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

L ’E s p r it C r éa te u r Julia Douthwaite. E x o t i c W o m en : L i t e r a r y H e r o in e s a n d C u l t u r a l S t r a t e g i e s in A n c ie n R é g im e F r a n c e . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 21 1 . Exotic Women shows the various ways in which seventeenth and eighteenth-century French authors portray non-European women (184). Combining feminist and New Historicist perspectives, Douthwaite’s useful comparison of male-authored exotic fiction and that of less mainstream female authors illuminates the social structure of Ancien Régime France, in particular the gender inequities of the literary world. For, as Douthwaite points out, the exotic heroines depicted in the work of women writers generally reflect the mar­ ginalized status o f these authors and the social conditions which made outsiders of all women. In ZaXde, Lafayette portrays the heroine through the eyes of a European nobleman, just as Prévost would some 60 years later in L ’histoire d ’une Grecque moderne. Pointing out the two authors’ different representations of women, Douthwaite writes that, “ while male authors [such as Prévost and Montesquieu] portray women as creatures defined primarily by their sexual functions, female authors stress their heroines’ social identity” (64). But, although Douthwaite distinguishes between narrative irony and authorial intention in La Grecque moderne (25), she seems to confuse the two in accusing Prévost of an “ obtusity on issues of gender difference” (64), for the novel’s hypocritical narrator-protagonist reveals his own colonialist prejudices and power fantasies. Douthwaite then compares two fictions in the tradition of M arana’s L ’Espion dans les cours desprinces chrétiens: Lettres persanes, and Lettres d ’une péruvienne. Unlike Montesquieu’s philosophes, she argues, Graffigny’s heroine criticizes French society in experiential terms, without aspiring to objectivity or universal Truths. Thus Graffigny reworks Montesquieu’s version of the cross-cultural com­ parison by choosing a more modest, but trustworthy visitor/ethnologist. Moreover, Graffigny does not portray the Peruvian as possessing the stereotypical sensuality of the Orient (like Usbek’s wives, for example). Finally, Douthwaite compares two lesser-known texts concerning Tahiti. La Dixmerie’s Sauvage de Tahiti aux Français is the harangue of a Tahitian visitor to France who compares French and Tahitian political and social justice, namely, the submission and repressed sexuality of French women as opposed to the social and sexual autonomy of their Tahitian counterparts. As Douthwaite points out, the text only reinforces a familiar stereotype of Tahitian women, famous for welcoming seafaring Europeans with open arms and sexual favors (157). Not surprisingly, M onbart’s Tahitian women reveal a very different experience (rape) and in a different form: “ Gone is the lofty, distanced perspective of La Dixmerie’s philosophical observer. . .” (163). Thus, Douth­ waite concludes, “ Monbart rewrites the traditional topos of Tahitian accessibility—which serves male interests—as an attempt against the Tahitian woman’s body/land” (167). Although Douthwaite demonstrates convincingly that the portrayal of exotic, marginal­ ized women reflects the status of Ancien Régime female authors, the theoretical link between New Historicism and feminism promised in her Introduction is unclear to this reader. Nevertheless, Douthwaite’s close, insightful readings and the book’s series of com­ parisons between male and female authored, canonical and non-canonical texts is reveal­ ing. Anyone interested in Ancien Régime cultural and sexual politics will appreciate this elegantly written, well-documented réévaluation of both celebrated and neglected texts. J o n a t h a n W a l s h Bates College 122 Su m m er 1994 ...