ourika, the Ourika Mania corpus, and La Peau de Chagrin. The symbolic violence of aristocratic femininity, represented in René through Amélie’s feminine emotional control over René, and in Balzac’s work through Raphaël’s nostalgia for the decadence of the ancien régime, is magnified here through the representation of a femininity that is marked as both black 314 Ibid., 90. 161 and aristocratic, and that physically endangers the body politic. The statue also symbolizes a hypersexual Black Venus, to which Duras and most of the adaptors of Ourika are only willing to gesture for fear of contaminating the national body. 162 CONCLUSION The necessity of woman’s reproducitvity marks her as both mother and Other. In the texts studied in this project, every effort to define the possibility of a national body requires the location of an Other, and each iteration of the Other brings that location closer to the national body, eventually landing in the soil of France, and in the marriage bed. Preparation for foreign contact leads to increasing anxiety about the return of the past, and about Others within France’s national borders. Scholars generally treat early nineteenth-century discourses of gender and class, and about gender, race, and colonialism, distinctly. This separation is justified as these anxieties are understood as geographically based: with anxieties about gender and class situated domestically, and concerns about race, gender, and colonialism located abroad. I have shown, however, how the works in my corpus demonstrate that the ambition to create a national body leads to a conflation of space as well as a conflation of anxieties, which means that discourses of gender, class, race, and colonialism should not be thought separately. These works do not always engage with French colonial anxieties by pointing to the spaces where France had colonies or had colonial interest. Instead, they raise the specter of the foreign Other more generally to articulate concerns about its relationship to the body politic. Beyond the scope of this project other texts that also can productively be read in this way include Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or and Cousine Bette, Théophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse, and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Une Vielle Maîtresse. In the face of plans for a national future these and other nineteenth-century works were engaging with the inescapable necessity of the female body, without which the very reproduction of the future would not be possible. This very necessity, however, marks 163 female sexuality as a dangerous variable. The female body stands in as the dubious past giving birth to the new nation. Moreover, the works demonstrate the necessity of Otherness in the constitution of a national identity and a national body. It is not that aristocratic women represented a local threat to the nation and that foreign women represented a threat to France’s international position. It is that the female body was defined as a foreign Other lurking within France’s national borders. Anxieties that would seem to be situated in the past or in the foreign return to the homeland and to the home itself. René and Ourika express a desire to rehabilitate elements of France’s aristocratic past in order to find a place for that past in the national project. Both works attempt to assimilate aristocratic subjectivities to bourgeois values. René proclaims aristocratic femininity as incompatible with futurity because it is sterile. The pacified and passive colonialized female body is offered as a substitute so that aristocratic masculinity can be integrated into the national body through participation in bourgeois re-productivity. The work’s colonial utopia is short-lived, however, and the text betrays Chateaubriand’s uncertainty about the feasibility of his proposed project. The same failure that led to the fall of the ancien régime leads to the colonial failure in America—the failure of aristocratic masculinity. This breakdown in French national potency is borne out in the Haitian Revolution. Ourika, which responds directly to both the French and Haitian Revolutions, re- frames aristocratic femininity as respectable through the cooption of bourgeois feminine values, i.e. maternity, generosity, and charitably, and through the authority of the intervention of bourgeois scientific masculinity. The work is successful in so far as it 164 recasts the salonnière as a model for combining bourgeois values with the intellectual and emotional intelligence of Duras’s idealized aristocratic woman. The novel also proposes a new model of colonialism that attempts to assimilate the black female body into Duras’s future-oriented aristocracy. For Duras, however, the integration of aristocratic womanhood into the nationalist project means that another inassimilable Other must be located within the national space. That Other is black femininity. At the same time that Ourika’s body is used as a screen for displaying the superiority of Duras’s new aristocratic woman, her foreignness is constantly enunciated so that white aristocratic women can take their place on the post-Revolutionary stage. That Duras allows a black woman to enter France provokes a reaction on the part of her contemporaries, who re-write the world as a racially segregated place in adaptations of the Ourika story, which insist on sending Ourika back to Africa. Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin ironizes contemporary desires for the aristocratic past and for colonialism. Instead of proposing one element as the cure for the other he critiques both through the danger of a feminine and feminizing female seduction. While Raphaël’s father attempts a bourgeois reclamation of his family’s aristocratic legacy through his son, the son’s desire for that very legacy proves too strong. While Chateaubriand attempts to render aristocratic masculinity compatible with middle class values through settler colonialism, Balzac sees aristocratic masculinity as a failure precisely because of its colonial ambitions, conflating aristocratic and Oriental decadence. He suggests that both are fatally effeminizing. The anxieties about race, class and gender explored in Chateaubriand, Duras, and Balzac culminate in Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille. Aristocratic and black femininities are 165 conflated and confused through the sexual danger they represent to the national body. The statue symbolizes anxieties about resurrection of the past, about regional culture subverting the nationalist