Seeing the Other in Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne

Seeing the Other in Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne Christine Roulston The figure of the exotic woman in eighteenth-century fiction, as Julia Douthwaite has argued, enabled certain writers "to imagine unconventional ways of negotiating women's concerns within the boundaries of ancien régime culture."1 Lettres d'une Péruvienne exemplifies this paradigm through the figure of Zilia, who, as the exotic female other, offers an alternative model for the construction of female subjectivity within eighteenth-century French culture. In addition to "negotiating women's concerns," however, Zilia's letters explore the ways in which the question of the gaze, of seeing the other and of being seen, in both the literal and the figurative senses, underscores the organization of the social and the feminine. In Lettres d'une Péruvienne, the exotic gaze and the gendered gaze mutually define one another within Graffigny's narrative vision. Nancy K. Miller has argued that the novel allows "the gaze of the female Other ... to point to an important blindspot in the Enlightenment's project to reorganize knowledge—its failure to take the measure of female subjectivity ," but equally that it "runs the risk of effacing 'the other woman' by writing in her place."2 According to Miller, therefore, "the gaze of the female Other" is problematized by a doubleness that offers both a new way of seeing and a potential erasing of models of difference. The exploration 1 Julia V. Douthwaite, Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 2. 2 Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 133. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 3, April 1997 310 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION of the various uses of the gaze within Graffigny's text will serve to map out the terms of the problematic of the exotic female other. The gaze in Lettres d'une Péruvienne repeatedly shifts between the literal and the figurative and is determined by two cultural models that produce different ways of seeing. These models are themselves dominated by that which makes the conditions of seeing possible, the metaphor of light. While the light of Peru is natural, clear, and transparent, that of France is artificial , deceptive, and illusory. Peru is dominated by two natural sources of light, the sun and the moon, which are also the defining symbols of its religion and its political system. The motif of natural light therefore inhabits and determines the cultural and ethical landscape. The sun, which makes the world visible, becomes the spiritual "culte du Soleil," producing a model of selfhood that is transparent and clear. We learn from the Historical Introduction that prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, "il passait pour constant qu'un Péruvien n'avait jamais menti."3 In Peru, therefore, the tie to nature produces a philosophy of transparency , in which what one sees is what is. The Peruvian subject, in this sense, is always revealed in his or her essence. In turn, the political hierarchy of Peru is dependent on a direct descent from the sun, which is anthropomorphized and deified as the Peruvian "père" and "Dieu" (p. 7). Mancocapac, "le fils du soleil" (p. 10), is, we are told, the first Incan leader, and Aza, Zilia's future husband, is his direct descendant and therefore tied to the sun in a patrilinear line. The figure of the moon, in turn, embodies the feminine principle: "Hs avaient aussi beaucoup de vénération pour la Lune, qu'ils traitaient de femme et de sœur du Soleil" (p. 1 1). By marrying Aza, Zilia will become the moon to his sun, completing the circle of natural light. However, already inscribed within this image of nurturing—"la mère de toutes choses"—is a narrative of destruction, "ils croyaient, comme tous les Indiens, [que la lune] causerait la destruction du monde en se laissant tomber sur la terre qu'elle anéantirait par sa chute" (p. 1 1). In contrast to the stability of the sun, the moon (the lesser light) is a source equally of creation...