The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel by Jennifer Yee (review)

While nineteenth-century exoticist texts have been generously analysed, by Jennifer Yee herself and by others, the relationship between colonialism and French realism remains neglected. This is undoubtedly due to the absence of any sustained treatment of the colonies in major realist fiction. And yet this new study reveals how, despite their apparent absence, the colonies play a determining role in French realism, allowing it to critique its own discursive foundations. Through intricate readings of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant, Yee argues that the colonies emerge through metaphor, metonymy, the embedded narrative, and displacement (what she calls the 'offstage space'). The first chapter shows how colonial objects—scarves, jewellery, purses, pottery—enabled authors to question the conventions of realism, through the dissonance between the effet de réel and the effet d'exotisme. Chapter 2 traces passing references to slavery in the Comédie humaine, uncovering a 'much more complex set of responses' (p. 56) to slavery than is generally assumed. Yee's reading of Eugénie Grandet exemplifies her approach: her searching analysis of the signifiers 'sucre', 'sucrer', and 'sucrier' reveals how sugar is contrasted with salt to establish an opposition between 'Parisian prettiness' and 'true but unrecognized worth' (p. 63). In Chapter 3, the association of imperialism with cover-up, trickery, and fraud in La Cousine Bette, L'Argent, and Bel-Ami is shown to undermine the apparent triumphalism of colonial discourse. Chapter 4 argues that unstable narrative perspectives, alongside irony, self-referentiality, and parody, allow novels such as Madame Bovary to engage in a self-conscious polemic aimed, long before Edward Said's magnum opus, at orientalism. In Chapter 5, 'The Black Maid and her Mistress', the maid's race is linked on the one hand to the bodily nature of female sexuality, so that in Son Excellence Eugène Rougon she 'stands for her mistress's genitals' (p. 156). In L'Éducation sentimentale, however, Yee suggests that her blackness is a 'red herring', 'a signifier with no signified' (p. 162) that spectacularly fails to illuminate Mme Arnoux's identity. This section combines forensic genetic criticism with tantalizing speculation: could Laure, the inspiration for Manet's Olympia and a probable model for his Children in the Tuileries Gardens, also have been known to Flaubert in 1860s Paris, given her similarity to Mme Arnoux's maid? The final chapter examines the role of racialization in the construction of class and sexuality. The Conclusion addresses the (post)colonial novel: Yee discusses Édouard Glissant and Ousmane Sembène among others, and argues for a more nuanced understanding of the radical potential of realism. This is an important study that recovers neglected novels and offers compelling and original readings of familiar ones; Yee rescues realism from the Saidian sin-bin of inevitable colonial complicity, and challenges the doxa that experimental modernism is somehow ethically superior to realism. The book should be required reading for both dix-neuviémistes and postcolonialists; readers will also learn much about the English novel, a constant point of comparison and contrast, and which Yee analyses with equal brilliance.