This other darkness: exotic bodies and the gaze of romanticism

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Content THIS OTHER DARKNESS: EXOTIC BODIES AND THE GAZE OF ROMANTICISM by Katherine Anne Holderbaum A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (French) August 1995 Copyright 1995 Holderbaum Katherine Anne UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007 This dissertation, written by J b H ? . ! i . 5 . r . . f e A . y . . r C i . under the direction of h&)c..... Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re quirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dean of Graduate Studies Date DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson Contents Introduction.................................................................................................... 1 Chapter O n e ..................................................................................................... 20 Chapter T w o .....................................................................................................65 Chapter T hree................................................................................................. 110 Chapter F o u r...................................................................................................161 Conclusion......................................................................................................201 Works C ite d ....................................................................................................211 Katherine Holderbaum Peter T.Starr This Other Darkness: Exotic Bodies and the Gaze of Romanticism This dissertation explores questions of race and gender to analyze cultural factors determining literary production during the first third of the nineteenth century. The study concentrates on four novels, each of which features a black or creole female protagonist: Madame Claire de Duras' Ourika (1824), Adele Daminois' Lydie, ou la creole (1824), La Negresse (1826) by Madame Ballent and J. Quantin, and George Sand's Indiana (1832). These texts exemplify how the colonialist era replaced experiences of women of color with a wide range of discourses, all associated with what we understand as Romanticism. In an effort to complement Edward Said's analysis, I locate orientalism as a sub-system, along with Christopher Miller's delineation of Africanist discourse, of the larger rubric of Romanticism. I furthermore see both orientalism and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific treatments of race as constructing a gaze designed to apprehend the difference that bodies of color represent. I demonstrate how Western discourse has historically insisted that an essence of black people be constructed such that it may be apprehended at a glance. By investigating the discursive factors that help explain Romanticism's configuration of black identities, this study argues for the need to racialize texts that have not been adequately racialized in previous critical work. For example, such figures as Naomi Schor and Leon-Fran^ois Hoffmann either regard Sand's construction of the other exclusively in terms of feminine identity (as in the case of Schor) or fail to theorize Indiana's creole characters as examples of negres romantiques (Hoffmann). The prescriptions of scientism and exoticism, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific treatments of race, and colonialist enterprise--all influenced the depictions of these protagonists. My study examines both the cultural environment an d the textual structure specific to each of the four texts above to determine the influences brought to bear on the black and creole women they present. Finally, my study causes critics and their theories of various discursive systems to come into contact in ways that I hope cause-or at the very least, call for— mutual critical disruption. Introduction This dissertation explores questions of race and gender to analyze cultural factors determining literary production during the first third of the nineteenth century. The study concentrates on four novels, each of which features a black or creole female protagonist: Madame Claire de Duras' Ourika (1824), Addle Daminois' Lydie, ou la creole (1824), La Negresse (1826) by Madame Ballent and J. Quantin, and George Sand's Indiana (1832). This project began with a reading of George Sand's Indiana (1832) in which I sought to theorize the doubling of the novel's female creole women. I specifically examined the repetition of a seduction scene involving first Noun, Indiana's black soeur de lait, then Indiana herself with the womanizing Raymon de Ramidre. I began to w onder about the implications that the females' racial difference had on the portrayal of these scenes. After extensive research, I realized that no critic had analyzed Indiana for the crucial question of these characters' racial difference. Such eminent figures in French literary studies as Naomi Schor and Ldon-Frangois Hoffmann either regarded Sand's construction of the other exclusively in terms of feminine identity (as in the case of Schor) or failed to theorize Indiana's creole characters as examples of negres romantiques (Hoffmann). This critical oversight motivated my investigation into the historical and cultural factors that served as the impetus to the construction of the black and creole female characters in the three remaining texts, each of which pre-dates Indiana and Noun. My aim here, in other words, is to track the development of approaches to contemporary 1 literature that were dictated by a cultural emphasis on the physical and experiential to support character development. My investigation into the status of the creole identity in the cultural imagination of nineteenth-century France led me to examine the impact on contemporary fiction of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific discourse and of the discourse of colonial administrators. My study of nineteenth-century literary portraits of sang-meles has brought me to the study and practice of physiognomy, which found repeated literary application in France and England after 1810 but has its roots in the Physiognomische Fragmente (1775) of Lavater. It has also led me to look at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialist discourse surrounding the mulatto. Romantic literary prescription (which incorporated such notions as those held forth by primitivism, scientism, exoticism and ethnocentrism), eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scientific treatments of race, and colonialist enterprise all influenced contemporary literary depictions of black and creole female protagonists. Physiognomical observations, which asserted that individuals' physical features betray their moral and spiritual levels of development, held great promise for character depiction and development. Balzac and George Sand, in fact, found themselves among the physiognomical proponents of the Romantic movement (Tytler 100). Physiognomy and the related science of phrenology were perhaps the most explicit manifestion in popular form of the belief in a direct relationship between the body, behavior and society. However, as L6on Poliakov stresses, "...avant Freud, il y eut Darwin", which is to say that 2 physiognomical practices exhibited many of the deterministic problems inherent to Darwin's theories (" Le Fantasme" 181). My investigation examines the effects of colonialism on the cultural imagination of early nineteenth-century France. I also examine Romanticism's fascination w ith orientalism. To this end, I will discuss such texts as Edward Said's Orientalism and Mario Praz' The Romantic Agony. Said's study throws considerable light on the nature of Romantic prescription for the literary portraits of non-European characters. For the purposes of this project, Christopher Miller's analysis of Africanist discourse from Blank Darkness refines Said's study by defining aspects particular to the discourses surrounding black identity. Sand's protagonist, Indiana, and her black servant N oun had been brought up as sisters on l'lle Bourbon, off the eastern coast of Africa. The novel opens with Indiana, a young woman of Spanish descent, unhappily living in France and married to an older and abusive husband, M onsieur Delmare. Indiana's passion is awakened by the unrelenting overtures of the womanizing Raymon de Ramidre, whom Indiana discovers to have been Noun's lover only after Noun's suicide. H er confronting Rami&re w ith her knowledge of their previous affair repulses him. After attempting to win back his affection— and to commit suicide herself— Indiana returns to L'lle Bourbon w ith her adoring English cousin, Ralph, the two in effect exiling themselves from society for the rest of their days. Melodramatic adventure and sentiment, or "low" melodrama, best characterize the text in four volumes, Lydie, on la creole. The story opens in Saint-Domingue before the French Revolution. Lydie, a European wom an of Portugese descent, is married to the kind a n d compassionate Comte de Saint- Yves. Early in th e text, M. d e Saint-Yves manum its their favorite slave, the m ulatto, Astolphe. During th e accompanying ceremony, Astolphe recounts his being wrenched from his m other's arms an d sold to a cruel master before M. de Saint-Yves brought him to th e ir household- The text introduces Don Aurdlio Gonzales, Lydie's uncle, a Portugese missionary and, later, a cardinal and favorite of the court at Lisbon- Gonzales is revealed as the story's villian when he plots against Astolphe and Lydie after th e death of M. de Saint-Yves. It was he, w e learn, w h o sold Astolphe into slavery- We learn that Astolphe is the son of a native N orth American and of Gonzales' sister, Maria. Gonzales feared that Astolphe's illegitimacy would threaten the pow er Maria's innocent Christian piety weilded over th e new converts. Lydie and Astolphe escape to post-Revolutionary France after the Saint-Domingue uprising. There they encounter racial prejudice ag ain st their friendship. After mishaps, triumphs and coups de thedtres, they die separately never having expressed their love for one another. Ourika stan d s noticeably apart from th e typically sentimental women's literature for its time. Madame d e Duras tells the story of an African girl brought to France from Senegal as a gift to M adame de B, a benevolent aristocrat. These events put o u rik a in an extraordinary social position: although well-educated and g iv e n every opportunity afforded to her peers, she stands no chance o f performing r °les that oth er (white) wom en play in society because, ultimately, marriage is out of the question. W hen the Revolution breaks out, Ourika describes th e chaos as one of the few liberating times of her life. After the m an she loves, M adame de B /s grandson, Charles, marries another woman, Ourika gives into her pain. She passionately longs for death and becomes gravely ill. Finally, she retreats into exile, dying in a convent after having recounted her first-person narrative to a young doctor. Although Madame de Duras did not originally conceive this tale. The story of Ourika is true and existed as a salon anecdote and also as the subject of various one-act plays (Hoffmann 227).1 The Chevalier de Boufflers, after having returned from Africa, presented a Senegalese girl to la mar£chale de Beauvau (Switzer 310). Two years later, La Negresse took issue with Ourika's story. Although it is unclear w heth' - Ballent and Quantin respond to the pre existing anecdote or to Madame de Duras’ version, the authors do clearly react to the dismal climax to Ourika's fate. Like Ourika, the protagonist, Marie, finds herself orphaned in France. Her benevolant neighbor, Madame Bertault, raises Marie and her own daughter as sisters. Marie meets Henri, a nephew of M adame Bertault's brother, Monsieur Durand. Soon H enri cain think of little else but Marie. Meanwhile, Madame Bertault entrusts Marie's care to Durand at her death. Durand endeavors to thwart the love between Marie and Henri. He has no reservations about their bi-racial romance; he stands in their way out of love for Marie himself. Provincial gossip also poses a threat to the lovers' well-being. The interracial couple circumvent both Durand's jealousy and parochial hostility by moving to Paris where they find success and happiness. Both utopic and dystopic versions of Ourikg, existed prior to the publication of Duras' version. W ithout its relation to unhappy versions, such 1 Hoffm ann mentions two plays, Ourika, ou I'orpheline africaine and a play by Villeneuve et Dupeuty. as Madame de Duras wrote, La Negresse holds little interest. The objection La Negresse raises w ith respect to tragic versions olOurika reveals a key to the cultural imagination of the time. The imagination of French reading audiences with regard to non-European characters was the product of complex cultural structures and systems. My study examines both the discursive cultural environment and the textual structure specific to each of the four texts above to determine the influences brought to bear on the black and creole female characters they present. I In the study that follows, I use the expression "black bodies" to refer to people of African origin and to connote the multiplicity inherent to this particular group of people. From time to time, this study also employs this phrase in the singular, "the black body," and phrases such as "the black object" and "black identity" in an racist fashion as though my discourse assumes no differentiation between people of color. While my use of these expressions assuredly deploys essentialist reasoning, I use these terms to connote the objectification black people have suffered in various Western discursive contexts. In so doing , my discourse manifests institutional bad faith. Lewis Gordon explains, I "call a spade a spade and take advantage of the duality of the black body as a construction of institutional bad faith and the black body as a situation faced by every black person" (Gordon 105). Which is to say that according to my use of the term, "the black body is invited to live in such a way that there is no distinction between a particular black body and black bodies. Every black person becomes a limb of an enormous black body: THE BLACK BODY" (Gordon 105). However, my study argues that Western discourse has constructed a gaze to stand in for elaborations of difference and that this gaze has been a primary historical means by which notions of black bodies have been conflated w ith notions of black identity. In those instances where I have chosen to refer to black bodies as "the black body" and people of color as "the black object" and "black identity," I hope to demonstrate how Western discourse has historically insisted that an essence of black people be constructed such that it may be apprehended at a glance. One of the earliest means by which the European became aquainted with people indigenous to other lands--and by which the identities of people of color were thus reduced to an objectified status— was the travel journal. Travel journals and fiction written by travelers, with their melange of personal viewpoint and colonialist perspective, provided essential principles for later scholarly "objective" reasoning about non-European peoples and customs. Historically, this m anoeuver— the transformation of travel testimony into scientific observation-proved a principal agent by which non-European identities became constructed. Thus, the mechanism by which travel literature transformed itself into empirical knowledge, also effectively effaced the threat of difference the non-European posed. From the first look, travelers perceived non-European bodies and cultures in terms of a European model for physical and social acceptibility. Ultimately, nascent scientific cultivation of travel diary testimonies greatly contributed to the evolution of deterministic and objectifying factors that the philosophes, European scholars, and w om en/m en of letters incorporated into their scrutiny of the black object (Said 157). Encounters between black bodies and the European observer had occured throughout the age of discovery, long before the institution of slavery. By the eighteenth century, however, many African and Caribbean nations found themselves overcome by European commercial exploitation of their collective and forced labor. While searching for the universal basis of equality among men, the philosophes fabricated general criteria to uncover the laws that determine hum an behavior and experience. Because of the unifying and universal nature of sensory perception, the philosophes based their general laws on physical determinants and limitations. As a consequence, universalization of human experience dem anded eradication of any identity proper to the non-European as a matter of ideological coherence.2 In place of an elaboration of black identity, the eighteenth-century imagination substituted disciplines and methodologies. The work of the philosophes is rife with tension betw een the universal factors underlying human experience and determinist theory and practice. By imagining the responses of Middle Eastern visitors to French aristocratic culture, M ontesquieu's Les-Lettres Persanes (1721) seeks to "demonstrate cultural relativity itself" (Creech 412). Likewise, Pierre Pluchon's Negres et juifs au X V III siecle: le racisme au siecle des lumieres identifies M ontesquieu as "le fondateur de la science politique moderne" (135). Pluchon recognizes that M ontesquieu's theories ”repren[nent] les id£es anciennes et les pr£jug£s condamn£s par les lumieres [qui] avaient, par accident, dit tout haut ce que chacun pensait tout bas..." (135). He quotes from De Vesprit des lois : 2 As Foucault observes, "Les 'Lumieres' qui ont dgcouvert les libertfis ont aussi invents les disciplines" (224). Ceux dont il s'agit sont noirs depuis les pieds jusqu'& la tete; et ils ont le nez si £crasd qu'il est presque impossible de les plaindre. On ne peut se mettre dans l'esprit que Dieu, qui est u n etre sage, ait mis u n e ame, surtout une ame bonne, dans vm corps tout noir. (135) F o r the most part, eighteenth-century philosophical texts betray more faith in a n ultimate, all-encompassing order than in any overt contamination by colonialist interest— except, of course, in the case of Voltaire. "For Voltaire," w rites U?on Poliakov, the blacks were quite simply animals....It might be remembered that he had invested deeply in the triangular trade...as when he discusses 'the monstrous beings b o rn from these abominable lives', namely crosses between orang-outangs and Negresses...Precisely because these utterances were not systematic, but blurted out at the most unexpected moments, his negrophobic statements did not lose their efficacy. ("Racism" 55) The w ork of Kant, no less than that of Voltaire and of Buffon, postulated theories that were themselves born of cultural relativism and thus served as an im portant inspiration for racial theory before Darwin (Ross 55). In his essays, O n the Different Human Races (1775-1777) and Definition of the Concept o f the H um an Race (1785), one finds traces of Buffon's L'Histoire naturelle de I'Homme (1749) which carried serious implications for m ost eighteenth- century perceptions of non-European cultures. Pol-P. Gossiaux observes: L’anthropologie de Kant autorisera VHistoire naturelle h combler l’ hiatus qui fracturait le champ de ses principes 4galitaristes et ses conclusions empiriques, inspires p a r le concept antinomique 9 d'une "culture " fondle sur un N orm e naturelle et qui ne pouvaient que s'alt£rer en une rhetorique blasphdmatoire contre l'homme non-blanc. (56) Consequently, the first chapter of this project, "The Effect of the Scientific Gaze on Indiana and Ourika", investigates the profound influence of Buffon's L ’ Histoire naturelle on subsequent systemics regarding black bodies, and especially on the development of the studies of anthropology and ethnology. Saint-Simon once observed th at "les revolutions scientifiques et les revolutions politiques ont toujours 6te successives." (Boissel 22). Similarly, the black African body, as an object of commercial exchange, also served as the object of nascent scientific exchange. Scientific conclusions regarding black bodies affected social theory and legislative interdictions which sought to control both slave mobility an d the sexuality of freemen. The first and foremost means of sacrificing black identity to the interests of methodology came through scientific experimentation. Experimentation led in turn to hypotheses on the crossbreeding of blacks w ith whites. Michele Duchet remarks that in Buffon's experiments to this end, "la superiority de la race blanche fait partie des donnyes" ("Du Noir" 182). The most important feature of L'Histoire naturelle is the international effect of Buffon's study on subsequent scientists and philosophers. Ultimately, Enlightenment philosophy and methodology established a give and take among burgeoning experimentors and theorists of the physical and biological sciences. More important, the genesis of the methodology th at determined European perceptions of the black body took place thanks to both philosopher and scientist. The tales of travelers and colonists alike were transformed into early forms of scientific discourse, 10 resulting ultimately in a textuality that combined critical positivist discipline with "pre-Romantic" ideals. n My first chapter examines the characterizations of both N oun and Indiana in light of an evolution of the gaze from scientific discourse from narrative discourse. More specifically, it examines the relationship between biological discourse and Romantic literary theory by tracking the influence of physiognomy and phrenology on Romantic literary practice. In the nineteenth century, as in our own, vision played as much a p a rt in the construction of racial difference as it played in the construction o f femininity. Throughout this study, the "gaze of Romanticism" refers to the gaze of scientists, colonial administrators, and women and men of letters from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Depictions of black bodies and identities in French literature of the Restoration were shaped in large p art by the scientific gaze established in the eighteenth century. This historical meeting between people of color and the gaze of travelers and conquerors subsequently established a systematizing gaze employed by sociological, scientific and political doctrine. Given the trans-historical nature of the gaze, each of the proposed fictional texts becomes an arena in which psychoanalytic theory of the gaze can be m ade to accomodate the feminine body of non-white, non-European origin. The inquiry that follows in Chapter One draws upon theories o f male desire as transmitted by the "gaze," as put forth by such critics as Kaja Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror, Jacques Lacan in his chapter, "Of the Gaze as Petit Object a, " an d Mary A nn Doane in "The Dark Continent." Thorough feminist theory of m ale desire an d the gaze, this project explores the role of the gaze of science, colonialist administration, and fiction in the construction of black and m ulatto identities at the turn of the nineteenth century. C hapter One also takes issue w ith the analyses put forth by critics w h o theorize black and feminine identity. For example, the theories feminist critics like Schor and Doane espouse reveal serious critical oversights. While Schor, for example, advances compelling concepts, such as that of female travesty, in relation to Indiana, she fails to do so in terms of racial difference. Doane, meanwhile, confuses the experience of black men by conflating it w ith that of w hite women in patriarchal society. My second chapter, "Sand's Doubling: Racial Difference Overlooked", focuses on the implicit racial ambiguity that surrounds Sand's creole characters. In an endeavor to shed light on Sand's construction o f Noun a n d Indiana, this chapter investigates the discourse of colonial administrators and women an d m en of letters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapter Two examines literary portraits of sang-meles that Hoffm ann provides in Negres Romantiques. It also draws upon Pierre Pluchon's study, Negres et juifs au X V JII siecle: le racisme au siecle des lumieres, to investigate exam ples of eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonialist discourse surrounding the m ulatto. This chapter uses theories of racism to determ ine just w hat motivates the findings an d pronouncements made b y colonialist discourse. The second chapter commences w ith France's developm ent of a new historicism in the early nineteenth century. The effort to reformulate historiography took place during the Restoration's efforts at restructuring French society. Historians could now interpret events and delve into questions 12 of class and ethnic origins without yielding to the nobility, which had colored both history and historiography with its power and privilege. In the end, however, the new historicism did not invalidate the priorities of the nobility. Young historians met the Restoration challenge simply by inverting the hierarchical values of the ancien regime. Nevertheless, proponents of the new historiography retained and promoted the racial consciousness of the defunct noble class. The new historiography also maintained a direct relationship to theories Romanticism held with regard to history and destiny. Again, these theories were for the most part overladen with determinism. Chapter Two explores the evolution of deterministic prescription elaborated by such proponents of the Romantic movement as Germaine de Stael (an im portant literary role model for Sand) and Stendhal.3 For the most part, Romantic authors, such as Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael and Stendhal, advocated systems based on physiological theory to structure evolving Romantic philosophy. The parallel seduction scenes from Sand's novel also insist on the visual. Each of these scenes is structured around the gaze of the womanizing Raymon de Ramidre. Ramifcre observes as his lovers, first Noun and then Indiana, attem pt to seduce him. In each case, the image of the absent woman 3 According to Jacques Barzun, de Stael's De la Literature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800) and De VAllemagne (1810) express a "N orth-and- South principle of criticism," embracing a "climate theory of art" that "shows a passion for finding one trait, one formula, to cover diversity" (Barzun 80-81). Barzun continues: "When the swiss critic and traveler Charles-Victor de Bonstetten...published his study L'Homme du midi et Vhomme du nord in 1824, the public w as already familiar w ith the North-and-South theories of art. The cliches were established, and a grave critic like Sainte-Beuve could rely on their general acceptance. In the following thirty years no im portant change occurred in the racial criticism of art” (86-7). 13 merges into that of the present woman, as if Ramidre cannot look at one creole w ithout recalling her double. Sand's description of these passages sets u p a kind of mise-en-abyme where the effect on the level of racial difference is particularly complex. In Chapter Two I examine not only how structures those discursive means of understanding racial difference but also how it plays a principal role in the structure of both sister scenes from Indiana. My third chapter addresses the status and employment of such complex notions such as primitivism, exoticism and sentimentalism in French literature before the publication of Daminois'Lydic, ou la creole. This chapter describes the primitive and childlike characteristics attributed to the female creole, Lydie, and her male mulatto companion, Astolphe, in the sympathetic terms through which enlightened m inds had depicted the non-European. As such, Lydie is a privileged vehicle for studying the effect of Rousseau and Chateaubriand in the evolution of Europe's impossible romance with the noble savage. The Enlightenment saw a proliferation of abolitionist texts, not the least of which were L'Abb£ Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes (1775) and Jaucourt’ s articles on slavery from La Grande Encyclopedic. In fact, at the onset of the Revolution, abolitionist rhetoric would discard its moderate tendencies and grow more and more impassioned (Pluchon 151). Numerous non- canonical philosophes, such as one La Valine, devoted texts like Le Negre comme i l y a peu de blancs to the anti-colonialist cause (Pluchon 151). However, many "anti-colonialist" texts transmitted mixed messages. Both La Vallde and Raynal, for example, make repeated and familiar references to the primitive, barbarous and childlike qualities of black men in the very texts where they condemn slavery and racial prejudice. These qualities formed the 14 basis of quintessential sympathetic gestures towards w om en and m en of color. Overall, argues Pluchon, racism ran ram pant during the era of Enlightenment: Les esprits ”6clair6s", en luttant pour la suprgmatie des dogmes universels, en arrivent k defendre la cause des "N&gres philosophes". A les £couter, les Africains doivent leur bonheur k leur ignorance, qui les m et k l’ abri des d^sirs contre-nature, g^n^rateurs du malheur de l'homme. Aucune reconnaissance d'ygality, autre que formelle, dans cette croisade. Une manifcre rationante du mepris. (149) Ad&le Daminois devoted her work to contemporary women's issues.5 Her repeated stand against racial prejudice lends to Lydie, ou la creole a tone of political engagement, a tone very much in tune with the political pulse of its time. The text frequently addresses its female readers because it seeks a response on an "emotional" level: "C'est pourtant k elles que je m'adresse...pour obtenir un regard compatissant, une larm e de pitiy. C'est k un sexe plein de sensibility...que je pr^sente le tableau des malheurs d 'u n homme qui a existy" (vii). Daminois appeals to her audience's emotional sensibility to transm it her message of racial harmony. Although Daminois' sentimentalization of her mulatto and creole characters is indicative of a politically liberal agenda, this liberal agenda carried grave implications for her literary portraits of the mulatto and creole (Hoffmann 238). Because Lydie, ou la creole invokes exotic constructions, such as the noble savage, the subject matter explored in Chapter Three necessitates 5 "Cette dame...a public dans divers recueils de nom breux artides p o u r obtenir Em ancipation de son sexe et son admission aux em plois et aux honneurs" ("Daminois, Adfcle," Nouvelle Biographic Gen(rale 867). 15 clarification of such broad term s as primitivism and exoticism. I therefore draw upon definitions Tzvetan Todorov puts forth in Nous et les autres: La Reflexion frangaise sur la diversite humaine. While the first two chapters of m y study examine the concepts of Africanism and Orientalism, according to Miller and Said respectively, these two term s fall w ithin the larger and more general discursive rubric of exoticism as Todorov defines it. Accordingly, the third chapter takes Todorov's definition of exoticism as a general rubric encompassing both Africanist and Orientalist discourse. Both of these discursive systems manifest some elements of exotic sub-systems which include nationalism, ethnocentrism, primitivism, scientism, and relativism. Todorov’ s model of exoticism and its subsets are indispensible to this project, especially to m y reading of Lydie wherein I see Daminois explicitly invoking Rousseau and Chateaubriand as her inspiration. Todorov's elaboration of primitivism also clarifies convictions held by the authors of La Negresse, which I discuss in my fourth chapter. Todorov's inquiry excludes erotic components specific to exoticism. The erotic and the exotic typically find expression in one another and their relationship sheds light onto the predicament faced by Duras' Ourika. The third chapter combines the notions of sentimentalism and Christian liberalism with the sub-systemic characteristics of Africanist and Orientalist discourse cited above to shed light on the characters of Lydie and Astolphe. Frank Bowman's French Romanticism is also important to chapter three insofar as it explores a relationship between the Christian liberal tradition and the Romantic agenda. Romanticism made use of exoticism -am ong other them es— to express its political and artistic visions. Lydie is useful to the extent 16 that it becomes the instrument for exploring the effect of sentimentalism on "exotic" characters such as a creole female and the literary m ulatto. The fourth and final chapter to this project considers D uras’ Ourika in conjunction with La Negresse. More specifically, it investigates Ourika in light of twentieth-century theories of autobiography and testimonio. Although testimonio is a twentieth-century literary phenomenon, theories of the genre reveal OunKa as an exception to prevalent nineteenth-century discursive treatments of black femininity. Because this text explicitly focuses on the social consequences of racial difference in eighteenth-century aristocratic France, Ourika represents an alternative to the aforementioned discursive treatments of black and creole femininity. Accordingly, questions that this chapter poses in relation to Madame de Duras' text include: w hy is Revolutionary upheaval a comfort to black subjectivity in white society? Does Madame d e Duras potentially empower black femininity by having Ourika tell her ow n story? Much more so than any of the other novels examined above, O urika explores the psychological ramifications of black femininity as a source o f alienation and inhibition to any representation in a society of whites. The authors of La Negresse question Ourika's characterization of black femininity. Their text stands as a veritable indictment of Ourika. The preface of La Negresse makes clear that Ourika's fate is unacceptable to an abolitionist society th a t looks forward to racial integration. Finally, Ourika's story is counterproductive to endeavors to promote positive images of blacks. Both the story a n d protagonist of La Negresse, by contrast, exist to advance such positive images. La Negresse combats negative images of blacks already too prevelant in the m inds of French readers. 17 That "Other Darkness" to which the title of this study refers is meant to invoke Maurice Blanchot's concept of "cette autre nuit" from L'Espace de la litterature. H ere, Blanchot clears a path away from the dialectic of night and day by introducing the ''other" night an d by advocating that one turn away from the first night, the essential factor o f the dialectic (169). The study that follows explores various constructions of black and mulatto identities in terms sim ilar to Blanchot's elaboration of the other night. Notions of darkness have historically constructed black identity an d thus have dominated portrayals of black characters in fiction and drama. The notions of darkness surrounding the portrayal of black characters are comparable to (but not equivalent with) those w hich construct mulatto identity. Therefore, various discursive contexts m aintained a different position for the construction and containment of both. I have suggested that the concepts that structured black identity were themselves constructed in such a way as to allow for black identity's sacrifice to em pirical methodology. Discourse presented the m ulatto identity, however, as an almost hidden and thus uncontainable threat, m uch as Blanchot has described the other darkness: Le fuir, c'est l'attacher & ses pas, il est alors l'ombre qui toujours vous suit et toujours vous pr£c£de. Le rechercher par une decision mdthodique, c'est aussi le mgconnaitre. L’ ignorer rend la vie plus ldgdre et les taches plus sures, mais dans l'ignorance il est encore dissimul£, l'oubli est la profondeur de son souvenir. (177) Likewise, the m ulatto identity is capable of producing a profound social anguish and paranoia, a reaction distinct from those scientistic reactions which m ore effectively staved off the threat of difference black Africans posed. 18 Thus there is a revelatory aspect to discursive treatment of the mulatto. The movement away from dialectical influences comprises a very small portion of Blanchot's explanation. More important, Blanchot's concept details the relationship between work and the machinations of misguided inspiration: Et qui le pressent [cette autre nuit], ne peut plus se ddrober. Qui s'en est approch£, meme s'il a reconnu en lui le risque de l'inessentiel, voit dans cette approche l'essentiel, lui sacrifie toute la v£rit£, tout le sdrieux auxquels pourtant il se sent li£. (177) This misguided state as Blanchot describes it, approaches the dynamics of racism. We shall see how all but one of the following authors attempt to elude, rather to respond to, the inspiration that political treatments of racial difference hold forth. 19 Chapter One The Effects of the Scientific Gaze on Black and Creole Characters of Indiana and Ourika This chapter investigates eighteenth-century scientific discourse in relation to non-European, and more specifically, black African bodies. I intend to highlight the consequences of this relationship for the development of black female characters of two novels: George Sand's Indiana (1832), and Claire de Duras' Ourika (1824). Scientific treatises historically emphasized the association between the non-European and the corporal. This association resulted in both rendering black bodies abject on the one hand and creating a sort of gaze designed to apprehend black bodies on the other.5 Buffon's L'Histoire naturelle (1749) for example, deems non-European bodies and customs abject, and had a far-reaching impact on works by subsequent scientists. L'Histoire naturelle follows the orientalist pattern, outlined by Edward Said, whereby one scientist's classifications of the black object served as the unquestioned fodder for the next scientist's point of departure.6 Thus, this chapter explores examples of succeeding eighteenth-century naturalism which both employed and perpetuated physiologically-based reasoning. In 5 I consider die abject according to Julia Kristeva's analysis put forth in Pouvoirs de I ’horreur. 6 According to Boissel, examples of works in natural history at this time w hich dealt w ith the question by establishing racial hierarchies include Dum gril’s Zoologie analytique (1806), his Legons d'anatomie compariede G. Cuvier (1800), and Desmoulins' Histoire Naturelle des Races Humaines (1826). Boissel also m entions one colonel Bory de Saint-Vincent who, divided hum an varieties into fifteen, deem ing the Hottentot not only the last but also the m ost grotesque (131). 20 this way scientific discourse passed along legacies of the abject with respect to black bodies which had equally abjectifying consequences for fictional depictions. In addition, the gaze of the phrenologist and physiognomist developed from typically hierarchical outcomes and implications of natural history's experiments and discourse. W omen and men of letters cultivated the gaze of the phrenologist and physiognomist to construct literary portaits regardless of the movement an author espoused. To this end, the gaze o f scientific discourse infiltrated not only realist projects b u t also Romantic works. Authors of the nineteenth century, Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Balzac, and George Sand in particular, embraced Lavater's physiognomical theories as a literary resource for character development (Tytler 100). For her part, Sand greatly admired Lavater from girlhood. Since her characterizations share physiognomical aspects like those constructed by the realists, her adherence to Lavater's theories questions her place within the nineteenth- century canon. In light of the weight of Lavater's theories o n her novels, her work purports as much scientific substantiation and panoptic inclination as does Balzac's realism. Authors as a m atter of course subjected their depictions of the European body to features that announced class differences. Depictions of the physical traits of non-European bodies especially endured dichotomies and hierarchization. Most portrayals of non-European bodies, in literature, drama, or the plastic arts, associated certain notions and character traits w ith whiteness and others w ith blackness.7 To this end, bell hooks describes w hite 7 H arold Isaacs cites some well-known historical foundations of systems o f color hierarchy, m ost of them literary, beginning with the Bible: "These concepts and usages of black evil and 21 womens cultural status in the nineteenth century, illustrating the fetishization of white/European physical features over either African or any mix in between: [The] 19th century white w om [an]... was depicted as goddess rather than sinner; she was virtuous, pure, innocent, not sexual and worldly ... White male idealization of white women as innocent and virtuous served as an act of exorcism, which had as its purpose transforming her image and ridding her of the curse of sexuality ... as long as white women possessed sexual feeling they would be seen as degraded immoral creatures; remove those sexual feelings and they become beings worthy of love, consideration, and respect. Once the white female w as mythologized as pure and virtuous, a symbolic Virgin Mary, white men could see her as exempt from negative sexist stereotypes of the female. The price she had to pay was the suppression of natural sexual impulses. (Ain't I a Woman 31) Sand's literary portraits of Indiana and Noun likewise hierarchize racial characteristics. The novel's two seduction scenes particularly illustrate the narrator's investment in racial hierarchization. As the novel opens, the affair between N oun and Ramidre is underway. Their liason takes a turn as soon as Ramidre lays eyes on Nouns mistress, Indiana. The first seduction scene, wherein Noun has invited Ramidre to the absent Indiana's bedchamber, begins by contrasting the objects decorating Indiana's chamber with the presence of Noun. While Noun believes that the trappings of her fair mistress will create a w hite goodness, of beautiful fairness and ugly blackness, are deeply imbedded in the Bible, are folded into the language of Milton and Shakespeare, indeed are laced into alm ost every entwining strand of the art and literature in which our history is clothed. They can be traced dow n the columns of any dictionary from white hope to whitewash, from the black arts to the Black Mass, from black-browed and blackhearted to blacklist and blackmail. 'I am black but comely,' sang the Shulamite maiden to the daughters of Jerusalem and on that b u t hangs a w hole great skein of our culture." 22 more alluring environment to entice and satisfy Raymons desire, these same trappings powerfully and fetishistically call Indiana to mind: Ebloui par la transition brusque de l'obscurit£ & une vive lumi&re, Raymon resta quelques instants ytourdis; mais il ne lui fallut pas longtemps p o u r comprendre oil il ytait. Le gout exquis et la simplicity chaste qui pr^sidaient I l'ameublement; ces livres d'amour et de voyage, £pars sur les planches d'acajou...ces gravures qui repr&entaient les pastorales am ours de Paul et de Virginie, les cimes de llle Bourbon et les rivages bleus de Sainte- Paul; mais surtout...ce lit blanc et pudique comme celui d'une vierge, orn^ au chevet, en guise de rameau bynit...tout ryiyva madame Delmare, et Raymon fut saisi d'un Strange frisson en songeant que cette fem m e enveloppee d'un manteau, qui lavait conduit jusque-lct, ytait peut-etre Indiana elle-meme. Cette extravagante idye sembla se confirmer lorsqu'il vit apparaitre dans la glace en face de lui une forme blanche et parye, le fantome dune femme qui entre au bal et qui jette son m anteau pour se m ontrer radieuse et demi-nue aux lumiyres ytincelantes. Mais ce ne fut que l'erreur dun instant: Indiana eut yty p lu s cachye...son sein modeste ne se fut trahi que sous la triple gaze de son corsage...(73-74; l e partie, ch. IV) Sand structure this passage according to Ram^re's confounded gaze and likewise ends it ends with his vision confused by w in e and his desire for both women. As this scene climaxes, Ramidre's gaze in effect superimposes one creole onto her double: Peu h peu le souvenir vague et flottant d'Indiana vint se m eler h l'ivresse de Raymon. Les deux panneaux de glace qui se renvoyaient l'un £ l'autre l'image de Noun jusqu'y l'infini semblaient se peupler de mille fantomes. il £piait dans la profondeur de cette double ryverbyration une forme plus dyiiye, et il lui semblait saisir, dans la derniyre ombre vaporeuse et confuse que Noun y refiytait, la taille fine et soupie de m adam e Delmare. (76-77; l e partie, ch. IV) 23 Rami&re's confusion is indicative not only of a drunken state, but also of European perception Of creole identity. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the literary gaze of the third-person omniscient narrator functioned to freeze pictures of bodies, objects, and situations in the minds of the European bourgeois reading and viewing populace. Black bodies especially suffered the burden of betraying low levels of individual moral and spiritual advancement. Although Indiana ostensibly examines the effect of the dominant social order on its participants, this novels literary portraits express a certain ambivalence where revelations and criticisms of cultural ideology and social practices combine with potentially colonialist perceptions of race and difference. In the first of these two seduction scenes w ith which this study is concerned, it is primarily through Ramidre's gaze that the portraits of Noun and Indiana are constructed. This chapter examines how Sand structures Rami&re's gaze during the first seduction scene in a manner which invokes the gaze of the scientist and of scientific discourse. To this end, George Sand's enthusiasm for Johann Casper Lavater's Fragmente Physiognomische indicates a significant relationship between Sand's literary portraits of her female creoles and scientific discourse. Finally, this chapter compares Sand's portrayal of N oun and Indiana with the protagonist Madame Claire de Duras creates in Ourika whose fate it is to recognize herself as radically abject in the eyes of the ancien regime. All three characters betray the traces of a methodology constructed out of orientalist and scientific discursive influences historically imposed on black bodies. 