project, about the impotence and sterility of the aristocracy, and about the threat of illegible and sexually aggressive aristocratic and black femininities. Like La Peau de Chagrin, this short story reflects on and complicates contemporary French nationalist and imperialist discourses by articulating interest in colonialism as a relic of ancien régime decadence. The publication of La Vénus d’Ille coincides with the restored monarchy’s increasing enthusiasm for French colonialism in Algeria. With France moving toward a more concrete plan for colonizing North Africa Mérimée resurrects the terrors of the colonial past, situating them closer and closer to France itself. The work suggests that as the colonial project became an increasingly imminent reality the need to produce a national body that could withstand foreign contact became increasingly important. Representations of aristocratic French femininity as a foreign Other persist throughout the nineteenth century, as the project of French nationalism continues to assert itself. This way of thinking the female body crosses the channel and comes back to France. So profoundly engrained is this imagining together of fears about gender, class, race, and colonialism that it even appears in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 Salomé. The play characterizes Salomé through overlapping anxieties about upper-class and Oriental feminine sexual excess. “Comme la princesse est belle ce soir!//Regardez la lune. La lune a l’air étrange. On dirait une femme qui sortait d’un tombeau. Elle ressemble à une femme morte. On dirait qu’elle cherchait des morts.” 315 Echoing earlier nineteenth- 315 Oscar Wilde, Salomé, drame en un acte (Paris: Librairie de l’art indépendant, 1983), 9. 166 century French literature, the text draws a comparison between Salomé and the moon to suggest that the former embodies the resurrection of a past mode of femininity that is fatal because desirable. These lines from early in the play presage the violent destruction will patriarchal society Salomé will cause in the end that both fascinates and repels characters and the audience alike. She manipulates Hérodias’s desire for her and forces him to murder to prophet in exchange for access to her body. She also violates the body of the prophet, who acts as intermediary between the Jewish people and their deity in the work. Similar to Mérimée, Wilde portrays the royal, female, Oriental Other as a dead and deadly threat to the sovereignty of the kingdom as she engages her sexuality to influence men and compromise male authority. It is unlikely that Wilde himself had much (or any) investment in French national or colonial projects or in the relationship between the two, being neither French nor terribly nationalistic. The play itself was only brought to France because it defied British censorship laws, and thus challenged moral hygiene and British imperial identity. We, however, find Wilde reenacting a conflation of race, gender, and class in a way that mirrors earlier French literary concerns about both the reproduction of the nation and about colonial expansion, for the entertainment of French audiences who were willing to consume his salacious play. Wilde does this at a time when France’s imperial activity in North Africa is vastly expanding and becoming increasingly important to productions of national identity and international power. French colonial expansion in the Maghreb and throughout Africa, after 1870, was motivated by nationalist zeal following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. 316 As we can see from Wilde’s work, early nineteenth- 316 Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 23. 167 century modes of imagining Otherness both in relation to actual geopolitical events, and as a literary device, persist throughout the nineteenth century. It is crucial that we as scholars understand the role of early nineteenth-century literature in constructing the female body as a foreign Other within the nation, in order to comprehend the development of France’s (inter)nationalist and colonialist discourses throughout the century and perhaps beyond. In fact, there are a number of ways that this work informs French relations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One avenue of approach would be to reconsider early nineteenth-century literature’s relationship to the missions civilisatrices that France implemented in North and West Africa and South-East Asia. We see resonances of the legacies of the civilizing missions in French attempts to domesticate Algerian women both in Algeria, and by encouraging migration to France following WWII, which marked the beginning of the end of France’s imperial reign. Even as France employs migration as a tool to maintain control over French colonial subjects, the female body is still located as a site of anxiety and desired control. As Kristen Ross argues in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, when French efforts to forcefully integrate the Other fail, and Algeria wins independence, France attempts to articulate the (moral) superiority of the nation by linking hygiene (clean bodies, clean homes), reproductivity, and consumerism (which symbolizes national wealth) to the body politic. 317 Another constructive way of considering the discourses of moral hygiene and reproduction that Ross evokes would be to, as I have done for pre-Algeria, explore productions of the female body as foreign Other in France post-Algeria. 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Creator Leventhal, Ingrid (author)

Core Title 'L'autre chez nous': defining the national body in French literature, 1800-1848

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program French

Publication Date 09/28/2017

Defense Date 09/01/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag French colonialism,French national identity, gender,nineteenth-century French literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,sexuality

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Meeker, Natania (committee chair), Diaz, Roberto (committee member), Harrison, Olivia (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email ileventh@usc.edu,ingrid.leventhal@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-439254

Unique identifier UC11264475

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Legacy Identifier etd-LeventhalI-5795.pdf

Dmrecord 439254

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Leventhal, Ingrid

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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