Black Venus. Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (review)

L'Esprit Créateur T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Black Venus. Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Pp. xii + 190. $17.95 (paper). In speaking of the African woman, H. W. Debrunner proposed that "she belongs to the dream world of primal psychological conceptions"—those conceptions being the ones of the western male. His words succinctly describe the subject of Sharpley-Whiting's book. She sets out to examine sexualized male narratives of the 19th century in France, in terms of the cultural, literary , and scientific representations of the black African woman. She seeks to examine their cultural and psychological importance, how they have produced racist-sexist ideologies, images, and institutions that serve to affirm and strengthen patriarchal dominance. Black women (primarily of African descent), who represent for French men the sexualized savage, have historically invoked primal fears and desire and inspired repulsion, attraction, and anxiety—giving rise to the 19thcentury "collective French male imaginations of Black Venus (primitive narratives)" (6). She offers a variety of examples. Chaps. 1 and 2 look at Sarah Bartmann, the Hottentot Venus from South Africa exhibited throughout the British Isles and France over a five-year period as an anatomical curiosity. For the celebrated anatomist and naturalist Georges Cuvier, who observed her while living and dissected her body after death, she provided the "missing link" between primitive species and "contemporary" Europeans, as borne out by his pseudoscientific theorization based on historical racist prejudices and phrenology and tinged with eroticism. Chap. 3 studies Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or in terms of how the sexually racialized stereotypes of the Négresse inform the portrait of the principal female character, the creóle Paquita. Chap. 4 looks at Count Gaspard de Pons's elegy Ourika, l'Africaine (1825), written two years after Claire de Duras's novel, Ourika. De Pons transforms the earlier sympathetic incarnations of Ourika into a figure of passion and vengeance, the racially quintessential African woman, primitive and bestial. Chap. 5 considers the "cafrine" woman of Baudelaire's La Belle Dorothée who is a "freed" black prostitute, "shuttled from French officer to officer, [and] continuously reinscribed into the racial-sexual political economy as dominated" (69). In chap. 6 Sharpley-Whiting considers Zola's Thérèse Raquin as an example of the conflation of black women with courtesans and prostitutes in 19th-century texts, and of the sexual allure of the black women for the French male psyche as a source of repulsion/repression and attraction (74). Maupassant's short story "Boitelle" (chap. 7) questions whether a white male can experience love for a black woman. In the case of Boitelle, a Normand peasant taken with a "young negress" on the quay in Le Havre, Sharpley-Whiting states that the supremacy of the white male "takes many forms, from extreme hatred of difference to an intensified adoration of Other bodies" (8687 ). Such truisms tend to proliferate in her study, wiüi the result that we encounter a redundancy of ideas, a listing of examples in a number of 19ui-century works that is at times too schematic to further any deeper understanding. For Boitelle, she concludes that "love of the Negress is indeed the love of the self and parenthetically remarks the fundamentally narcissistic nature of love, according to Sartre and Lacan, and others. She leaves us dangling without further comment. The relative brevity of the book and of the treatment of diverse authors and texts comes from a similar lack of development of her ideas that we find in other chapters. Chap. 8 treats Pierre Loti's Le Roman d'un spahi, which "veers from the standard Loti fare of exotica and sexual conquest" (92). As she explains, this novel becomes a "particular commentary on race mixing, on the unmendable differences diat blackness makes..." (92). In amply pointing out the degrading portrait Loti offers of Africans and black women in particular, we are left with a listing of the ways in which white men have degraded black women. Chap. 9 singles out Josephine Baker, the 1930s music hall sensation from America, and her debut in the "talking" cinema. "The Baker cinematic Venus...