24 Scientific Discourse: Black Bodies Abjectified Elements of doubled vision structure Sand's parallel passages of seduction. In this way, the seduction scenes reflect the influence of both scientific and colonialist discourses on the creation of the novel’s creole characters. In both discursive practices the hybrid offspring of miscegenation attained the status of monstrousness. In Pouvoirs de I'horreur, Julia Kristeva defines the abject, in fact, by incorporating a notion of hybridization: "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4). While Kristeva identifies the hybrid as ambiguous and thus abject, in "The Uncanny," Freud likewise identifies the double as a prim ary example of uncanny phenomena (387-390). The first seduction scene featured in Indiana describes Rami&re's sight of Noun as uncanny in the sense that it is a melange of Norm's image w ith that of the wom an who has newly caught Rami&re's fancy, Indiana. The result of the melange of each woman's image with the other results in a certain racial ambiguity as well. Ramitre's desire for both women provokes the blurring of Noun's identity with that of Indiana, such that Rami&re's vision becomes a dreamlike experience which has the effect of each woman doubling the other. Thus, Rami£re's experience provokes but in fact may also uncover an abjection which both colonialist and scientific discourses already sought to contain by the tim e Sand wrote her first novel. The rhetoric and barrage of images designed to maintain the colonialist system in the minds of the French population began during the eighteenth 25 century w ith four currents which Edward Said identifies as: "expansionism, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification" (Orientalism, 120). Said sees the first two elements in particular as indicative of colonialism's generative influence on notions concerning black bodies. The texts produced by the voyages of discovery began both the process of colonialism and of conflating black identity with the body. In time, scientific investigations resulted from the historical confrontation between East and West, North and South. These treatises played an immense role in fashioning the body, understood as Doane says, "a function of discourse," (112) into one of m any inevitable prisonhouses for black identity itself. As Franz Fanon observes, black m en and women would not escape this long-established association maintained by European scientific evaluation through the centuries: "Je suis sur-det6 rmin£ de l'extdrieur. Je ne suis pas l'esclave de l'id te que les autres ont de moi, mais de m on apparaiatre" (93). Thus, the discursive prisonhouse to which black identities found themselves confined, resulted from experiential evidence, a function of scientific procedure. Specifically, Fanon's remark bears witness to sight as the first experience of racial difference. The eighteenth-century furor for classification set the stage for the dissemination of a value system used to judge types of m en based on scientific procedure itself. In fact, Said's last category attests to the influence scientific discourse and procedure exercise upon the orientalist gaze.8 To this end, the 8 In Orientalism Said cites Buffon and Linnaeus as his two primary examples when he writes "another element preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures was the impulse to classify nature an d man into types..." (119). Frank Tinland notes that, "[l]es differences visibles entre les esptces naturelles servent b marquer et k rem arquer les differences institutes entre les groupes humains. Le rtseau des differences naturelles sert & cartographier la repartition des hommes entre les divers clans totemiques" (28). 26 orientalist gaze and the gaze of naturalism become synonomous. In L'Histoire naturelle de Vhomme (1749), for instance, Buffon endeavors to account for differences among men and the varieties that spring from these differences. In so doing, he more often reports physical features and cultural mores others before him have observed. In accordance with orientalist ontology, Buffon frequently concedes the authority of observations m ade by previous travellers an d scientists. One of the ways in which Buffon grapples w ith the unknown in relation to non-European cultures is to refuse to distinguish or elaborate differences am ong ethnic groups. L'Histoire Naturelle refers to Laplanders, "les Samoi&des, les Borandiens, les Zembliens..." each as examples of denigrated Tartars (Duchet 202). Along with conflating their differences, Buffon frequently rem arks the ugliness of these varieties: "Chez tous ces peuples, les femmes sont aussi laides que les hommes" (66). Although he carefully details certain physical features which distinguish groups of black people from one another, he easily divides the black race into two groups. Basically, body odor and degrees of pigmentation distinguish groups of black Africans from one another: "Les noirs ont, comme les blancs, leurs tartares et leurs circassiens; ceux de Guin£es sont extremement laids, et ont une odeur insupportable. Ceux de Sofala et de Mosambique sont beaux et n ’ ont aucune mauvaise odeur" (Buffon 254). Buffon concludes that the two groups consist of "ndgres", on the one h an d and "cafres", on the other. Buffon's evaluation of differences among ethnic groups, while not as explicitly racist as Jean-Jacques Virey's L'Histoire Naturelle du genre humain (1824), or as anything produced by Joseph de Gobineau, nevertheless paved the way for their work. L'Histoire Naturelle also pioneered the course of the nascent study of anthropology. H is discussions of practices among different African people, however, frequently involve observations of physical differences. Of the Senegalese, he writes: "Les Negresses portent presque toujours leurs petits enfans sur le dos pendant qu'elles travaillent; quelques voyageurs pr£tendent que c'est par cette raison que les N6gres ont communement le ventre gros et le nez applati...(458). Accordingly, as anthropology developed separately from natural history, later scientists would reflect the disdain with which Buffon regards black civilizations an d physical features. W hat is more, in terms of the means of assessing groups of Africans, L'Histoire Naturelle considers culture and physiognomy significantly interrelated: "Ces deux espdces d'hommes noirs se ressemble plus par la couleur que par les traites du visage; leurs cheveux, leur peaux, l'odeur de leur corps, leurs m oeurs et leur naturel sont aussi tr£s differens" (Buffon 254-55). W hat begins w ith accounts of non- European customs and rituals, ends with assessments of physical differences. Both anthropology and scientific experimentation use experiential evidence to evaluate phenomena. In discourse that dealt with African bodies and African cultural practices, scientific methodology began a long relationship between the gaze, black identity and the body. The system of hierarchization along racial lines reflected by Buffon would have begun with Classicism in general and w ith Descartes in particular. Critics have asserted that Buffon’ s method boldly rejected Descartes (Roger 532). However, Descartes' philosophy counts am ong the first sources for burgeoning anthropological theory and practice. The relationship begins with Descartes' simplification of man's constitution which he sums up as the combination of 28 body and soul.9 Buffon believed that, deprived of his physical senses, m an nevertheless retains a fundam ental thinking essence: "Buffon arrive k paraphraser Descartes et k soutenir que l'existence de notre am e est plus certaine que celle de notre corps et du monde ext^rieur" (Roger 537).10 In the meantime, the sight of the black body immediately provoked the racial segregation between these two designations. From the m om ent at which body and soul are segregated, racial hierarchy has historically stepped into discourse.11 Mary Ann Doane concurs, declaring that whiteness, the color of dominant ideology, has assigned blackness, "to corporality itself. Black is the body, is the biological" (224). The nature of eighteenth-century experimentation on black bodies bears out Doane's observation. The work of D utch naturalist Camper (1722- 1789), for example, contributed to both the development of th e concept of physical anthropology £ . of phrenology (Kremer-Marietti 319-20). He devoted his work to facial angles, w ork that "fut k l'origine d e ce que les naturalists appel&rent T 6 cole philosophique'...que soutinrent ensuite les th£oriciens de la phrgnologie..." (Kremer-Marietti 321). His facial angle theories, whereby he objects to the concept of an y geneological link between monkeys and men, appeared in the treatise De I’Orang-Outang et de quelques 9 Gossiaux qualifies Descartes' ontology as, " une simplification radicale d e la definition de I'homme" (50). 10 Roger ultim ately concedes th at Buffon's adherence to positivism approaches Descartes’: "...otez a un hom m e la vue, le toucher et l'ouie, 1® pens§e se manifestera toujours au dedans de lui-meme"'. 11 Miller bases his arguments about color discourse on the historical association between "white" and "soul", an d thus "Black” with "body" (29). 29 autres especes de singes. (Gossiaux 60). Camper w as considered un ami des noirs in light of another of his most important goals: to reveal the relativity of European ideals of beauty (Gossiaux 59, 60). Throughout these efforts, however, Cam per relentlessly relied on physical evidence to maintain his arguments. Regardless of his commitment to relativism, his methods contributed to subsequent developments in racist theories and systemics. The extent to w hich he tried to respond to the experiments of Jean-Fran^ois Meckel sustains this assertion. Celui-ci [Meckel] fondait son argumentation sur la noirceur du cerveau...et du sang...d'un Noir dont il avait fait la dissection. L'annde suivante, Camper...d^montrait que Meckel s’ 6 tait grossi^rement tromp£. En 1766, il r£p£tait sa demonstration en dissequant publiquement k Groningen, trois cerveaux: celui d'un N£gre, d'un Blanc et d'un Orang-Outang. Qu'importe: les "demonstrations" de Meckel fu ren t revues de toute l'Europe. (Gossiaux 54) This anecdote attests to the fundamental volatility of physical, or experiential, evidence. The physical proves too unstable, too manipulatable, to sustain arguements in favor of relativity am ong the races. Physical evidence results in an easy recuperation by scientists already seduced by theories of radal hierarchization. Camper recounts his influences in his greatest work, Dissertations sur les Varietes Naturelles qui caracterisent la Physiognomie des hommes des divers climats et des differens ages (1791). Through his avid interest in both drawing and painting, Cam per developed a critical regard toward contemporary anatomical drawings (Gossiaux 60). H e describes how he became aware very early that painting and drawing constituted 30 interpretations of the physical that could either enhance or expunge certain physical traits. In cases where the subject matter involved non-whites, Camper noted that artists rarely took the physical traits of Africans into account: "Que Ton peigne un N£gre...et c’ est un Blanc noirci" (Gossiaux 60). Camper also refuted Buffon's notion that climate, food or custom determined "variations" among different peoples (Gossiaux 60). He proposed instead that for each race beauty consists of a specific range of facial angles. Therefore, one race's range of beauty determines the limits of another's plainness. Proponents of physiologically-based reasoning enthusiasically received Cam per’ s system -to ambiguous ends: "pour en constituer l'un des socles taxonomiques les plus durables et l'anthropologie physique s'en empara pour en faire, pendant d'un si&cle, l'un des axes de son episteme" (Gossiaux 60). In Camper's w ork no less than in the work of Buffon, difference is apprehended through vision. Said notes this recurrance w ithin orientalist discourse whereby he characterizes the "vision of the Orient as spectacle, or tableau vivant..." (157). Because science at this time consistently relies on physical evidence to support the results of its experiments, the abject as spectacle makes its way within the progression of scientific investigation of the black body. Since the eighteenth century, scholars subjected black bodies to various systemics in order to determine difference, to classify it, to repress it. In so doing, scientific methodology transforms black bodies (and consequently black identities) into the abject to affirm and safeguard European domination in the realm of ideas. Throughout this evolution of scientific endeavor, blackness has been synonomous with "being seen" .12 12Farah Griffin and S. V. H artm an concur with Said declaring that "Blackness...designates a relation between the seer and the seen" (362). 3 1 Abjectification became the mode and repository for images designed to portray the bodies that signified an uncomfortable anomaly. These bodies subsequently found the anomaly they represented incorporated into the very progression of European discourse. Where seeing became the first step in this process, and depicting the second, Camper, for example, recognized the arbitrary techniques of anatomical drawings. He thus constructed his scientific hypotheses born of a suspicion for the "regies de l'optique" of his time (Gossiaux 60). In this way, Camper anticipated Michel Foucault's later remark that the disciplines established in the eighteenth century, and continued by the nineteenth, became "un faisceau de techniques physico-politiques" (225). While the scientific laboratory functioned as an overt example of a panoptic space, men and women of letters, such as Balzac and George Sand, enthusiastically received the scientific gaze and incorporated it into their literary practice and theory. Phrenology, Physiognomy and Nineteenth-Century Writers Before the emergence of Realism, Romantic writers embraced the scientific gaze in the form of phrenology and physiognomy which they habitually employed as a primary means of character portrayal and development. In "Gall's Phrenology: a Romantic Psychology", Jason Hall deliniates the relationship between Franz Joseph Gall's phrenological theories and Romanticism. Of four precepts from which Gall derived his 32 results, two illustrate a basic credence in the body as the locus of abstract hum an functions and responses: "1) Moral and intellectual faculties are innate, not acquired; 2) Their exercise depends on material organs..." (309). In order to determine the functions an d /o r responses of a particular individual, Gall attended to the "organs" of the brain, substantiated by the shape of the skull (305). His theories circulated within popular consciousness largely because of a Romantic enthusiasm for phrenological theories. Attributing Gall's ascendency to his "positivistic Romanticism" Hall explains that, although Gall maintained at all times a rational language and presentation, phrenology responded in a very timely fashion to the need among the Romantics for a psychology that could speak for its generation.13 Phrenology thus constituted a turning point within a history of conceptualizing the body where Romanticism and classical methodology met. Although Realism will prove more responsive to the omniscience w hich the scientific gaze promises, both as components of scientific discourse and as invaluable narrative constituents, the studies of phrenology and physiognomy fascinated Romantic authors. Thus, the Romantic predilection for phrenology favorably disposed its writers toward incorporating a certain means of scientific investigation into their work. 13 "At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a wide range of competing psychologies arose to fill the gap created by Romantic dissatisfaction w ith the Enlightenment picture of man. It was necessary to find a psychology that w ould provide a theoretical underpinning for a quite different view of the "natural" m an, a psychology that would give primary attention not to intelligence and the acquisition of knowledge bu t to character and the emotions, a psychology that would make sense of the new Romantic man". (306) 33 Hall does not fail to acknowledge phrenology’ s debt to physiognomy's strongest proponent, Johann Casper Lavater (307).1 4 Graeme Tytler in Faces and Fortunes: Physiognomy in the European Novel em phasizes the artistic and scientific constituents upon which the particular gaze of the physiognomist calls. Lavater prom oted the study of physiognomy as a science of hum an understanding (54). H is Fragmente Physiognomische (1775) suggests that the shape and features of the head-m ost especially of the face— determine a person's disposition and deeper m oral make-up. Tytler remarks: "By reflecting some of the main trends in eighteenth-century thought— notably the preoccupation with experimental science; physiology, anatomy and aesthetics, Lavater's Fragmente were more 'scientific' than any physiognomical w ork had been hitherto” (5 4). W hat is more, Lavater's emphasis on the scientific aspects of his theories m ade physiognomy that much m ore popular with his contemporaries: "His discussion of bone structure, heredity, and the analogies between m an and animals are among the best parts of the work and in some ways anticipate evolutionary theories" (74). During the nineteenth century, art and literature enjoyed a very close association. The art of literary portraiture is an important example of the relationship between the gaze of painter and that of the narrator (Tytler 173). As it happens, however, scientific treatises had as significant an impact on the construction of the literary portrait as did theories of painting and literature. 14 Historically the studies have been frequently confused. Tytler remarks,"Like physiognomists with their noses, mouths, and eyebrows, phrenologists attributed a moral significance to each bump on the head. As physiognomy became more "scientific”, especially w hen the skull becam e the focus of interpretation, so it encroached on phrenological territory. H ence the confusion that exists today" (88). 34 For example, Francois Jost remarks that although Buffon considered that the passions leave an essentially transitory impression o n the body an d facial features, L'Histoire Naturelle nevertheless includes facial examples illustrated w ith the traces of various emotions (66). Camper's hypotheses on facial angle, which he developed through his study o f painting a n d drawing, represent another example of the extent to which artistic pursuit and scientific inquiry continued to inform one another from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Lavater points out that the artist, by nature, possesses a physiognomical sensitivity and that physiognomy edifies artistic undertakings (Tytler 181). This sensitivity extended to nineteenth-century literary endeavors. Observations of the nineteenth-century narrator possess a dynamic similar to those born of the eye of the physiognomist: both narration and painting necessitate a beholder who th en transmits bis or her observations to the inquiring reader or viewer. At th is time in literary history, Tytler emphasizes, narrative emulated the investigative faculties o f the portraiture artist. He remarks, "most literary portraits have something of the frontal quality of a portrait" (210). Physiognomy's role at this stage of narrative's evolution is crucial. Tytler continues: Much of the general advice Lavater offers the physiognomist, particularly the necessity of developing one's powers of observation and of being true to nature, seem to have direct bearing on Champfleury's ideas of the novelist as observer*-The pictoral methods of character description came to be modified by an essentially physiognomical approach to portraiture. T hus we note a steady increase in the use of physiognimical correlations as well as in comments on the effects of inner life on the appearance. (181-83) 35 The gaze of the third-person omniscient narrator, then, becomes an intregal constituent in both configurating and carrying out many nineteenth- century discourses the eighteenth-century emphasis on classification subsequently influenced. Many Romantic writers, Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, and Sand among them, found physiognomical studies so significant that the Romantics can be understood to have found "a highly visual way of conveying character traits” in both physiognomy and phrenology (Hall 316). Whether or not the author was conscious of the influence, the observational faculties of the nineteenth-century writer, regardless of generic affiliation, originated in contemporary "scientific" theories such as physiognomy.15 The inherently visual dimension to authors' putting physiognomical theories into practice carried consequences for European perceptions of the body/ most especially for non-white, non-W estern and colonized bodies. The two seduction scenes from Sand's Indiana demonstrate well the determinist dangers which lurked w ithin a nineteenth-century scientific approach to literary portraiture. One consequence of scientific influence on the literary portraiture of non-European characters is an orientation of these characters' depiction around the empirical whereby black characters are typically associated w ith the corporal. The physical differences between the European and the non- European typically provoked characterizations of non-Europeans according to the visual aspects of those differences. Hence, each seduction scene from Indiana privileges Ramidre's gaze as the m edium through which the reader 15 H enry Fielding refers to physiognomy in his complete works as a "mode of vision." (Tytler 177). 36 understands the creole women. In the first seduction scene between N oun and Rami&re cited above, the mirrored panelling of Indiana's room underscores the hyper-visual atmosphere that envelopes these creole characters: ...Raymon, apres l’ avait examinee dans la glace sans tourner la tete, reporta ses regards sur tout ce qui pouvait lui rendre un reflet plus pur d'Indiana, sur les instruments de musique, sur les peintures, sur le lit etroit et virginal. II s'enivra du vague parfum que sa presence avait laissd dans ce sanctuaire; il frissonna de d£sir en pensant au jour oil Indiana elle-meme lui en ouvrirait les d£lices... (73-74; l e partie, ch. IV) Furthermore, the visual emphasis in this first seduction scene indicates a determinism at work on Sand's literary portraiture of her female creoles. The determinism at work in Indiana demonstrates that the observational gaze so painstakingly developed by the Realists can not be readily confined to their work alone. Moreover, this gaze and its attention to physical details incorporates aspects constitutive of the scientific gaze developed in the eighteenth-century and contemporary to Sand. Romanticism, Realism and Sand's Idealism Sand's admiration for Lavater calls into question the critical tendency to distance her work from the panoptic pulse of her time. Her portrayal of the racial difference between Indiana and Noun falls in line w ith a gaze characteristic of any of the writers of her time, regardless of their gendered an d /o r generic inclinations. In addition, the visual aspects of the omniscient narrative, refined by the nineteenth century, relate to Foucault's 37 analysis of the Panopticon. Regardless of generic interest, the narrative language of the Realist, the Idealist or the Romantic (and later of the naturalist, and the symbolist) illustrates a bias toward pow er couched within that narrator's observations: Et pour s'exercer, ce pouvoir doit se donner l'instrument d'une surveillance permanente, exhaustive, omnipfesente, capable de tout rendre visible, mais k la condition de se rendre elle-meme invisible. Elle doit etre comme un regard sans visage qui transforme tout le corps social en un champ de perception...Et, & la difference des nfethodes de l'ecriture judiciaire ou administrative, ce qui s'enregistre ainsi, ce sont des conduites, des attitudes, des virtualifes, des soupqons— une prise en compte permanente du comportement des individus. (Foucault 215-216) The Panopticon encompasses narrative, especially as Realism evolves from Romanticism. The age of scientific investigation determined the course of the systems and the genres that narrators would use to portray non-white and colonized bodies, thereby reinforcing the determination of the balance of power which the preceding ages of discovery and colonialism had already brought to bear. In VInfluence des sciences physiologiques sur la litterature francaise, de 1670-1870 Donald King comments on the marriage between the arts during the nineteenth century emphasizing, "On cherchait une seule beaufe sous des formes vaine^s...Tous les arts, comme toutes les sciences, chercheait k se renouveler en reconnaissait les liens de parenfe qui les unissaient" (92). He traces the history of Romanticism in terms of various authors reception of scientific precepts. Acceptance or non-acceptance of 38 them determ ined the evolution of nineteenth-century literary genres.16 Before the onset of realism, the conditions that gave way to the Revolution engendered those traits the Romantics held in esteem. As a reaction against those passionate, individualistic, melancholic and divinely inspired Romantic projects, then, realism was primarily motivated by observing details outside the self and recording observations according to scientific systemics of investigation (94). Consequently, once the Restoration had re established a semblance of political order, letters again embraced those characteristics that the eighteenth century had proclaimed supreme: "la clartg, le sens de la mesure, la justice de l'expression, l'analyse pgngtrante et objective" (95). K ing also associates the rise of the bourgeoisie with the primacy and dissemination of these moderate and utilitarian tendencies (97). He attributes the success of social movements such as Saint-Simonism to these qualities' mainstream acceptance (97). Sentimentalized, or idealized versions of the Romantic movement were kept alive into the century by writers such as Hugo, Sand and Lamartine in order to appeal to the bourgeoisie. In their eagerness, these authors succumbed to utilitarian inclinations, which necessarily encompassed sentimentalism and idealism, especially in terms of character psychology. Early Realists, by contrast, including Stendhal, Balzac and Mgrim^e, upheld scientific imperatives in both their narrative structure and their character depictions, thereby heralding the onset of Naturalism later in the century. For Balzac, for instance, "comme pour ses successeurs, 16 King arg u es that the pow er inherent to the physician's ability to hear and see all particularly appealed to Realist Writers (12). l'individu est un etre complexe qui doit etre £tudie dans son corps aussi bien que dans son ame, puisque le physique explique le moral..." (King 111). However, the general popularity of physiognomical study during the nineteenth century attests to the great extent to which contemporary literary audiences and authors demanded th at the physical assume responsability for illuminating the moral. While the Realists' sedulous attention to detail betrays scientific methodological influence, Romantic w riters embraced positivism no less in the forms of phrenology and physiognomy.17 Ultimately, the nineteenth-century proclivity toward exploring identity in terms of national physiognomies can not be restricted so easily to the work of Realists. Among the early Realists, Stendhal w as instrumental in promoting observations of national characteristics. His writings on Italian culture in Rome, Florence, et Naples en 1817, and L’Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817) consistently analyze national identity by polarizing character traits according to a north-and-south dichotomy. However, Madame de Stael, a passionate proponent of German Romanticism, equally evaluates populations of both N orth and South in a m anner that Tytler identifies as pre-Rom antic.18 Thus, King's deliliniations along generic lines of the tendency to scientifically catagorize personality traits is questionable. His classification of writers is additionally arbitrary in the case of George Sand 17 Hall, in fact, underscores the lack of clarity to any distinction between the scientific and the Romantic by defining essential com ponents of phrenology in terms of Romanticism itself. He demonstrates how three fundamental principles of Romanticism according to A rthur Lovejoy-organicism, striving, and uniqueness- evolved from phrenological theory (311). 18 He contends that the pre-Romantics were the first, after the ancient Greeks, to actively prom ote a sense of national identity (234). 40 given the fact that she exhibited as much enthusiasm for Lavater as d id Balzac. To this end, Naomi Schor has taken issue with nineteenth-century critics'— and thus the canon's — classification of Sand as a proponent of sentimentalized Romanticism, as an Idealist ("Idealism" 58). According to canonical prescription, male writers either earned the privilege of having advanced the Romantic genre or of having advanced genres in reaction to Romanticism. Schor highlights contemporary definitions of Idealism which endowed idealist fictions with aspects similar to those to which femininity found itself most heavily associated at that time. Schor argues that in light of the nineteenth-century critical bias that designates Sand's work Idealist— a designation based, finally, as Schor puts it, on "woman's relationship to truth"- -both Sand's place and the place of Idealism within the canon need reevaluation (64). For her part, Schor validates Sand's Idealism as a true alternative to Realism, as a significant "refusal to reproduce mimetically and hence legitimate a social order inimical to the disenfranchized, am ong them women" (69-70). Sand’ s adherence to Lavater's theories allowed her, like the Realist writers of her time, to retain a fundamental relationship to the scientific gaze throughout her oeuvre. Even Schor's redefinition of Sand’s Idealism as "an art of deliberate erasure "-an art that understood well realism's emphasis on detail and yet which sought the alternative— itself correlates with the influence Lavater contributed to her work. The seventh among the Lettres d 'u n voyageur, in which Sand recalls hours spent pouring over Lavater's illustrations during childhood, proclaims the nature of h er Idealism. 4 1 Addressed to Liszt, Sand writes in this letter, "Seulement cette science nous semblait mysterieuse et presque magique" (Jost 67).1 9 In this way, Sand’s Idealism n o t only evolved out of Lavater's theories but finds definition within a conflation of the mysterious with the scientific. Sand recognized physiognomy as a science, no less than Buffon’s inquiries and pronouncements. Lavater's theories of physiognom y-that is, science combined w ith the mysterious and magical effects morality exerted on faces and bodies— had a tremendous effect on her imagination, as she declared again and again. In her own w ords, Sand's Idealism blends an eradication of pleasure in detail (that can be understood in terms of promoting a certain mystery), along with characterizations and descriptions based no less on the deterministic prescription that physiognomy purports.20 Determinist Portraits in Sand's Indiana Therefore, the determinism that shaped the gaze of the scientist was embraced by many nineteenth-century authors w ho incorporated it into their literary portraits. Lgon Poliakov's observation, ...avant Freud, il y eut Darwin, easily applies to the m ethods of literary portraiture applied by nineteenth- century authors ("Le Fantasme" 181). Romantic and Realist writers brought the 19 Jost bestows a certain mysticism on Lavater, "Lavater a confer^ a la physiognom y un autre dimension: celle que les mystiques donnent & toutes choses. II entend d£couvrir, p a r le visible, l'invisible, envahir l'univers d e l'ame hum aine, saisir les myst&res de i'immat^riel" (66). 20 Jost highlights the eighteenth-century antecendent o f the nineteenth-century mania for physiognomy in Laclos' final treatment of Madame d e Mertreuil: "Mais on retrouve egalement les traces du syst&me chez les historiens et les biographes-voire chez les sociologues et les psychologues. La throne a marqu£ toute une 6poque" (71 & 72). 42 influence of determinist theory and practice (such as manifested by Darwin's theories) to bear on the construction of "exotic" literary characters, characters whose backgrounds include no direct involvement w ith continental European society. The fact that Sand constructs the first seduction scene of Indiana around the visual, around the confused and hallucinatory gaze of Raymon de Ramidre, has an im portant impact on the reader’s introduction to Noun's literary portrait. That Raymon's memories of Indiana influence his sight of N oun carries more significance than Sand's merely condemning the sexual desires of a rogue. The differences at stake between Rami&re's sight of Noun and his desire for Indiana unravel a critique of the sexual and political dynamics inherent to Raymons characterization as a contemporary European male whose seeing one creole woman unavoidably provokes the memory of the other. The depiction of Noun's racial difference from Indiana adheres to prescriptive demands by a history of color discourse which the determinism inherent to physiognomy, for instance, served to augment. During the first seduction scene in the novel, the narrator and Rami&re share a visual perspective that significantly structures the passage. Noun gives herself to be seen as a mimicry of her white double, Indiana. Because the image of Indiana dominates Ramidre's imagination, we can understand Noun's body subsequently recuperated by Rami&re's gaze, the transmission of his desire. This recuperation substitutes N oun for her double and carries implications .or the racial difference Sand's narrator erects between the two characters. During the nineteenth-century, as in our own, race more often than not determined class. Nevertheless, the narrators depictions of Indiana 43 and N oun complies with a tendency to hierarchize racial characteristics: Indiana's bed, which the narrator tells us is "blanc et pudique comme celui d'une vierge," and even the design of Indiana's room, which is of a "gout exquis et [d'une] simplicity chaste," contrasts with the spectacle of the creole maid, the present female inhabitant w ho is less "cach£e and modeste" than the decor would indicate. Instead of unproblematically inducing Raymon to succumb in her arms, these material surroundings realize the alluring image of Indiana, fairer than her sister, already seductively evading Raymons possession. For Raymon, her things evoke the spectacle Indiana would make of herself were she present in Noun's place. Indiana's possessions themselves seem to suggest modest sexual behavior— if any sexual behavior at all. They reflect her higher social rank which, during the nineteenth century, would have indeed dictated her approach to sexuality. Therefore, the narrator contrasts the indications given by Indiana's things to the spectacle of Noun, more consciously enticing, sensual, less sexually inhibited. Noun, then, represents the antithesis of the nineteenth-century ideal of femininity, nestled in Raymons imagination, of an innocent and submissive feminine sexuality attributed more often to white women than to dark: Elle eut peut-etre orn£ ses cheveux de camilias naturels, mais ce n'est pas dans ce d£sordre excitant qu'ils se fussent jou£s sur sa tete; elle eut pu emprisonner ses pieds dans des souliers de satin, mais sa chaste robe neut pas ainsi trahi les mystdres de sa jambe m ignonne. Plus grande et plus forte que sa maitresse, Noun dtait habiliye et non pas vetue avec ses parures. Elle avait de la grace, mais de la grace sans noblesse; elle £tait belle comme une femme et non comme une f£e; elle appelait le plaisir et ne promettait pas la volupty. (74; l e partie, ch. IV) 44 This first of two seduction scenes that my study examines turns on the fundamental difference in the characters' social status as a determining factor in their bodily descriptions. Noun, for instance, wearing Indiana's finery, appears clothed but not dressed. In addition, the excerpt above clearly enacts the idealization of white women bell hooks describes at the beginning of this chapter whereby the nineteenth-century white woman ... "was depicted as goddess rather than sinner... was virtuous, pure, innocent, not sexual and worldly." Raymons gaze recuperates Nouns seductive efforts in this excerpt, such that his gaze bypasses her body altogether in favor of the image of Indiana. Nineteenth-century cultural prescriptions clearly affect Ramidre's perception, exorcising the spirits of sexuality from Indiana's bed, a virginal thing, preserving her destiny for the pedestal by displadng these spirits into Nouns dark body, le fantome d'une femme. As the passage above illustrates, Sand's narrator frequently reinforces dialectics such as mind over body, and spirituality over physicality, w ith the effect of hierarchizing feminine sexuality along racial lines. For instance, of N oun the narrator says: ...ses grands yeux noirs lui jetaient une langueur brulante, et cette ardeur du sang, cette volupt£ tout orientale qui sait triompher de tous les efforts de la volont£, de toutes les d£licatesses de la pens£e (76; l e, ch. IV). More significantly however, is the manner by which Sand mystifies the role of the gaze as her narrator alternately ironizes Raymon de Rami&re's desire and assumes his perspective. In scenes involving either Noun or Indiana, the narrator frequently makes little effort to distinguish Rami6re’s perspective from that of "his” ow n omniscience: 45 Si Madame Delmare n'eut eu, pour l'embellir, son esclavage et ses souffrances, N oun l'eut infiniment supass£e en beauts dans cet instant. (103; l e, ch. VII) Indiana eut £t£ plus cach£e...son sein modeste ne se fut trahi que sous la triple gaze de son corsage; elle eut peut-etre orn£ ses cheveux de camellias naturels, mais ce n'est pas dans ce d£sordre. (101; l e, ch. VII) C'£tait Indiana qu'il voyait dans le nuage du punch que la main de N oun venait d'allumer; c'£tait elle qui l'appelait et qui lui souriarit derridre ces blancs rideaux de mousseline...lorsque, succombant sous l'amour et le vin, il y entrama sa creole £chevel6e. (105; l e, ch. VII) The sum of the entire excerpt's fetishistic aspects illustrates well Sand's ironization of male desire. The above instances exemplify how Sand gives her narrator little critical distance from Ramtere's looking, however. The last words of the final except above--"il y entraina sa creole dchevelde"— demonstrates how the portrayals of these womer onfound the female characters to the extent that both Raymond's sight and the narrative depictions can potentially and randomly refer to either creole. Certainly, Sand's tendency here follows a literary fashion of iflating the viewpoint of the narrator w ith an observing agent (Tytler 186). This conflation reinforces visual perspective as intrinsic to Sand's construction of this scene between Noun and Rami£re. More important, however, is how this inclination underscores an ambiguity fundamental to the depiction of racial difference in this text. Given the nature of cultural prescription at this time, critics today could easily make the case that racial inequality forms the basis of Raymon's 46 taking a more active interest in Indiana than in N oun. But since the narration describes Raymon as a fop, a rogue, a lady-killer, it thus allows his reasoning for finishing the affair with N oun to rem ain unclear: it may have as much to do with her status as lady's m aid as with her African origins, La femme d'un pair de France qui s'immolerait de la sorte serait une conquete precieuse; mais une femme de chambre!...La femme de quality vous sacrifie vingt amants quelle avait; la femme de chambre ne vous sacrifie qu'un m ari qu'elle aurait eu. (75; l e par tie, ch. IV). To this end, his consideration of the affair is frankly ambiguous: L'epouserait-il pour la rendre odieuse h sa famille, mgprisable h ses 6gaux, ridicule & ses domestiques, pour la risquer dans une socidt£ ou elle se sentirait d£placde, ou l'humiliation la tuerait, pour l'accabler de remords en lui faisant sentir tous les maux quelle avait attires sur son amant? (76; l e partie, ch. IV) Does Noun's color, or her class render m arriage to her socially unfeasible? The narrator does not distinguish between the two issues. Either problem produces the same solution for Ramidre— to abandon N oun. And thus Sand eliminates the problem of clarifying her social critique through N oun's subsequent suicide. By 1832, scenes laid out before a particular character's vision revealed as much about the observer as about the observed (Tytler 265). The literary convention that conflated narrator perspective with the seeing subject itself hints "that character description should be analysed as manifestations of a certain point of view” (265). We could conclude that Raymon's perspective regarding the non-white female body-a perspective that substitutes one 47 creole for another— pervades this interlude w ith Noun. In diana's narrator does indict Ramiere's ambivalence toward Noun. From her preface of 1832, Sand critiques Ramiere's gaze which qualifies the black creole female as abject from the standpoint of his hegemonic position within the colonialist system as the dominant race and sexuality. However, the fact that we cannot distinguish the narrator's point of view from Rami&re's ow n mystifies any potential project Sand puts forth to effectively indict the male gaze. N oun’s Suicide Sand also shrouds Noun's suicide in ambiguity. According to Sand, class and colonialist issues encompass the suffering women face within the structure of marriage and romance: [S'jil lui est arrive d'exprimer des plaintes arracWes h ses personnages par le malaise social dont ils sont atteints; s’ il n'a pas craint de rgpgter leur aspiratons vers une existence meilleure, qu'on s'en prenne & la soci£t<§ pour ses in£galit£s... (i; preface de 1832) However, throughout Indiana, the narrator keeps colonialist issues at the level of metaphor. Romantics scrutinized social realities in order to provide alternative visions in their work (Said 114-16). Accordingly, the authors preface to the 1832 edition of Indiana contains som e fundamental notions of the Romantic mission, setting the tone for the novels preoccupation w ith society'ss many victimizations. W hatever its manifestation, however, Indiana 48 suggests that as far as concerns womens social condition, any social injustice ultimately and surreptitiously affects and compounds another. Therefore, because Sand focuses her narration less on the victim than on the abuses, Noun's suicide ultimately reinforces a notion of black inferiority on the level outlined by Hoffmann whereby the dominant culture understands th. inferiority in terms of that of a child or an animal: "On les plaint, mais pas comme on plaint la victime lucide..." (187). Accordingly, the malaises sociaux Sand pinpoints in her preface intertwine such that when N oun drowns herself, pregnant and despairing over Raymons easily tossing her aside for Indiana, the reasons for Nouns executing this action remain ambiguous. The narrator has featured personal factors leading up to her drowning. However, because the author refuses to distinguish inequalities from one another, Noun's floating body in the stream may as easily result from Ramiere's racist treatment of their affair as from his rejection of Noun's social status. To this end, Noun may recognize herself as a represention of a cultures radical abjection, a monster w ith respect to her double. In this novel, black femininity thus represents a distortion of prototypical femininity that Noun's mimicry of Indiana in the first seduction scene has only served to underscore. Noun's suicide may result from an effort at "self-determination and definition" (Higgonnet, "Suicide as Self" 73). The status of feminine suicide during the nineteenth century does not exclude the possibility of a certain agency. Here Madame de Stael's influence on Sand extends to her treatment of Noun's suicide. Often de Stael's texts portray suicide as "a form of mastery" and liberation where frequently, it holds out the only possibility for female characters' speech or action (Higgonnet, 49 "Suicide as Self" 71). In fact, most motivations for female characters' suicide involved defeated love or chastity (Higgonnet, "Suicide: Representations" 108). In Noun's case, the ambivalence surrounding the portrayal of her death may comply w ith the nature of Sand's "bisextuality", whereby a male narrative voice and visual perspective continually frame and mediate Sand's feminist politics (Higgonnet, "Suicide: Representations" 107). M argaret Higgonet remarks a split along gender lines in nineteenth-century questions of suicide. In works by men on the subject, "the voluntary act often appears involuntary; the quest for autonomy is replaced by breakdown of identity" ("Suicide: Representations" 116). Higgonet contrasts the breakdowns depicted in literature by men w ith disturbing ambiguities found in literature authored by women, ambiguities w hich often call both genre and women's socialization into question ("Suicide: Representations" 116). Higgonet elaborates: [these disturbances bring] into play three central features of w om en’ s experience: its elusively subjective character, the constriction of independent activity into dependent mediation, and the fundam ental fusion of communication w ith silence. ("Suicide: Representations" 116-117) Sand's narrator's treatm ent of Noun's suicide does manifest each of these features described above. More important, Noun's death underscores her supplemental identity. After she drowns, each character adheres to an unspoken agreement whereby Noun is never mentioned again— until the second seduction scene between Ramiere and Indiana. In fact, Noun's suicide provokes that turning point which ultimately affects both the outcome of the affair betw een Indiana and RamiSre as well as the final utopic outcome of the novel. According to de Stael, suicide always involves metamorphosis. Suicide 50 engenders a split personality. It allows one’ s former identity to give way to a renewed and autonomous self. Higgonet writes: To embrace the ideal of suicide is in some fashion to fracture the past and to violate old laws, in order to give another self room to develop. For as de Stael herself says...the vast majority of us do not commit suicide, but pass o n through these crises to a reflexive consciousness, "as if one were two" (Passions 230). That dedoublement, that alienation from both self and world, may in turn become an enabling, creative moment. ("Suicide as Self" 75) Indiana's utopic climax does suggest an alternative to both Romantic melancholy or bourgeois Realism (Schor, "Idealism" 6 8 ). However, in order to elaborate th at generative and potential apex of social revision, Noun, the black identity, is sacrificed. Sand's treatment of Noun's death does manifest each sex's tendencies in regard to literary suicide according to Higgonnet's schema. Although h er suicide suggests the possibility of Sand affording Noun a certain autonomy an d political agency, Sand invariably tends toward complicity w ith mythical portraits of the colonized in order to gain audience sympathy for her political agenda. Albert Memmi describes the cultural and psychological process by which the colonized learn to accept mythical portraits of themselves, "Souhaitg, r£pandu par le colonisateur, ce portrait mythique et d^grandant finit...par etre accepts et vdcu par le colonist" (87). According to his arguement, Noun's suicide can be understood along the lines of an intolerance w ith a system that allows her situation little to no representational access as a subjectivity~a possibility that equally parallels Ourika's exiling herself to the convent. After all, N. jn ’ s fate merely supplements the larger story of Indiana, a role black 51 characters frequently play. Her suicide furthermore contains her. O n the one hand, the excess she represents-that is, sexuality~is finally under control in death. On the other hand, Noun's suicide reflects an agency, a course of action in the face of her subordinate position to Indiana's story. If Noun's death results from an awareness, a realization that the personal is ultimately overcome by the political, then her drowning may also indicate her escaping a supplem ental identity in favor of accessing the ultimate hors de societe. Indiana and Ralphs escaping to a Paul et Virginie -esque exile into nature involves a sim ilar refusal of prevailing societal norms. As Memmi sees it, the actual political situation of the colonized results in great confusion, forcing the colonized to wrestle with his identity: Frustrated by history for too long, he makes demands all the more imperiously as he continues to be restless...He complicates and confuses, a priori, his human relationships, which history has already made so difficult. Oh, they are sick! wrote another black author. They are all sick! (140) "So goes the dram a of...a product and victim of colonization. He almost never succeeds in corresponding w ith himself" (140). Thus, on this level, Sand splits her protagonist into two. W hereas Indiana embraces sickness throughout the first third of the text, and utopic exile at the novels end, Noun's anguish over a lack of identity within the colonizing system causes her suicide. Noun's death does n ot clearly serve, as Schor intimates, to unmask an inimical social order. The unspoken pact between the remaining characters never to mention Noun again functions to doubly exile her as the pitiable, silenced and forgotten negress. Contrary to Schor's assertions regarding her Idealism, Sand's characterization of N oun and of her subsequent suicide fall 52 more in line with Romanticism's sympathetic treatment of black characters~a treatment which typically conflated black identity with victimization as a means of rejuvenating contemporary society according to Romantic/orientalist imperatives. While I do not intend to take issue with any arguement for the canon's disregard for serious implications of Sand's Idealism, in light of contemporary societal issues, her approach to race is one of sublimation of the issue into metaphor. Although Schor implies that Sand's investment in the disenfranchised could include people of color, Noun's character adheres, both physically and functionally, to a characteristic pattern outlined by Hoffmann of authors' depictions of Blacks in literature. He writes: ...la presence d u Noir...a une valeur exemplaire pour les ecrivains de tous bords: aux sentimenteaux qui cultivent la m&ancholie, qui voit en l'homme la victime du malheur, l'exild dans un monde injuste...le Noir fournit un veritable symbole. (152) Thus, the narrator's portrayal of Noun's suicide betrays his tendency to emphasize the victimization over the victim .21 Higgonet points out that, because it may either "affirm identity or erase it," the ambiguious nature of women's suicide generally necessitates interpretation (Higgonet 107). Contrary to Schor's assertions, by refusing to recognize the issue on the one hand and adhering to contemporary literary commonplaces on the other, Sand's Idealism— indistinguishable from her Romantic mission— effectively erases Noun's identity by sublimating it to the function of catalyst for Indiana's masquerade depicted in the second seduction scene of Ramtere. 