Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (review)

In this enlightening, highly readable study, Madeleine Dobie traces the previously unknown genealogy of the "Oriental woman" from the early eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century in the following texts: the Baron de Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois and Lettres persanes; Crébillon fils's Le sopha; Denis Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets; Gérard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient; and Théophile Gautier's Le roman de la momie. Despite the crucial importance of the "Oriental woman" to understanding the interrelation of gender, race, sexuality, and politics, no critic building on Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism has, until now, analyzed this figure "as a central category of Orientalist representation or asked why over the last three centuries Oriental sexuality has occupied such an important place in the European imaginary" (3). From the beginning of France's colonial expansion in the 1600s, travel writers and men of letters associated the Orient with woman, and by the early nineteenth century, "Oriental woman" had become a cliché, "denoting a mystery, an enigma, a promise" (1). In investigating the genealogy of "la femme orientale," Dobie distinguishes her scholarship from the last decade of studies on Orientalism, which have privileged theoretical abstractions, by reading French Orientalism within specific domestic and colonial contexts. This contextualization, which includes analyses of paintings and furniture, is one of the most exciting aspects of her study. Dobie's entirely persuasive claim is that without a historical knowledge of French (and other Western) attitudes toward the Orient and the various reasons for which the West has polarized the East, we cannot sufficiently understand the current reasons for such polarization or Islamic responses to Western attitudes toward "the" Oriental other.

Before turning to an example of Dobie's reading of the "Oriental woman," let me evoke one of her historical insights that revises previous readings. As Dobie rehearses, most theoretical studies of eighteenth-century French Orientalism have assumed that writers' obsession with the Orient paved the way for the expansion into North Africa and the Levant that began with Napoleon Bonaparte's Expédition d'Egypte in 1798. While Dobie accepts this theory as valid, she insists that it also misses a critical point: by representing Persia, Turkey, and Siam, what French Enlightenment writers were not doing was portraying the colonies that France already possessed—the Antilles, Gorée and Saint-Louis in Senegal, and Ile Bourbon and Ile de France in the Indian Ocean. Dobie argues that by focusing instead on the Orient, French writers were operating "a displacement of French interests in the New World onto a veritable fascination with things Oriental" (5; Dobie's emphasis). As she clarifies, displacement signifies in psychoanalytic terms "the replacement of a disturbing object of revulsion or desire with a more anodyne substitute" (38). So although writers in the first half of the eighteenth century may have been disturbed by France's enslavement of Africans, they did not condemn colonial practices directly either because they feared political reprisal by the crown or because they felt ambivalent about the commodities that such practices made available—sugar and coffee. In the 1770s, however, direct criticism of colonial practices emerged, first because the world of politics and foreign policy that had previously been the unique province of the crown opened up to include individuals associated with the philosophes. Second, the physiocrats articulated and emphasized the economic as well as the moral reasons against slavery; and finally, France had to give up most of its North American colonies as a result of losing the Seven Years' War, which no doubt encouraged it to reconsider the economic and political value of its colonial enterprises and making direct criticism of them acceptable (20).

In her chapter on Crébillon fils's Le sopha and Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets, Dobie not only masterfully weaves together her analyses of these two contes orientaux but also introduces material culture into her reading of representations of the Oriental...