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

Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism joins the discussion of exoticism in French literature in the wake of Edward Saïd's Orientalism (1978), making a contribution in the specifically focused area of the figure of the Oriental woman. Dobie promises a study that "explores ways in which the changing realities of French colonialism are paralleled by shifts in the mode of literary representation" (4). Specifically, she asserts that her work is distinctly different from previous studies in that it will "ask about the range of functions that representations of Oriental others have fulfilled within the domestic social and political economy" (ibid.).

Dobie's project spans the historical period from the publication of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes in 1721 to Gautier's Le Roman de la momie in 1857. It is not, however, a continuous study. Dobie rather chooses to isolate historical moments defined by the literary texts under scrutiny and to explore the literary representations of the Oriental woman within the political and historical context of each text. Moreover, Foreign Bodies also eschews chronological order to open with an examination of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, a choice that is never explicitly addressed by Dobie, but which presumably facilitates theoretical discussion.

The title, Foreign Bodies, illustrates one of the central difficulties of the book: it fails to deliver a consistent study unified by its theoretical framework. While the provocative title promises, as Dobie suggests, a Janus-faced representation of the Oriental woman and the Orient "as a compliant female body that invites penetration and possession, or in a different scenario, as an impenetrable veiled body that harbors hostility and deception" (31), it also draws on medical discourse to evoke the danger of contagion and disease. These themes, while present at moments in the study as a whole, do not unify Dobie's analysis. This failure to fully integrate the theoretical and thematic discussions plagues the entire study.

In its most insightful moments, Foreign Bodies provides perceptive readings of the selected texts. Dobie deftly uses a deconstructive approach to point up the ambivalence that lurks within the representations of the Oriental woman that she chooses to analyze. For example, her reading of the final letters of Lettres persanes highlights the thematic of reading and writing within the novel, and the power relations embedded within textual relations. She explains Usbek's failure to exert control over his harem in these terms: "Never texts, but only envelopes or pre-texts, Usbek's orders are, in the end, dead letters that teach him that to be meaningful, writing must be complemented by an act of reading" (76). Likewise, her readings of texts by Diderot, Crébillon-fils, Nerval, and Gauthier are laced with similar insightful literary analyses.

Where Foreign Bodies stumbles is in Dobie's attempts to link literary analysis with broader social, political, and economic questions related to race, gender, and colonial policy. Her desire to condemn Western colonial practices, and the literary representations to which they presumably gave rise, colors her ability to sort through and make sense of the texts she examines. While her aims are laudable, the result falls short of the mark.

In the introduction, she states that "[w]hat is at stake in this analysis is not simply the construction of an accurate and fair-minded historical model, but rather the chance to reflect upon the paradoxes of our modernity, to trace the origins of the contradictory relationship between our experience of political liberalism and the ongoing history of racial and sexual prejudice and injustice. We are wont to wring our hands in despair while asking how it can be that racial prejudice and sexual discrimination coexist with the tolerance and political openness of liberal democracy" (11). In order to reflect in productive ways about modernity, specifically the history of liberalism and its paradoxes, it is important to suspend judgment for the purposes of analysis. Particularly in a study that purports to...