21 "...Suicides of the nineteenth century...imply disintegration and social victim ization rather than heroic self-sacrifice..."("Suicide: Representation"106). 53 Indiana vs. Ourika A m ore illuminating means of illustrating Sand's depiction of her creoles is to compare Sand's portrayal of both Indiana and N oun with Madame de Duras' portrayal of Ourika. A critical negligence similar to that which surrounds Indiana arises in the case of Madame de Duras' Ourika. Like Indiana’ s critics, Ourika's critics from Sainte-Beuve to the present day have downplayed or ignored the impact racial difference exerts on the story. Ourika's reviewers, for example, have considered this text mainly in relation to Duras' personal history. Sainte-Beuve notes the them e of social alienation so prevalent w ithin the three texts Duras published including Olivier (1826) and Edouard (1824). Critics have rarely treated Duras' first text Ourika in terms of the politics of racial difference.22 On the contrary, Sainte-Beuve notes how Madame de Duras weaves the theme of alienation throughout her work, explaining Ourika's racial difference as a mere instance of the theme's expression (80). According to an article from La Quotidienne , January 28, 1826, the subject of M adame de Duras' text always involve obstacles to love where, again, racial difference serves as an example (Jensen 260). The Revue des Romans from 1839 proclaim s," 'Ourika cesse d'etre noir h la lecture, et voili pourquoi on s'intgresse & son sort' " (Hoffman 227). Chantal Bertrand-Jennings also sees the pain O urika experiences in terms of an autobiographical analysis of Duras 22 Exceptions include O'Connell, Critchfield and Kadish and Massardier-Kenny. 54 (39-50). Accordingly, Ourika becomes less the story of a black woman confronted by her social marginalization than an allegory of the author's stuggles writing as a woman in the first decades of the nineteenth-century. Claudine H errm ann opens her critical edition of Ourika as well with the sentence, "II est difficile de parler d'Ourika sans parler d'abord de la Duchesse de Duras..." (7). Overlooking the questions of racial difference that Ourika so overtly poses overlooks crucial question involving the text's political engagement, an aspect that distinguishes Ourika from a text like Sand's Indiana. While Duras' text presents an assuredly sympathetic portrayal of a black character, Duras nonetheless presents the image of an acutely cognizant African femininity. More explicitly than Sand's novel, Ourika implicates the social consequences of racial difference in eighteenth-century aristocratic France. Ourika's narration explores the psychological ramifications of black femininity as an arbitrary source of alienation and inhibition to any identity within a society of whites. While Sand's text conflates the gaze of male and colonialist desire with that of the omniscient narrator, Madame de Duras explores the gaze as of primary importance in her protagonist's realization of her marginalization. The disquieting consequences of Ourika's internalization of society's looking at her indicts that society's disdainful vision of her body. The story of the actual African girl's adventures circulated as an anecdote within Duras' ow n salon society. Through her position as a salon pet in Duras' version, the protagonist understands her status as a social novelty. Significantly, after Ourika has made a spectacle of herself at a ball one evening, she overhears the searing remarks of a friend to Madame de B. Both her 55 outlook on her surroundings and her perspective of herself change radically: "l'^clair n'est pas plus prompt; je vis tout; je me vis n£gresse, d^pendante, m£pris£e, sans fortune, sans appui..." (36). Instantly, Ourika suffers a physical reaction to this new perspective: "Une affreuse palpitation me saisit, mes yeux s'obscurcirent..." (36). She internalizes the gaze of the salon society that surrounds her, a look tainted by burgeoning anthropological studies, which generally conflated the genetic origins of monkeys w ith those of Blacks: "ma figure me faisoit horreur, je n'osois plus me regarder dans une glace; lorsque mes yeux se portoient sur mes mains noires, je croyois voir celles d'un singe..." (38). She rids her room of mirrors and intentionally covers her body from head to foot: "H61as! je me trompois ainsi moi-meme: comme les enfants, je fermois les yeux, et je croyois qu'on ne me voyoit pas" (49). At the same time, this transition, along with the onset of the Revolution, endows Ourika with a critical gaze, especially tow ard those whom she had amused as a child: "j'examinois, en le critiquant, presque tout ce qui m'avait plu jusqu'alors" (39); j'apergois les ridicules de ces personnages qui vouloient maitriser les 6v£nements; je jugeois les petitesses de leurs caract&res, je devinois leurs vues secretes;...je renon^ai a l'esp£rance, en voyant qu'il resteroit encore assez de mdpris pour moi au milieu de tant d'adversitSs (41-42). Ourika's physical reaction to what she sees directly relates to her internalization of the prescriptive look that alienates her from French society, that views her as abject. Duras inscribes the outcome of Ourika's seeing herself finally as others see her onto Ourika's body itself, whereby Ourika reacts to her new perspective by falling seriously ill. 56 In this way, Ourika’ s illness might serve as a variation on the "other as diseased" them e so prevalent during the nineteenth century. Her relationship to sickness throughout the text also parallels that of Indiana, whom Sand's narrator describes as ill from the novel's outset. Both characters' maladies carry political implications and in both cases one can read their respective sickness in tw o ways. O n the one hand, these characters' illnesses represent their author's sympathetic treatment of an outsider. On the other hand, both illnesses signify the physical symptoms of the effects of the position of each, Indiana and Ourika, w ithin the economy of their respective households. Indiana's ambiguous identity, for example, as both master and slave does not dispel the fact of her suffering. The narrator explains how her loveless marriage to a harsh husband is consuming her youth: Aussi elle se mourait...Les m^decins lui cherchaient en vain une disorganisation apparente, il n'en existait pas; toutes ses facultis s'appauvrissaient igalement...encore quelque tem ps, et la pauvre captive allait mourir (60-61). W ithout a doubt, Indiana's illness directly corresponds to the contemporary literary imperative to enhance feminine weakness. However, the psychosomatic disorders Franz Fanon encountered among politically oppressed individuals during his years as a psychiatrist are not insignificant to Sand and Duras who include illness in their fictions which bear witness to black identity.23 23 Zahar sum s up many of Fanon's writings on race relations between colonizer and colonized. Z ahar recapitulates Fanon from Toward the African Revolution: "The unceasing violent confrontation of the colonized person with the norms and institutions of the colonial system...produces mechanisms of defense and processes of compensation in his psychic makeup- If the defense mechanisms collapse under extreme pressure, psychosomatic disorders...are the result"(53). 57 These characters' individual maladies assuredly fall in line with Romantic ideals fo r feminine beauty understood within the ’ "climat g&vSral’ , [et l']exacerbation morale' " of the frenetic (Steinmetz 34). Freneticism generally inform ed factions o f Romantic prescription w hich encompassed le mal. Mario Praz reminds us th at the Romantic "search for themes of torm ented, contaminated beauty" included visions of the negress along w ith those of the hunchback, the m ad woman, an d the woman's corpse (14 & 38). Nonetheless, however they conform to the Romantic agenda, the sicknesses that afflict Indiana and Ourika also correspond to a certain collapse beneath the w eight of colonialist enterprise. According to Fanon's schema, these characters' afflictions signal an insufficiency within the system of defenses they have developed as the colonized against the oppression of the colonizer. While these characters' respective illnesses betray similarities on the level of the colonized and the colonizer, these novels' depictions and treatments of the gaze diverge radically. M adame de Duras, for instance, m ore clearly takes the gaze of the scientist to task. She not only implicates the look of the naturalist who sees an ape in place of a black woman's b o d y , but she also circumvents the gaze of the physiognomist. Ourika's first-person narrative avoids the literary portrait altogether. Duras' giving voice to her protagonist breaks w ith a pattern of typically sympathetic portrayals of black femininity that Indiana, for instance, upholds. If Duras' text refuses the literary portrait, Ourika illustrates a typical reaction by the colonized to "mythical portraits" the colonizer ascribes to them. To this end, Memmi's analysis outlines Ourika's situation as well as it illuminates a significant portion o f Duras' ow n agenda. M e m m i argues th at 58 failure at these almost impossible attempts to assimilate into the colonizer's system can result in the colonized's self-hatred: ...at the very m oment when the colonized best adjusts himself to his fate, he rejects himself w ith most tenacity— Love of the colonizer is subtended by a complex of feelings ranging from sham e to self-hate (121). Ultimately, Memmi explains, those who develop the capacity to understand these mechanisms on some level become intolerant and rebel at their destiny (120). Unlike Noun, Ourika does not com m it suicide but rather exiles herself to the convent. In this way, Duras m anifests a certain complicity with exiling the abject. However, since Ourika is her ow n narrator, the text doesn't exile her identity so much as Ourika, though forced, ultimately chooses a space of her own outside society, fully aw are of having recourse to no other choice. Both the convent and suicide relegate feminine subjectivity to the space of non-representability. However, Higgonet associates suicide with a "speaking" voice otherwise unavailable to female characters. Likewise, Ourika, telling her own tale, isn't silenced by convent walls. On the contrary, speaking from the convent's confines, her storytelling takes place. Sand's utopic finale, on the one hand, read in terms of Indiana's ambiguous racial origins, has m uch in common with exiling ambiguous factors-like that of a creole ethnicity--to the space of no-where. On the other hand, Schor reads Sand's utopia in terms of an Idealist social revision. Critics, however, generally acknowledge the heavy parallel between Sand's use of the trope w ith Saint- Pierre's Paul et Virginie. I would argue that, like most writers of her time, Sand falls back on exoticism as the definition of that-which-Europe-is-not, sending Indiana and Ralph (himself representing an considerable alternative to the masculinities of Delmare and Ramidre)24 back to whence they came. Various critics' readings of the novel's end, like that of Deutelbaum and Huff, who assert a nostalgic return to a familial ideal, leave the impression that Sand's social revision can am ount to little more than concluding that no room for active critique exists w ithin the space of the social (271). Indiana as Suffering Mulatto A comparison with Madame de Duras' text underscores one of the most curious aspects of Sand's Indiana. Although Sand allies Indiana's position in the Delmare household with slavery w hile she refuses to adm it any possible physical ethnic characteristics other than white on the protagonist's body. Although "creole" may refer to anyone born on a colonized island, regardless of their racial origins, the w ord also implies miscengenation. Rape of black slave women by white owners and overseers in the colonies was commonplace. Mulatto wom en were frequently m anum itted in order to marry white colonists in the beginnings of colonialization when w hite women were scarce (Conlen 95). Robert Chaudenson explains that by 1704 on l'lle Bourbon the halfcaste category no longer appears within the settlement census because the white population already incorporated halfcastes and mulattos by this time (73). He explains that by 1689: 24 WingArd-Vareille explains how Ralphe opposes Rami&re and Delm are politically: "Ralphe est pour une 6conomie orient^ non-seulment vers le profit individuel, mais aussi vers le bien collectif. U est franchement republicain, mais ce n'est pas un d e ces 'hommes de parti'...au contraire, il critique l'egoi'sme des partis politiques" (56). 60 a certain number of mothers were themselves born in the island, and therefore were "creoles": 10 out of a total 45: six were born of French parents, two were halfcastes (French Indo- Portugese women), and three halfcastes w ho were "French- Madadgascan"...In...(less than 25 years) there already are children whose parents are "creoles” themselves. (72) Immigrants to l'lle Bourbon came primarily from Madagascar where the inhabitants already constituted a mixture of European, East African, East Indian origins and Indo-Chinese halfcastes. While Sand emphasizes Indiana's pallor, and her physical features according to nineteenth-century European fashion, the fact that we know nothing of her mother shrouds Indiana's origins with certain mystery. Indiana is thus portrayed as an ambiguous creature in the eyes of both Raymon and Sand's narrator. The text construes Indiana as equally opposed to provincial French women as to the black creole, Noun, and as especially to Parisiennes: "Une telle finesse n’ avait jamais frapp6 Raymon. Noun, la creole, etait d'une sante robuste, et les Parisiennes ne s'£vanouissent pas quand on leur baise la main" (84; l e partie, ch. V). As Francois Hoffmann reminds us, nineteenth-century authors writing after the Haitian uprising of 1824 typically included a mulatto character in their fiction to express just such ambiguity: Personnage ambigu, trait d'union pour ainsi dire entre les races ennemies, le Mulatre s'articule mal dans une structure rigidement dichotomique. Sa psychologie ne coincide pas par definition ni avec celle des Blancs ni avec celle des Noirs, tout en participant de l'une et de l'autre. Les auteurs n'ont pas su la traite ou, plus probablement, n'ont pas voulu compromettre la stricte ordornance de leurs compositions en y introduisant un element ambivalent. (169) 6 1 Moreover, Sand's use of slavery as mere m etaphor underscores her tendency to bypass any issues other than (white) women's role in marriage and society. Along this line, Hoffmann relates an anecdote involving the preem inent themes among poems submitted to l'Acad£mie frangaise for the prize of 1822. The subject that year was "VAbolition de la traite des Noirs ". He points out that among the poems submitted: "...le Noir n'est vu que comme une victime, n'est determine qu'en fonction des abus dont il souffre. Et c'est l'abus qui est le sujet du podme non pas la victime" (155). Sand's duel portrayals of Indiana and N oun reflect this sympathetic outlook that, as Hoffmann asserts, does nothing in terms of furthering alternative images of black characters. In this way, the critical tendency to minimize and overlook the question of race in the novel reflects Sand's own sublimation of the issue to white women's cultural status and to her development of sympathetic gestures.25 These gestures relate as closely to critical definitions of Idealism as they paralleled current Romantic treatment of black characters. As we have seen, to the extent that the scientific gaze made use of pre existing portraits travellers had already put forth, subsequent portraits of non- European people betray mythical underpinnings. During the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, futhermore, emphasis on physiological 25 Hoffmann continues, explaining the general tendencies of French writers when describing the colonized: "Le Noir cr6ole..on le repr6sentait comme inferieur au Blanc, ou tout d u moins & la vaste majority des Blancs. Son inferiority est plus ou moins explicite, mais elle est toujours r£elle, meme lorsque l’ intention de l'£crivain est d'avatager le personnage. Objectivement parlant, c'est 1 2 i une representation exacte, puisque, dans la realite, le Noir creole est en position d'inferiorite absolue. II vit dans une society entierement dominee par des Blancs qui lui refusent tout pouvoir politique" (209). 62 evidence and reasoning was as fundamental to the gaze of the physiognomist as to scientific discourse and experiments. Significantly, Said equates the Romantic agenda— which ultimately constructed its narratives in order to rejuvinate contemporary society— w ith scientific endeavor, calling: "Romantic Orientalism...an enthusiastic, even messianic European science..." (115-116). While we must recognize Sand and Duras' individual efforts as contributions to orientalist discourse, these two texts come to very different conclusions about the "mythical portraits" black femininity faced in nineteenth-century Restoration literature. Both authors' insistence on their characters' (racial) difference from Parisian/aristocratic women underscores the effect of Ourika and Indiana's confrontation w ith a complex nineteenth-century gaze. However, because Duras focuses on the lucid victim rather than on the abuses she suffers, her text, moreso than Sand's Indiana, promotes an alternative portrait of a black woman as both speaker and autobiographer. According to Tytler's analysis, it follows that everything Ourika sees allows the reader to access her perspective. Schor's arguements notwithstanding, if Sand's Idealism promoted alternatives, it did so in direct correspondance to the Romantic agenda. In addition, like scientific discourse, Sand's text demonstrates a certain proclivity for the terror inherent to the presence of doubles which the next chapter will explore in further detail. The mulatta herself construing an uncomfortable ambiguity, Sand sublimates the possiblity of Indiana’ s mixed blood to the use of slavery as metaphor for women's situation w ithin the institution of marriage. Significantly, whatever the extent to which Sand's sublimated racial issues mystify her project, she allows Indiana an important space within which to return Ramiere's gaze. It is through his gazing that the doubling aspect of Indiana's structure along with its ramifications becomes clear. N oun, the repressed double, returns through Indiana's mascarade as her black counterpart. While Noun mimics Indiana's status in the first seduction scene of Rami^re, Indiana's mascarade as Noun definitively indicts Ramiere's colonialist gaze. She confronts his gaze with the creole woman's abject status. H er confrontation in tu rn plagues him w ith hallucinations, revealing the colonialist nature of his ow n paranoia. 64 Chapter Two Racial Difference Overlooked: George Sand's Indiana This chapter examines m ofe closely Indiana's characterization in light of Francois Hoffmann's analysis of fictional portraits of the mulatto. Authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally split the literary mulatto into tw o counterparts according to racial hierarchy. Whereas the w hiter physical features of the heroic m ulatto prevailed, the features of the villainous sang-mele betrayed the dominance of an African heredity. This doubling also structures Sand's Indiana. Naomi Schor has praised the "'slippage of personality’ " that Sand's doubling her female characters entails ("Female Fetishism" 308). Recalling the second of two parallel passages from Sand's Indiana, Schor qualifies "female travesty" as an instance of blurring boundaries between characters th at works well to erode the sense of individuation to w hich Sand's realist contemporaries definitively clung (307- 8). In the first seduction scene, Ramiere's gaze recuperates Noun's body by imagining the fair Indiana in her place. As the negative reflection of the first passage, the second seduction scene features Indiana who masquerades as Noun, now dead. Madame Delmare ne se doutait point de l'effet qu'elle produisait sur Raymon. Elle avait entour£ sa tete d'un foulard des Indes, noud n£gligemment h la mani&re des crdoles; c’ dtait la coiffure ordinaire de Noun...elle le regardait fixement, mais avec plus d'attention que d e tendresse... 65 ...II se pencha, et vit une masse de cheveux noirs irr£guli£rement longs qui semblaient avoir coupes cl la hate et qu’Indiana rassemblait et lissait dans ses mains. Mais, en les prenant...Raymon crut y trouver quelque chose de sec et de rude...11 £prouva aussi je ne sais quel frisson nerveux en les sentant froids et lourds comme s'ils eussent 6 t6 coupds depuis longtemps...ceux-l£ £taient d'un noir n£gre, d'une nature indienne, d'une pesanteur morte... —Vous m'avez fait un mal horrible, lui dit-il. (191-193; 3e partie, ch. XVH) Schor emphasizes the effect Indiana's masquerade as N oun exerts over Ramiere's gaze at this moment. The exclamation he emits at her spectacle— "Vous m'avez fait un mal horrible''-dem onstrates the success of Indiana's masquerade. The spectacle she makes of herself blurs "difference within difference" for Ramidre's gaze, disorienting him and causing him to dread w hat he sees ("Female Fetishism" 308). Moreover, Schor maintains that Ramiere's reaction to this moment of female travesty radically reveals the machinations of male narcissism /fetishism — an emphatic component to Sand's agenda. Schor nevertheless argues that Sand's doubling her creole protagonist alone effectively "causes male desire to misfire" (308). I intend to elaborate this arguement on the level of the influence that various discourses exerted on Sand's construction of the racial difference between her creoles. To the effect of scientific discourse on Sand's literary portraits already examined in chapter one, this chapter adds historical discourse, scientific discourse regarding hybridization, colonial administrative discourse and literary discourse to a host of prevalent deterministic discourses from the turn of the nineteenth century which treated the question of race. None of these 66 discursive treatments of mulattos, Blacks, slaves, freemen and general concepts of racial difference existed in isolation from one other. Rather, each informed the other. M y discussion begins with changes in historiography during the era o f Restoration. The years following the Revolution posed questions of domestic social and political order which in turn gave w ay to changes in former approaches to historiography. Younger contemporary historians, like Augustin Thierry, sought more liberal interpretations of history. The liberal approach to history opposed historiography's origins in the documentation of the nobility’ s rise and right to power. Before Thierry, French historiography an d class consciousness had been constructed out of concepts of race employed b y the nobility of centuries past. By contrast to discriminatory interpretations p u t forth by the aristocracy, the w ork of Augustin Thierry responded to the needs of an unsteady Republic demanding a history now in terms of its people and local color. His version of the origins of the French "race" nevertheless conformed to racial theories already established by the nobility. Concurrent to changes in approaches to history, the discourse surrounding hybridization developed through scientific experimentation and emphasized the inherent monstrousness of the hybrid. Abjectifying components to the French colonialist perspective toward the m ulatto likewise arose from the threat of miscegenation. In addition to m y continuing examination of scientific and colonialist discourse, the limitations of Edward Said's study— the African border-dem and an explanation of what Christopher M iller terms "Africanist" discourse. Both colonialist and scientific discourses comprise tw o important aspects of Africanist discourses. Africanist and orientalist discourse betray many of the same predispositions in spite of the fact 67 that Africanist techniques have yet to be as fully outlined as their orientalist counterparts. Miller points out Africanist discourse's historical grounding in color hierarchization: By actively forgiving and overlooking the color of their skin, one perceives an "inner whiteness"...Discourse moves from the rock of a secure idea to a maelstrom of reversals: w hite/inside, black/outside, white soul/black body, etc. (29-30) Texts produced by missionary voyagers, for instance, generally based representations of black bodies on hierarchization. In addition, the dichotomies Miller mentions have had a significant structural influence on literary depictions of the mulatto. As chapter one elaborates, racial hierarchization determines the literary portraits of Noun and Indiana. More important, the relationship between "creole" and miscegenation at the turn of the nineteenth century informs this narration's repeatedly ambiguous descriptions of Indiana. Accordingly, Sand incorporates this ambiguity into the effect of the creole women's seduction on Ramidre's gaze. By endowing Ramiere w ith substantially paranoid tendencies after N oun's death, Sand invites an analysis of not only the violence and abjection of the double (along the lines argued by Girard and Kristeva, for instance), but also analysis of the paranoid tendencies inherent in the colonizer position itself. This chapter finds that female travesty, whereby one woman disguises herself as another, limits Schor's elaboration of the "blurring of difference within difference" that Indiana's m asquerade provokes. This chapter explores the "blurring of difference within difference" that takes place within the second seduction scene more thoroughly than through an examination of a 68 white woman dressing up as a black woman to reproach Ramidre's cruelty to Noun. This chapter presents a reading of Rami£re's reaction to Indiana's masquerade in terms of his seeing the possibility of Indiana's mixed blood. During her masquerade as Noun, Indiana flaunts the portion of her creole identity to which black blood potentially contributes, the spectacle of which is not lost on Ramiere. The very word, "creole" provides a basis for understanding Sand's use of the word, and definitions contemporary to Sand correspond to those of today: "creole" designates both any w hite born of European parents and any black born of parents involuntarily transported to a colony. The primary Littre definition specifies creole as any person of either European or African races born and naturalized in a particular colony, as opposed to someone recently forced from his or her homeland. Thus, the term designates neither ethnicity nor skin color. In L'Histoire du genre humain (1824), Jean-Jacques Virey underscores the strict geographical orientation of the definition: "Ce mot ne d^signe que la naissance dans les Indes...meme aussi des animaux" (175). Other references of Sand's time as well admit without a doubt that questions of ambiguous racial identity are inherent to the term, creole. La Grande Encyclopedic (1816) gives a concise explanation for keeping the question of racial intermixing coterminous to the question of creole identity: ...Malgre la pretention des creoles d'etre seuls de ... race pure de tout melange, il est evident que tout ceux qui portent aujourd'hui ce nom sont loin d’ etre exempts d'admixtion de sang n£gre ou indien. II suffira de rappeler que beaucoup d'auteurs donnent le nom de creoles indistinctement h la progeniture issue des unions de blancs avec les mulatresses ou avec les autres blancs indiens. (13: 324) 69 Eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific discourse, however, typified m ulatto bodies as unnatural a n d monstrous. A colonialist perspective underlies both contemporary administrative attitudes toward the mulatto and scientific treates of hybridization. These scientific and administrative approaches to the hybrid are themselves inscribed into the depiction of both the gaze of Sand's narrator and of Raymon d e Rami&re. Sand, however, incorporates a return of th eir look into Indiana's subsequent disguise as Noun. While Indiana's gaze potentially destabilizes their position, Sand's confusing her protagonist's racial origins fixes the novel's stake in those same colonialist interests. Questions of Racial Identity Shape Historical Discourse H istorical discourse counted am ong many deterministic voices speaking by the beginning of the nineteenth-century. In order to delineate the context within w hich readers read Sand's Indiana, this chapter outlines the status of historiography during the first third of the nineteenth century. Physiologically- based reasoning laid the foundation for new domestic political theory that included considerable revisions in historiography. The Restoration saw various transformations in the conceptualization of history's cultural function. Formerly, the nobility had required that history reflect the evolution of its ow n political agenda. The freshest of new nineteenth-century historians reoriented their interpretations in favor of classes n o t formerly considered w orthy of attention. However, many of these revisions leaned heavily on race theories 70 already established by prominent historians of the nobility, themselves members of the aristocracy.26 By the end of the eighteenth century, studies in physiology comprised the primary m odes of exploration into the realm of human character. Any examination of the socio/political and scientific work of intellectuals such as Constantin-Fran?ois Volney, Destutt de Tracy, Georges Cabanis, and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (who, among others, composed the Ideologues group) bears witness to the relationship at this time between physical circumstances, physical traits, an d the study of psychology as the term is understood today. Their work also combined political theories with physiological factors. At the turn of the century the European imagination was convinced of the immense sway that the physical carried over the psychological. To this end, we cannot underestimate the weight which Ideologue theory carried in relation to sociological concerns.27 The scientific, philosophic, and political work of the Ideologues tendentiously m erged Revolution w ith Rationalism: the social with the empirical (Gaulmier x). In Rapports du physique et moral de 2^ Le Comte Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722), for example, divides the origins of the French people into two basic groups, the Franks and the Gauls. Briefly, according to his schema, the nobility had descended from the Franks, a conquering race who had taken the Romans themselves to task and had historically m aintained an independent attitude w ith respect to the king's authority. According to Simar, "Boulainvilliers...considere les "Fran?ais" ou Francs, commes des tribus germaniques conqu£rantes dont les principals vertus sont leur am our de la liberty et leur soin jaloux de ne pas accorder au roi de perogative superieure a celle de ses peres” (23). 27 Strictly rationalist, each of these thinkers relied on experiential information while advocating detailed classification of their sociological a n d /o r scientific data. Gaulmier outlines how Volney's w ork at this tim e not only falls clearly w ithin the range of orientalist discourse but also significantly contributes to the larger oeuvre of Ideologue philosophy- During Volney's travels in the orient, "sa pensee a pris sa forme definitive" (xix). 7 1 Vhomme, for example, Cabanis (1757-1808) asks, " 'L'organization physiologique des etres, n’ est-elle pas toujours en rapport avec leurs facult£s intellectuelles?"' (Boissel 45). The predominance of empirical evidence in approaches to history and sociology at this time, produced very deterministic discursive practices. In this way, the m anipulation of experiential factors of hum an existence, which began in the eighteenth century, carried over into the nineteenth. Ultimately, the intersection of various discourses, all infused to one degree or another w ith determinist elements, had direct implications for depicitions of non-European peoples in the European imagination. The empirical approach of works such as those produced by the Ideologues w on the group the loyalty of many influential contem poraries.28 Destutt de Tracy, the Ideologue leader, had a great impact on Stendhal's conception of race and climate as he elaborated them in Rome, Naples et Florence and L'Histoire de la peinture en Italie, for instance (Barzun 42). The historians Fauriel, Merimee, and A ugustin Thierry corresponded with de Tracy at the time he published Traite d'ldeologie in 1821 (Barzun 42). Countless members of the nineteenth-century literary and philosophic elite, including Thierry, Stendhal, Michelet, and Sainte-Beuve, figure among the enthusiastic advocates of Ideologue mandates (Gusdorf 29)2 9 In this way, historians and m en of letters found m utual ground in their respective associations with the Ideologues group. 28 "D6s son voyage en O rient, Volney a compris l'importance des facteurs physiologiques dans la form ation des caracteres"(Gaulmier 275). 29 Rulon N ephi Smithson observes that Ideologue influence on Thierry cam e via his apprenticeship for Le Com te Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon from 1814-1817 (30). 72 Not only did sociological discourse admit the importance of physiological factors on hum an development, but the changes new historians sought also included racial theories developed centuries before. Augustin Thierry proposed his new historiographical methods in Lettres sur I'histoire de France .30 In general, Thierry’ s texts presented a liberal reconfiguration of contemporary class structure that rejected universalisations, yet simultaneously borrowed notions predicated on racial theory. The aristocracy had previously employed racial hierarchization in o rd er to historicize their own divine right to political power. Thierry's work generally shifts focus aw ay from the dynastic by expressing a general contempt for Germanic tribes, from whom the Franks were understoood to have descended (Smithson 287). He prioritizes the presum ed mild qualities of the Gauls w hile characterizing the conquerors as: cruel, avaricious, wilv, co-usurpers with the Catholic Church of hum an liberty and property. Their descendents, the nobility, established the Feudal System...becoming and remaining the landed aristocracy, which through the centuries served either to aid or to ham per the king, and inevitably to hinder the progress of the Third Estate in its struggle toward constitutional liberty. (Smithson 287) Meanwhile, the younger Am4dee Thierry, in his L'Histoire des Gaulois (1828), called upon race theories to posit the "eminent intelligence" of the Gallic people (Barzun 28). To adequately conceptualize history's progress meant for the brothers to represent the tribal roots of the burgeoning bourgeoisie.31 30 This appeared first for Le Censeur europeen and later after the dissolution of Te Censeur in 1820, for Le Coarrier frangais (Smithson 77). 31 Barzun explains in The French Race that the inferior classes w ere understood to have descended from the Gauls, the race ultimately subjugated by the Romans (141). 73 This system advocated by the Thierry Brothers becomes a transference, finally, of the ancient aristocratic obsession w ith "pure" and "mixed" blood .32 Although the Thierry Brothers' w ork took issue with the existing classist structure in order to posit histories of the French bourgeoisie, their historiography nevertheless derives from the determinist methodology the eighteenth-century had initiated and that the Ideologues, for example, h ad aggressively propounded.33 Enlightenment systemics clearly carried over into various sectors of turn-of-the-century intellectual pursuit. They informed sociological inquiry as well as scientific endeavor. Resulting sociological hypotheses reflected dependence on experiential and physical evidence. Aspects of Thierry’ s historiography that rely o n racial theory, for example, would seem to merely conglomerate the reasoning and theories predicated by eighteenth-century positivism .34 As the preceding chapter enumerated, the discourses of phrenology and physiognomy significantly guided the evolution of both the third-person narrative voice and the literary portrait. These studies notwithstanding, 32 Observations on Boulainvilliers apply as easily to eith er Thierry brother: "...la theorie biologiquement qui est invoqu£e ici est toujours une theorie de classes, bien qu'on y decouvre des germes d ’une doctrine raciale ou ethnique qui ne tardera pas a prendre corps" (Simar 34). 33 Moreover, according to Hayden White, Thierry's work is not informed by original sources. He worked from published m aterial-already accessible to contem porary scholars (637). 34 Boissel points out, "Ainsi, pendant les cinquant annees q u i virent l’ etablissem ent de l'ideologie revolutionnaire, bourgeoise et democratique, o n voit s affirmer sinon une nouvelle philosophie de l'histoire, du moins une conception de I homme e t d e l'histoire de l'hum anite dans laquelle le facteur physiologique et ethnique est pos6 corrune un fait que l'historien ou le philosophe ne peut ni ignorer ni nggliger ni peut-etre r&ruser" (11). 74 NOTE TO USERS THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT RECEIVED BY U.M.I. CONTAINED PAGES WITH POOR PRINT. PAGES WERE FILMED AS RECEIVED. 75 THIS REPRODUCTION IS THE BEST AVAILABLE COPY. discourses on the creation of the novel's creole characters. In both discursive practices the hybrid offspring of miscegenation attained the status of m onstrousness. As chapter one explains, eighteenth-century scientific discourse was directly influenced by the gaze of the traveler. For the most part, early traveller's tales conveyed their observations through a visually descriptive approach to foreign lands, customs and people. European scientists subsequently espoused and cultivated experiential modes, typically visual, of gathering and relaying information about both the physical and the metaphysical world. As a result, scientific discourse developed conclusions about the physique and customs of the non-European from physical and experiential evidence from travelers and natural scientists alike. Eighteenth-century scientists also cultivated a fascination for monstrousness that converged at hybridization, around w hich a discourse generated. The potential proliferation of the offspring of hybridization posed a complex problem for discursive containment. Hybridization, for example, figures prominently in scientific explanations for the origin of the black race, repeated throughout the eighteenth century from Volaire to Buffon, as the cross-breeding of whites with monkeys. In this way, preconceived m onstrousness formed the basis for eighteenth-century scholarly notions of black bodies, notions which consequently extended to black sexuality.35 35 Poliakov cites a later scientist, one English doctor Edward Long, who, during his sojourn in Jamaica, concluded that Blacks, bom of an unnatural alliance, w ere then logically capable of procreation with either europeans or orang-outangs ("Le Fantasme 174). 76 Experiments in hybridization occured frequently; and plants and animals were not the only constituents of these studies (Gossiaux 58).36 Buffon devotes a significant portion of the L'Histoire Naturelle (1749) to hypothesizing the nature of the experiment and the length of time necessary to transform a black body into a white body.37 Compelled to experiment with racial interbreeding in the name o f progess for the whole hum an race, the final outcome of Buffon's experiments necessitated white features effacing black traits (Duchet, "Du Noir" 180). According to Buffon's experiments, science ennobles the species by allowing w hite features to genealogically overtake those of the black body's distinguishing characteristics (180). Out of their unnatural being, came the conviction in scientific circles of the catagorical sterility of the offspring of hybrids: Darwin, tout monog£niste qu'il £tait, discute dans La Descendertce de Vhomme la sterility des hybrides...Pour Darwin et pour pratiquem ent tous les auteurs d u xixe la distinction entre races supdrieures et races inferieures allait de soi, n'avait m al besoin d'etre prouvee. ( Duchet, "Racisme" 176). 36 Simar explains the two theories that constituted the extent of discussion involving the origins of racial difference a t this time. On the one hand, monogenist theorists hypothesized that variations in climate accounted for physiological— and thus tempermental and cultural— differences among men. Polygenists, on the other hand, diverged from Scripture, believing that each race had had a distinct pair of ancestors. Monogenists thus favored classification of varieties or races distinguished primarily through physical characteristics (68). 37 Blumenbach (1752-1840) also displays a certain fascination for "la variety interm ediate", between Black and white. H ow ever, as in the case of Buffon, biological and racial variations too often find themselves assigned w ithin the "deviant", "mutated", or "degenerated” rubric o f Blumenbach's findings (Poliakov, "Racism" 58). 77 Over time, scientists disregarded this precept of hybrid sterility an d continued to experiment with generations of hybridized offspring- Successful crossbreeding was understood to produce a variety of th e original race.3 8 Jean- Jacques Virey's L'Histoire du genre humain (1824) avidly details the characteristics of the offspring th at various generations of miscegenation produce. The coupling of a white man w ith a Hottentot produces a baster whereas Virey gives the outcome between a Hottentot an d a black m an no name. Virey does, however, distinguish the stature an d skin color of the presumed result of this coupling from those of the baster (188). Like m ost contemporary scientists Virey recognizes that generations of miscegenation obscure racial characteristics which distinguish "pure" ethnicities from one another. Buffon took u p as well the results of Cornelius de Pauw's experiments on the proportions o f black blood versus w hite after various generations of miscegenation (Duchet, "Du Noir" 181). The simplicity of his procedure motivated the influential monogenist's interest in De Pauw's experim entation: Buffon voit bien en effet que...ce qui distingue un e race d'une autre n'est pas seulement la couleur de la peau, mais u n ensemble de caracteres dont la permanence est tout aussi assum e ou tout aussi douteuse, et dont le tableau de Cornelius de Pauw ne tient pas vraim ent compte. (Duchet, Du Noir 179)3 9 38 Duchet,"Des croisements entre esp£ces voisines pourraient former des races constantes, qui seraient une vari£t£ dans une des especes d'origine-.La definition biologique de l'esp&ce devient de plus en plus floue" (Antropologie 218). 39 To this end, Buffon's experiments carried implications for the as y e t unrecognized study of anthropology, which developed in order to take into account secondary cultural characteristics of a people. 