Through Strangers' Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France

7. Voltaire's L'Ingenu and Claire de Duras's Ourika: The Aristocracy's Betrayals

185 Chapter Seven Voltaire’s L’Ingénu and Claire de Duras’s Ourika The Aristocracy’s Betrayals But the ability to contradict, the attainment of a good conscience when one feels hostile to what is accustomed, traditional, and hallowed—that is still more excellent and constitutes what is really great, new, and amazing in our culture; this is the step of steps of the liberated spirit: Who knows that? Nietzsche The Gay Science This chapter will conclude the study by focusing on two works that have a stranger as chief protagonist, but have diametrically opposed philosophical positions regarding nature and society. On the surface, these authors and these texts seem very different . Voltaire and Claire de Duras are two figures who could be considered exemplary: one of the most central, prolific, and dominant male figures of the Enlightenment, and a woman from the highest ranks of her society who lived to see both the last years of that period and its brutal destruction, and who played a limited public role as the author of three novels. Voltaire’s Huron man and Duras’s Senegalese woman, both racially other visitors, come to very different ends during their sojourn in Europe. There is no direct connection between these works as there was between Montesquieu’s novel and Graffigny’s avowed response to it. One motivation for examining them in the same chapter is my interest in feminist criticism . I do not wish to reproduce the hegemony of male authorship nor to enclose women in a ghetto; I do wish to treat male and female authors on an equal footing; to highlight the depiction of a woman’s struggle in a male-dominated society; 186 Chapter Seven finally, to show that there is a variety of women’s responses such that Graffigny and Duras, responding to the same social context, are diametrically different and yet echo each other. Like Julia Douthwaite, who finds advantages in the matching of male and female authors, I wish to stress the “interconnectedness of men’s and women’s roles in ancien régime society by comparing the male-female relationships found in novels by women with those of male-authored texts” (Exotic Women 6). One procedure is to perform the “reading ‘in pairs’” suggested by Nancy Miller (Subject 129), which allows texts to interact with one another, just as they did in the culture at large. Voltaire’s and Duras’s texts, moreover, have some unexpected meeting points. Both best-sellers in their times, both texts show a stranger interacting with a specific part of society, namely, its very highest levels, the Versailles court and the ruling aristocracy. Like the Lettres persanes and the Lettres d’une Péruvienne, both these texts use a stranger as a figure of ambiguity to critique society, but unlike Montesquieu and Graffigny, Voltaire and Duras erase the ambiguous stranger by opposite resolutions that are mirror images of each other: either integration (Voltaire) or complete rejection (Duras) of the stranger. Both texts self-consciously explore connections between various periods of history: they are deliberately set in an earlier period. Written in the later eighteenth century, L’Ingénu is set in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and Ourika is written in the nineteenth century and set in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Both stretch the boundaries of the time of the story by also including allusions to the period of their writing —though this stretching pales in comparison to the Lettres d’une Péruvienne, which merged the period of colonization and the eighteenth century. L’Ingénu and Ourika transcend the boundaries of their original space and time, thereby suggesting that having a retrospective viewpoint opens up the possibility of a broader reflection on history, both past and future.1 L’Ingénu, or Nature Confirmed Critics have debated the message and the unity of Voltaire’s story, and consensus does not seem achieved yet. Is its hero a devalued hero (Henein) or an example of the natural man of 187 L’Ingénu and Ourika the highest order? Why does this story seem to have two distinct parts and tones, a philosophical tale and a sentimental novel, and how are these two connected (P. Clark, Levy)? Is the story unified (H. T. Mason, Wellington, Clouston), or does it contain two opposite and irreconcilable stories, one optimistic...