Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France (review)

198 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:2 peoples, thus relating to the excluded other (in these cases, the disenfranchised, the mad, the women) and subverting the dominant law of the brother, unmasking its truth as violent aggression against the other. In a final series of readings of James's What Maisie Knew and Duras's The Lover and Lot V. Stein, MacCannell identifies a hope of going beyond the law of the brother by restoring the missing relation of mother to daughter as a model of relating to and including difference. The Regime of the Brother clearly challenges the reader to take the politically subversive power of literature seriously. Moreover, in its remarkable readings of Rousseau, it reminds readers and critics of the Enlightenment of Rousseau's central importance in both founding and criticizing modernity. Janie Vanpée Smith College Julia V. Douthwaite. Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. vi + 211pp. US$31.95 (cloth); US$16.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8122-3125-2. Julia Douthwaite's very fine book on the representation of foreign women in both French novels and anthropological or "proto-scientific" narratives from the 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution exemplifies how gender studies and new historicism are opening up new perspectives on eighteenth-century cultural productions. Applying the methodologies that feminism and new historicism have favoured, Douthwaitejuxtaposes a "cross-cultural montage" of texts of various genres focusing on the exotic woman's conflict with French culture to argue that such a figure is a highly coded representation not only of the French encounter with foreign cultures but also of the ancien regime's marginalization of woman within its own culture. For each of three moments during the ancien régime (the 1670s, the periods 1721-47 and 1770-84), Douthwaite first juxtaposes novels about the encounter of a foreign culture with the politics of foreign contact in anthropological travel texts concentrating on the same culture. By thus framing her analyses of novels with what are traditionally interpreted to be more scientific and therefore accurate narratives, Douthwaite deconstructs the differential relationship between the two genres to show that both types of narratives , in fact, insist on the same recurring topoi, that both represent the foreign woman as a figure of the exotic—the erotically seductive yet dangerous, the "unknown" and untamed other—and that, although the travel narratives claim scientific objectivity, they are as determined by the author's own cultural biases, and therefore as fictive, as their novelistic counterparts. Douthwaite further enriches her readings of texts with analyses of iconographie representations of newly discovered cultures and peoples in contemporary book illustrations. While the comparison of pictorial representations to textual ones is intriguing and productive, it merits more development than Douthwaite can possibly give it within the parameters of her own study. With this basic framework, Douthwaite then compares two literary works, one canonical text by a man and a lesser-known narrative by a woman. In each of three pairings, the basic plot, featuring the exotic woman's difficult experience with European culture, is similar, but the narrative strategies and the point of view offered by the women authors differ substantially from those imagined by the men. The first chapter compares Madame de Lafayette's romance of a shipwrecked Greek princess and her Spanish suitor in Zayde (1670) with l'abbé Prévost's tragic tale of a Greek harem slave's struggles with her enamoured French master in Histoire d'une Grecque moderne (1740). In both narratives, the REVIEWS 199 European aristocrat perceives the foreign heroine as seductive and desirable because culturally different, mysterious, and unknowable. However, Lafayette's narrative strategy of offering multiple perspectives on Zayde's story, including eventually Zayde's own, contrasts with that of Prévost, whose narrator, nostalgically reminiscing about a past and a woman he could not and still cannot understand, provides the only perspective on the heroine. It is no surprise, therefore, that the dénouements diverge significantly, reflecting , Douthwaite argues, the gendered perspectives of their authors. Whereas Lafayette chooses to integrate her exotic heroine into patriarchal society, emphasizing the possibility , if not the...