78 By the year of Indiana's publication, not only scientific explanations but also colonialist administration found it necessary to react to the hybrid, whose body disturbed identity, system and order. The elements of doubled vision that structure the novel's parallel passages reflect the influence of both scientific and colonialist discourses on the creation of the novel's creole characters. By the time Sand wrote her first novel, colonialist and scientific discourses already sought to contain the disturbance of identity racial ambiguity provoked by deeming the hybrid, the mulatto, abject. The question of hybridization, whether posed by scientists or by governmental officials, was continually treated in terms of black contamination of the w hite body. Experiments in hybridization of blacks with whites over generations proved, however, that black blood could contaminate a white body unbeknownst to the community. Thus, both scientific experimentation and colonialist discourse espoused a m anner of consideration whereby the hybrid, the mulatto, embodied the figure of paranoia. We shall see how the nature of colonialist mandates for the hybridized body inform Sand's physical depictions of Indiana as well as Ramiere's reaction to Indiana's masquerade as Noun. Miscegenation and Colonialist Administration In order to uncover the mulatto body underlying Indiana's physiognomy, we can compare Ramiere's reaction to her spectacle w ith the reaction of colonial governments to interracial coupling. By the eighteenth century, governmental officials began an open discussion of their concern over 79 the numbers of Blacks who had already arrived from the colonies onto French shores. Most objections stemmed from the increased potential for miscegenation. Explicit anxiety over interracial coupling motivated le ministre de la Marine, for example, to forbid colonial administrators from allowing passage to either slaves or negres litres.40 Likewise, le ministre Sartine argued that miscegenation constituted un libertinage that visiting Blacks could too possibly make known to friends and family after their return to the colony (Pluchon 132). Because colonialism became so preoccupied with percentages of black blood we can think of colonial societies in terms of "pigmentocratie" that hierarchized social status according to skin pigmentation (Girard, "Le Mulatre" 204).41 In this way, miscengenation constituted a social as well as a scientific issue. The mobility of freemen necessitated a discourse that w arned of the dangers of sexual relations between races. That the status of a mulatto varied from colony to colony made this discourse all the more imperative.42 Because 40 Pluchon quotes him, "...le nombre des esclaves s’ est augm ents si fort en France, deplore-t-il, qu'il en est rSsultS un sang-mele, qui se m ultiple tous les jours, par le communication qu'ils ont avec les Blancs..."(125). 41 Pluchon notes the example of Saint-Domingue as an illustration of how anatom y determined destiny within a given colonial system: "Le critere d e l’ epiderme, qui dSsigne une catSgorie sociale, et ouvre ou limite les ambitions, joue a pleine contre les metis...Le prSjugS de couleur ne se reduit pas h une rSpulsion physique, il exprime la philosophie de l'organisation sociale de la colonie...longtemps apres que la Seconde Republique eu t aboli l'esclavage, les colons antillais restaient profondSment attaches & ce qui avail constituS, pendant deux siScles, la clS de voute de l'ordre coloniale" (). 42 H offm ann, "Certains sont esclaves, et ne se distinguent gu£re des Noirs. Certains appartiennent it cette classe intermgdiaire de contremaTtres et d'artisans auxquels on concede la liberty mais pas l'6galite" (231). 80 the mulatto occupied the social strata between black and white, he or she enjoyed certain privileges denied either an African slave or freeman. Mulattoes w ere also more commonly m anumitted than black slaves (Conlen 85). The w hite parent (more often than not, the father) commonly saw to the child's education, and frequently sent him or her back to the metropole. Mulattos could not only gain freedom thanks to their white parentage, b u t also could interm arry with whites and own property (Girard 202). As m ulattos enjoyed more mobility~and the chances of white features' obscurity ever increased-colonial administrators instituted marriage laws according to color combinations (Duchet, "Du Noir" 181).43 Marriage laws generally became stricter between races once the colony had abolished slavery. Likewise, the discourse that surrounded colonial m arriage and sexuality promoted prejudice against unions between the races in the interest of prohibiting m ixed offspring (Duchet ,"Racisme" 177).44 Racial hierarchy structured every aspect of actual colonialist societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As m ulatto and black freemen made their way to the metropole, administrators saw to it that their colonialist doctrine upheld racial hierarchy. W ithout such legislation and mandates, blackness could too easily become so diluted as to become unrecognizable. 43 Conlen w rites "In a certain sense we can say that the race system with its legal prevention of interm arriage and interfomication does not arise until after slavery has been destroyed, b u t the first sign of its coming can be seen towards the end of the period of slavery... " (89). 44 Bellecombe, governor of Saint-Domingue, writes to this effect in the "Mulatre" article for the Supplements to L 'Encyclopidie, ”1 1 eut sans doute 6tg & souhaiter pour les bonnes moeurs et pour la population des blancs dans les colonies que les Europgens n'eussent jamais senti que de l’ indiffgrence pour les nggresses..." (Duchet, "Du Noir" 177). 81 L'abb6 Provost's Histoire des voyages characterizes the m ulatto "race" as composed of the worst in Europeans and the worst of Africans: " 'Elle en est comme le cloaque' " (Girard, "Le Mulatre" 192). By the fifth generation of miscegenation, the dominant class of w hite colonialists can no longer so easily distance a rightful member of the class of gens de couleur libres from their superior circle (Duchet, "Du Noir" 183).45 Frank Tinland locates the origins of racism in the cultural necessity for differentiation.46 Difference, he argues, provides any social system w ith cohesion and order. Difference became an especially crucial social element as the bourgeoisie rose to economic power in the aftermath of the Revolution. Difference became indispensible for a distribution of heterogenous positions and status to persons otherwise substitutable: "L'homog£ndit£, de ce point de vue, est vdcue comme source d'incertitude et de dissolution"(28). The indetermination of the mulatto body, then, w ould prom pt a similar cultural paranoia whereby the very foundation of identity in the eyes of the beholder is menaced.47 Faced w ith the potential 45 Duchet characterizes prejudice against mulatto m en and women: "Loin de contribuer a la perfection de l'esp&ce humaine, le melange des sangs, en brouillant l'ordre naturel, fait perdre a la race dominante ses traits distinctifs e t sa sup£ritorit£ naturelle” ("Du Noir" 183). 46 Tinland explains, "C'est done par l'institution des differences...qu'une soci£t£ aquiert en definitive sa cohesion et un ordre stable et securisant, reposant sur la distribution des statuts heterogenes a des individus naturellement substituables dans les fonctions qu'ils seraient capables de remplir" (28). 47 "Produit aldultere du melange des sangs qui efface la couleur mais non la tache originelle, le sang-mili, co n sid er d'un point de vue politique, entre dans la classe des Blancs; considere d'un point de vue moral, il n'est q u'un homme vil: “ '...enfant d e la plus detestable debauche, espece de monstre toujours compose de la sceieratesse des deux couleurs’ " (Duchet, "Du Noir" 185). 82 for the propagation of ambiguous bodies, colonial powers responded with legislation that attempted to limit miscegenation.4 8 The sight of the mulatto disturbs notions of fixed identity because after so m any generations, miscegenation transforms the differences so crucial to social cohesion to the point of eradication. As the first victim of the scientific search for the causes of the difference it represents, black bodies suffer the imposition of an empiricist methodology that voids any elaboration of a multiplicity of cultural identities particular to them. Through this obliteration, then, positivism effectively staved off the threat of difference. The nature of mulatto bodies, by contrast, threatened the colonialist system w ith its propagation. As a result, mulatto-ist discourse emerges from a society's anxiety over lack of distinct identities, systems, or order, borders, positions, or rules. The sight of this body implicitly critiqued existing social distinctions. Regardless of whether the individual betrayed the dominance of black features or of white, lack of racial clarity limited social determination by allowing power no clear deliniations on which to focus domination. Consequently, ambivalence and abjection arose around the product of miscengenation. The sight of mulatto bodies becomes intolerable and dangerous because, as the sign of ambivalence, these individuals are no slates onto which white superiority 48 Conlen highlights the treatm ent of mulattos which alternated between fetishization and paranoia surrounding mulattos passing for white, "Almost universally mulattoes were considered superior from the aesthetic point of view, hence they were often preferred as houseslaves and concubines. On the other hand, breeding slaves who w ere too light was not in the economic interests of the master, because the lighter a slave was, the easier his chances of escaping and passing himself as a freeman" (85). For more on the interdictions of intermarriage, see the Pluchon appendix which reprints le m inistre Sartine's Arrtt du Conseil d'Etat du Rot Interdisant au Blanc tous manages avec des Noirs, Muldtres, ou autres Gens de Couleur du 5 avril 1778. 83 m ay assert its doctrine. Mulatto bodies do not constitute the white bodies’ opposite so much as they potentially confound white superiority.4 9 Africanist Discourse Colonialist prohibition against interracial marriage rendered any outcome interracial coupling, i.e., the mulatto body, abject. The dread and hallucinations Ramiere experiences just between Noun's suicide and the second seduction scene reveal him reacting on tw o counts. First, before the scene between him and Indiana, the remorse he feels after Noun's suicide seems to provoke his anticipating a confrontation with the abject. Second, during the scene with Indiana, he reacts as if he indeed faces an abject spectacle. Before continuing with an exploration into Ramiere's reaction to Indiana, however, it becomes necessary to elaborate another component of exoticism, Africanist discourse. Certain tropes of Romanticism, the frenetic and the melodramatic, for example, have a strong effect on Sand's depiction of Ramidre's guilt and dread after N oun's suicide. To this end, during o u r analysis of the mulatto body underlying Indiana's physiognomy, this project potentially mistakes melodrama for abject portraits of N oun and later, of Indiana's reanimation of Noun's memory. How ever melodrama and the frenetic may influence Sand's depiction of Ramiere's experiences betw een the time of Noun's drowning and his second rendez-vous in Indiana's room , 49 "Le Pouvoir a d it et r6p6t6, notamment dans une lettre ministdrielle d u 7 janvier 1767, que les descendants d'Indiens 'doivent etre assim iles aux sujet du Roi originaires d'Europe. L'homme de couleur, lui, c'est jamais qu'un fils d'Afrique, un enfant de l'esclavage. Peut-il exister menace plus effrayante, et d£shonneur plus indel6bile qu'un tel patriom oine ancestral?" (Pluchon 191). 84 Ramiere's dread and paranoia reveal the weight exoticist— and more specifically, Africanist— discourse carries over his perception of his experiences. While Said focuses on orientalism's W est/East dichotomy, he ignores whether the colonized's skin color is black or brown, for example. Regardless of Middle Eastern, N orth African, or Tahitian ethnic and familial ties among the colonized, orientalist discourse springs from the desire to apprehend difference. While physical difference most blatently motivates orientalist discourse, confrontations with anything existing outside the reproduction of European cultural ideals prompted an orientalist response in the European observer (Simar 42). To this end, Pluchon discusses the eighteenth-century fashion for negrillons, black children, housed in the best of families, represented in paintings alongside the mistress, w ho served as salon conversation pieces (136). This particular vogue illustrates im portant contemporary ideological motivations for colonialism on whatever scale: to strengthen the alliance between its self-identity and power the dominant ideology keeps whatever it considers foreign both subjugated and at hand. Consequently, notes Pluchon, "On aime 2 l les [les ndgrillons] peindre auprds de grandes dam es dont ils font ressortir l’ dclat de la blancheur" (137). Christopher Miller identifies Africanist discourse as another movement w ithin the vast enterprise of colonialist discourse. Miller distinguishes one im portant difference between Africanist and orientalist discourse. He observes that, as a construction, the Orient possesses an identity-albeit fictive. Miller argues that, historically, Africa has existed as a non-entity, considered not so m uch Europe's opposite b u t as a mystery, an unknowable spectre. He affirms th at scientific discourse has intervened between the European spectator and the 85 black body. Analysis and empiricism replaced that body w ith a methodology. The consequences of this particular European m ode of knowledge accumulation, most evident in the Enlightenment fascination for classification, were efforts at eradicating difference~or at "shedding light into darkness"— rather than at elaborating difference (Miller 19). In addition to clarifying discursive containment to w hich the black object has been historically subjected, Miller's concept of Africanist discourse also clarifies those perceptions of the sang-meles w hich brought forth ensuing discourse designed to contain m ulatto propagation. Like orientalism, Africanist discourse owes its legacy to the colonialist perspectives circulated through travel literature: "The etymologies of 'colony' and 'Afer' tell exactly the same story of an empty slate, written on by outsiders" (Miller 16). Once European modes of knowledge accumulation and transmission successfully eradicated difference, the empty slate resulted. The "void", then, that European discourse made of black bodies, furthermore stands in direct contrast to the ambivalence that the mulatto individual represented. Travel texts, w hich furthered the aims of Africanist discourse, created the "sights, images a n d abstractions" for reading audiences at home, ennabled in p a rt because black bodies had been voided of multiple identities proper to them (Said 48). The "empty slate", then, allowed for any manner of discursive substitution to stand in place of the difference black men and women represented- Worse, Edward Said reminds us, "original" observations transmutated from telling to retelling (158). Science fell back on accounts like these, invariably creating its facts, by classifying and writing coherent, authoritative pronouncements on the presumed blank slate of the colonized physiognomy. 86 Buffon, for example, relied on travel records kept by various explorers for his scientific conclusions on existing differences among various indigenous peoples of the world. L'Histoire Naturelle incessantly defers to the written accounts of previous scientists, travelers and explorers. The journals of men to w hom Buffon refers, however, were again already slanted in favor of m aintaining European cultural hegemony: On ne saurait conclure que tous les voyageurs gtaient nScessairement imbus de pr£jug£ racial, car comment expliquer alors le fait que le meme Roubaud, qui d£crit les Hottentots en des termes si nggatifs, soit plus tendre envers le peuple malgache qu'il defend contre la perversion europgene... (Gunny 173) Bernardin de Saint-Pierre also kept a record of his voyage of discovery w hen Du Voyage a Vile de France (1773) began as letters sent back to friends. A m ong descriptions of island foliage and village customs, his remarks about the black and white population manifest a predilection for obscuring racial identity. He groups his observations about both the Indian and the black population under the same heading of "Des Noirs", for example (Droixhe 164). According to the fashion of his time, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's preface dem onstrates a predilection for naturalism so prevalent among his contemporaries: "L'histoire naturelle n' 6tant point renfermge dans des biblioth&ques, il m'a sembl£ que c'£tait un livre ou tout le monde pouvait lire" (ii). His inclusion of quasi-scientific accounts of the island is an example of the unhappy marriage between orientalist enhancement and scientific investigation, whereby each continually (mis)inform the other (Said 157). 87 Moreover, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre uses this text to abolitionist ends. In his postscript to "Des Noirs" he harangues his political comtemporaries, "Je suis fach£ que des philosophes qui combattent les abus avec tant de courage, n'aient gudre parl6 de l'esclavage des noirs que pour en plaisanter"(129). Bernardin de Saint-Pierre embellishes his physical accounts of the enslaved natives— wherin he describes blonds and redheads among les Balanbous, for example (121). His embellishments fall under the rubric of "innumerable speculations" made by voyagers which in the earlier years of travel literature addressed "giants, savages, natives and monsters" (Said 116). Ultimately, these mythical monsters, themselves constructed from notions of hybridization, sustained and invigorated Europe's ideological might. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's distorted content is easily recuperable from an Africanist perspective: his goal of stirring abolitionist sympathies demanded that he exaggerate the black object, that he fill up an emptiness. He describes blacks with white features and one example of a Europeanized black personality he considers regrettably restrained, in order to gain sympathy from his white audience~a quest his postscript to Des Noirs makes very clear. Consequently, travel testimonies like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's, formulated abstractions that either shied away from the particular or enhanced the individual. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre exemplifies the processes by which European hegemony prescribed an identity to the black body. The m ulatto body posed a more difficult threat. Nothing less than abjectification could contain the fears this body prompted. 88 The Literary Mulatto Literary treatment of the mulatto coincided with increasing concern of colonialist administrations over the ever-improving social status both in France and in the colonies of the sang-mele. Great imperialist ventures and the literary genre of the novel both m atured during the nineteenth century. Thus, no author whose country's colonialist investments were thriving, wrote in ignorance of either empire or colonialist discourse surrounding freemen (Said 14). Hoffmann mentions the more frequent occurrences of sang-mele protagonists after 1815, once the slave uprising at Saint Domingue in 1791 proved a growing mulatto class a force to be reckoned w ith. More important, Hoffmann emphasizes that the literary portrait of the m ulatto hero generally reflected the dominance of white characteristics over black African. Thus, the heroic m ulatto possesses white characteristics that signal "la valeur r£demptrice" inherent to white blood ( 232). That authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally split the literary mulatto into two--one good, one bad--reflects both the nature of colonial color hierarchy and an important doubling component inherent to both the uncanny and to abjection. In a sense, Sand's splitting her creole protagonist into two conforms to this literary commonplace. What is more, the text mentions Indiana's father, a Frenchman, as descended from Spanish nobility who took refuge in the French colonies at the fall of Napoleon. Indiana's background includes no information about her mother, however. This omission comprises further evidence tow ard whether or not Indiana and Noun m ay share certain racial origins. 89 Hoffmann recognizes that the complexity of the mulatto inspired a great many Romantic authors (230). The characteristics w ith which writers generally endowed the mulatto closely parallel Indiana's own background according to Sand's text, including exoticized origins that usually involve some history of abuse or violence (229). What is more, the responsibility for the mulatto's black ancestry usually fell on the mother, who a white man had, more often than not, raped or seduced. Rarely did the literary portrait of the mulatto portray distinctive black features— especially in the w ork of authors who thought themselves politically liberal (238). These authors allowed the white features of the mulatto's origins to dominate: "II s'agit de prouver que la partie noire de son hgrgditd ne l'empeche pas de se d£velopper.. .dans la meme direction que la race des Seigneurs" (231). Because of the complex social and political situation of the sang-mele whether in the colonies or at the metropole, the literary mulatto offered the opportunity for the Romantic’ s to elicit audience sympathy. Hoffmann observes that the literary mulatto betrays similarities to the bastard, a literary type favored by the Romantics. Like the bastard who finds his illegitimacy the object of societal disdain, the mulatto suffers prejudice against an indistinct skin color, a status as freeman, and an ancestry's disenfranchisement (234). Likewise, Sand's creole finds herself while perhaps not at the margins of polite society (because of her exoticized origins) nevertheless distinctive from it. The blush of her cheeks, for instance, is of an especial rosiness: "La chaleur des appartements avait h peine reussi & elever sur ses joues une nuance delicate comme celle d'une rose de Bengale" (80). The ambivalence inherent to the narrative’ s exoticism of Indiana parallels Romantic tropes. More important, however, the physical descriptions of Indiana indicate the operations of a colonialist discursive imperative which harbors extensive ambivalence toward the colonized. Indiana Ressembles the Literary Mulatto. Durot who traveled to L'lle Bourbon at the beginning of the eighteenth century, observed the various hues of native skin tone. He specifically points out the racial variation and conplexity among bourbonnais who were, in his w o rd s," 'noires, mulatresses, ensuites creoles' " (Gunny 163). Color confusion seems to comprise the very term "creole". To this end, Sands narrator can refer to each woman as creole and yet allow the racial origins of both to remain a mystery by definition.50 Of course, pervasive miscegenation accounts for some this racial confusion. The name Indiana itself indicates origins of both other and same, inspired by both indian (indigenous) influences, and a goddess of the Roman empire (Diana). In this way, the title of Sand's novel itself indicates a creole protagonist, a split nature of sorts, a hybridization-neither black nor white, neither lady nor savage— that travellers since the Early Modern period have approached with trepidation. 50 Varet observes a certain duality inherent to the term "creole" as the nineteenth century understood it: "D'une part si vous etes cr6ole, vous pouvez bien etre, le cas £ch£ant, un mulatre: tout depend s'il est urgent ou non d'y aller voir de trfes prfcs. Car d'autre part, l'important, c'est que rien d'autre en effect n'est n£cessaire...que sa naissance outre-mer, fut-il de souche raciale particulifcrement blanche; mais dans l'id€e d u temps, c'est done une condition suffisante pour en faire d£j& un citoyen de seconde zone— un 'n atif" (259). 91 Nevertheless, Sand expresses an investment in depicting Indiana's physiogmony dominated by w hite features. The text describes Indianas hair as black, although her figure reveals characteristics more allied to European ideals of beauty than to indigenous physical features: "c'£tait u n e creature toute petite, toute mignonne, toute ddli£e; une beauts de salon..-" (51)- Ultimately, the narrator equates "creole" w ith exotic, m aking repeated reference to Indiana's upbringing in order to reinforce the innocent a n d lyrical qualities of her character nurtured not merely outside Paris but on a distant island. Consequently, Indiana's manner sharply contrasts with th a t of a true w om an of the world, a continentally bred lady. In the following quotation the narrator directly addresses presumed readers: "Femmes de France, vous ne savez pas ce que cest qu'une creole: vous eussiez, sans doute, c£dg m oins aisement...car ce n'est pas vous qu'on dupe et qu'on trahit! (127). The development of Indiana's character closely adheres to Romantic tropes which refined if not created the mulatto protagonist- Descriptions of Indiana indicate an exoticized backround, a p ast full of suffering/ and a protagonist at odds w ith prevailing social standards. Each o f these attributes conforms to Hoffmann's assessments of the literary mulatto. Yet the narrator does not make any such ancestry explicit. Following Hoffmann's remarks, we can conclude that Sand's politically liberal predisposition m a y urge her to insist on the dominance of Indiana's w hiter features in order to effectively critique social gender roles. Indiana's protagonists are creole, and as such they len d an exotic touch to a story primarily concerned w ith society's victimization of women. Thus, Sand uses Indiana and Noun's exotic creole status merely to ensure reader sympathy. As the previous chapter outlined, Sand's preface to 92 the 1832 edition of Indiana presents notions intrinsic to the Romantic mission for social revision. This preface illustrates the novels preoccupation with societys many victimizations. As I have argued, the novel, however, emphasizes the social revisionist mission itself over any actual plight of freemen or of w om en of color in France or the colonies. That the narrator is finally not concerned w ith any victimization other than that of wom en in society does not preclude the possibility of Indiana’ s m ulatto lineage. On the contrary, the Romantics used the literary mulatto to the very purpose of gaining sympathy for a particular social revisionism. Sand also potentially assures audience sympathy for her heroine and initiates a feminist agenda through placing Indiana squarely between the desires of two equally dangerous male figures. Sand maintains a distinctive political edge to Indiana, especially in regard to all three male characters. In fact, the political conviction each expresses in discussion affects their respective relationships to her. All three, Rami£re, Delmare and Ralph, represent a particular moment w ithin the recent political developm ents in France (Wing&rd-Vareille 46). Delmare and Rami&re most especially oppose one another politically. O n the one hand, Rami£re is a m an of his time, when parlimentary procedure and Romanticism held he who most seductively argued his cause in the highest esteem. (WingSrd-Vareille 35). Delmare, on the other hand, embodies the outmoded glory of Bonapartisme and the military (Wingard-Vareille 47). To this end, Delmare and Raymon reflect the two dom inant nineteenth-century male political figures that Eric Meyer identifies in his delineation of the power relationship which typically binds the fictional sultan to his counterpart, the Imperialist. 93 Meyer observes that W estern imperialism's efforts frequently upheld the pretense of liberating Eastern w om en from their society's many oppressions. He emphasizes that the ultimate deadlock betw een these two male figures nevertheless serves to exoticize, eroticize, and contain "Oriental" w om en (659). From the eighteenth-century onw ard, the harem functioned as the recurrent discursive "site/sight of colonialist desire" (Meyer 662). Therefore, in orientalist fiction, w om en are often figured squarely between the sultan and the W estern imperialist monarchy. In the process, orientalist fiction, like Sand's seduction scenes, typically structures the relationship between these m ale figures through doubling an d visual devices: The Oriental despot, with h is paralyzing gaze, and the Napoleonic conqueror, w ith his panoptic world-historical vision, merely reflect, in inverse mirrors, a single specular structure from which the mutually mesmerized protagonists find it impossible to extricate themselves. And between them , caught in the conflicting field of opposed gazes, is the colonial woman whose fate it is to be destroyed by th e redoubled violence of the male protagonists. (Meyer 675) This analysis sums up Indiana's predicament. She finds herself occupying the position not only betw een her husband, the symbolic sultan, and his colonizing rival, Rami&re, but also between Ralph and Raymon. Naomi Schor recognizes the emphasis Sand places on the gaze to illustrate Indiana's position in relation to the fetishism /narcissism which comprises Rami^re's desire. Schor points to the example of the scene wherein Raymon discovers the presence of Ralph's ever-surveillant gaze fixed by a portrait of him hanging in Indiana's chamber. Here Sand reveals the nature of the bond linking the male characters to one another: 94 Not surprisingly, then, given the violence of Raymon's reaction to the fancied voyeuristic privileges enjoyed by the m an in the portrait, the rivalry between Raymon and Sir Ralph, the portrait's model, will be entirely ocular, a struggle over who shall posses the exclusive right not to be gazed at by Indiana but to gaze at her. (Schor, "The Portrait" 125) Sand’ s narrative does enact Meyer's model of the homosocial colonialist bond whereby the colonizers' institutions, particularly those of marriage and romance, victimize Sand's heroine. Nevertheless, Sand does so in complete conformity to orientalist fictional practice. Here an im portant ambiguity steps into Sand's story. Her incessant Romantic orientalist approach to her female characters prescribes that she use "orientalist" figures and gestures to conduct a social critique. As such, Sand's love triangle between two creole women and one European male sublimates any racial or ethnic oppression to a feminist agenda. Significantly, however, Sand allows her dow ntrodden heroine to recuperate her potential destruction as the colonized creole, the focus of the male gaze. Indiana does so through her mascarade as the dead woman, Noun, which both uncannily reanimates Noun's forgotten memory and includes the return of Rami&re's Imperialist gaze. Indiana's Masquerade Reveals the Colonialist Gaze. While the novel's seduction scenes underscore the doubling of Indiana's female characters, they become tableaux that unfold before Rami&re's gaze. An important aspect of these passages' visual elements manifests itself as Ramiere's hallucinatory experiences with these women which surface during the first seduction scene with Noun. Here, Rami&re imagines Indiana in 9 5 Noun's place. Between the time of Noun's suicide and his meeting Indiana for the second seduction scene, Rami£re suffers from nervous palpitations, agitating dreams, and near-fainting at the stream w here he imagines the reflection of Noun's drow ned countenance. Recurring dread and paranoia motivate these phantasmes as the second seduction scene approaches. Indeed, the very hallucinatory effects of RamiSre's paranoia provide the means to assessing his reactions to these scenes. The abject, according to Kristeva, contains an important hallucinatory component which lies: ...on the edge of existence and hallucination (2). To get at the nature of that which troubles Ramidre about Indiana's masquerade, the structure of Rami£re's (and thus, of the narrator's) observational gaze is significant. It is comprised of such an ambivalence that substitutes one creole for another, and that paints ambivalent portraits of the protagonist, Indiana. Just as colonialist discourse renders the mulatto particularly abject, Rami6re’ s vision becomes representative of his cultures colonialist imagination with regards to both gender and race. The second excerpt, which presents Indiana's mascarade of the deceased Noun, especially realizes the fears which overriding guilt has instilled in Rami&re up to this point. N oun seeks to seduce Ramtere through mimicking Indiana and double vision for Rami&re ensues. This particular scene depicts Raymons idealization of the as yet unconquered Indiana, an idealization which thwarts Nouns efforts at seduction. Raymon experiences Nouns brow n creole body while helplessly fantasizing about the white goddess Indiana. The omnicient gaze of the third- person narration of the nineteenth century so often relied on and thus conflated w ith the vision of the gazing performer (Tytler 266). We may 96 conclude, therefore, that creole femininity instills double vision n ot only in Raymon but also in Sand's narrator. Moreover, the distorted vision they share clears a path, as Ren6 Girard w ould have it, for that "middle ground between difference and unity that is indispensible to the process of sacrificial substitution" (161). Accordingly, N oun becomes the sacrificed substitute to the utopia that Indiana achieves by returning to L'lle Bourbon at the novel’s end. First, Noun's sexualized body is chimerically swallowed by Indiana's memory during the first seduction of Ramiere. Second, the narrative effaces her through death such that her presence remains as no m ore than the threat of a ghost throughout the rem ainder of the text.5 1 Clearly, N oun supplants Indiana's spiritual and utopic ideals for universal equality and harm ony between masters and slaves. Moreover, S.V. Griffin and Farah Jasmine Hartman w rite that in those films w here mulatto women "pass" for white, as a general rule, the success a mulatta acheives in being seen as a white wom an and thus not recognized as black m ulatto depends upon "the erasure or marginalization of black women" (371).52 In this way, Noun's suicide is not only an example of her ow n marginalization, but is also a requisite element to an implicit story of Indiana's "passing" for white. 51 Julia Kristeva also observes the process of sacrifice. If we substitute Indiana for "I" and N oun for the "object" separated from Indiana through abom ination in the following, we can understand the novel from the seduction scenes to the utopic finale: "The killed object from which I am separated through sacrifice, w hile it links m e to God it also sets itself up, in the act of being destroyed, as desirable, fascinating, sacred...To the contrary, the abjected object from which I am separated through abom ination...tum s me aside, cuts me off, and throw s me out..(110-lll). 52 Griffin and H artm an remind us that "The traditional mulatta is a character for w hite audiences, created to bring whites to an understanding of the effects of racism and...encourage their sympathy and their empathy"(371). 97 Noun's seduction of Ramiere functions for his gaze as a means of substituting Indiana in her place. Here, in terms of sheer contrast, Noun highlights Indiana's European features and thus her sameness for Rami&re. N oun's death, however, provokes Indiana's mascarade later as her dead sister. The headdress she wears to recall N oun at this moment~"un foulard des Indes, noud h la manidre des cr£oles"--also recalls her ow n roots o n l'De Bourbon. Judging by his troubled reaction, however, this second scene also radically underscores Indiana’s difference for Rami&re— and not only o n the level of continent versus colony. Tout a coup il lui vint une de ces id£es bizarres, incomptetes, que les etres inquiets et malheureux sont seuls capables de rencontrer. Elle risqua tout son sort sur une £preuve delicate et singulidre contre laquelle Raymon ne pouvait etre en garde. Elle avait & peine prepare ce mysterieux moyen, qu'elle entendit les pas de Raymon... ...Indiana lui tournait le dos, elle £tait envelopp£e dune pelisse d o u b le de fourrure. Par un dtrange hasard, c'Stait la meme que N oun avait prise & l'heure du dernier rendez-vous...Je ne sais si vous vous souvenez que Raymon eut alors pendant u n instant l’ id6e invraisemblable que cette femme enveloppeee e t cach£e dtait madame Delmare. M aintenant, en retrouvant la meme apparition tristem ent pench£e sur une chaise...& cette m em e place ou tant de souvenirs l'attendaient, dans cette chambre o u il n'^tait pas entr£ depuis la plus sinistre nuit de sa vie...il recula— attachant son regard effrayd sur cette figure immobile, et tremblant comme un poltron qu'en se retournant elle ne lui offrit les traits livides d'une femme noyde. (190-191; 3e partie, ch. XVII) Rami&re's paranoia and hallucinations which lead up to and during Indiana's masquerade are symptoms of a twofold abjection written into the novel: (on the one hand,) they are inseparable from his seeing a black identity in Indiana that he cannot recognize and which (on the other,) the narrative insists is 98 unrecognizable. To this end, the structure of Rami£re's (and thus, of the narrator's) observational gaze is comprised of an ambivalence that significantly parallels Homi Bhabha's notion of the ambivalence inherent to colonialist ideology. According to Bhabha, colonization is typified by the colonizer's desire to make "difference that is almost the same but not quite" of the colonized (126). Bhabha understands this process as essential to the colonizer's prescription of “mimicry" for the colonized. In addition, the result of this ambivalent prescription contains fortuitous consequences for the colonizer. The ambivalent outcome of mimicry— objects almost the same as their colonizers, but not quite— causes the colonialist discursive imperative to transform itself: into an uncertainty...It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent...upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects...so that mimicry is at once resemblance [to the colonizer] and menace [to the colonizer]. (127). Sand's characterization of Indiana is infused with and informed by the colonizer's desire for mimicry on the part of the colonized. In addition, Indiana's masquerade includes consequences for the colonizer. Her masquerade confronts Ramiere's colonialist desire transm itted through his gaze by embodying, and w hat is more, flaunting, an ambivalent outcome— whereby Rami£re is menaced by Indiana's resemblance to Noun. Ramidre's reproachful reaction to her masquerade testifies to a "strategic limitation or prohibition" her spectacle features. Two events which occur 99 during Indiana's masquerade especially indicate a strategic prohibition to the seduction of RamiSre's desire. The first involves Indiana's offering Ramidre the dead womans shorn hair. Raymon has somehow anticipated this event since N oun's death. Instantly he understands Indiana's trap and his fears are confirmed. Naomi Schor interprets the gesture as revealing the extent of Raymon's fetishism of the female body and its intrinsic relationship to castration anxiety. Thus he reproaches her, "'Vous m'avez fait u n mal horrible!”’ As such, Indiana's gesture confronts Rami&re with the full extent of his narcissism, of which she is well aw are. Schor w rites that in this scene, "male narcissism and fetishism are show n to be inextricably linked. To unm ask one is to unm ask the other and...to unm ask both is to attack the very foundations of the representational system elaborated by patriarchal society." (Schor, "Female Fetishism" 308). H owever, the narration indicates that the texture of the hair Rami£re touches acts as the distinguishing feature between N oun's characteristics and those of Indiana. While he can tell th at the tresses lack a certain vitality and that they have been cut a long time ago, he nevertheless also senses a fundamental difference between them an d the feel o f Indiana's hair: "en rassemblant dans sa m ain cette riche chevelure dont quelques tresses tombaient jusqu'& terre, Raymon crut y trouver quelque chose de sec et de rude que ses doigts n'avaient jamais remarqu<5 sur les bandeaux d u front d'Indiana" (192). In this case, the cultural fetish and lack Indiana does indeed present Rami£re is racial difference borne out by experiential evidence. The difference proves horrifying. Rami£re fears the presence of such ghosts and reapparitions of Nouns corpse which reinforce the abject overcoming the first half of this text. 100 Finally, the abject finds ultimate expression in this novel in one feminine entity of ambiguous racial origins split in half to accomodate Sand's particular Romantic social project. The second moment which acts as a strategic limitation to the colonizer's desire is the level of control Indiana wields over her spectacle. Accordingly, her gaze betrays the level of her awareness: "elle le regardait fixement, mais avec plus d'attention que de tendresse" (170). Together, Ramidre frequently looses control over these affairs. They conjure either phantoms, which overwhelm him in the first excerpt or uncanny apparitions orchestrated by Indiana in the second. Indiana's look back at Rami&re complicates the containment of difference abjection assures its subject.5 3 Indiana's oppositional gaze, played out by her masquerade, significantly fixes Raymon, the imperialist, as a partial presence, according to Bhabha's outline. Examining the role of the male figure in these seduction scenes allows us insight into the role creole femininity plays in turning the second of these two exotic fantasies sour for Rami&re. Indiana’s masquerade exists as perhaps the ultimate means of understanding the nature of Rami£re's partial presence. However, it does not exist as the only means in the novel. Other instances, induding the literary portraits of Rami£re--even the shape of Indiana's bed chamber— contribute to revealing Rami&re's helplessness in the process of his 53 Her gaze works in such a way as Alloula observes: it reverses the panoptic effect of the imperialist’s gaze by mirroring that gaze back onto the seeing subject. Gazing at N oun in the first scene, Raymon's look transmits a certain level of ambivalence w hich Fanon remarks in the desire that ultimately eminates from any w hite's sight of the Black body. Falling prey to Indiana's mascarade, by contrast, which incorporates an act of mirroring the gaze back onto Raymon's seeing subjectivity, Rami&re's look meets an example of w hat Bhabha calls "the displacing gaze of the disciplined" in her eyes (129). 101 efforts at colonizing creole femininity. The nature of his partial presence m ay, in fact, bear some relationship to the text's ow n definitions and stereotypes of the feminine creole figure. Sterling Haig in "La Chambre circulaire d'Indiana, " asserts that, because Raymon is the perfect portrait of a man of his time, his romantic fantasies victimize him. His eloquence results in oneiric pleasures that serve to delude him. One example of Ramtere's unhappy situation at the hands of these women includes the morning after his interlude with Noun, w hen he wakes up, helplessly locked in Indiana's room, "un prisonnier de Vamour " (508). The circular shape of Indiana’ s chamber according to H aig indicates an exotic and singular space unto itself (508). It functions as a "magic chamber" wherein Raymon transforms from vil seducteur to "s^ducteur travesti" in Sand's ow n words from a letter to Musset wherein she describes the table turned on Rami&re (507). Thus, Indiana discovers him trapped in her room that day, where to justify his presence, Raymon persuades her that he is her slave w hom she has called forth from exile (509). Indiana's circular bedchamber significantly compares to Foucault's "...fameuse cage, transparente et circulaire..." whereby Haig's sympathetic interpretation of Rami&re's character recognizes on some level how pow er changes hands w ithin the colonialist system the narrative unfolds (Foucault 210). The narrative attributes a second quality of childishness to both the creole female and to Rami&re. In order to further romanticize Indiana's background, the narration elaborates her childlike qualities: "Le principal charme des creoles, selon moi, l'excessive ddlicatesse de leurs traits et de leurs proportions leur laisse longtemps la gentillesse de l'enfance. Indiana...semblait 102 maintenant avoir quatorze ans" (153). The terrors that guilt inflict upon Ramidre torment him no less than children at the mercy of their fears. The narration especially emphasizes his apprehension during his trek across the Delmare property to fulfill his ill-fated rendez-vous w ith Indiana. W ith every step he takes, Ramidre's m ind becomes further and further afflicted : "...il se fut aussi rapidement, aussi lachement que l'enfant qui passe le soir auprds des cimetidres" (186). In conjunction with these childlike qualities and the hallucinations he experiences, a final aspect of the creole that Sand's narrator subsequently attributes to Raymon is the creole's superstitious nature. In fact, the definition of "creole" cited above from La Grande encyclopedic includes secondary characteristics, regardless of color, such as "spirituels" and "plein d'imagination" (324). Travel literature and fiction as well generally reinforced images of natives as idol-worshipping and nervous creatures (Hoffman 202). Thus, the opening descriptions of Indiana feature her otherworldly sensibilities, "Madame Delmare avait toutes les superstitions d'une creole nerve use et mala dive; certaines harmonies de la nuit, certains jeu de la lune lui faisaient croire & de certains 6v£nements..." (59). Though she knows nothing of their affair, she forsees Ramtere's arrival into the family's life: "Vous direz encore que je suis folle...mais je ne sais quelle catastrophe se prepare autour de nous" (59). Likewise, Ramtere's guilt-ridden anxiety after Noun's death prompts his superstitious fantasies: C'6tait la premidre fois qu'il pouvait pleurer depuis la m ort de Noun, et c'£tait Indiana qui soulageait son ame de ce poids terrible. — Oh!...vous la pleurez ainsi, dit-elle, vous qui ne l'avez pas connue... 103 ...Si ces mots..1'avait d61ivr6 d'une cruelle anxiStd, cet appel k la m&noire de sa victime, dans la bouche innocente d'Indiana, le frappa d'une terreur superstitieuse. (146; 2e partie, ch. XII) During the course of this conversation, Rami£re recovers: "Raymon repris sa force, sa volonte, son amour, ses espdrances; la sinistre impression qui l'avait glac£ s'effa?a, comme un cauchmar" (147). In the process of leading u p to the climax of Indiana’s masquerade, the text presents the limitations to Rami&re's control. Again, it does so somewhat ambivalently. Rami&re's guilt an d the hallucinatory experiences that accompany his loss of control subdue his power, in effect, femininizing him, according to stereotypes that determine the narrative's descriptions of the feminine creole characters. While the above characteristics illustrate strategic limitations to Ramtere's colonization of these women, these stereotypes also dominate the narrator's understanding and depiction of creole femininity. The hallucinatory-double vision born out of his paranoid anticipation-* typifies Ramiere's experiences w ith these women. As Schor's quotation above remarks, Rami&re's narcissism and paranoia are constitutive of his desire for Indiana. Christopher Miller observes that the earliest attem pts at hierarchization and hegemony prompted European discourse to attribute a "'null' mode" to Africa: historically, Africa has existed as a non-entity, considered not so much as Europe's opposite than as a mystery, an unknowable spectre. Moreover, Miller asserts that the "null mode" historically im puted to Africa approaches the nature of hallucination. Miller explains, "...in Africanist 104 discourse it is always the European subject who represents thought (sane contemplation of an object recognized as other) as opposed to hallucination ..." (64). Vet, like the strategic limitation constitutive of the ambivalence of colonialist discourse, Miller details a glitch inherent w hich any coherence Africanist discourse might promise its subject, the European identity. It begins w ith an opposition that w ould otherwise distinguish "dream"— understood, according to Freud, as a perceived reality— from any objective "reality" generated through "thought identity". Miller contends that Foucault, for example, in direct contrast to Freud, sees (Western) thought play itself o ut in an essential relation to discontinuity (62). Foucault sees no separation betw een the nature of W estern thought (and thus from the "sane contemplation" of "thought identity" Western thought attributes to itself) and the structure of dream s. In fact, he definitively relates the two: for Foucault, an "hallucinatory taking-for-real" already historically comprises the nature of W estern thought (64). Africanist discourse, by implication, hinges on a dual treatm ent of the object equivalent to the oscillation between perceived reality an d thought identity inherent to the work of dreams according to Freud. U nlike orientalist constructions, which attribute fictive identities to the Orient, Africanist discourse creates identities composed themselves of the stuff of hallucination. Miller writes, "discourse-criticism can no more free itself of regressive, hallucinatory "thought" than dream can free itself of the drive tow ard wish-fulfillment" (64). Approaching Indiana's chamber for the second tim e, Sand's narrator completes the same oscillatory movement of Africanist discourse that Bhabha imputes to his colonialist schema. Bhabha writes: 105 The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly tu rn s from mimicry— a difference th at is almost nothing but n o t quite~to m enace-a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power...can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia th at repeat furiously, uncontrollably. (132) In the end, colonialist theory may reveal as much if not more of the narration's constructions of both masculinity and femininity as does an investigation of Sand's femininist agenda. Indiana quite thoroughly develops the male component to literary exotic/erotic desire. W hatever the extent of Ramidre's power over Indiana during their affair, his reaction to her displacing gaze proves that masculine identity in the exotic imagination can be destabilized. Indiana's returning Ramiere's gaze also plays a principal role in the constitution of feminine identity and pleasure in this novel. Through female travesty, Indiana's making a spectacle o f herself potentially clears a way to pleasure/disruption otherwise denied w ith in her m a r ia g e blanc to Delmare, within her affair w ith Ramidre, within natures' bosom a n d social exile with Ralph at the texts end. However, if Sand destabilizes Raymon's position as representative of the dominant culture and sexuality of her time, this occurs as y e t another instance of ambivalence im puted to the colonialist m ission and textuality w hich Sand's novel repeatedly demonstrates. H er mystification of her project, that is, her ironizing male desire whereby the narrator maintains little critical distance from Ramtere's sight of these w om en, stands as an example °f the ambivalence inherent to colonialist discourse. Theories of colonialist discourse, such as that outlined by Bhabha, reveal how Sand's investments thw art any real evolution 106 in black and colonized identity or any abolitionist sentiment taking place in this text.54 Finally, Bhabha’s quotation above sums up the very dynamic of the love triangle Sand's novel creates. As Sand's preface of 1832 to Indiana states, the narrative constructs Rami&re's character around the contention that, in romance, men use power to women's disadvantage. The narrator thus allies Indiana w ith the oppressed in general. However, Sand characterizes her white creole according to the ambivalent structures that colonialist authority demands. Sand accepts prescribed Romantic depictions of the colonized which underscore their victimization. She furthermore sustains an ambivalence that refuses to utter mulatto origins yet portrays difference almost the same but not quite revealed to Ramidre through Indiana's masquerade. Noun's suicide summons the fantastic effects of Raymon's paranoia, itself a symptom of a colonialist agenda and desire according to Bhabha's definition above. Sand's novel, however, both pinpoints and complies with this agenda.5 5 In Romantic 54 While Nancy Rogers notes Sand's using slavery as the principal m etaphor for women's situation in m arriage under the Napoleonic code, she remarks Sand's refusal to denounce the barbarity of the institution of slavery itself. Rogers highlights Sand's letter of 1836 to Gustave de Beaumont, author of Marie ou I'escalvage aux Etats-Unis, remarking how it "does not directly address itself to the subject of slavery but instead speaks of the problems of a democracy which allows for such prejudices" (34). Sand also expressed great adm iration for Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (34). The article she published in 1853 in praise of the work exhibits a contemporary Christian universalism: it passes over any politics of slavery in order to laud the novel's sentiment. 55 Finally, as Schor asserts, Sand's later novels bear witness to her discovering the talking cure, psychoanalysis itself: "Sand never stopped inventing psychoanalysis: the notion that neurosis..can be averted only by passing through the straight gate of the symbolic is a recurrent theme in her fiction"("Reading Double" 265). Thus, Indiana represents the result of an effort to pass Black identity through the "straight gate" of the symbolic. Blackness, writes Mary Ann Doane, constitutes the very limits of this discursive practice to the extent that psychoanalysis becomes a veritable ”ethnography...of the w hite W estern psyche "(211). Sand's first novel proves just as problematic w ith respect to racial difference as does the discourse of psychoanalysis. 107 fashion, Sand's narration repeatedly sets Indiana apart from continental ladies. The narrative's incessant Romantic orientalist approach to the female characters subordinates any racial or ethnic oppression to a feminist agenda. Thus, the text exoticizes Indiana but refuses to specify her racial origins so that her ancestry becomes a kind of Vindidble. The text finds the mulatto body unnatural and monstrous, not unlike the way in w hich eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific discourse does: Sand does not utter her racial origins but rather shrouds Indiana in exotic ancestral mystery. Indiana's masquerade, by contrast, allows the mulatto body to break free from its "unspeakable" status. To this end the parallel scenes of seduction featured in Sand's novel become touchstones for the novel's stake in colonialist interests that color Indiana as Bhabha would have it, "almost the same b u t not white" (130). In this way, the various determinist aspects of historical, social and scientific discourse we considered at the beginning of this chapter all weigh upon Sand's depiction of Noun and Indiana. At the same time that travelers' tales whetted the European appetite for both colonialist expansion and subsequent scientific investigation into an already abjectified body, the Imperialist focus necessarily embodied and enhanced the scientific field of the panoptic. Thanks to the political reconfigurations of Restoration France, the physiologically based reasoning that evolved out of eighteenth-century rationalism influenced discourse from the scientific to the political to the historical to the literary. Vision is the first sensory perception which sought to transmit its experience into portraits of black and m ulatto bodies. I have 108 already explored to some degree how Romanticism proved no less a determining factor to representations of creole and black femininity. The next chapter moves from naturalist visions of scientific treatises to supernatural visions of sources for Christian universalism contained w ithin the discourses of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. The following chapter investigates an additional novel— Addle Daminois' Lydie, ou la creole (1824)~in relation to Christian universalist aspects of Romanticism. Romantic discourse coupled w ith a Christian liberal outlook on prescribed black identity, mixed blood, and creole ethnicity resulted in sentimental and thus, detrimental results for colonized individuals during the Restoration. 109 Chapter Three Sympathetic Elements of Literary Discourse Ad&le Daminois' Lydie, ou la creole is a typical roman de femme de chambre. Christian Jensen contends that by 1826, only two types of novels existed in France: the roman de fem m e de chambre and the roman noir, or w hat we m ay call the "frenetic" novel. Jensen devotes more analysis to the roman noir than to the roman de femmes de chambre, of w hich qualifies as trivial and "invraisemblable" (Jensen 256). At this time, "frenetic", applied to those works which encompassed any expression of le mal, and took English Gothic novels for their inspiration (Steinmetz 17, 34). By contrast, as a roman de femme de chambre, Ad&le Daminois' sentimental text closely adheres to tropes advanced by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, both of whom she explicitly invokes. For example, the narrator aligns the tribulations the novel's m ulatto character, Astolphe, with the discontents Rousseau experienced with his society. Likewise, the m anner in which the text presents Astolphe’ s ancestry is a clear tribute to Chateaubriand's Atala. Along w ith the combined influence of colonialist and scientific discourses, the discourse of Romanticism itself h a d an immense discursive impact on identities attributed to non-European people. In order to delinate the place of Rousseau and Chateaubriand w ithin Daminois' scheme of exotic sentimentalism, this chapter explores both w riters' contribution to the tradition. To the extent that Lydie may be classed as a roman de fem m e de chambre we may also think of it as an example of a melodramatic text. Peter Brooks also 110 identifies two prevalent genres am ong early Romantic works. Like Jensen, he understands these form s as consisting of either melodramatic or Gothic elements. Brooks' understanding of melodrama illuminates the effect of the Lydie's sentimental tone on the literary portrait of both Lydie an d Astolphe. As a protagonist, Lydie is a sentimental pastiche w here the figures of the noblewoman and the child combine to combat prejudice, w hatever its incarnation. In its entirety, the text is a good example of "low" melodrama according to Peter Brooks analysis o f the genre in The Melodramatic Imagination. I would argue that Daminois chooses such a conventional method to reach a popular audience. Like a realist author, Daminois uses over wrought sentiment a n d adventure to make a break with the dulled mode of daily consciousness (Brooks 2). In the manner of realists, her narrator seeks to attain a truer reality lying beneath the surface of standard social practices and interactions (Brooks 2). Ultimately, however, her narrator undertakes to sway the reader's awareness of the various social and religious implications of racial prejudice. This chapter seeks to deepen o u r understanding of Romanticism by exploring the exoticist tradition in French literature. Up to now, this study has referred only peripherally to various characteristics attributed to the movement. I have show n how George Sand, for instance, was influenced by deterministic prescription elaborated by proponents of the Romantic movement. Examples include Baronne Germaine de Stael and Stendhal w ho each advocated principles to evaluate characteristics of a population based on the geographical situation of that population and on the climate it experiences. I have shown how perceptions of black people in works associated with 111 Romanticism typically conflated black identity w ith victimization in accordance with the Romantic orientalist imperative to scrutinize contemporary social realities in order to suggest alternatives. This chapter must bring notions such as Romantic orientalism out of the periphery in order to clarify our understanding of the machinations of such broad rubrics and their discursive sub-sets. Accordingly, this chapter understands Romanticism as a political, literary and artistic movement which, among other applications, applied exotic tropes to its endeavors. Exoticism is that larger rubric which contains orientalist and Africanist discourse. Exoticism is a duel but simple process. First, it involves any procedure by which a subject values those aspects of another's country and culture. Second, the subject in turn uses those aspects to critique the subject's ow n cultural institutions. Therefore, Edw ard Said's analysis of Romantic orientalism comprises a partial examination of the larger rubric of exoticism. Accordingly, Said articulates how Romanticism used oriental settings, motifs and the voices of Middle Easterners to critique the structure of European culture and society. In this respect, the Romantics had learned from predecessors like Montesquieu. As Frank Bowman writes, "All too often Romantic thought has been read as a break w ith or reaction against the Enlightenment; in a great many ways, it is rather a revision an d complicating, a nuancing, of the Enlightenment heritage" (601). Accordingly, the tradition of exoticism has run through French literature since missionaries brought back tales of non- European civilizations from the N ew World. Primitivism (the notion that holds indigenous societies up as a model civilization, a less developed, more 112 innocent, and authentic state) reached its ostensibly ultimate expression in eighteenth-century discourses— most notably with Rousseau. W hereas exoticism encompasses orientalist and Africanist discourse, primitivism comprises a sub-set within the general discursive boundaries of both Africanism and orientalism. The Romantics no less than the eighteenth- century philosophes before them used primitivist tropes to socially revisionist ends. The difference between their respective primitivisms becomes merely aesthetic: the Romantics added a sensual dimension to the prim itivism set in m otion by the eighteenth century. In the manner of both the general political tendencies of the philosophes tow ard social revision and the Romantic writer who upholds the heroicism of the light-skinned mulatto, Lydie, ou la creole also makes use of primitivist tropes to revisionist ends. However, unlike the secular universalism propounded by the Enlightenment, Lydie appeals to the universality of hum anity's unity in Christ. Christian universalism constituted another trope which found articulation among liberal nineteenth-century writers. This trope combined a notion of abolished slavery w ith rhetoric concerning Christ's relationship to the souls of his followers. This chapter, then, discusses the impact of versions of contemporary Christian universalism on literary depiction of slaves, freemen and other exoticized figures, such as the creole. It discusses in particular the influence of Chateaubriand's Christian savages. Lydie is prefigured not only by Atala, with its praise of man's hypothetical place in the state of nature, but also by those fictional characters featured in missionary travel texts. These authors applied primitivist theories to the probable state of the hum an soul "outside" society. In so doing, missionaries 113 shaped the historical course of French exoticism before either Chateaubriand or Rousseau. Missionary Discourse and Rousseau's Notion of the Noble Savage No less than the discursive treatment of non-Europeans by Chateaubriand, by Rousseau, and by the Jesuit missionaries before them, Daminois sought to influence her society's estimation of the plight of non whites and other outsiders. In tribute to the deposed philosophe, Rousseau, the title pages of each of the text's four volumes feature quotations from La Nouvelle Heloise. In sentimental fashion, the text stages a startling encounter between Astolphe and the memory of Rousseau. Because their alliance produces a social awkwardness once they reach French shores, Astolphe decides to separate from Lydie. One of the first men he encounters in his exile is the present inhabitant of Rousseau's home at Monmorency. Astolphe had found his way to Monmorency by walking from Paris. Concerned, the nameless old m an takes Astolphe in, much to the latter's surprise: '"--Quoi! vous me traitez comme un de vos semblables!"' (in, 56 & 57). We understand that the memory of Rousseau motivates the old man's sympathy: — C'est ici, dit-il...que v£cut un homme malheureux aussi... (in, 64) ...C'est dans ce modeste asile que de longues armies le virent oublie, presque miserable, et que l’ exil et la persecution devaient encore le sortir de son humble obscurite. (HI, 65) 114 The old m an exhorts his listener to take heart and remember the unhappiness of the m an who previously inhabited these four walls. He in effect likens Astophe's social predicament as a mulatto in Europe, to Rousseau's sufferings. The narrator extols the suffering of Rousseau, and in so doing invokes those states that the Romantics held sacred, including misery, exile and persecution. The old m an effectively describes Rousseau as a Romantic hero. He furthermore equates Astolphe’ s sufferings w ith the sufferings of the consummate Romantic hero himself. In this way, Daminois' text fashions Astolphe into a prime example of what Ldon-Frangois Hoffmann terms, the negre romantique. More important, the line between Astolphe's heroic identity and that of Rousseau blurs, such that each man's predicament is ennobled through the association of each w ith the other. Before the appearance of Rousseau's primitivist reveries, however, missionaries indelibly influenced the historical evolution of French exoticism. Those w ho economically and thus discursively favored colonialism kept a system of reasoning in circulation which perceived enslaved peoples as somehow deserving their lot (Simar 38). Some colonialist theoreticians and administrators we have already examined merely reformulated theories that the Spanish Conquistadores — for example— had developed in their dealings with the civilizations native to the Americas (Simar 38-39). Combining their economic interests w ith a divine mission, the Conquistadores returned to Europe to paint the picture of a godless people capable of every sort of violence and debauchery. By contrast, returning French, Spanish and Portugese missionaries brought hom e images of an enviable people living in harmony. The way of 115 life of indigenous peoples of Canada and the Louisiana territories, for instance, were understood to bear witness to an innocence that recalled the state of nature as propounded by the ancients.55 Many missionaries did, in fact, invoke antiquity— "the Golden Age"-by comparing the life of indigenous people to sixteenth, seventeeth and eighteenth-century perceptions of ancient Roman and Greek civilizations. Whatever the m etaphor or comparison, European missionaries insisted that people indigenous to the New W orld lived outside the site of the struggle for ideological dominance. From the sixteenth century onward, these fantasies upheld both utopic visions of nature as the universally optimal hum an environment and colonialist apologists' perpetuating their conception of the "white man's burden". These conflicting and ambiguous notions of indigenous societies had circulated among Rousseau's countrymen since the Jesuits set foot in the French territories and colonies. For his part, Rousseau had done little more than synthesize pre-existing contradictory conceptions. These missionary texts took an ambivalent attitude toward their converts in the sense that, like Rousseau later, most would use a perception of native society to to critique contemporary European mores and further a notion of progress for European society. Perhaps m ost important, Rousseau's ow n ambiguous treatm ent of non-Europeans contributed to distorted visions of the non-European for at least a century to come (Starobinski 384). His early education among Jesuit priests testifies to his aquaintance with their travel literature (Chinard, L'Amerique 345-6). The journals kept by these priests presented idyllic notions 55 "Un 6tat d'innocence idyllique qui ne rappelle que trop le fameux 6tat de nature de l'antiquite" (Simar 40). 116 of non-European social relations fully three-hundred years before Rousseau. Rousseau himself makes reference to travellers' tales m ost expressly in Emile (1762) and in his Discours sur Vorigine et les fondements de Vinegalite parmi les hommes (1755). The accounts of voyages of discovery formed a significant basis for Rousseau's understanding of indigenous people. Because h e never directly witnessed the operations of non-European civilizations, Rousseau's conception of life within the state of nature directly depended upon the inform ation travel texts put forth. Nevertheless, Rousseau implicitly disavows any real influence these texts may have exerted on his understanding of man's relationship to m an in the state of nature. In L'Amerique et le reve exotique dans la litterature frangaise au X V W et au X V IIIe siecle, Gilbert Chinard isolates three priests in particular w hose eighteenth-century works prefigure the principle themes of Rousseau's thought about alternatives to his own country's social structure. W hen Rousseau im putes high m oral standards to "savage" interactions, C hinard argues, he recalls P£re Lafitau’s manner of correlating their lifestyle w ith that of the ancients.5 < s Lafitau's m ethod provides a veritable storehouse of comparative ethnography that recounts the striking similarites between the ancients and indigenous Americans (Chinard 319). Chinard writes: "Moeurs, costum es, c£r£monies religieuses sont les mem es chez les uns et chez les autres; ils ont le meme genre de vie"(319). Even the brutality of New World custom s of war compare to those of ancient civilization (Chinard 322). A lthough not the first to compare the non-European to the ancient Greek, 56Chinard speaks of Lafitau's Moeurs des Sauvages Americains comparie aux moeurs des Premiers Temps (1724). 117 Lafitau's learned and meticulous approach to details of ancient civilizations and his comparison of those details to the daily life of the people of the Americas attributed noble aspects to indigenous custom. Lafitau's observations reflected the accounts of many early travelers who perceived "savages" of the New W orld as the noble inheritors of a realm outside constraints and passions to which the European observer's society subjects him. Both Chateaubriand and Rousseau would subsequently concur w ith his observations and uphold the high moral character and standards missionaries such as Lafitau had already im puted to savage society. Pere Buffier's oeuvre systematized the enthusiasm of Jesuit literature for indigenous morality (Chinard 332). As such, he commited a chapter of hisCours de Sciences sur des principes nouveaux pour form er le langage et le coeur dans Vusage ordinaire de la vie (1732) to the subject o f prejudice. Specifically, he constructs a dialogue wherein one speaker plays the p art of social critic who takes to task the understanding of barbarity endorsed by colonialists, conquistadores, pervaders of Christian conversion and merchants. He subsequently applies this concept of barbarity to the French aristocracy: "Nous sommes des betes fauves qui affectent des m anures courtoises" (Chinard 327). As w ith Rousseau, the fundamental goodness that resides within indigenous people is a given for Buffier. He refutes the idea of his society's technological superiority or progress. He sees indigenous peoples as having nothing from which to benefit from contact with the "material" life of eighteenth-century France (Chinard 328). Finally, he distances himself to a certain degree from the word "sauvage". At the end of this particular chapter of the Cours de science, Buffier responds to contemporary criticism by 118 conceding that the w ord "sauvage" inadequately expresses his thought (Chinard 333). Rousseau, meanwhile, will apply the very w ord Buffier's critic had found inappropriate for an analysis of indigenous cultures. In his Journal historique (1744), the third priest, Charlevoix, comes to similar conclusions.57 The journal proclaims that the lack of social hierarchy among indigenous societies results in little restriction of its members (Chinard 336 & 337). Each m an is equal to any other and each estimes his neighbor (Chinard 337). Implicitly, then, indigenous societies should serve as the model for contemporary French society. Charlevoix presents the equality that all members of indigenous society share in terms similar to those employed by Enlightenment philosophes: "Dans ce pays tous les Hommes se croyent £galement hommes, et dans l'Homme...Nulle distinction de naissance, nulle prerogative attribute au rang...." (Chinard 337). Not very much later Rousseau will m ake this relationship between nature and equality more explicit, thereby smoothing over the contradictions that any examination of the variety of these travel texts inevitably yields (Chinard 348). Perhaps m ost important, he will add passion and mysticism to this pre-existing tradition of idealizing peoples indigenous to the New World (Chinard 364). While Rousseau acknowledges that his portrait of "savage" life draws from the literary tradition of missionary journals, he does not credit any specific voyager w ith having influenced his thought. In fact, he ultimately seeks to discredit them, implying that they have traveled a path unenlightened by subsequent revelations that Reason has brought forth to Rousseau's age. If 57 The third volume of Histoire et description generate de la Nouvelle France (1744), qtd. Chinard 333. 119 his contemporary philosophes had traveled, for instance, these tales would have held a different significance (Chinard 348-9). W hat sort of significance and for whom Rousseau does not make clear. He objects principally to the lack of philosophical integrity of voyagers' findings impute. The philosophies of the Enlightenment valued experiences at hand rather than extraneous input from far-away places. Perhaps Rousseau's reluctance to credit these missionary texts results from his refusal of Christianity. For as Chinard notes, Rousseau’ s conception of "savage" morality implicitly advocated a new religion-one which must believe as wholeheartedly in the corruption of m ankind as it sanctifies an exclusively earthly innocence (Chinard 343-5). W hatever his motivation for not acknowledging the influence of missionary texts on his work, Rousseau couched notions which circulated long before together in a literary style befitting a new generation's clamor for a reform of styles as classical dogma had dictated them. According to Jean Starobinski, another similarity exists between Rousseau and an im portant predecessor, Buffon. Rousseau's conception and treatm ent of non-European people in the Discours sur Vorigine de Vinegalite, seems to borrow notions from Buffon's Histoire Naturelle. Both m en seek to define "une forme el£mentaire d ’ existence, afin de mieux apercevoir...ce qui relive d'une faculty supgrieure ou d'un d^veloppement ult£rieur" (383). As I have already considered in chapter one, the methods of scientific discourse almost exist in order to evacuate multiplicity from the identity of ethnic groups different from Europeans. The evacuative properties of European scientific methodolgy with respect to non-European identities contributed to complications surrounding depictions of non-Europeans in various discursive 120 contexts. T he focus of Rousseau's examinations assuredly rejects any scientistic approach to human development in favor of humanism a n d universalism. However, th e similarities between the discourses of Rousseau and Buffon nevertheless reflect the influence of Buffon on Rousseau. Rousseau's depictions o f savage m an and society would carry the same complications of Buffon's scientistic approach to portraits of non-Europeans. Chapter one of this project illustrates how scientific treates became one primary historical m eans by w hich the bodies of outsiders, non-Europeans a n d women alike, became a function of discourse (Jensen 134). Enlightenm ent philosophy took experiential evidence, the premise of scientific procedure, as the basis for its political, social and philosophical observations. Scientism perm eated m uch of Enlightenm ent philosophy and Rousseau's hum anism was no exception. Tzvetan Todorov remarks th at Rousseau attributes the same characteristics to the savage that Buffon had attributed to anim als (376). According to L£on Poliakov in "Racism from th e Enlightenment", the w orks of Buffon, Kant, and Voltaire count am ong the m ost influential eighteenth- century discourses, before that of Darwin, to hold sway over subsequent racist polemics. Whatever Buffon's influence on Rousseau, Todorov uncovers evidence w hereby Rousseau may not be considered in the sam e racist league as Buffon, Kant and Voltaire. A certain ambivalence with respect to savage m an distinguishes Rousseau from the ranks of these three. Todorov maintains that nineteenth-century "misinterpretation" attributes the idealization of prim itive societies to Rousseau. H e argues th at Rousseau occasionally contextualizes the state of nature anu notions of natural man in w ays that give the impression of a bias toward them (374). However, in the final analysis, it is more precise to 121 say that Rousseau advocates an alternative to his own society in a state existing somewhere in between that of nature and that of European society. Nonetheless, Todorov concedes that Rousseau's writings contain enough ambivalence to have prompted generations of misinterpretation: "Gardons-nous de confondre l'homme sauvage avec les hommes que nous avons sous les yeux," nous disait Rousseau en commen<jant [le Deuxieme discours]. II n'ob&t pourtant pas h sa propre injonction, et la fictions philosophique interfere avec le portrait des hommes d'aujourd’ hui. (Todorov 376) Thus, that ambivalence within Rousseau's discourse would bear some relation to the ambivalence inherent to colonialist discourse. We will see how this ambivalence affected subsequent Romantic depictions of the non-European— or the negre romantique--transm itted through Romantic enthusiasm for Rousseau. His work did, after all, combine a method of searching for a distinctly hum an essence with an empassioned literary style. His approach to human perfectibility inadvertently presaged more complex forms of exoticism, some of which were absorbed by colonialist discourse. The ambivalences within Rousseau's ow n discourse allowed for sentimentalist intervention, and laid the ground w ork for various Romantic agendas. Chateaubriand Although Rousseau invokes the paradise of Eden while conceptualizing indigenous society, Chateaubriand's work brought exoticism and fiction quintessentially together with Christian ideals for hum an transcendence. Unlike Rousseau, Chateaubriand actually traveled to N orth America. He 122 venerated Rousseau and likewise typically drew from existing literary practices. His form ula met w ith great success not only among his readers but also among subsequent writers. Daminois' Lydie, ou la creole, for instance, testifies to the readiness of writers to incorporate Chateaubriand's brand of sentimental exoticism into texts featuring non-European characters. The portrait of Astolphe's father, the proud pagan rebel, Almanzar, betrays the impact of Chateaubriand's Les Natchez: u n carquois 6tait suspendu k ses gpaules demi-nus, il tenait h la m ain un arc de bois de cedre, ses cheveux blonds flattaient autour de sa figure basan£e; aucun ornement ne courait sa tete, dont la noblesse gtait remarquable; semblable au fils de Thes4e, cherchait les forets profondes pour y cacher sa tristesse et se ddrober k la vue de ce soleil qu'il adorait e t qu'il croyait outrage. (138-139) Astophe, Alamanzar's carries o n the family ressemblance: "II 6tait beau comme Chactas, mais, hglas! il 6tait esclave!" (I, 15). The ressemblance father and so n share, however, has been handed dow n from the house of Chateaubriand. A discussion of the nineteenth-century mania for historical fiction is not irrelevant to this investigation o f Chateaubriand's exoticism. The Americas fascinated nineteenth-century France (Jensen 134). At the time of Sir Walter Scott's success am ong French readers with Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815) and Old M ortality (1816), foreign literature, including Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, had already seduced a nation of French readers. As the proponents of the Romantic movement in France embraced historical fiction, the genre became another example of exoticism. Historical fiction shaped contemporary conceptualization and treatment of the question of 123 historical origins.58 Two basic endeavors involving notions of history took place during the first few decades of the nineteenth century. First, historical fiction, like that of Scott, exoticized historical figures and places. Second, because the new historiography— that of the Thierry brothers, presented in chapter two-hierarchized racial origins no less than did the nobility before it, the new historiography reacted to (and thus relied upon) fictionalized historical origins. Soon the methods of historical fiction began to inform the methods of the new historiography. Scott's wild success in France, for example, inspired A ugustin Thierry's "novelesque" technique for structuring his histories (White 636). Historiography thus played a param ount role in the evolution of Romanticism. The fashion for historical fiction during the nineteenth century acts as another instance of French culture's fascination w ith exoticism. In Nous et les autres: La Reflexion frangais sur la diversite humaine, Todorov defines exoticism as first and foremost a mode of self-criticism (355). W estern discourse looks into the Eastern distance to examine itself m ore closely. Francois Hoffmann and Edward Said concur, and add the Romantics' contributions to the evolution of exoticism. To construct social commentary, the new wave of writers after the Revolution enlisted images to illustrate the nature of the non- European put forth by such long-ago texts as those generated by the voyages of discovery. In this way, Romanticism-the ostensible wave of literary reform— 58 "The nineteenth century is the century of history par excellence. The new forces of nationalism and romanticism both helped to make historical studies param ount and to endow them with a kind of authority which before, as mere literature or entertainment, they h ad never possessed...Romanticism by its insistence on local color and o n the particular as against the generalized view of Man, by its interest in the M iddle Ages...gave an enormous impetus to historical research" (Barzun 27). 124 combined w ith age-old exoticist/orientalist preoccupation w ith self-critique. Chateaubriand's texts, for example, also manifest a concern w ith social critique. In Rousseauist fashion, Chateaubriand's Les Natchez stages an encounter between natives and the European, Ren6. The outcome should result in a synthesis whereby European civilization maintains a level of social interaction and understanding of self outside the confines of hierarchy. Moreover, Todorov accounts for how Les Natchez (1826) represents a critique of primitive exoticism because it, like Rousseau, refuses to subscribe to the myth of the noble savage. Chateaubriand's critique takes place, he explains, "dans l'esprit des Lumi&res" (388). Les Natchez represents no break w ith Rousseau since, Chateaubriand, "replace done une mauvaise interpretation de Rousseau par une autre, meilleure..." (381). Perhaps more so th an Rousseau, Chateaubriand found inspiration in fictions that exalted indigenous cultures. One such example, according to Gilbert Chinard in L'Exotisme americaine dans Voeuvre de Chateaubriand, is the ctory of Oderahi (1798). O n the very title page her anonymous author i fies her as " une soeur ain£e d'Atala" (Chinard 140). If this is the case, Oderahi inspires Ad&le Daminois' characterization of "la belle creole", Lydie. Chinard's appraisal of the influence of Oderahi on Atala can perhaps help formulate a conclusion w ith regards to the quality of Chateaubriand's interpretation of Rousseau. The story of Oderahi appeared w ithin three volumes at the very end of the eighteenth century entitled Veillees am ericaines*9 Chinard argues that Oderahi prefigures Atala and contemporary critics made the comparison. According to a contemporary review from Le 59 For which Chinard gives no year (139). 125 M oniteur, Oderahi demonstrates more classical strengths than does Atala and features a more believable protagonist (Chinard 140). Oderahi is simply a more credible depiction of a native American: "Elle est plus dans la nature. Atala...est une esp&ce illusion6e"(Chinard 141). Also, the text does not include the sort of fantastical or marvelous effects that surround Atala's seduction of Chactas (Chinard 141). Clearly, Oderahi conforms to the M oniteur's sense of vraisemblance and Chinard's estimation of the text implicitly agrees w ith the review. For instance, Chinard points out how, unlike Ren6, the European male, Ont£r£e, goes through a remarkable process of adapting to the language and the customs of the indigenous people living at the border of Canada. Likewise, in contrast to most of the exotic writers of his time, Od£rahi's anonymous author, also depicts the customs of the Day of Dead with m uch greater fidelity to versions of these rituals put forth by naturalists (Chinard 155). But as much as the text prefigures Atala, it also, Chinard notes, thwarts readers' expectations fashioned by the formulas of exoticism. Although the setting description and the relationship between them indicates a budding romance, for instance, Ont£r£e never falls in love with Oddrahi. We could conclude that, given the M oniteur's disdain for the Romantic movement, its classical propensity would esteem Oderahi over Atala. At this time, Le M oniteur did not look favorably upon the artistic reforms Romanticism sought to establish. These reforms included reaction against w hat the Romantics viewed as artistic restrictions imposed by classicism. Tragedy and comedy of manners, for example, which depended upon hierarchical and cohesive social strata, collapsed w ith the ancien regime (Brooks 15). Thus, the Romantics 126 advocated new sources of inspiration: sources which resided in the individual, in the supernatural, in the exotic, and in the divine. Oderahi in many ways still complies with exotic manoeuvers. By 1798 a European male saved in some capacity by a native American female had become a veritable trope circulating for approximately the same num ber of centuries as missionary travel diaries (Chinard, L'Exotisme 125). Oderahi also features the archetypal ancient male who counsels the hero. In his preface to Les Natchez, Chateaubriand admits to having borrowed observations of the Natchez from other travelers~P£re Charlevoix, for exam ple (Todorov 396). However, as far as regards his love story, he makes n o reference to predecessors such as Captain Smith, Chamfort and countless authors of short stories, playwrights, even composers of melodramatic theater, who took the colonies and New World for their idyllic settings (Chinard, L 'Exotisme 125-6). Todorov remarks that both Chateaubriand and Rousseau share a common bond to validate indigenous life in the face of scholars who have historically portrayed Indians as hybrids of men and monkeys (384). The assured exotic aspects of the story, combined w ith its potential influence on Atala, nevertheless illustrate a certain lack of originality surrounding Chateaubriand's version of the encounter between the European and the Native American. Todorov, on the other hand, considers Les Natchez a potential critique of exoticism as it had evolved by the time of the text's publication (388). In his preface to Atala, Chateaubriand announces his differences with Rousseau and in so doing he attributes to Rousseau a typical preference for savage society over European society (381). Todorov claims that, Chateaubriand's m isinterpretation notwithstanding, he successfully eschews the mandates of 127 primitivist exoticism. Moreover, he does so in a m anner similar to Rousseau's actual agenda, which Chateaubriand's misreading does not allow him to recognize. Like Rousseau, Chateaubriand does not look to validate the savage state-of-nature over French society or vice versa (387). On the contrary, synthesis between nature and society comprises Chateaubriand's ideal as much as it had for Rousseau (388). However, Les N atchez's portrayals and implications fall well within a tradition of exoticism. Although Todorov claims that Chateaubriand critiques primitivist exoticism, aspects of Chateaubriand's version of the encounter between European and non-European signal a m otivation Todorov nevertheless identifies as ethnocentrist (395). According to Todorov's schema, ethnocentrism involves assigning a universal value to the specific values of one's own culture and society (21). To this end, Chateaubriand's sense of ethnic identity markedly affects his vision of America: "Ce que Chateaubriand veut voir est entitlem ent d£termin£ par son identity de Fran^ais, non par ce que les Amgricains sont— ce qui ne l'int£resse qu'& peine" (Todorov 396). According to Todorov, then, Les Natchez critiques primitivist exoticism while it simultaneously maintains ethnocentric interests. The question becomes: how effective to his analysis is Todorov's separating the machinations of primitivist exoticism from those of ethnocentrism? According to Edward Said's work which comprises a broader examination of orientalism, the response is negative. In order to decide, we can examine an im portant expression of Chateaubriand's ethnocentrism: the blond native American Atala who embodies sentimentalized Christian ideals. Chateaubriand couches Christian overtones in the text’ s general investment in 128 universalist and egalitarian sentim ent (Todorov 386). The Christian aspects of Chateaubriand's universalism have colonialist consequences for Atala's character. For instance, Todorov remarks that the combination of Atala's "force de caract&re" a n d her "ouverture d’ esprit...[la] fait aimer les Blancs" (391). Bearing in mind that conversion frequently took place during efforts at colonialization, Christianity marks Atala as colonized no less than as spiritually open. H er colonized status, then, w ould also potentially open her to loving a European m an. Again, Chateaubriand takes a step that authors before him had taken in their depictions o f black characters: he allows Christianity to significantly factor in sentimentalizing the savage, in colonizing various images of the native American, an d in fashioning those images into a characterization that the European reader might find familiar. W hat is more, Christian ideals open the Native American up to accepting any sacrificial and brotherly impositions the white m an proffers. W ith Chateaubriand, colonialist imposition comes in the form of his characterizing a native American female as white— his form of literary mimicry. His characterization of Atala recalls Homi Bhabha's explanation of mimicry as a prescription for creating the colonized in an image "almost the same, but not quite" of the colonizer (126). In Memoires d'O utre Tombe, Chateaubriand explains how he developed Atala's character. While travelling with a group of Americans, Chateaubriand happened upon tw o young female natives of mixed race, whom he learned were prostitutes (Todorov 396). He says of the encounter, "Je ne sais si je leur ai ren au la vie qu'elles me donn£rent; du moins, j'ai fait de l'une une vierge, et de l'autre une chaste Spouse, p ar expiation.." (Todorov 396). To attem pt to understand another 129 world in terms of one's own system of values is a gesture inherent to a nationalistic a n d /o r an ethnocentric approach to the foreign according to Todorov's definitions. Restructuring that world according to the dominant ideological apparatuses of one's own culture is fundamental to th e process of colonialization. In the case of Atala, contemporary Christian prescription makes a virgin of a prostitute in the process of literary (and ideological) substitution. Todorov recognizes this manoeuver as "violence" a n d as a "sublimation brutale" orchestrated by poetic license (Todorov 396-7). However, this particular anecdote illustrates an inextricable link between ethnocentrism— between the universalizing of one's own systems of ideological dispersion— and the w ork of exoticism which fetishizes the mores of a culture other than one's own. Producing allegorical savages— "products of ideological necessity"— falls clearly within the realm of exoticism (299). The production of both Rousseau and Chateaubriand presents an effort at illustrating an ideal synthesis of native and European societies. Todorov measures the outcome of Chateaubriand's effort, however, in terms of ethnocentrism. In the end, it may be m ore precise to consider Les Natchez as the ethnocentric consequence of a European encounter with exotic places, people and customs. All in all, Les Natchez depicts Atala's colonialization more explicitly than it critiques the development of primitive exoticism by the time of Chateaubriand’s writing. I would argue that Chateaubriand’ s development of Atala in effect presents a character colonized by the combination of literary and Christian mandates of the author's time. Finally, Chateaubriand is swept away by his allegorical savages no less than w as Rousseau. The power of his descriptions to evoke irreconcilable 130 feelings and moods in the heart of the solitary hero came to inspire a generation. Les Natchez furthermore recalls Rousseau's critique of society. It makes use of an exotic location, of the rapport between European and indigenous characters, and of the discoveries one individual experiences to comment on the state of "civilized” life in European society. However, by adding Christianity to the exoticist equation, Chateaubriand refines the relationship between sentimentalism and the non-European. H ere lies Chateaubriand's contribution to exoticism's legacy~a contribution that will not go unnoticed by a subsequent generation of writers. Like Sand's Indiana, Le Genie du christianisme (1802) also features a slavery metaphor. While Sand uses slavery as a m etaphor for women's plight in nineteenth-century households, Chateaubriand uses the metaphor to Christian ends (Rogers 29-30). Here, slavery illustrates the predicament hum anity faced before the advent of Christ. His use of the metaphor will set an important example for later writers of social and political discourses. We shall see how Chateaubriand's adherence to the slavery metaphor within a Christian context found application in even more early nineteenth-century discursive contexts. The m etaphor carried implications for abolitionist and conservative rhetoric surrounding notons of the black body as much as for literary depictions of freemen characters. Christianity and Exoticism Like Atala, the principal female characters of Daminois' text, Lydie, and Astolphe's mother, Maria, both embody Christian ideals. Of Lydie the text says, "En s'occupait du bonheur d’ un autre, Lydie sentait dans son empire" (II, 158). 131 Maria's piety is exploited by her brother, the portugese missionary, Don Aur£lio Gonzalas. He prizes her devotion only insofar as it wins him converts among the North Americans. Maria's Christian purity contrasts against Aur£lio's colonialist corruption. Again, we can say Chateaubriand directly influenced the polarized Christian overtones of Daminois' story. Christian ideals, however, also relate to the melodramatic and sentimental shape Lydie takes. Like Chateaubriand's texts, a notion of Christian universalism is fundam ental to the sentimentalism of this story. Sentimentalism results from sympathetic gestures. Sympathy, we recall, counts among four currents that Said recognizes as having had detrimental influence over European depictions of people of color (Said 120). Sentimentalism is therefore a stylistic approach to difference and is a function of the heightened emotional realm of melodrama. Discourse reaches melodramatic proportions when it seeks to lead the listener or the reader through the surface of ordinary daily experience to reveal the deeper hidden "truths" which lay just beyond (Brooks 2). Consequently, the truths of racial equality which Daminois attempts to reveal to her readers are marked by the trace of Christian sympathetic gestures toward her mulatto and creole characters. The image of Christ and of slavery combined often in m any nineteenth- century discursive contexts. Their combination held influential sway over portraits, and especially melodramatic portraits, of slave, freemen and creole characters. Les Natchez features such portraits. We can consider Les Natchez a break with the Enlightenment insofar as it favored the universalist and egalitarian tradition of Christianity as opposed to the universalism and egalitarianism propounded by the Enlightenment (Todorov 386). In general, 132 the philosophes refused Christian humanism in favor of scientistic means of divining the unifying factors inherent to human existence. According to the Le Genie du christianisme, Christianity's civilizing function definitively relates the religion's capacity to liberate the oppressed (Bowman 16). The text's defense of Christianity is not unlike that to which missionaries h ad turned in the past and continued to tu rn in contemporary times: Christianity promotes civilization. To that end, it founds schools and brings medical treatm ent to otherwise primitive people and locations.60 In French Romanticism, Frank Bowman chronicles the manifestation of this theme throughout various discourses of the nineteenth century. As the them e made its way into Romantic social discourse, it tended to refute Rousseau's equation of Christian sacrifice w ith a life of slavery (Bowman 15). Even as the primitive exoticist aspects of Romantic discourse embraced those aspects of Rousseau's discourse, in the name of social critique and progress, some Romantics allowed Christianity to take credit for comforting the disenfranchised and relieving oppression (15). The liberating pow ers Christianity exerts on believers became a noticeable theme of the nineteenth century and circulated within various political, sociological and historical contexts (14). Moreover, the pervasiveness of this Christian ethos had its foundations in the work of Chateaubriand. 60 "The Romantics refute Rousseau— particularly his declaration in the Social Contract that 'true Christians are made for slavery.' The first refutation-.cam e from Chateaubriand in h is Ginie du Christianisme (1802). At the end of the chapter that describes Christianity's beneficial influence on politics and govem em ent, he proclaims: 'Let u s add, as the crowning contribution among so many ...THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY.'...Christianity is a civilizing force, contributing to progress, founding hospitals and schools, improving the condition of the poor and oppressed-including women— and freeing the slaves" (Bowman 15). 133 Lamennais' Essay on Indifference in Matters o f Religion (1817), for instance, contains a typical variation on themes put forth by the Le Genie du christianisme (17). Bowman analyzes the conclusions of Lamennais regarding the power of Christianity. According to Lamennais, Christian implementation of power "inspires respect and love, so that one can obey without ceasing to be free. In fact, one is free because one obeys"(17). Bowman also remarks that, until 1830, most Catholic treatments of this theme defer to Chateaubriand an d /o r to Joseph de Maistre (18). Maistre also links religious obedience to autonomy and freedom. The Western world has Christianity to thank for releasing humanity from the shackles of natural bitterness and evil (16). Maistre even opposes Rousseau's conception of hum anity’ s essential freedom squelched by society, finding m an in chains until the onset of religious practice (16). Most important, the themes produced by the metaphor of souls enslaved before the teachings of Christ are revealed to them carry implications for literary depictions of slaves and freemen. As in the case of Atala, the theme of Christianity's freeing the enslaved soul especially affects portrayals of the colonized— the creole, the freeman or the converted of whatever ethnic origin. For example, w hen writers like Lamennais highlight the "love and respect" that accompany Christianity's implementation (on whatever the scale and regardless of setting), they effectively neutralize its power as a political force and ideological tool. Insofar as Atala represents the transformative effect of brotherly love on the soul of the savage, her colonized status is erased. By effacing class and ethnic differences, Atala stands as evidence of Christianity's "true" potential for liberating the oppressed. As such, Chateaubriand's 134 portrayals of the Sioux people merely contribute to his overall praise of the Christian faith. This theme contributed to a process of effacing multiplicity from the identity of the colonized by sentimentalizing black characters, a practice begun in the eighteenth century. Before the genesis of Le Genie du christianisme, the pieces negrophiles of the eighteenth century had already aquainted popular French audiences w ith black protagonists, heroes and villains alike. These characters were themselves in part the product of characters enhanced by missionaries and travelers' tales. Before the events of 1789, versions of the "noble savage" had been presented on stage primarily as Indian characters. After 1789, when issues of emancipation and colonialization infiltrated the French political conscience, the Indian noble savage took on an African ancestry. Plays that featured African characters usually also featured an abolitionist message. In L’Esclavage des noirs (1789), for instance, Olympe de Gouges adopts an abolitionist tone tempered by calls for m utual understanding between the races (Striker 78). The majority of the authors of these plays w ere motivated by politically liberal tendencies. In general, such abolitionist plays encouraged an educated approach to difference while attempting to raise audience consciousness in the spirit of universalism. The fact that these plays reached a typically popular and uneducated audience tells us something about the sort of universalism to which many of the plays appealed. De Gouges and other playwrights of the eighteenth century had likely been inspired by the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment. The universalism for which the Enlightenment strove refused any notion of transcending human experience. In fact, the two general tendencies within the 135 Enlightenment, hum anism and scientism, specifically focused o n human experience to discover constants w ithin the human condition. Rousseau exemplified the humanist approach to universalism. He sought to discover the universal by studying particulars, in the manner of Lockean empiricism, b y transposing two particulars in relation to one another (Todorov 34). In so doing, Rousseau opposed the scientistic approaches of Diderot w hich maintained that scientific observation holds the key to effective government, for example (Todorov 41-2). As Diderot would have it, the laws o f nature contain the model for successful social legislation. By contrast, Rousseau finds his model in juxtaposing other cultures to European civilization. Whether a playwright's philosophical preferences fell more in line with Rousseau or w ith the scientism of the Encyclopedistes, eighteenth-century universalism explicitly opposed itself to Christian universalism. Nevertheless, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the pieces negrophiles began to appear, an uneducated audience w ould have more likely responded to Christian universalism. Moreover, within a playwright's appeal for harmony between the races, an audience m ay not have been capable of clearly separating Enlightened universalism from Christian universalism. That these plays split their black characters into two only reinforced a Christian perspective in an audience's mind. Adonis, ou le bon negre (1798)/ for instance, set a precedent for representations of the "good" black w h o opposes the "bad" black (Striker 78). Here, the hero stands for loyalty to his ex-master while the villain makes devilish appeals for vengeance (Striker 78). This splitting, which excludes any middle ground, not only comprises the logic of Christianity: "the logic of the excluded middle" lies at the heart of melodrama 136 (Brooks 15). Both Christianity and Romanticism absorbed an d prom oted this logic to convey their themes and morality to a wide audience. In this respect, the desires of Christianity and Romanticism combined to fly in the face of the secular premises of the Enlightenment. We recall that Rousseau's discourse, which prefigured Romantic fascination w ith melodrama, approached a theological system of belief. Rousseau believed as much in the fundamental evil of humanity as in the hum an potential for perfectibility. Playwrights who sought to transmit a "Rousseauist" message w ould thus n o t have been entirely capable of distinguishing their universalist message from th at of Christianity. In light of those "misreadings" allowed by the ambiguities in Rousseau's texts, Chinard estimates th at Rousseau's social theories amounted to a new religion: "il s'agit simplement de montrer que...[ce qui £tait] un lieu commun...de morale chr£tienne; en le faisant sien...Rousseau ne faisait qu'adopter une tradition litt£raire" (Chinard, L'Americjue 345). In fact, Christian perspectives constituted an im portant contributing factor to the sentimentalization of non-European characters. Although sentimentalizing non-white characters was already well established before the nineteenth century, it became particularly widespread in the Romantic era as a means of securing audience sym pathy for the heathen. Because it accomodated the agendas of either the right or the left, the theme of C hrist freeing Christian souls from the bonds of slavery also elicited refutations from both factions. For example, in his Observations critiques sur le genie du christianisme (1815), Senancour finds no evidence for Christianity's having abolished slavery (25). Therefore, if this them e contributed in any w ay to non-European character construction during the nineteenth century, it would have done little to efface 137 the extremes of the logic of melodrama that began on the eighteenth-century stage (Brooks xii). In fact, it would have contributed to the mancheism which determined these characters and which eighteenth-century melodrama had already inaugurated. The topos would have determined character construction regardless of whether an author adhered to a more liberal or a more conservative view of slavery. In either case, the allegorical savage remained a "product of ideological necessities of the moment," to the point of serving whatever political purpose. Romantic appeals to social revision cling to a remarkably Christian organization in Lydie, ou la creole, for example. The result of this structural apparatus carries ambiguous clear implications for Daminois' mulatto and creole characters. Furthermore, the Christian ethics of this text prescribe its sentimental tone. Melodramatic works employ sentimentalism because it thematically conveys excess. To successfully m aintain a "moral manichaeism" melodrama uses every recourse to excess (Brooks 4). Daminois' preface expresses just such an investment in melodrama: her readers will pardon her, she says, "d'avoir cherchg h exciter une Emotion, qui sera pour moi une certitude de succ£s et un motif d ’ encouragement" (xviij). The Christian sentimentalism of which this roman de femme de chambre makes use in order to sollicite pity, to heighten reader awareness, and to break outside the boundaries of everyday racism, nevertheless provides the means for ideological enslavement. Daminois exoticizes as she sentimentalizes: "Rien n'est si touchant que cette figure vive et langoureuse h la fois, dont s'expression est commun en France, et qui fait des creoles les femmes les plus s£duisantes..." (II, 179). 138 Finally, universalism, the potential m eans out of the containment that continual emphasis o n the physical had for black identity, proved another means of refusing to elaborate the multiple aspects of black identities. During a process o f popularization, such as the staging of a piice negrophile, an author could not effectively separate aspects of Rousseau's Enlightened humanism from Christian universalism in the minds of readers or viewers. Because neither the discourse of Rousseau nor of Chateaubriand can be completely divorced from a Christian tradition, the construction of their "allegorical savages" revolved around an ambiguous process of solliciting pity. Bowman's analysis reveals that the trope of Christ freeing the slaves found employment in many social contexts to various effect. The Romantic movement d id identify itself with program s for social change. The Romantics argued for the necessity of the techniques of artistic endeavor and social revision informing each another. As such, the social revision advocated by the Saint-Simonists would have also carried over into literary revision that determined depictions of non-white characters. We shall see how the Saint-Simonist movement continued Diderot's scientistic approach to history and nature. The Sociology of Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon Saint-Simonism comprises another example of a system of thought based on experiential factors that carried eighteenth-century scientism over into the Restoration. W e have followed Edward Said's argum ent that, in 139 following Rousseau, Romantic authors employed foreign characters and surroundings in order to throw revisionist light onto a specifically French author's native mores. The utopian ideals put forth by the Saint-Simonist movement may have contributed to some of the later Romantics' literary inspiration. The group's work and doctrines become significant in light of their scientististic approach to determining similarities among human groups. We can identify "scientism" as a general European approach to human nature begun by the classificatory undertakings of the Encyclop^distes (Todorov 35). Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon's social dogma continued w ithin a tradition begun first by the Encyclop6distes and then advanced by the Ideologues. We know, furthermore, that the sociology of the Saint-Simonists inspired literary contemporaries, George Sand among them. Bowman identifies a relationship between the trope of Christ putting an end to slavery and specifically Romantic social preoccupations.61 The resulting "Romantic 'Gospel Socialism'" consequently found its way into various nineteenth-century discourses (21). Gospel Socialism had its origins in Saint- Simonism, which combined a philosophy of history w ith entreaties for religious reverence (21). Restoration writers w ho considered nature's relationship to history and who called for political participation thus found inspiration in the professed aims of the Saint-Simonists (21). Saint-Simon specifically combined Christian topos w ith scientism to formulate a new conception of progress. In his utopian vision, Christianity's role in the abolition of slavery became a model for the influence spiritual 61 "Over the door of their utopian community at M&ulmontant they placed the inscription, 'God who sent his Christ in order to put an end to the slave trade of men, now sends him again to put an end to the slave trade of w om en’" (Bowman 20). 140 leadership could wield over material conditions (Bowman 21). In fact, by 1825, after Saint-Simon's death, the group's new leader, Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire especially emphasized the spiritual prospects inherent to the group's "scientistic" approach to social renewal (Bourdier 48). Because Saint-Simon sought to contextualize his scientism w ithin specifically political an d social discursive contexts, his particular scientistic enthusiasm also affected the historical pamphlets he w rote in collaboration with Augustin Thierry. One product of their partnership, De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne (1814), advocates a "scientistic" approach to governmental procedure; "Ideal government, they write, should be subjected to 'la m ^thode des sciences d'observation'...so that no law may be enacted without 'toute la rigueur des mdthodes logiques...'"(Smithson 34). The pamphlet furtherm ore advocates the ultimate unification of European states-at the price of each country's uniqueness and individuality. In recompense, the people of Europe gain a w orld dominated by its superior "race" (Todorov 51). Thus, Saint-Simon an d his followers promoted social relations in physiological terms and propounded w h at they called la science de I'homme.62 Briefly, the group culled precepts of la science de I’homme from the Indian caste-system such that one's birth, one's heredity, and one's anatomy determined one's social capacity (Boissel 31). Perceived physiological inequalities, therefore, justify imposed inequities in relation to social status: C'est la capacity native qui, dans une sorte de "concours g&idral" de tous, attribuera h chacun la place qui lui revient: c’ est cette 62 Another manifestation of Saint-Simon's particular scientism lies in his esteem for the Ideologues, especially Cabanis. Saint-Simon nam es him "un des esprits qui ont concouru le plus activement de la ’science de I'hom m e’" (Boissel 58). 141 "concurrence" qui assurera 'aux individuality le meilleur classement de leur capacity et qui sera, ainsi, "la plus solide garantie de l'ordre." (Boissel 34) In effect, the group advocated a general approach to questions of social order, an approach that would effectively erradicate diversity in the name of progress. Ironically, the ostensibly utopian aspects of the group's doctrine, w hich clearly addressed itself to the oppression of women and slaves, proclaimed the effacement of difference in the name of progress. For this reason, w e find traces of Saint-Simonist doctrine within the works of subsequent racists.63 By the time of Sand's involvement with the group, inl825, Saint- Hillaire had come to advocate a pantheistic religion in which the inspiration of the Holy Spirit would spring forth less from God the Father than from scientific method (Bourdier 48). In these ways, eighteenth-century scientism formed the basis of Saint-Simonist doctrines. Yet, the group's ideals also exemplify Romantic social ventures and thus the premises of Romantic orientalism. Like the Saint-Simonists, Romantic orientalism em braced Christian conceptions such that the structure of Christian myths inform significant aspects of Romantic orientalism. The next section explores Rousseau's combination of passion and social critique which heralds the Romantic orientalist agenda and all of its implications for identities subsequently attributed to the non-European. Christianity formed a significant contingent to the passion and critique Rousseau advocated. 63 Victor Courtet emulated Saint-Simon from a very young age. At eighteen C ourtet published the essay Aux chefs de la hyerarchie saint-simonienne (1831) (Boissel 31). 142 Christian Mythology and Romantic Orientalism Todorov identifies Rousseau as the first to have criticized an ethnocentrism that ran rampant during the eighteenth century. Unlike Diderot, Rousseau advocated exploring the hum an essence by way of examining human differences (34). According to Rousseau's scheme, the universal becomes the threshold of appreciation that m ust involve thorough understanding of tw o particulars. Therefore, perhaps in opposition to certain readings of the philosophe, Rousseau's notion of the universal nevertheless involves a dialogue between tw o particulars (34). However, the structure of his discourse put Rousseau's adherence to his ow n prescription for dialogue into question (34). For instance, the universalist components of his discourse also exhibit certain ethnocentric tendencies (32). That is, in the fashion of Enlightenment universalism, Rousseau hopes to arrive at general conclusions about the human condition through the study of his own culture (22). Unlike universalists before him , Rousseau factors the element of "savage" society into his equation. That his discourse involving indigenous societies is somewhat ambiguous is evidenced by subsequent inclusions of Rousseau among upholders of Classical ideals, such as Hippolyte Taine (Todorov 32). Most important, the ambiguities that Rousseau's "allegorical savages" manifest served as a major source of inspiration for Romantic orientalism's literary endeavors. W hat appealed to the Romantics was Rousseau's refutation of a determinism inherent to earlier scientistic approaches to the hum an condition (45). Rousseau's allegorical savages become elements in his endeavor to prove that transformation and perfectability are universal hum an attributes (45). 143 Nevertheless, Rousseau's treatment of his savages problematizes his refusing the myth of the noble savage. Rousseau does not confuse contemporary indigenous societies w ith Natural Man. From an estimation of savage life provided by contemporary voyagers and naturalists, Rousseau had tried to gain perspective and paint a portrait of the probable state of m an in nature. While his ultimate goal involved illustrating an ideal state which consisted in a combination of European social mores w ith those of man-in-nature, Rousseau culled ethnocentric approaches to his subject matter. As Todorov explains, his discourse about the Caribs from Le Deuxieme discours became "entraind p ar l'usage altegorique qu'il fait des donnges ethnographiques" (376). Rousseau's discourse, then, puts the reader in a position of having to distinguish between his ends and his means (376). The reader must cope, then, w ith an im portant ambivalence on Rousseau's part. Moreover, Rousseau's allegorical images of indigenous peoples necessarily suffer from an ambivalence not unlike the ambivalence inherent to the process of mimicry or of colonialist discourse. The "allegorical savages" that Todorov identifies in Rousseau are a direct result of the necessity to create the "difference that is almost the same b u t not quite" from the colonized. Thus, Rousseau's discourse manifests similarities to colonialist discourse. It is this allegorical, and thus colonialist, usage of non-Europeans that inspired a generation of influencial writers, politicians and philosophers, including Chateaubriand and Sand. Rousseau's agenda prompted portrayals of non- Europeans intended to serve the revisionary project of Romantic orientalism. In effect, the revision this generation promoted, responded to the ambivalent discourse that structures Rousseau's allegorical savages. Lydie, ou la creole 144 exemplifies a discourse which, while assuredly adhering to Romantic presdptions for social change, nevertheless presents allegorical savages for consideration. The Dictionnaire de la Biographie Nationale says that Daminois wrote Lydie "pour combattre le prdjug£ des Europdens contre des les hommes de couleur" (70-71). In the process, however, her depiction of the m ulatto and the creole suffer from the same ambivalence which structured the portraits of people of color for generations. The portrayals of Astolphe and Lydie testify to the dominion of Romantic orientalist images of non-Europeans over which Rousseau's combination of allegory and ethnography held sway. By the 1820's Rom antidsm existed in a number of incarnations. While not all had their origins in Rousseau, each expressed some investment in social and artistic change. Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare (1823), for instance, advocated a notion of Romanticism in reaction to the Christianity and chivalry propounded by Chateaubriand's texts. Stendhal's essay nevertheless posits the importance of continuous cultural renewal (White 633). Images of non- Europeans, as they constructed notions of black identity, had historically been the construction site of whatever is not European in order to induce revision and renewal into the European cultural cycle. The Romantic era was no exception to this historical pattern. Moreover, a significant basis for the Romantic Orientalist agenda lay in Christian mythology. The Romantic penchant for framing questions or situations according to certain dichotomous extremes, for instance, good vs. evil or exile vs. reunion, resounds with a reinterpretation of Christian mysteries. Manichean extremes likewise prescribed attributes to black 145 characters and negres romantiques during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The tendency to structure black characters along polar extremes also corresponds to Christian universalist efforts at sentimentalizing black identity. Either tradition, w hether Christian universalist or Enlightenment universalist, tendencially effaces difference. Whereas the Enlightenment tradition has its origins scientism, the Christian tradition, by contrast, has its origins in sympathetic gestures which result in sentimentalizing black identity. To say that European concepts of the Orient and representations of non whites specifically relate to the Christian concept of resurrection and rejuvination is not to say that a w riter in the Romantic Orientalist vein, who allegorizes non-whites to effect social critique, is necessarily Christian. Rather, it is to say that Romantic Orientalism is an extention of missionary exoticism. If, as Todorov argues, Chateaubriand's depictions of his voyages throughout North America epitomized Rousseau's call for a philosophe-esque travel tale, this implies a relationship between Rousseau's universalism and Chateaubriand's Christian romanticism (379). In this way, the black and non- European characters advanced by Romantic Orientalism had origins in the allegorical savages of both universalists, Rousseau and Chateaubriand. Thus, the tiegre romantique is born not only of "misreadings" of Rousseau but also of the "religious" overtones of his discourse on natural man. In Chinard's estimation, little of Rousseau's discourse involving his allegorical savages contradicts the prior journals of Christian missionaries. The popular style of Addle Daminois' text, Lydie, ou la creole betrays traces of a similar "misreading" of Rousseau which in turn structures her characters. In the tradition of the pi&ce negrophile, Daminois writes her fiction in order to raise 146 the contemporary reader's awareness regarding the consequences of prejudice. The characters of this sentimental text contain evidence of the Christian universalism of Chateaubriand’s allegorical savages. Her characters also m aintain a fidelity to that misreading of Rousseau which mistakes Rousseau's attempts to theorize the state of m an in nature for an idealization of non- European societies. Lydie ou la creole and the Emergence of the Bourgeois Subject Lydie's noble savages reflect both the influence of a misinterpretation of Rousseau and of the Christianized approach to people of color advocated by Chateaubriand. Atala, for instance, clearly served as the sem inal model for Daminois’ characterizations of wom en of color and exotic background. Starting in the preface, the narration expresses a deep investment in primitivism and a no less profound commitment to raising consciousness w ith respect to racial tolerance. Daminois' sentimentalized story subscribes to the primitivism Chateaubriand m ay have eschewed but nevertheless inspired. Likewise, the narration presents the noble savage, both m ale and female, that Rousseau may have never employed but that he nevertheless refined for th e eighteenth century. In short, Daminois' text presents problem s typically inherent to the liberal discourse of her time: it surrounds notions of slavery with Christian rhetoric and overtones. It does so by configurating the tradition of the noble savage to reflect the contemporary Restoration order. Because the text so frequently equates Restoration order with slavery, the structure of the creole 147 and mulatto characters in Lydie reflects the emergence of a bourgeois subject in French society. In her preface, the author recognizes the emphasis her age has placed on the physical realm: ...il y a de la folie et de l'absurdit<§ a se croire un etre privil£gi£, parce que Ton possede une peau ros6e et des cheveux longs, et que les trois quarts du globe £tant peupl^s d ’ homme de races n£gres, il est probable que cette majeure partie ne peut point raisonnablement etre vou£e au mdpris ni h l'abjection, parce que quelques Europ6ens le pr£tendent ainsi...Ce principe pos£, j'ai cherch£ h vaincre le pr£jug6 qui dom ine surtout en France, (xij- xiij) While the preface addresses itself in the first person to female readers alone, this texts carries none of the complexities of Sand's Idealism as I outline it in chapter two. On the contrary, Daminois invests in typically sentimental imagery, including that most central to Christian rhetoric. Lydie is the paragon of Christian maternal love. In fact, the text idealizes each mother figure and instance of maternal love in the text, in seeming flattery to its readers: II y a quelque chose de respectable et de charmant dans cette faiblesse des femmes, et si la soci6t£ blame le sentiment de vanity qui la cause, les etres bons et sensibles y voyent une tendresse presque divine et le d£dommagement de leurs peines maternelles. (m, 120) L y d ie 's main focus, however, is the divine moral contained w ithin the "true" story of Astolphe's life: La v6rit6 est une, je le sens au fond de mon coeur dclair£ par une religion pure...Cette v6rit6, £man£e de l'Eternel...(xij) 148 ...ne sont-ils pas d£j& assez malheureux de se voir l'objet d'une repugnance qui les decourage et les isole au milieux d'une population de blancs? (ix) Moreover, repeated conflations~of femininity w ith children and creoles, of nobililty w ith the mulatto and with any "outsider" including creoles and children— that take place in the novel reveal m uch more about textual investment in eliminating racial prejudice than the narration's sympathetic proclamations. The m any textual conflations of Lydie complicate Daminois' passion for harmonious race relations. The first significant conflation surfaces in the preface. Albeit ambiguously, the text equates femininity with "creole," Le caract&re de la crdole a cette douceur qui approche de la faiblesse...Peut-etre quelques femmes...s'y reconnatront-elles, et ne se refuseront point & accorder des pleurs h la destin£e de celle qui ne su qu'aimer et se soumettre. N'est-ce pas l&...une grande partie de la vie des femmes?...C'est done h leur indulgence que je confie mon but et mon travail, (xvj-xvij) "La creole" here indicates Lydie in particular. At the same time, "Le caractdre de la creole..." also associates creole wom en in general with an essential femininity. Thus the text presents Lydie, the female creole, as ni femme, ni sauvage. As le Chevalier de Valmire exclaims upon making Lydie's aquaintance, "Ah! c’ est plus qu'une femme!" (1,148). What is more, the text's predilection for separating creole femininity from European femininity serves to underscore Lydie's remarkably noble bearing. Before the uprising at Saint- Domingue, Lydie is a countess, married to the benevolent and idealized slave owner, M. de Saint-Yves: 149 cependant on eut dit qu'elle rechercheait ces difficult^ qui la portaient tout-^-coup dans une region plus pure, et que son moral en acquerait plus de force; car Lydie, debout sur la pointe du rocher, semblait prendre une nature supgrieure. Sa tete se relevait avec noblesse. (4) There is one last sentimental characteristic the text employs in relation to Lydie. As in the case of Indiana, Lydie is like a child: 'Ton trouvait en elle les graces de l'enfance unies aux sentimens £lev£s" (1,25); "Lydie raisonne comme un enfant sur beaucoup de choses” (1,130); "aussi ces premieres peines la virent-elle abattue comme un faille enfant" (II, 73-74). Thus we discover the ni femme, ni sauvage of the creole character more precisely in the image of the child. Through the character of the Chevalier de Valmire, the narration details the persecution the nobility suffered during the Revolution. Because of his experiences, de Valmire convinces Lydie and Astolphe to sail for England after the slave uprising and the death of M. de Saint-Yves. The narration clearly sympathizes with the deposed nobility. However, it makes a distinction between "authentic" nobility— such as that of the Chevalier, of M. de Saint- Yves, of Lydie and finally, we learn, of Astolphe— and nobles who hold fast to racial and classist prejudices. The character of Lydie's sister-in-law, Madame d'Outreville cleary embodies the European prejudice the narrator reproaches. By the second volume, Lydie has left England for France, travelling with Astolphe. She encounters much resistance to her friendship with him from all sides including from Mme. d'Outreville, who explains that Astolphe's company is unseemly. 150 The troubles o f Lydie and Astolphe begin on the continent. Lydie's association with him makes her a victim of prejudice. In one episode, the newly arrived Lydie and Astolphe look to rent a room. The queries of the maitresse de I'hdtel reveal the narration's attitudes concerning the new order of the Restoration: La maitresse d u lieu lui avait demand^ son nom. - J e m'appelle de Saint-Yves- — Voil£ un drole de nom..les saints ne sont plus de m ode id, et la rgpublique avait abolie en pared cas les nom s de famille...l'on est libre maintenant...monsieur est votre m ari sans doute? (11,97) Lydie explains she is a widow and introduces Astolphe by his first name. The maitresse presses Lydie for some indication of Astolphe's identity. Lydie is at a loss for w ords and sputters that Astolphe is her brother, L'hotesse sourit malignement... — C 'est & merveille!...mais qui aurait devin6 qui monsieur est votre frdre? -D e grace, laissez-moi dit Lydie... — Q uelle femme hautaineL.Ah! si nous dtions encore en quatre- vingt-treize! (II, 98) Lydie's response reveals how she an d Astolphe occupy two sides of the same coin. The narrator, meanwhile, continuously treats post-Revolutionary French society w ith disdain. For instance, Lydie finds m ost Parisians, including the nobility, "resserrdes et mesquines" (IL 94). To the narrator's dismay, racial prejudice proves to be a great equalizer in the France of the Restoration. The Revolution seems to have left any sense of truly noble demeanor, such as Lydie and Astolphe possess, in its wake. Deplorably, the Revolution has throw n 151 nobility of character out with the ancien regime. Yet Lydie, Astolphe and Lydie's supportive sister-in-law, Mme. d'Elmance, possess a noble heritage as well. To this end, the text displays a rather ambiguous investment in the nobility of the ancien regime: the noble in origin do not always comprise the noble of character, w hile the noble of character are always noble in origin. The initial steps toward eradicating racial prejudice would seem to involve the cultivation of a certain nobility which is distinctly non-continental. Another am biguity that permeates the text is a disdain for the efforts of Christian missionaries on the one hand, while adhering to and idealizing the power of Christian doctrine on the other. The only real villainous character here is a Jesuit missionary, don Aurelio Gonzales, Lydie's uncle, who, we learn later, h a d snatched Astolphe from his mother's arms to sell him into slavery. The narration repeatedly equates a notion of savagery w ith his lust for power: D on Aur^Uo con^ut la pensee d'aller lui-meme travailler h leur conversion, et de soumettre, avec leur ancienne croyance, leurs habitudes, leur liberty enfin...de devenir 1'homme le plus recommandable comme le plus puissant du royaume aprds son souverain. (IV, 112) These textual conflations--of savagery with missionary work, of the child with the feminine, of nobility with the non-continental--certainly lend an ambiguity to the text. However, in each case, the narrator makes an effort to distinguish the superiority of a "free" femininity over a "shackled" femininity, an "authentic" nobility over the noble in name only, the "truly" Chrisitian over the hypocrite. This effort has its basis in the Golden Age constructions put to use by P6re Lafitau an d others. Into this tradition, Lydie, ou la creole inserts autonomous individuals who have lived outside the constraints of European 152 society. The combination of these elements have their origins in the earliest of utopic imaginings. Furthermore, they have historically formed the basis of European self-critique. I have already argued for the parallels which exist between Les Natchez and Daminois' presentation o f Astolphe's background. After don Aurglio's death, his assistant, le frdre Gregorio, hands over his m emoires to Valmire and Astolphe. It contains the story of Astolphe's sainted m other, Maria Dona, and of his father, Almanzar, the consummate noble savage and the son of the king. The story of these lovers recalls all the fictional romantic encounters that took place between Europeans and Americans from the sixteenth century onward. Its Christian context especially reflects Atala• Almanzar proudly refuses Christian conversion. Gonzales, meanwhile, uses Maria, his virtuous and convent-educated sister, as a Christian idol to be worshipped, a santified means of exhorting the native people to convert. While Almanzar sees through Gonzales, he nevertheless falls in love w ith Maria and w ith the ideal of an unmediated relationship w ith and piety for the Christian god which she represents in spite of her brother's manipulations. W hile Almanzar holds fast to his native pagan religion, he nevertheless experiences epiphanies as she instructs him at his bedside w hen he falls ill; and finally her love converts him. The text constructs an ideal for harm ony that can be acheived between noble native religious tradition in combination with virtuous Christian love and charity. The narration's Christian universalist message, then, contrasts w ith the missionary corruption of don Aur^lio. The Christian universalism of Lydie ultimately results in a sentimentalization of her characters, that is, a "lower" form of melodrama, in order to teach the perils of racial prejudice to a 153 popular audience. N o less than Rousseau o r Chateaubriand, Daminois continues the traditions set forth by Christian missionaries. Lydie’s preface announces its preoccupation with the story of Astolphe, and exhalts the soul of the suffering mulatto. At the sam e time, it condemns the investment the contemporary age has m ade, along w ith that of the previous century, in physical factors. However, the episode of the slave meeting below, conforms to typically abjectified accounts of black mores: Les flambeaux agit£s £clairaient les fetes noires et hideuses, dont l'expression atroce gla^ait d'horreur et d'effroi. Leurs membres demi-nus, leurs mouvemens d£sordonn£s formaient un tableau impossible h d^crire, et qui donnerait une id6e de l'enfer s'il nous est permis de comprendre. (II, 21) Disdain for revolutionaries and false prophets extends to the black slaves who plot the uprising at Saint-Domingue. The narration labels the actions of these conspirators fundamentally indescribable. This conspiracy affords the narration the opportunity to underscore Astolphe's heroism with respect to common black slaves, according to the precedent set by the pieces tiegrophiles: Consequently, Astolphe's evil double appears. Jealous of the new freedom that M. de Saint-Yves has bestowed upon him, Astolphe's villanous and nameless corollary incites the master's slaves to revolt (II, 15-19). In additional accordance with contemporary characterizations of heroic literary mulattoes at this time, Astolphe is three-quarters white. We know his mother was white but w e learn as well of his paternal grandmother's European origins. Thus, Almanzar was mulatto. Like Atala, his hair is blond (IV, 139). The narrative makes its sympathies clear from the outset. The text declares that both Europeans and blacks safeguard m ulatto unhappiness because each 154 looks down on the sang-mele. The real racial prejudice Daminois seeks to dispel is that weilded against the mulatto and against the m ulatto alone. W hat is more, Astolphe's features manifest his distinction: "ses traits rdguliers avait retenu un caract&re noble qui ne rappelait en rien les visages difformes de rAfrique” (1,14). The text is most disturbed in particular by that prejudice against the white percentage of mulatto lineage. In this way, to paraphrase S. V. Griffin and Farah Hartman, Lydie, ou la creole recognizes no suffering but that which the white negro, Lydie and Astolphe, experience (Griffin and Hartm an 370). Astolphe expressed his differences with society even as a child. During the ceremony whereby M. de Saint-Yves gives Astolphe his freedom, he recalls the slave, still a child newly arrived in France, who perceives the barely civilized mores of French society. Le petit sauvage, as Astolphe was known, recognized the lack of liberty allotted to women and to servants. In his mind, society treated these two groups no differently than it treated slaves themselves (II, 157-159). This narrative easily employs the discursive conclusions of Rousseau and a series of missionary narratives, which had all questioned the state of eighteenth-century society to more or less explicitly primitivist ends. The instance above resonates particularly well with Buffier. In L'Examen des Prejuges Vulgaires, he writes, "Parlons nettement, n’ est ce pas que les peuples les plus polis sont les plus artificieux et que les sauvages sont les plus naturels" (Chinard, L ’Amerique 327). However, another interesting episode takes place involving the perceptions of a child. As Astolphe walks along the streets of Paris, passers-by begin a discussion concerning the origins and aesthetics of the m ulatto 155 physique. This section ends with a banal dialogue between a mother and young daughter. Predictably, the child's responses emphasize the senselessness of racial tension. Chapter two discusses how Sand's narration also attributes child-like qualities to the female creole. The figure of the child seems to serve as an important metaphorization for the creole’s position in society. Like a child, the creole is an outsider. The image of the outsider in Lydie, which also encompasses certain members of the deposed nobility, consistently avoids common attitudes od the populace, not the least of which includes attitudes of racial intolerance. This text ennobles the outsider or exile's social situation, then, w ith respect to the common people. Furthermore, this treatment of child-like characteristics has its origins in Rousseau. In his article, "The Noble Primitive as Bourgeois Subject", Peter W eston sees Rousseau's Emile as having evolved directly from the tradition of the noble savage (67). In a primitivist manner, Emile contains musings on childhood that imagine moments w hen man develops anterior to what we now understand as entry into the symbolic realm (67). From its inception in the sixteenth century, however, the noble savage trope has borne an im portant relationship to bourgeois subjectivity. The trope is based on a notion of unified subjectivity which exists outside societal dominion. This concept of the coherent and individual subject w ho survives outside the marketplace became the instrum ent for the "radicalism" potentially inherent to the social critique proposed by primitivism in the eighteenth century.6 4 64 "Thus it was w hen the utopian features of a non-contradictory world outside outside history became invigorated by the theorization of the free, non-contradictory bourgeois subject, himself 'prior' to society...that the literary strategy of confrontation between prim itive and civilized could by effectively deployed as a potential radicalism..." (W eston 64). In Lydie, ou la creole, not only the character of Almanzar but also of that the hero, Astolphe, manifest characteristics of the noble savage: "L'existence primitive d'Astolphe, les £preuves dont elle avait £t£ sin£e, et son organisation morale et physique, devaient servir h le faire distinguer..." (HI, 72). Like Aphra Bhen's Oroonoko, a quintessential noble savage, Astolphe curses the apprehension he feels among an intolerant Europe: "Dans un mortel d£sespoir le mulatre s'6crirait: Malheureux paria! que vas-tu faire aux milieux des hommes d'Europe?...A quoi te sert ta liberty si tu retombes dans l'avilissement?" (II, 83-84). He is, like Oroonoko, a complete and contained individual subjectivity who counters the values of French colonialist society (Weston 63). Perhaps the narration’ s contem pt for revolution can be explained more specifically in terms of contempt for the augmenting status of the bourgeoisie after the Revolution. W e recall that the rise of the bourgeoisie with the fall of the ancien regime had the effect of homogenizing Restoration sodety. This rise to power sought to eliminate the social distinctions that stratified society on which society necessarily thrives. Otherwise, members are too easily threatened by their substitutability for one another. The rise of the bourgeoisie dem anded an opposite reaction in the guise o f an arbitrary differentiation between members o f society (Tinland 28). The many forms social differentiation can take, of course, includes racial prejudice. Thus the narration can express sympathy for a lost nobility and take a "potentially radical" stance tow ard contemporary society at the same time. The noble savage, Astolphe, the solitary and complete heroic subjectivity who represents natural reason and integrity becomes the means of effecting a protest against the ignoble rad al 157 prejudice prevalent w ithin post-Revolutionary French society. In the end, the narration uses the autonomous hero, himself a bourgeois construction, to stage a counter revolution against the rise of the bourgeoisie.65 In this way, Daminois projects a universalist solution to the augmentation of bourgeois social status. The relationships between Lydie and Astolphe, Maria and Almanzar exemplify both the suffering racial intolorance produces and the transcendence interracial coupling can bring about. Nevertheless, certain contradictions remain so that the text's radicalism remains definitively potential. Astolphe proves to be Lydie's cousin: Astolphe's mother, Maria, was the sister of don Aur£lio, Lydie's uncle. Incest, then interdicts their love for one another. Although each clearly loves the other, Lydie avoids any romantic entanglement between Lydie and Astolphe and thus avoids racial intermixing.66 O ne characteristic that separates Lydie, ou la creole as un roman de femmes de chambre from a Romantic orientalist work, is the text's moralist tone, II n'y a rien de si ordinaire dans le monde qui ces sortes d'assemblages [de Lydie et d'Astolphe] ou la faiblesse est dom inie par des dehors imposans...le m£chant juge et condamnd et la vertu tremble...La soci£t£ alors accorde sa consideration I k celui 65 "This potential radicalism is bourgeois to the extent that, as Marx and Engels noted, "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part...it has pitilessly tom asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors"', but also, to the extent that an im plied utopia is per se an imagination of the end of exploitation, there may be found the seeds within it of a self-critique of bourgeois society" (Weston 65). 66 Chateaubriand also considered the outcome of racial intermixing the w orst of both worlds (Todorov 390). 158 dont le role est le plus brillant, jusqu'& ce que le tem ps ait fait justice de ces divers m&ites. (Ill, 37) The sentimentalism and Christian universalist aspects of the story and characters of Lydie, ou la creole typify a liberal-minded narration that incorporates ambiguous images of blacks, creoles and mulattoes. In a revisionist fervor to promote racial tolerance, Daminois' text falls into a history of Romantic orientalism. The text uses exotic characters to promote a sense of social revision. To this end, the characterzations of the colonized in Lydie manifest the sorts of problems inherent to characterizations of the colonized that any Romantic orientalist text would manifest. These problems include universalism w hether Christian or philosophe-esque in origin. Daminois' text illustrates the regressions that can result from allowing the influence of Rousseau and Chateaubriand to structure characterizations of the colonized. In the process of considering the evolution of the romans de femmes de chambre, such as Lydie, ou la creole, we cannot discount the contributions that ambiguities inherent to Rousseau and Chateaubriand m ade to these stories’ subsequent success among readers. On occasion, Rousseau contextualizes the state of nature and notions of natural man such that his discourse seems biased tow ard the state of man-in-nature (Todorov 374). Whereas, he more precisely searches for alternatives to the state of contemporary eighteenth-century society. Thus, Rousseau manifests enough ambivalence to have incited subsequent misinterpretation of his work. Chateaubriand upholds such misreadings w hen he announces his differences with Rousseau in the preface to Atala. Christian overtones preside over Les Natchez's general expression of universalist and egalitarian sentiment (Todorov 386). However, with 159 Chateaubriand, Christianity becomes a significant factor in sentimentalizing the savage and in colonizing various images of the native American. Chateaubriand's Christian sentimentalism works to familiarize the N orth American to his European reader in order to extract sympathy for these characters. Sympathy, I have argued, carries negative implications for portraits of non-whites and non-Europeans and thus constitutes one facet of orientalist and colonialist enterprises. In having absorbed these aspects of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, and in having constructed characters around these problems, Lydie, ou la creole reveals the ultim ate sentimental consequences to both Rousseau's and to Chateaubriand's Romantic orientalism and Christian universalist efforts.6 7 Very few texts in the history of French literature present progressive images of either the colonized or of women. In the course of my examination of the representations of colonized femininity, one text alone indicates a progressive stance w ith respect to its protagonist. The next chapter considers Ourika in close relation to both theories of women's voices in autobiography and the response to Madame de Duras' text, La Negresse. 67 Moreover, Daminois' respect for Lavater contradicts her protestations against the abjection that blatent determinism produces. She published a short story after Lydie, ou la creole, "Champs des Roses" from Mes Souvenirs (1827) wherein Lavater figures am ong the cast of characters. In fact, he saves a young girl under suspicion of murder. The narration clearly esteems the scientific deduction of ”le sage de Zurich" although Lavater does n o t employ his physiognomical methods to prove her innocence. As Buffon exerted his sw ay over Rousseau’s thought, so Lavater exerts his influence on Daminois. Daminois' zeal recalls not only Sand but also the zeal of all of her Romantic contemporaries for Franz Gall, for instance. 160 Chapter Four Ourika: A Social Critique Critics up to the present day have favored regarding M adame de Duras' Ourika in terms of thematics of social alienation. The Dictionnaire de Biographie Frangaise, for instance, understands Ourika and Edouard (1824) as two D uras novels whereby "il s'agit...d'amours impossibles, h cause des differences de race ou de condition sociale..." (731). Critics have also tendentially tried to establish a relation between Ourika's situation and that of the author herself. Sainte-Beuve writes of Duras: "Ld, dans ses dcrits, elle se plait h retracer l'antagonisme douloureux et le ddchirement. C'est au fond tout etait lutte, souffrance, obstacle et ddsir dans cette belle ame, ardente comme les climats des tropiques ou avait muri sa jeunesse..." (80).68 The three previous chapters have presented the characterizations of black and creole femininity in Sand'slndiana, Duras' Ourika, and Addle Daminois'Lydie, ou la creole. These chapters show how the female characters of Sand and Daminois ultimately conform to typical literary paradigms of non white figures which Francois Hoffmann, for example, outlines in Negres romantiques. Chapter one highlights the role that the gaze of scientific discourse plays in both Sand's Indiana and Duras' Ourika. Chapter two reveals the alignment of George Sand's treatment of creole femininity w ith colonialist sympathies. Chapter three demonstrates how Rousseau and Chateaubriand 68 Claire de Duras's mother was herself creole. The Dictionnaire de Biographie Frangaise writes: "En 1792, elle suivit aux Antilles, sa mere, qui dtait Martiniquaise...EUes y restfcrent quatre ans" (731). 161 exerted significant influence on the sentimental tone and characterizations of Lydie, ou la creole. Daminois's preface to Lydie testifies to the estime in which she holds both writers. Both Rousseau and Chateaubriand contributed greatly to an already well-established tradition of sentimentalizing hum an relations set against the backdrop of exotic surroundings. Ourika, however, represents a significant alternative to these paradigms. As this black protagonist realizes her impossible social position, Duras creates a tortured consciousness. In addition, Ourika's acute cognizance of her situation relates to her ow n body and to the bodies of those around her. The nature of the gaze, both internal and external to Ourika, directly results in the protagonist's dysphoria. Duras creates a psychologically complex situation w ith by now familiar implications for her society's treatment of women in general. For in eighteenth-century French society, femininity is unthinkable outside the containment of either marriage or the convent. This text explores the ramifications of this lack of representation available for wom en’ s identities outside the confines of these institutions. More important, however, the level of Ourika's consciousness challenges prevailing literary images of non-white and non-continental characters. Of the texts this study has examined, Duras most definitively vilifies the implications of her society's exoticism of the non- European identity. In contrast to the texts I have examined thus far, Duras allows Ourika to voice her own experience in the first person. This chapter considers Ourika's narrative with respect to Sand's narrative treatment of Noun's attempts to communicate w ith Ramtere from Indiana. While Ourika recounts her story to her doctor in the first-person, Sand’ s narration avoids divulging the exact 162 contents of N oun's communication on two occasions: first, in two letters addressed to Ramidre and second, in the speech she gives to Rami£re wherein she pleads the case for their continuing liaison. With regard to Indiana's character, Sand's narrator refers to the strange language to which creole presentiments are privy. Each example--of Noun's repressed statements on the one hand, and of Indiana's supernatural correspondance on the other-- associates creole identity with a special use of language. Moreover, according to Indiana's narration, this relationship seems to be determined according to the color of the creole. Allegorization of the story for Duras' own unhappy experiences becomes m ore and m ore irrelevant in light of more pressing political implications. Claudine Herrm ann's analysis, which illuminates Duras' ow n frustrating relationships w ith her daughter and with fellow writer Chateaubriand, foregrounds an important femininist reading of Duras' letters moreso than of her first novella. Likewise, Chantal Bertrand-Jennings focuses on Duras' texts as the expression of her ow n alienation and self doubt.69 Each of the published texts which comprise Madame de Duras' oeuvre, Jennings argues, gives apt witness to the feminine condition (40). However, Ourika's relationship to the testimonial narrative substantially diminishes the author's relationship to the narrator, if that relationship can ever hold any significance. By allowing Ourika to speak, Duras appropriates the "I" of Ourika's physician, the problematic interlocutor, more than she appropriates the "I" of her protagonist. 69 Jennings writes, "Malgr£ le succfcs de ses romans publies de son vivant, Ourika et Edouard...elie doutait d'elle-meme, de son talent, et confiait k Rosalie de Constant en 1825 k propos de ses amis ecrivains hommes: 'Je les vois tous si surs que ce qu'ils font est superbe...Je les envie’ " (40). 163 Ourika's voice, like the voice of any testimonial narrator, creates a collusion between the narrator and the reader that omniscient narration never successfully achieves.70 As a result, I consider the text in light of theories of first-person narrative and autobiography. This final chapter examines the characteristics of Ourika which conform to the characteristics of the pseudo testimonial novel. Theories of the testimonial novel illum inate the implications that Ourika's fictionalized experience carries for politically marginalized groups am ong the ancien-regime. This chapter also examines Ourika in relation to a text conceived as a direct response to Duras' pessimism, La Negresse (1826). Like Lydie, ou la creole, La Negresse contains a Christian universalist approach to racial difference. The authors evoke humanity's unity in Christ to appeal for harmony between the races. At the same time, the authors implicate M adame de Duras in their attem pt to offer an alternative to prevailing images of blacks and freemen in contemporary fiction and drama. The outcome of La Negresse suggests that by fleeing with her w hite husband to the cosmopolitan sanctuary of Paris, the protagonist, Marie, can strike a compromise w ith society at large. This stands in direct contrast to the stark accusation in the final outcome of Ourika whereby society offers no compromise but exile and no identity b u t abjection. Tzvetan Todorov defines exoticism as a mode of self-criticism and renewal (264). The foreign object offers a different set of standards by w hich 70 Beverly explains that in the testimonial narrative, "The erasure of authorial presence...together with its nonfictional character, makes possible a different kind of complicity— m ight we call it fraternal/sororal?-betw een narrator and reader than is possible in the novel" (97). 164 European civilization can critique and invigorate ailing institutions. Through a process of exoticization, the foreign object becomes subject to idealization according to such standards in the European imagination (Todorov 264). In this way, exoticism expunges those properties of the foreign object irrelevant to Europe's project of revitalization. There are important erotic components specific to exoticism that Todorov's account does not elaborate. For instance, the m ulatto held an abjectified position in colonialist administrative discourse. Yet, in terms of societal function and status in colonies such as Saint- Domingue, the m ulatto fared m uch better than the black African, slave or freeman. Because color hierarchies formed a significant basis for colonialist societies, sang-meles held governmental positions and enjoyed a continental education unavailable to the darker skinned population. Likewise, mulatto women were favored as mistresses by black and white m en alike. I have already examined the familiar element of m ulatto bodies— white blood-w hich proves terrifying b ut thus eroticizable. While incessantly associated with the corporal, black African bodies nevertheless figures as too distant from the familiarity of white features. Thus abjectification typifies the experiences of black individuals while eroticization typifies the experience of mulattos. In this way, Ourika carries implications for exoticism as it stood by the 1820's because extoticism definitively illustrates the non-entity that European society attributes to black individuals. Ourika and Prevalent Literary Depictions of Africans As critic have emphasized, each of the three texts Madame de Duras published do manifest a preoccupation with alterity and social alienation 165 (Jennings 40). Edouard concerns the difficulties tw o lovers encounter as a result of differing social status. Olivier (1826) explores the effect of sexual impotence on the subsequent relationship between the protagonist's psyche and the society in which he must perform. All three of these comment on the limited conception of hum an relations in contemporary society. Each of Duras' three protagonists likewise suffers as a consequence of social restrictions.7 1 Moreover, as Sainte-Beuve observes, each text re-invokes a favored theme among the romantics— that of impossible love (80).72 Duras shared a very close friendship with Chateaubriand, who had been instrumental in the creation of the Romantic hero. In fact, M adame de D uras invokes the movement and its heroes when she quotes Lord Byron on the frontespiece: " 'C'est bien 1 & etre seul, c’ est IS, c'est IS, que se trouve la so litu d e'". In Ourika, Duras presents a young black woman as a Romantic and exotic character: Ourika is a solitary marginalized figure whose condition represents a social commentary on the experience of marginalized identities in pre-Revolutionary and Restoration France. That Madame de Duras should put a black character forw ard in this regard is in keeping w ith the Romantic prescriptions of her tim e. For w riters of all calibres and political persuasions, black protagonists proved to be very valuable vehicles for the aspirations of the Romantic movement. For sentimentalists, for example, Blacks became the consummate symbol of 71 Jennings explains, "le m alheur des trois protagonists est bien du au poids des tabous sociaux qu'ils sont totalement impuissants a modifier" (42). 72 Jennings concurs with Sainte-Beuve, "L'eclat de la mglancholie profonde dont m eurent les h6ros, ou qui provoque leur folie, evoque le vague des passions & la Ren£ ou le mal de sifecle romantique" (41). 166 melancholia, victimization and exile w ithin a labyrinth of worldly injustice (Hoffmann 152). lik e the negre romantique, Ourika also ressembles the literary bastard, who often appears in Romantic fiction. This figure typically exemplified an excess of either good or evil (Hoffmann 235). Like the bastard, each Durasian protagonist seeks to fit into a society where his or her difference is perceived as a social transgression (Jennings 41). Romantic writers ensured the bastard, the same unhappy fate that Madame de Duras' ensures her characters (Hoffmann 235). Ourika also a bears limited resemblance to tropes employed by the Christian universalist approach to the non-European. Christian universalism based its notions of human community on hum anity's unity in Christ. As the protagonists and narrators of Lydie and La Negresse have done, Ourika invokes God the Father and turns to Him for divine justice. However, while the narrators of Lydie and La Negresse do so in order to plead the case of humanity's unity in Christ, Ourika's appeals and subsequent destiny potentially subvert credence in Christian universalist sentiment. Clearly, Christian universalism has instilled neither Ourika nor Madame de B's aristocratic circle w ith a sense of communality or brotherhood. In fact, French sympathy for the colonized m ay very well have been the root cause of Ourika’ s impossible condition: by bringing Ourika out of the African darkness and into the society of Enlightenment, Ourika is brought face to face w ith her identity as an aberration in the eyes of those around her. Because this ostensibly enlightened society offers her little more than public scrutiny and marginalization, Ourika chooses to entrust her destiny in the religious order of the Ursulines. After the marquise de... taunts Ourika a 167 second time by mocking her love for Charles, Ourika falls ill and comes close to death. Visits from the parish priest save her. She expresses her thanks to God for this opportunity to sequester herself in God's love: "Dieu, en me jetant sur cette terre 6trangdre, voulut peut-etre me prddestiner k lui; il m ’ arracha k la barabarie, k l'ignorance...il me d£roba aux vices de l'esdavage, et me fit connoitre sa loi" (63). From the suffering, oppression and sickness that the prospect of her solitude has brought her, Ourika finds new faith in God: "je ne sais quel mouvement me portoit vers Dieu, et me donnoit le besoin de me jeter dans ses bras et d'y chercher le repos" (62). Her priest encourages this epiphany by echoing Christian universalist mandates: II n'y a pour lui ni ndgres ni blancs: tous les coeurs sont £gaux devant ses yeux...Ces paroles simples portoient dans mon ame je ne sais quelle paix que je n'avois jamais connue. (62) W ith her newfound faith in God, Ourika quits the society of men for the familial certainty of religious life: s'il les a priv6s des liens du sang, il leur a donn£ l'humaniti6 tout e n tire pour famille. La soeur de charity, me disois-je, n'est point seule dans la vie...elle s'est cr66e une famille de choix; elle est la m£re de tous les orphelins, la fille de tous les pauvres vieillards, la soeur de tous les malheureux. (63) Clearly, Ourika does not regard the convent as a ghastly sentence. In fact, in contrast the hysterical feminine space Diderot depicts in La Religieuse, Ourika takes ownership of her destiny by acting on her choice. Diderot's convent exemplifies an ambiguous space of birth on the one hand and of stunted growth, or still-birth, on the other (Julien 134-5). Ourika describes the convent 168 as the prom ised land- By contrast, the world outside represents a land of exile (58). She also fantasizes about a life of plantation slavery. There, Ourika would have know n a community of comrades and fam ily as opposed to such solitude: "Je cultiverois la terre d'un autre: mais ...j'aurois un compagnon de ma vie, et des enfants de ma couleur..."(58). While Ourika has little choice between a spinster life with M adam e de B. and the confinement of the convent, her acting on her desire for communality renews this space traditionally reviled in literature according to the fulfillment Ourika finds there. Hoffm ann writes that the majority of w riters at this time attributed to black characters the inferiority an d weakness of small children and animals rather th a n the status of the oppressed in the face of the oppressor (Hoffmann 187). The narrative treatment of Noun's suicide, as chapter one examines it, serves as an example of a typical Romantic rendering of a black character. In contrast to Noun, the ambiguous victim, Ourika possesses a devastating lucidity th a t subverts many prevalent characteristics of nhgres romantiques. In spite of th is and despite of the eloquent expression of relief she finds in Christian love, the narrator of La Negresse makes pointed references to the efforts of Ourika's author to bestow an uncharitable fate upon her. In the face of the heinousness associated w ith the convent, for example, the authors of La Negresse strongly object to Ourika's fate. H owever fervent her faith, the convent figures as the last resort of the unm arried and unmarriable, the terminally marginalized. The authors of La Negresse speak out against this injustice o n Ourika's behalf. 169 Sand's Narrator "Translates" on Noun’s Behalf W e know from our initial discussion of this text that Ourika recounts her life story to her physician. In contrast to Ourika's unfolding og her tale, Sand's narrator represses Noun's speech on tw o occasions. The narrator in effect intercepts between the reader and tw o letters that Noun writes to Rami&re. In these instances, the narrative focuses on the callousness of Ramteres reaction to Noun's statements w ithout disclosing any of her own words. During the first seduction scene, the narrator begins by quoting Nouns pleas to Ramidre to reconsider his breaking off their affair. Then, the narrator interrupts, N oun parla longtemps ainsi. Elle ne se servit peut-etre pas des memes mots, mais elle dit les memes choses, bien mieux cent fois que je ne pourrais vous les redire. Ou trouver le secret de cette Eloquence qui se r£v£le tout h coup? (75; l e partie, ch. IV) W hatever eloquence the loss of Ramidre's attentions m ay have m oved her to express the narrator has silenced and covers over with a sympathetic gesture: Ce fut le dernier coup. La lettre d'une femme de chambre! Elle avait pourtant pris...le style dans son coeur...Mais l’ orthographe! Savez-vous bien ce qu'une syllabe de plus ou de moins ote ou donne d'£nergie aux sentiments? H£las! la pauvre fille & demi- sauvage de l'ile Bourbon ignorait meme qu'il y eut des regies h la langue. Elle croyait dcrire et parler aussi bien que sa maitresse. (76- 77; l e partie, ch. IV) Again, we can attribute the narrators choosing not to expose Noun's words to the preference he continually demonstrates for courting reader sympathy for the creole. These passages leave the impression that to quote the letter would 1 7 0 be to render Noun's language a ridiculous version of that of the colonizer. The sympathetic gesture of explaining Noun's lack, however, ostensibly leaves intact the dignity of Nouns emotional force. The narrative thereby intercedes on Noun's behalf, lest her choice of words or sentence structure seem ridiculous to the reader. By contrast to Lydie's domestic, Edith, for example, Sand's narrative does not fashion Noun into the stereotypical black domestic spouting petit-negre,7 3 The narrator intervenes, then, to maintain reader sympathy. While it attempts to sympathize w ith Noun's domestic status, her lack of education and isolation on the colony, and her m anipulation by Ramifere, the solution for Noun's portrayal does not rest in replacing her eloquence. The narrator also includes a reference to the demi-sauvage. While repressing Noun's expression, the narration nonetheless defers to Noun's passion. W hat the creole lacks in the way of standard French, she more than compensates for in the strength of her emotional conviction. The narrative voice seems to equate Noun's eloquence with a kind of sublime force, like that which Indiana is able comprehend: just before Rami&re's discovery on the Delmare property, Indiana declares to Ralph, "Je ne sais quelle catastrophe se prepare autour de nous...je me sens £mue comme a 1'approche d'une grande phase k ma destinge” (59-60, l e partie, ch. n). Sand's narrative is nevertheless powerless either to report or to grasp this sublimity. The narrator fashions Noun's speech into an expression that eludes representation. 73 Daminois refers to Edith as Lydie's "negresse”. Lydie sends her to ask a man she believes to be Astolphe if he w ill join them while they walk. Edith reports: "Mattresse!...moi ne point reconnattre du tout le bel Astolphe...toi ne pouvoir aller plus loin sans qu'il t'arrive mal" (I, 83). 171 The narrator, while he fears treading on this sublime territory, offers to translate. The narrator's putting his words in place of hers at the moment of Noun’s pleading w ith Ramidre, and during the treatm ent of her letters, signifies an intervention similar to that of a translator.74 The narrator intervenes between Noun's black passion and the reader's European sensibilities. In order to avoid belittling Noun by transmitting her written or spoken ineptitude, and to avoid Noun's ow n expression potentially misrepresenting the force of her own passion, the continental narrator intervenes as though Noun's words are a foreign language to the reader. In Positions, Jacques Derrida points out the usefulness of considering translation moreso in terms of transformation.75 This concept effectively eliminates any notion of the original text as serving as a sort of origin unto itself that translation can only reflect or supplement. Derrida uses this concept to modify Walter Benjamin's analysis from "The Task of the Translator." The latter leans heavily on the notion of the original text as containing a sacred nucleus at which no translation may arrive (Levesque and McDonald 152) Heidegger, as well, treats the original text as "untouchable" to the language of translation (152). Whatever the ideological advantages of the notion of transformation, Benjamin's ultimate ideals for origins and purity prove useful to understanding Sand's narrative interruptions on N oun's behalf. 74 My use of translation in this context conforms to the first type of translation Jakobson distinguishes, intralingual translation or paraphrase (Lev&sque and McDonald 127). 75 "Dans les limites o u elle est possible, ou du moins elle parait possible, la traduction pratique la difference entre signify et signifiant, Mais, si cette difference n'est jam ais pure, la traduction ne l'est pas da vantage et, a la notion de traduction, il faudra substituer une notion de transformation: transformation r£gl£e d'une langue par une autre, d 'u n texte par un autre" (Derrida 31). 172 Benjamin's desire for the self-contained nucleus provides insight into yet another colonialist consequence of Sand's narration. Benjamin writes that translation works to bring about the kinship of languages. The language of translation can only supplem ent the language of the translated, or the original text. However, the combination of both original and translated languages provides for an exchange between them. This exchange facilitates the final approach toward the apex of "pure language" that Benjamin sees as a goal of the combination of tw o languages during the translation process. Likewise, the example of the moments of narrative interruption in Sand's novel serve to "point the way" to a "higher and purer" region than neither Noun's speech nor the language of the narration can acheive alone (Benjamin 75). Sand's narrator manifests a similar desire for the purity that results from language combination. As the narration protects Noun's expression from overexposure to the reader, its sympathies approach the higher and purer region in its effort to avoid degrading Noun's language. As Benjamin explains, any origin of translation will undergo a change during the translation process. Consequently, the moments of narrative interruption in Sand's text, in effect, mediate and modify N oun's passion, a realm which the language of European sensibility would not presumably otherwise attain or explore: "The language of the translation signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien. This distinction prevents translation and at the same time makes it superfluous" (75).76 In the sense of its imposition into Noun's 76 This observation, that the language of translation, which signifies origin, prevents effective translation, also explains how we may also consider Indiana's narrative interruptions a simultaneous refusal to translate, that is, to paraphrase, N oun's speech to the reader. 173 expression, Sand's narration ultimately conforms to Benjamin's observations on translation. It does so, furthermore, according to le phantasme du noyau intact that Derrida locates in Benjamin. Sand's narration also upholds this phantasm which, in effect, wounds any and every sort of desire or language, interpellation or address (Lev&sque and McDonald 153). Benjamin's desire for this phantom nucleus leads to his appraisal of translative intentio: "The intention of...the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational. For the great motif of intergrating many tongues into one true language is at work" (76-77). This observation anticipates the final outcome of Sand's indirect discourse during Noun's exchange w ith Rami&re. Insofar as the narration combines with whatever N oun says to Ramidre in order to have her speech conform to European reader sensibility and sympathy, the narrator mediates between Noun's speech and the reader to integrate each into one true, higher and purer narrative language.77 Insofar, as chapter one discusses, as Sand's narrator closely relates black identity w ith death and with a kind of speechlessness, the narrator equates Noun's identity w ith the abject. As chapter one remarks, N oun is the victim of 77These moments of silenced language also become remarkable in light of Albert Memmis analysis of language from The Colonizer and the Colonized w h ere colonial bilingualism becomes a "linguistic dram a" (108). As a consequence of the drama, the colonized forever suffers from "linguistic dualism" whereby the colonized can only ever be sure of having mastery over the native language (106). Because the culture of the colonized marginalizes the mother tongue, the colonized fall into a perpetual state of "poor oral development" (106). Presumably, Noun is also a victim of this continuous conflict between two languages (107). Sand's narrator intervenes on h er behalf with the effect of a certain intolerance for N oun’s verbal expression of herself. This intolerance as also typical of the colonizer: "If [the colonized] w ants to...make a place for himself, exist in the community and the world, he must first bow to the language of his masters” (107). 174 an ambiguous double bind: on the one hand, her suicide reflects a refusal of the language of her oppressors whereby Noun embraces silence. On the other hand, the narrators treatm ent of her speech gives us a sense of the text silencing h er. Kristeva writes that where speech fails signals the presence of the abject, "A body w ithout soul, a non-body, disquieting matter, it is to be excluded from God's territory as it is from his speech* (109). In contrast to Noun, speech does not fail Indiana. The narrator discloses all of the letter she sends Rami^re from l'fle Bourbon, for example. She does receive presentim ents, however: M adame Delmare avait toutes les superstitions d'une creole nerveuse et maladive; certaines harmonies de la nuit, certain jeux de la lune lui faisaitent croire k de certains dvdnements...la nuit avait pour cette femme reveuse et triste un langage tout de myst^res et de fantomes qu'elle seule savait comprendre. (59; l er partie, ch. II) The narration equates N o u n with death itself while it equates the creole Indiana w ith an otherworldliness th at merely opposes the cosmopolitan airs of Parisian ladies. The novel's narration betrays a mire of colonialist discursive intrigue w hereby the narrators depictions of Indiana and N oun betray tendencies toward complicity with hierarchizing racial characteristics. We shall see how o u rik a's ostensible autobiography offers a resolution to oxymoronic complications of silence as either a means of resistence to the colonizer or of eliciting colonizer sympathy. In th e end, Sand's narrative gesture conforms to Benjamin's analysis insofar as it both sanctifies and represses Noun's speech. Sand's narrative exemplifies the type of interference that has constructed black characters in 175 order to mediate their presentation to European readers. Madame de Duras avoids either sanctification or repression by allowing Ourika to bring her own past to light. By employing a genre other than the third-person narrative, Ourika resolves certain problems that have com pounded depictions of black characters. The authors of La Negresse, however, do not consider Ourika a solution to the sorts of impositions Blacks and their characterizations have had to endure. On the contrary, Ourika complicates the problem. The Response of La Negresse By 1824, the convent had also secured an infamous place in French literature. The article of the the Encyclopedic entitled, "C£libat", bears witness to the deviation that the convent signified for the world outside.78 The image of walls became most often associated with literary convents (Grenier 579). As for what lies inside the walls, authors usually refrain from description. The only other condition which characterizes the convent besides that of confinement and burial, becomes that of negation. (Grenier 581).79 La Negresse existed as a piece negrophile before it was published as a novella.80 Penned by Radet and Barr£, the play, like Ballent and Quantin's 78 Julien 132. 79 For example, Diderot's La Religieuse typifies each of these observations. Once the reader follows Suzanne inside, the text allows for little spacial orientation (Julien 133). The preface to La Nigresse refers to Ourika as a story thirty years old: "1 1 y a trente ans done, on nous aurait offert Ourika...comme tr&s suseptible de rendre heureux un honnete blanc" (171). 176 story, ends happily for the bi-racial lovers, a European m an and African woman. The young m an's father pronounces the last lines of the play wherein he enjoins them to serve as good examples of harmonious racial relations for French society: "Venez, venez en France et montrez un module de bienfaisance et d'humantitS" (Striker 77). Like Lydie, ou la creole, La Negresse typifies un roman de femmes de chambre (Jensen 256). The authors understand their effort, however, in the context of contemporary, politically liberal activism. The majority of liberal eighteenth-century political, literary and theatrical writers who practiced negrophilia did so in the spirit of political progression. Negrophilia most often implemented its liberal politics through constructing the sentimental noble savage. Like abolitionists and liberals of the Saint-Simonist persuasion, for example, J. Quantin and Madame Ballent recognize the abuses Blacks face in white colonialist society. Moreover, the authors do so in response to the various versions of Ourika in circulation by 1826. This publication date of La Negresse, therefore, gives good indication that the authors take particular issue with the version that Madame de Duras authored. They present their protagonist as, finally, a more liberal version of Ourika and declare Marie, "une Ourika de ma fa^on." (Quantin and Ballant 171). The authors preface their short volume with the question, " 'Les int£rets de la soci£t£ permettent-ils qu'il y ait alliance entre blanc et noire, ou entre noir et blanche?' " (169-170). The preface implies that pieces negrophiles in general and Ourika in particular, respond negatively to this question which has captivated public interest at the metropole.8 1 By contrast, the narrative 81 'Tout Paris s'est occupg un grand mois de cet question arrang£e en scfene th&itrale, avec ou sans musique...Les auteurs desdites scenes, et celui du petit volum e, r6solurent 177 voice of La Negresse replies affirmatively to the question of an allegiance between black and white. While the public generally responds negatively to this idea, the authors insist that the heart of society nevertheles vigourously replies, "yes" to the thought of black and white alliance (Ballent and Quantin 170). Consequently, the narrative of La Negresse offers a resolution to the negative images of non-whites and to their often sorrowful fortune. The preface undertakes to implicate authors in an ideologically conservative conspiracy against images of black Africans: M ais la soci£t£, selon moi, se rapprochait des tem ps primitifs h certains 6gards, et d^barrassait son jugement d'une foule d'opinions fausses qui nous sont prdsent<§s aujourd’ hui comme opinions conservatrices. (171) The conservative opinions which this narrative has committed to com bat are those w hich disavow the revisionist aspects of exoticism. Like the Rousseauist notion th a t seduced m ost of the eighteenth century, the narrative of La Negresse considers exoticism as intrinsically valuable to any society engaged in self-critique. Furthermore, the authors suggest a certain nostalgia indicative of primitivist exoticism. Primitive exoticist nostalgia involves fantasies of a time and place in history w hen communication between people and betw een people and nature took place unencumbered by regulation of any kind (Todorov 394). Thus, the narrative voice of La Negresse considers Ourika an overall effort to refute all that exoticism and its ideological sub-sets, such as primitivism, have to offer the European social revisionist imagination. n^gativement la question, e t la pauvre O urika, toute raison et toute gentillesse, fu t sacrifice" (Ballent and Q uantin 169-170). Because the text continually takes issue w ith narrow characterizations of Blacks, it projects a liberal European stance throughout. It presents, for example, a debate between "a liberal" and one Madame of Tours, who represents a conservative, provincial opinion of relations between Blacks and whites. Marie finds herself in Tours after the marriage of her white sister, Lise. The sight of Marie disgruntles polite society and she quickly becomes the object of discussion. Again, the liberal perspective in this debate orients itself around physical attributes. The liberal declares, "Dds qu'on n'6tait habitu£ k la teinte africaine de son visage, on d£couvrait en elle mille perfections physiques et morales, et elle s'£tablissait solidement sur la ligne commune" (208). In the process of endowing characters such as Marie's adoptive mother, Madame Bertault, w ith liberal inclinations, the text implicates not only the economic slave trade, b ut also the ideological trade that enslaves Africans to narrow characterizations. The benevolent Madame exclaims, "Je plains un homme qui adm et qu'un ndgre est son frere en Jesus-Christ, et qui trouve des motifs pour l'enchainer et le m£priser" (179). At the end of this declaration, Madame Bertault refers to the fate Ourika suffers as she announces Marie's destiny: "Marie se mariera, car il y a des hommes bons et sages..."(179). Likewise, the narrative employs the tension betw een the cosmopolitan and the provincial, which dictates where Marie and Henri settle, to disprove that their union must result in unhappiness. The narrators seem to upbraid such outcomes, accusing them of parochial contempt. Prejudice at Tours peaks at the announcement of Marie's marriage to Henri. The narrative attributes opinions such as, "un jeune homme bien £lev£...par un gout d£prav£, un inconcevable aveuglement, se sacrifiat k un 179 monstre d'Afrique..." to unsophisticated and insular minds. The conclusion: the couple moves to Paris where their troubles diminish. They choose to settle, moreover, in the unspecified philosophic and artistic quarter of the city: "Nous ne pensons point que son 6poux l'ait jamais pr£sentde au faubourg fdodal; il se contenta de ses succ£s dans le quartier des arts et de la philosophic" (218). The narration leaves no doubt that art and philosophy in any way jeopardize the couple's happiness. Thus, La Negresse casts a final shadow of skepticism over the artistic and philosophic merits of less than utopic possibilities for inter racial marriage. Like Lydie, the narrative of La Negresse sets out to challenge prevailing social prejudices against Blacks. Nevertheless, elements of orientalist discourse make their way into the liberal stance the narrative projects. Liberal European politicians and authors characteristically sought to sanctify the status of slaves, colonized Africans and West Indians. They expressed such santificaton, however, through negrophilia which employed sympathetic and universalist approaches to race relations. Such sympathies worked against images of blacks in the cultural imagination just as did the images of blacks that Christian universalist discourse employed. Sympathetic efforts likewise comprise orientalist discourse (Said 120). La Negresse sanctifies the image Marie to both orientalist and Africanist ends. Chapter two explains the principal manoeuvres of Africanist discourse as efforts at effacing any multiplicity associated with black identity. Africanist discourse substitutes black identities for an emptiness. Marie's character manifests sympathetic aspects intrinsic to orientalist discourse. Her story also manifests a certain denial with respect to 180 the real suffering of contemporary colonized peoples, a denial of difference so indicative of Africanist discourse. The preface claims, for instance, that proof that the heart of society supports inter-racial romance resides in the lukewarm audience reception to various adaptations of Ourika. The tale of Ourika sparks public interest as does any lurid novelty. But public has had enough: "on craignait d'gprouver encore l'£motion partible, le serrement du coeur que produissait le denouement des ouvrages cites, c’ est & dire le malheur de l'interessante Negresse" (170). In reality, readers of the 1824 version clamoured for the identity of Ourika's then anonymous author.8 2 Thus, if liberal discourse wants to posit alternatives to the status quo, the narrative voice of La Negresse suggests exoticism as a viable mechanism upon which liberals should draw. Because exoticism exerts so much influence over this narrative's political stance, La Negresse betrays the "constitutive paradox’ ’ inherent to the system. Todorov begins his definition of the exoticist paradox by recognizing that praise of others based solely on their difference from the referent is rather ambiguous admiration. Yet, exoticism pursues just that, what Todorov calls, "praise without knowledge" (265). One sign of the presence of the narrative's compliance w ith this condradiction is the manner in w hich it underscores similarities between the European and the African. The narrative of La Negresse goes to lengths to downplay, to the extent of effacement, Marie's differences with respect to both the white society around her and an ostensibly 82 The article on Claire-Louise-Rose-Bonne de Coetnepren de Kersaint, duchesse de Duras from the Dictionnaire de Biographie Frangaise writes, "Elle publia un prem ier roman, Ourika, 1824, san nom d'auteur, au profit d'un gtablissement d e charity. Ce fut un grand succ&s...." (732). 181 white readership. They develop sympathetic aspects of her character and physiognomy by giving her a European name, and by describing Marie's involvement in familiar cultural rites of passage such as first communion. Ultimately/ the similarities between Marie and her sister exist in shared physical characteristics: II e u t £t£ impossible des les s£parer..la nature...leur avait donner des jambes pour courir...des mains pour se caresser ou se jouer ensemble, une voix qui articulait avec facility les memes sens, les memes mots, po u r s'appeler d u doux nom de soeur, et enfin un coeur pour s'aimer, la nature ne leur avait donng aucun indice que l'une fut d'une esp&ce sup£rieur h l'autre. (176) The narrative universalizes (and thus relativises) the hum an form such that no significant differences exist between Lise and Marie. In term s of physical beauty, Marie is special. Her beauty is clearly appropriate to European standards and surpasses that of the average black woman: Elle £tait dans tout l'^clat de la beauts des femmes de son pays et de sa couleur...Rien n'£gale...[les] contours de ses bras, de sa taille, de son coursage et de tout son corps. Ses pieds et ses mains, que les ndgres ont ordinairem ent d'une dimension ridiculement grande, effets des travaux auxquels ils sont livr£s, gtaient remarquabies par leur petitesse, le fini et le gracieux de leur forme. Au bout de quelque jours, Henri...ne songeait qu'& Marie, ne cherchait qu'elle. (184-185) Here, the text's estimation of Marie's beauty becomes a denial of her possessing any black features at all. In the end, the text assesses black value according to its conformity to white European ideals. This appraisal develops a fundamental aspect of the exoticist paradox. Difference is praiseworthy only in so far as it 182 relates to the same. Exoticism either effaces difference or it uses difference in order to revise familiar social problems. In this last regard, La Negresse again manifests the exoticist paradox. The narrator values inter-radal romance and details objections to it in order to ameliorate social ills inherent to the author's society, such as the provincial m entality at Tours. Clearly, these efforts to equate Marie's experience w ith that of her white sister w ork to familiarize Marie to her audience. Familiarization facilitates reader sympathy. More important, the efforts the narrative makes to efface Marie's differences also leave no obstacle to a white man's erotitizing her. One of the prim ary conflicts of the text occurs betw een two w hite men— Henri, her betrothed, and Marie's uncle, M onsieur D urand-w ho vie for her affection. Utimately, a utopic climax emerges from the text's denying Marie's physical differences: Marie and Henri enjoy their romance in the peace of cosmopolitan Paris. That which allows these w hite characters to eroticize her and which allows for Marie's utopic romance, involves, finally, a sublimation of her difference. Fear of ethnic and cultural difference simulates castration anxiety, whereby the lack attributed to ethnic difference takes on properties similar to that w hich femininity represents to male desire. The castration complex results in an eroticization of the feminine that tends to deflect the fear of castration that femininity's lack of a penis instills. On the level of ethnicity, exoticism performs a similar function. Exoticism staves off the terror that ethnic difference induces in the European subject through fetishization of that ethnic and cultural difference. This fetishization of cultural difference lies at the heart of exoticism: "les meilleurs candidats au roles d'id£als exotiques sont 183 les peuples et les cultures les plus dloigngs et les plus ignores."; "On chgrit le lointain parce qu'il est lointain" (Todorov 356). This "cherished remoteness" is an example of fetishization borne of anxiety.8 3 Paradoxically, the foreign person or object can be successfully "cherished" or e(x)(r)oticized only if the person or object in question possesses enough characteristics already familiar to the European subject. The fear of difference which underlies orientalist endeavors, for example, effectively translates into an eroticization of the foreign. Therefore, orientalism admits "sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy" into its project (Said 118). The transition of the foreign to an e(x)(r)oticized object takes a different turn in Africanist endeavors. By contrast to orientalist discourse, Africanist discourse illustrates how the West has historically equated "black" with "blank", or w ith what w e also understand as "non-entity", or "void". The "blank" of blackness, Christopher Miller explains, allows the violence of sadism to assert itself into the erotic project: "To attain the object, the object must be disfigured, dismembered, and disorganized until it expires, ceases to exist. Africanist discourse has appeared to follow this practice from the beginning" (197). Although the Oriental was no less unfamiliar to the European imagination, the fictive identities ascribed to the O rient permit aspects of "soft-core" to result from the endeavors of orientalist discourse. T he sadistic elements of Africanist discourse assure that in the realm of (white male) desire, violence and degradation follow black femininity. 83 The castration complex similarly sublimates the fear of castration that femininity’ s lack of a penis-or, sexual difference itself— induces in the male subject. T he castration complex ultimately overcomes that fear of sexual difference through fetishizing, or eroticizing that lack of a penis, that sexual difference. Sublimated fear of difference, then, constitutes the very foundation of eroticization of the feminine. 184 Adminstrative and scientific discourse reveal the abject standing of the hybrid. Therefore, chapter two analysed RamiSre's hallucinatory dread of Indiana's masquerade in terms of it's revealing the abject that the hybrid instills, that surrounds any indication of bi-racial coupling. In Sand's novel, Ramidre sees Indiana's masquerade as a kind of racial overlap whereby tw o prim ary colors and ethnicities signify a secondary an d ultimately repulsive outcome. The result is complete ethnic confusion. Accordingly, the second seduction excerpt betrays a mixture of indiscriminant racial indicators: Indiana has w rapped her hair in a scarf described as from the Indies. She has done so carelessly, in the creole manner. Likewise, the lock of hair she offers Ramidre is of a black described as "n£gre", the nature of which is "indienne”(Sand 190-3). Thus, Rami£re finds the bi-racial outcome of Indiana's masquerade "un mal horrible": a confusion that exemplifies the abject.84 Yet, concurrent to the discourse that abjectified the hybrid, was the eroticization of mulatto women. The passion for m ulatto women is a superb example of how a certain amount of familiarity breeds fetishization: "La mulatresse est la maitresse id£ale proposee h l'imagination yrotique du frangais moyen. La sensuality lascive des ndgres coule dans leurs veines, mais raffin g par l'apport blanc, humanisye, parye des charmes de la conversations et de 84 Schor asserts that Rami&re em its this exclamation at his discovery of having been castrated. From "The Portrait of a Gentleman," Schor reads Indiana's m asquerade as a reenactment of the dynamics at w ork at Rami&re's discovering Ralph's portrait hanging in Indiana's room: "In the event that the meaning of the portrait scene should have escaped the reader, male or female, it is doubled by another scene that takes place in Indiana's room.... As Raymon approaches Indiana, she points to a 'mass of black hair' she holds in her hands...But when he takes that 'luxuriant mass' of hair into his own hands, Raymon realizes that it is...[...] ..shorn— from the corpse of the dead Noun....When he comes to, he exclaims: 'You have inflicted a horrible wound on m e '" (125-126). 185 l'dlggance du vetement" (Hoffmann 249).85 Mulatto women were prized as mistresses by black and white men alike: "Creoles, voyageurs, personne, du planteur au gouverneur gdn£ral, ne manque de odder au charme exotique et troublant des mulatresses" (Pluchon 205-206). Chapter two discusses how difference provides a social system with cohesion and order. A breakdown in class structure or in the purity of racial physical characteristics initiates cultural anxiety. Mulatto bodies, then, can generate cultural anguish over the foundations on which social identities are based becoming confused and imperiled. W hatever lack of differentiation the mulatto body's racial mixture represents, in the realm of the erotic, the "difference that is almost the same but not quite" which initiates the cultural paranoia nevertheless allows desire a requisite am ount of familiarity with which to fetishize mulatto women (Bhabha 126). The lack of differentiation attributed to mulatto bodies is dispelled by fetishization of mulatto women. Pierre Pluchon points out that colonial society consistently treated mulatto men w ith abject disdain.8 6 O n the one hand, Ramidre's reaction to Indiana's masquerade illustrates the abject discursive status of the hybrid. The utopic finale of La Negresse, on the other hand, suggests the erotic potential for those bodies endowed with certain familiar characteristics. 85 Pluchon quotes one baron Wimpfin who writes that mulatto women, "sont les plus ferventes pretresses de la W nus Amgricaine. Elies ont fait de la voluptg une esp&ce d'ar mgcanique, qu'elles ont porte & son dem ier point de perfection" (206). Pluchon points out that "Dans ces classes, le Franqais adopte les femmes, mais rejette les hommes" (207). 86 Pluchon quotes Laujon, "le colon nantais" (207)," 'Le commerce que les Europgens ont avec les mulatresses....leur attire une sorte de consideration; on se perm et de les voir en society, de manger avec elles; mais on ne permet pas aux mulatres le moindre rapprochem ent."' 186 By contrast, black bodies, those non-entities, are too far removed from familiarity to be deem ed desirable. Thus, the violence of rape has historically exemplified the relationship between white m en and black women. The black body has also historically been the locus of perversion and "diseases" such as sexual superfluousness.8 7 The nineteenth-century phenom enon of the Hottentot Venus, for example, reveals female black African bodies as possessing a radical lack of familiarity, that desire cannot dispel.8 8 Accordingly, Duras makes no effort to determine Ourika's beauty in the reader's eyes. Ourika's body betrays no sign o f white blood to familarize her for the fantasies that comprise exoticism. Duras' version of the tale is not concerned w ith the actual story of the Senegalese girl brought to France by the Chevalier de Boufflers. That girl died at the age of sixteen89 and the letter from her captor discloses her already-objectified status, "II m e reste une perruche pour la reine, un cheval pour le m a rsh a l de Castries, une petite captive pour M. de Beauvau..." (Switzer 310). In the outcome otOurika, Duras' text exposes a society commited to African abjectification. However m uch the authors Ballent and Quantin wish to critic Duras' pessimism, Ourika's climax in exile lays bare the revisionist potential of exoticism. Or, if th at potential exists at all, it occurs only for those black characters whose physical features possess enough similarity to those of the European subject. In La Negresse, familiarity dictates erotic harmony. Ourika's 87 Gilman 83. 88 Gilman writes, 'The antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty is the black, and the esssential black, the lowest exem plum of m ankind on the great chain of being, is the Hottentot" (83). 89 O'Connell 50. 187 destiny critiques such fantasies that comprise exoticism. The aspects of exoticism w hich involve a n d depend u p o n the mechanics of erotic (male) desire for their implementation, must take a certain amount of familiarity for their object. The dynamic o f European male desire accounts for the fact that m ulatto women could be eroticized while the hottentot could be displayed as a freak of nature.90 Thus, because Ourika's body proves too distanced from the fantasies of exoticism, and destiny, her story has m ore in common with the experience of a venus hottentot than w ith the female mulatto. Solace in the Revolution Duras' novel opens the young physician's aquaintance w ith Ourika. H e rem arks that th e wreckage of the French Revolution traced on the convent grounds seals Ourika's exile: "La revolution avoit ruin£ une partie de r^difice; le cloitre etoit I d^couvert d'un cote par la demolition de l'antique gglise..." (27). This remnant of the enorm ous impact of the Revolution's destruction foreshadows th e role Revolution plays in the heightening of O urika's consciousness. Like Q uantin and Ballent, Duras singles out those who relish black suffering. In Ourika's experience, the soon-to-be deposed aristocracy, represented by the marquise d e...., takes pleasure in Ourika's torment. The m arquise pains Ourika once before the Revolution, and once after. Each time, she has a powerful effect b o th on Ourika's psyche and on her physical health. Before she overhears the conversation between la marquise and Madame de B., 90 Gilman 85. 188 Ourika's childhood among the ancien regime was among the happiest. Specifically, she identified w ith the society around her, Je ne pouvois m'&onner de vivre au milieu du luxe, de n'etre entour£e que des personnes les plus spirituelles et les plus aimables...mais, sans le savoir, je prenois un grand dgdain pour tout ce qui n'£toit pas ce monde ou je passois ma vie. (32) In spite of her familial rapport w ith the aristocracy, in the end, Ourika feels a great affinity for revolutionary upheaval. Ourika describes the reign of terror as one of the instants doux of her life (46). Following the terrible revelation she experiences, seeing herself as the pitiable negress that others see, revolutionary chaos is a comforting turn of events. Ourika describes how, initially, the Revolution gave her hope in an already distressing situation: Toutes les fortunes renvers£es, tous les rangs confondus, tous les prdjug£s dvanouis, amdneroient peut-etre un dtat de choses ou je serais moins £trang&re. (41) On aurait cru que tous les liens s'dtoient resserrds par le malheur: j'avois senti que 11, d u moins, je n'dtois pas dtrangdre. (46) Ourika understands her ow n identity as an approach to revolutionary chaos: "Ma couleur ne m'isoleroit plus au milieu d u monde, comme elle avoit fait jusqu'alors" (41). Her impossible social situation results in "Ce mal...de ma couleur", which in turn propels Ourika into emotional turmoil. The external upheaval of the Revolution has the effect of reconciling Ourika to her immediate surroundings, instilling in her a stability she had not experienced since her happy childhood. 189 M ost important, perhaps, the upheaval gives Ourika new insight into how she might turn the disdainful sodetal gaze back on itself. For the first time since her new understanding of society's attitude tow ard her, Ourika perceives the dominant social class as errant. Here, although Ourika feels nothing has essentially changed society's perception of her, the Revolution has nevertheless brought about a significant change in her ow n point of view. She effectively sees through the eyes of re vision. Although her gaze is more voyeuristic than that of Indiana, who returns her abusive lover's gaze, Ourika, like Indiana, returns the dominant gaze of her newly-recognized oppressors by looking back. W ith her discovery of her status as an unmarriable negress, the ambivalent gaze of the colonizer tranfixes Ourika. In her childhood, that gaze had always been at work. Ourika devotes the first few pages of her story to detailing her superb education. She never doubts the beneficent intentions of Madame de B. The representations for difference in the world in which she grew up, however, codified her even as a child. For example, Ourika describes the spectacle she was to make at a ball given by Madame de B. Although Madame de B. used her grandsons as a pretext for the celebration, Ourika discloses her awareness of another motivation for the fete: le veritable motif 6tait de me montrer fort & m on avantage dans un quadrille des quautre [sic] parties du monde oh je devois repr^senter l'Afrique. On consulta les voyageurs, o n feuilleta les livres de costumes, on lut des ouvrages savants sur la musique africaine, enfin on choisit une comba, danse nationale de mon pays. (34) 190 A few days later, Ourika overhears the marquise’s concern for her to Madame de B. As a result, Ourika internalizes the ambivalent and orientalist gaze of the aristocrats who surrounded her in childhood. She describes the effect of this discovery itself in terms of psychological enlightenm ent and subsequent revolution: C'^toit un grand changement dans ma vie, que la perte de ce prestige qui m'avoit environn£e jusqu'alors! II y a des illusions qui sont comme la lumi&re d u jour; quand on les perd, tout disparoit avec elles...la confusion des nouvelles id£es qui m'assailloient. .c'6toit un abxme avec toutes ses terreurs. (37) W hile Ourika internalizes the disdainful societal gaze of the ancien regime, the Revolution endows her with a powerful revision of people an d events external to her. During the Revolution and specifically during the Reign of Terror, Ourika insists on the comfort that the general unhappiness of her compatriots brings her. Nevertheless, she feels no essential change take place within her (42). In fact, once Charles de B returns from the arm y at his mother's behest, outright disaster strikes Ourika, who falls in love w ith him. Although his return renews their friendship, Ourika m ust nevertheless endure the planning for his marriage to Anais de Thymines. Ourika declares her love for Charles to be the only joy she has known since her overhearing the unhappy revelation of la marquise de... (54). The demolition that the ancient convent church has sustained, figures as a significant image of damage done, in the m idst of revolution, 191 to an institutional space. More than her final confinement to the convent, the Revolution stabilizes O urika’ s internal and external life during the Revolution figures as the strongest m etaphor for the mal de la couleur that preoccupies this text. In the end, Ourika finds peace in religious life.9* In fact, her insistance on the sanctuary of the convent falls in line with the defense of this space by nuns during the French Revolution such as that of one Camille de Soyecourt and of one MSre Natalie of the Parisian Carmelites (Grenier 583). Ourika does not suggest exile as the representative m ark of black identity in white society but rather revolution, internal and external disorder. With respect to contemporary characterizations of Blacks, the Revolution in Duras’ version of Ourika acts as a more sophisticated metaphor for the representation of racial difference for an integrated society. While authors such as Albert Memmi and Franz Fanon recognize the aberration that black identity represents to white culture, they liken this aberration to a sickness, whereby frequently the colonized take on the physical, emotional and m ental sicknesses that society attributes to them. In order to equate femininity with the colonized, Sand upholds this association in Indiana's character and physiognomy by attributing her with fragile health. Ourika’s story speaks more to a post-colonial situation. Ourika illustrates the psychological consequences of integration. She certainly suffers from physical afflictions. Ourika's aberration, however, takes on revolutionary proportions. As the authors 91 H er decision to join the religious life is not w ithout poignance. She responds to Charles's objections to her leaving, "Laissez-moi aller, Charles, dans le seul lieu oh il me soit perm is de penser sans cesse a vous" (64). 192 o f La Negresse suggest, D uras' text does not discredit arguments against integration. The Romantic comfort Ourika finds in the convent and in fantasies about plantation slavery is assuredly problematic. Taken together, however, D uras' Ourika illustrates the marginalization and disenfranchisement third-w orld peoples, post-colonial refugees and descendents of displaced slaves face in white society. If, on the level of content, Ourika does n o t reveal m arginalization, disenfranchisement a n d the arguements they bring to light it does so on the level of genre. O urika as Testimonial Narrative Because, to a certain extent, Ourika confounds generic distinction, the genre at w ork in this text is not easily pinpointed. D uras bases her story o n the actual events surrounding a Senegalese girl brought u p and educated among the pillars of the French ancien regime. Thus, we may th in k of Ourika as historical fiction. Yet, like a post-colonial testimonial narrative, Ourika relates a first-person account of h er life experiences as an unsuccessfully integrated outsider. Ourika is not an autobiography although the text conforms to certain autobiographical conventions best characterized by Saint Augustine'sCott/essi'ons: Ourika's narrative contains a clear conversion experience. After her harrow ing illness, which resulted from the marquise's supposition a n d condemnation of h er love for Charles, O urika realizes that Q0d had never once forgotten her. For Ourika as for 193 Augustine, the conversion experience originates in self-hatred.92 To this end, Ourika’ s experience brings two contrasting modes of being together, such that the self is split between a present and a former state.93 In both states, seeing is being. Initially, Ourika accepted society's abject perception of herself. The present Ourika, who recounts her experiences from the convent, recognizes a desire in her former self to shut own eyes in order to make society's perception disappear: "like a child, I closed my eyes, and believed no one could see me" (49). Her present converted state has its foundation in a revision of that former self: "I saw that in fact I had not known my duties" (63). Ourika's conversion becomes a throwing off of shackles that had held her former self: "[God] concealed me from the vices of slavery, and made his law known to me: this law shows me all my duties..." (63). Immediately, a sense of tranquillity floods her soul and Ourika finds real and lasting happiness in the religious life. Notions which incurred the inception of bourgeois subjectivity also initiated the genre of autobiography. W ithout a cohesive, coherent, self-conscious and autonomous protagonist, autobiography is impossible. John Beverly notes that, as the genre evolved in the eighteenth-century, autobiography actually worked to confirm the privilege and status its readers enjoyed (103). Like Ourika, most autobiographical texts at this time focused on obstacles that confronted the narrator. However, the conventions of that genre required that the 92 Folkenflik 216. 93 Folkenflik 217. autobiographer trium ph over obstacles. By the end of h e r narrative, O urika has certainly trium phed over her former em otional turmoil. In contrast to O urika's climax, however, "triumph" in m o st eighteenth and nineteenth-century autobiographical texts translated in to access to the dom inant dass occupied by the presumed reader (103). Ourika's fate does not conform to this last stipulation. Ourika does b e ar a strong comparison to testimonial narrative, however, in the sense that a strong association exists between the transmission of Ourika's story and th e cure for social ills. As the protagonist points out, "my unhappiness is the story of my whole life"(Duras 29). Like a picaresque hero, Ourika experiences and narrates her life in society as a personal fate, rather than as the fate of others of her class, or ethnicity. In spite of Ourika's peculiar predicament, however, she was not alone. Others did share her plight. It is probable that other negrillons-black children, like herself, brought into the best houses in France-faced the same situation once they grew to adulthood (Pluchon 136). Likewise, the sang-meles often found themselves educated, as the children of white men, and thus in often in a position o f contempt to both Blacks and whites in the colonies an d in France. Although D uras' readership consisted almost exclusively of salon society, to the extent that Ourika's story speaks to similar, albeit few, stories o f integration, her story speaks for a political minority. To this end, M adam e de Duras's text does involve an "urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival" typical of present-day twentieth-century testimonial narratives 195 (Beverly 94). The situations particular to both negrillons and m ulatto children of colonists provoke a reading of Ourika as a political response to the status of integrated blacks in French colonialist society. If w e read Duras' text on the level of unsuccessful racial integration, the genre from which Ourika speaks becomes problematized once again. While theories of first-person narrative and the problematic hero clearly apply to Ourika, theories of the testimonial narrative, as Beverly elaborates them, equally illuminate crucial aspects of this text. In the m anner of a testimonial narrative, Duras' text displays interest in the "problematic collective social situation in which the narrator lives" (95). Like the testimonial text, then, w e can understand Ourika in broader political terms. Her narrative speaks for the otherwise speechless political non-entity co existing in luxury with the aristocracy but excluded from any sense of identity associated w ith the privilege. Seen in this light, Ourika contains elements essential to the testimonial narrative. Like testimonio authors, O urika recounts her experiences to an interlocutor, her doctor, who in turn, transmits them to the reader. Like autobiography, the testimonial narrative affirms an individual subjectivity and speaker. It does so, Beverly explains, only in so far as that subject speaks for the community (103). This distinction differentiates testimonio from autobiography (103). While the injust society in which blacks have been forced to live also motivates sentimentalized stories of black characters, as Hoffmann elaborates 196 them , Ourika narrates the injustices she has witnessed and experienced during her life in European society. Ourika's indictments also p u t the reader in a position not unlike that of the testimonio reader. Madame de Duras' readers frequented Parisian salon society.94 Like the interlocutor of the present-day testimonial narrative, Duras has w ritten Ourika in such a manner as to present her readers w ith the narrator pleading her case for the injustice of her marginalization and for the suffering it has caused her. Ourika's narrative describes the effects of others' actions toward her, of her confrontations with the marquise de..., of her secret love for Charles, and of the confidence Charles bestows on her during his engagement to Anai's de Thymines. As Ourika describes her responses to her status as a black woman, the reader, in effect, becomes a jury member (Beverly 94). By drawing on the same sort of complicity with the reader found in the testimonial narrative, Ourika bypasses sympathetic or universalist gestures which typically structured the literary portraits of black men and women. Ourika creates a complicity with the reader based on developing a sense of ethics and justice as opposed to morality, Christian or otherwise (Beverly 99). Finally, Ourika can only occupy a generic middle ground because the testimonio comprises a strict function of the post-colonial as an historical configuration. The text does not conform to definitions of the testimonial narrative as such. For instance, we have no indication that Claire de Duras ever made the aquaintance of the girl whom the 94 Sainte-Beuve 73. 197 Chevalier de Boufflers brought from Africa. Little possibility exists for Duras' having transcribed any of that young girl's actual experiences. Also, Ourika bears no relation to twentieth-century political situations in developing nations, an unmistakable aspect of the present-day testimonio. The generic middle ground that the text inhabits, however, allows for a tension between fiction and history which, Beverly argues, the testimonial narrative puts forth (102). Perhaps Ourika becomes more precisely, an example of a testimonial novel which he defines as "those narrative texts in which an 'author' in the conventional sense has either invented a testimoniolike story or...extensively reworked, w ith explicitly literary goals...a testimonial account that is no longer present except in its simulacrum" (105). The text certainly exhibits aspects of w hat is understood as "pseudo-testimonial" narrative, in the sense that it transforms "a form that grows out of a subaltern experience into one that is middle-brow" (105). The generic middle ground that this text occupies allows Ourika's voice, sicknesses and subsequent exile to come together to political ends. These pressing political implications render irrelevant the observations of those critics who insist on allegorizing this story for Duras' own unhappy experiences. Ourika's narration illustrates the consequences for racial difference, which include sickness and exile, for people of color in eighteenth-century aristocratic France. I would argue that, by posing a certain difficulty w ith respect to generic definition, Ourika goes further than pinpointing those social problems which result from efforts at racial integration. Duras vilifies her society which finds the non- 198 European identity abject w hile Ourika's generic m iddle ground in effect points the w ay to alternative means of literary portraiture and the determinism it entails for the colonized. While the nature of the gaze, b o th intrinsic and extrinsic to the protagonist, contributes to Ourika's dysphoria, the use Duras makes of the gaze uncovers those factors that render Ourika abject. As Ourika learns to look back, the gaze takes on revelatory an d revolutionary status in this narrative. W hile the relationship betw een the colonizer and colonized has historically been characterized by dichotimous metaphors— sickness vs. health, black vs. white, soul vs. body— the integrated black faces a situation similar to that of social supplement. Ourika's story clearly presents the political implications that th e supplem ental position entails. Although the results of her society's scorn of the non-European include m arginalization and exile, in the final analysis, the image th a t dominates Ourika's narrative is n o t one of exile, nor even one of sickness. M ore than her final confinement to the convent, the Revolution parallels Ourika's internal disorders and thus has the effect of reconciling Ourika to her immediate surroundings. The Revolution paradoxically instills in Ourika a stability she had not experienced since her happy childhood. Moreover, Ourika's consciousness reaches a level that she herself equates with revolution. Exiled outside the realm of desire, this text portrays a black woman's consciousness as revolutionary and h er social standing as chaotic. 199 In summary, the authors of La Negresse seem to take issue with Ourika's tension between fiction and history. They particularly object to the problematic interlocutor, who writes w hat from their perspective constitutes a conservatively biased depiction of black femininity. On closer inspection, however, the bias with which La Negresse takes issue is less a bias against black femininity than that bias against European men. As if they sense an indictment of contemporary European male desire, Quantin and Ballent w ant recognition for extraordinary m en in the face of their common and vulgar counterparts: "II y des hommes bons et sages, qui font plus de cas d'un coeur vertueux que d'une belle figure" (180). While Sand associates black with "blank" and "abject", M adame de Duras' text illustrates abjection while Sand allows for Noun's victimization of abjection at the hands of her narrator. On the level of genre, Ourika undoubtedly stands as a unique treatment of black femininity. The text's political power approaches that of the testimonial narrative. While the relationship between the colonizer and colonized has been one characterized by dichotimous metaphors— sickness vs. health, black vs. white, soul vs. body-the integrated black faces a situation similar to that of societal supplement. Ourika's story presents that supplem ental position w ith political implications. In this way, Madame de Duras' text puts an important twist on the notion of the self as Other in an autobiographical context. Ourika will have the reader understand this notion in terms of revolution, the consummate m etaphor for forays into integrating racial difference. 200 Conclusion Throughout the preceding chapters, I have tried to uncover the discursive mechanisms that shape the black or creole characters in texts from post-Revolutionary France. In conclusion, I w ant to discuss the way in which my study might be pertinent to a range of contemporary critical work— from feminism to m edia studies. The discursive dynamics that dictated characterizations of non-Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-such as scientific discourse, colonialist discourse, universalist discourse, and Christian rhetoric-have since significantly contributed to our notions of difference. Continual analysis of such cultural discourses from the Early Modern period onw ard reveals the structures that underlie not only specific textual manoeuvers but also such larger concepts as exoticism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and Romanticism. It is only through a commitment to critically investigate these concepts that we can begin to determine the issues at stake and the principles at w ork in present-day notions of racial difference. I have shown how George Sand’ s Indiana presents creole femininity both through the eyes of a principal male character and through the descriptive lens of an omniscient third-person narrator. I have argued moreover, that Sand's novel insists on the visual w here its creole characters are concerned. Indiana's emphasis o n the visual is a result of a host of nineteenth-century predilections, such as for physiognomy, w hich governed contemporary narrative treatment of racial and sexual difference. Agents such as this one for physiognomy, w ere fundamentally determinative. The extent to which they governed aspects 201 of nineteenth-century descriptive prose is implied by the fact that the literary portraits of Noun and Indiana— especially in those scenes of Rami&re's seduction— function like tableaux laid out before the gaze of both Rami6re and the reader. Therefore, theories of the gaze elaborated by feminists in relation to cinematic representations of (a principally w hite) femininity apply easily to the implicitly visual domain oflndiana's third- person omniscient narration. Critics such as Griffin and Hartman, Fanon, hooks, and Gordon underscore how black identity must be understood in terms of "being seen." Over the course of my study, I have sought to reveal the socio-historical foundations for w hy whites have structured images of blacks and mulattos according to visible physical determinants. Implicit elements which comprised notions of difference in the nineteenth century include discourses such as orientalism and scientism. These discourses subsequently constructed a gaze designed to apprehend the difference that bodies of color represent. Therefore, I would argue, those discourses underlie virtually any description of the non-European.95 Likewise, issues of sentimentalism and universalism were a great resource for the construction of non-Europeans in the fiction and theater of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many writers, such as Daminois or Quantin and Ballent, attributed sentimental and supposedly universal qualities to their mulatto, black and creole characters in order to combat prevalent racist characterizations of non-whites. Although each of these authors explains their desire to highlight the universal factors th at underlie hum an experience, their efforts put aside any elaboration of 95 For example, the scene in which Ourika describes the spectacle she w as to make at a ball indicates the machinations of orientalist discourse because M adame de B.'s circle gives Ourika over to be seen by the company. 202 difference. Many authors who attem pted to raise European consciousness of racial prejudice did so by appealing to a spirit of universalism. W hether it is expressed in transcendent or non-transcendent terms— in the terms of Christianity or of the Enlightenment— universalism has the effect of glossing over or effacing sources of political conflict in an effort to underscore utopic notions of humanity's unity and communality. Before a successful elaboration of difference can take place, the various discursive components of universalism, including Christian rhetoric and sentimentalism, m ust be thoroughly examined for the political implications it glosses over. Critics have emphasized the autobiographical content of Madame de Duras' Ourika to the detriment of its effective illustration of how writers can express the difference particular to an individual or to a group. Duras draws upon a socio-cultural phenomenon— the fashion for raising black children, or negrillons, in aristocratic households— in order to critique her culture's inability to achieve racial integration. From my analysis of Ourika, I conclude that Duras avoids typical depictions of non- Europeans or non-continentals exemplified by Indiana, Lydie ou la creole and La Negresse. Linda Hutcheon outlines critical traits common to theories of postcolonial identity. She writes that those works, critical or fictive, that successfully explore the social and political implications of the postcolonial, "do not deconstruct an existing subjectivity or posit an essentialist, universal, unitary subject; instead, they investigate the 'multiplication' of identities...and the intersection of nation, gender, sexuality, class, and race as well as history, religion, caste, and language" 203 (11). In a manner that approaches postcolonial imperatives, Duras reveals the multiple psychological-and political-facets of Ourika's discovery of her racial difference. Three characteristics inherent to Duras' text allow the personal implications for Ourika's consciousness of her racial difference to unfold. First, Duras rejects the literary portrait. Ourikai recounts her revelation of herself as other in the first person. Second, Duras' text brings together a range of genres. Ourika's fictitious autobiographical testimony traverses generic lines between the testimonial novel, historical fiction and autobiography. Third, because Ourika takes the actual experiences of a Senegalese girl for its foundation and imagines an account of her life based on that girl's experience, Duras questions the history of a range of cultural treatments of the non- European. Moreover, she conducts this particular inquiry in such a manner as to question her society's inability to achieve racial integration. Through these three primary means, Ourika avoids characterizations of difference which have been historically dominated by notions determined by experiential evidence or universalist utopias. In this way, my study of these four texts also conforms to Hutcheon's outline of postcolonial objectives to the extent that it reveals no "single binary construction of oppression" while uncovering the multiple functions of oppressive discursive possibilities for black and mulatto identity (12). The preceding chapters have put forth analyses that bring a range of critics and their theories into dialogue w ith one another. In so doing, I have sought to illustrate the limitations of literary analyses that do not take race into account. The Encyclopedia o f Postcolonial Literatures highlights three major postcolonial theorists: Homi Bhabha, 204 Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak (1303-1306). Like them, I explore the colonialist nature of four literary texts. I argue that because these works were produced during the age of European colonial expansion, each reflects significant aspects of colonialist discourse. To this end, my study manifests post-colonialist concern w ith issues of "hybridity, marginality, mimicry" and to a certain extent in chapter four, subalternity ("Post- Colonial," 1303). As for the theories these critics propound, I have sought to position these novels more in relation to the work of Said and Bhabha than to that of Spivak.96 Because the protagonists of these texts are black and creole, Said's outline of orientalist discourse has limited application to my readings of these novels. Christopher Miller's delineation of Africanist discourse, which explains the prim ary means by which European culture constructed black identity as a void, has had a greater impact on my study. I locate orientalism as a sub-discursive system, along with Africanist discourse, of the larger rubric of Romanticism. To the extent that I have sought to extricate the colonialist contribution to the construction of these feminine characters, I would add TzvetanTodorov's work in Nous et les autres to the Encyclopedia's list of Bhabha, Said and Spivak as the three front-runners of post-colonialist theory. Todorov's profile of exoticism, prim itivism, scientism, universalism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism in French literature and philosophy expands my investigation and investment in orientalism and Africanist discourse as the discursive factors which explain Romanticism's configuration of the black identity. 96 Because Spivak's work concerns itself w ith the status of colonized women w ithin their ow n culture and economy and with Western constructions of "Third-World" femininity, I draw less upon her theories. 205 Each of the protagonists I examine is a literary construction of a displaced entity by a European w om an-a black or creole feminine character who finds obstacles to integrating with the colonizer. The preceding chapters take a post-colonialist approach to the four novels in question insofar as my analysis of these four texts generally relates to the work of Bhabha, Said and Spivak. Bhabha's notion of ambivalence illuminates my investigation of three out of the four authors' treatments of these black and creole characters. I invoke Said's notion of adjacency through my ow n "exploration of the complex levels of interaction between literary texts and social and cultural processes" ("Post-Colonial," 1305). And like Spivak's work, which "mobilizes Marxism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and feminism in ways that ensure their m utual ’ interruption”’ , my study causes critics and their theories of various discursive systems to come into contact in ways that I hope have caused--or at the very least, have called for— mutual critical disruption ("Post-Colonial," 1306). Above all, I hope to have shown the importance of racializing texts that have not been adequately racialized for critical purposes, such as Indiana and Ourika. To this end, my study illustrates the exclusions that take place in m uch of the critical discourse it has examined. For example, there has been a recent and alarming trend among post-colonialist feminists and their African-American counterparts who attem pt a critical exchange. The experiences of women in post-colonialist economies and the experiences of African-American women differ to an incomparable extreme. White feminists have historically demonstrated a commitment to the politics of exclusion. Yet, a divisive discourse exists among 206 feminists who give a critical perspective to the experience of a particular faction of women of color to which they oftentimes belong. I am thinking of the example of Sara Suleri's "Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition." Here, Suleri announces her intention to correct or, at best, re-orient, a multiplicity of voices speaking from within the "theoretical intersections of feminism and gender studies" (758). She writes: "For until the participants in marginal discourses learn how best to critique the intellectual errors that inevitably accompany the provisional discursivity of the margin, the monolithic and untheorized identity of the center will always be on them (757-758)." Specifically, Suleri attempts to question the practice among some contemporary feminist critics of exploring how issues of race affect lived experience. She finds allowing lived experience to inform their theories a misguided effort as though Suleri cannot understand lived experience to be permeated by the political: The embarassed privilege granted to racially encoded feminism does indeed suggest a rectitude that could be its own theoretical undoing...The coupling of postcolonial with woman...almost inevitably leads to the simplicities that underlie unthinking celebrations of oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for "the good." (758- 759) This statement culminates in Suleri's musing about a potential tautological hierarchy involving gender and race and, furthermore, about how a chronology of this kind can possibly "lead to some preliminary articulation of the productive superficiality of race" (759). 207 She m akes an im portant point w ith respect to using "lived experience" as a critical feminist resource. Throughout this essay Suleri m akes no m ention of understanding the personal as the political although she emphasizes that invoking lived experience m ust manifest some consciousness of the historical or theoretical significance of that experience (761). Suleri finds African-American feminism particulary guilty of using the "racial voice" to speak of a lived experience devoid of historical or theoretical context. These problems of what Suleri seems to understand as race for race's sake and lived experience without any theoretical underpining come together particularly in the feminism of bell hooks. Suleri recognizes Hazel Carby's observation that black feminist criticism is complex, at times contradictory, and m ust be recognized for the questions and problems it raises rather than for any solution it may seem to hold forth (763). Yet, Suleri's reading of hooks' works, Talking Back and Yearning, seems to disavow any such knowledge of the necessarily non-cohesive nature of the many political convictions and stances black feminist criticism puts forth. Again, Suleri criticizes the local and personal quality of hooks' work based on a lack of theoretical mediation as if hooks' approach to her subject matter is inherently incapable of holding forth any effective political agenda. Suleri insists, "hooks claims that personal narrative is the only salve to the rude abrasions that Western feminist theory has inflicted on the body of ethnicity" (764). Suleri describes as divisive hooks' decidedly provocative observation from Yearning, that "the current popularity of post-colonial discourse that implicates solely the West often obscures the colonizing relationship of the East in relation to Africa and other parts of the Third World" (93). 208 Suleri's insistance on the political ineffectiveness in which questions of race result fails to recognize a basic tenet of the four preceding chapters: colonial discourse incorporated into its agenda a scientistic gaze, which was a discursive system in itself, comprised in part of experiential evidence. In other words, colonial discourse used race as a superficial means of encoding difference, whereas postcolonial discourse, by definition, has the theoretical and historical means to politicize race such that race can longer stand for a superficial relationship to the body or to vision. Suleri's criticism of hooks, furthermore, gives in to a strategy of divide and conquer which patriarchal economies typically enact to control and manipulate women, to keep them from the discovery that the personal is in effect the political. Suleri also fails to recognize the basis for hooks' suspicion of Third World intellectuals. The institutionalization of postcolonial studies does exclude the African-American experience to the extent that the term itself implies a previous state of colonization. African-American ancesters were never colonized but taken from their countries for the purpose of enslavement in a foreign world. Through studies such as the one I have completed, we can perhaps recognize a factor universal to the experiences of women of color: the colonialist era rendered their experiences catagorically insignificant. The texts I have examined are examples of how the experiences of women of color were replaced by a range of discourses, most notably and most broadly, by those associated with Romanticism. Ultimately, m y dissertation is concerned w ith the colonialist era when the colonizer replaced the experience of non-Europeans with images that reveal more about European discourse than about the colonized. After the fall of 209 colonialist economies, the decendents of colonialist and imperialist empires are left to define the political legacy that colonialism bequeathed to each group in question. This is the work of post-colonialist and African-American critics. It is my conviction that through an examination of the portraits colonialist empires created, descendents of both colonized and colonizer can better understand the impact of these respective roles in their daily lives. 210 W orks Cited Abrams, M.H. Natural Supematuralism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. 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Creator Holderbaum, Katherine Anne (author)

Core Title This other darkness: exotic bodies and the gaze of romanticism

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program French

Degree Conferral Date 1995-08

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

Tag literature, romance,OAI-PMH Harvest,sociology, ethnic and racial studies,women's studies

Language English

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-84888

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