Through Strangers' Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France

Contents

Contents x List of Illustrations xi Preface xiii Note on References 1 Introduction Ambiguous and Useful Strangers 15 Part 1 Montaigne’s Cannibals 17 Chapter One Montaigne’s Unknowable Cannibals 17 Prologue: The Skeptical Crisis 18 The New Strangers 21 The Discoveries 23 Montaigne’s “Des Cannibales” 23 1. Subjective and Objective Knowledge 26 2. Unknowable Nature 29 3. Objective and Subjective Knowledge 31 4. A Reversal of Perspectives, or The Wise Cannibals 34 Eighteenth-Century Inheritors of the Cannibals 39 Part 2 Montesquieu’s Persians 41 Chapter Two The Men’s Quest for Knowledge: The Impossibility of Transcendence 41 Prologue: The Early Enlightenment 44 The Strangers’Arrival 45 The Voyage 49 The Split Subjects of Knowledge 52 Society without Origin nor Essence 56 Double Subjects and Modernity vii viii Contents 65 Chapter Three Women’s Knowledge: The Temptation of Equality 65 Prologue: The Difficulties of Women’s Learning 70 The Persian Women as Objects 74 The European Women’s Ambivalent Freedom 77 Liberation? 85 Chapter Four Who Are the Eunuchs? 87 The Text: Internal Clues 89 Natural Roles in Question 94 Nature/Artifice, or The Generalized Eunuch 106 Two Forms of Power: Surveillance and the Sword 114 Montesquieu, Naturalist or Artificialist? 118 Chapter Five Montesquieu’s “Introduction” and “Réflexions,” and the Question of the “Secret Chain” 120 The “Introduction,” or TheAuthor’s False Modesty 124 The Question of the “Secret Chain” 133 Part 3 Graffigny’s Elusive Peruvian 135 Chapter Six Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne: Giving (and) Reading 135 The Preliminary Texts and Their Mandate 140 The “Avertissement”’s Gifts 147 The “Introduction historique aux Lettres Péruviennes”: The Stranger’s Gaze 154 Zilia’s Play: Place, Language, and Exchange: The Acts of Discovery and Self-discovery 154 1. Act I: Exposition—The Voyage 159 2. Act II: Self and Language 168 3. Acts III and IV: Society’s Contradictions ix Contents 173 4. A New Kind of Exchange 176 5. Act V: The Dénouement—Zilia’s Way, Imitable or Inimitable? 183 Part 4 Nature Affirmed and Nature Denied 185 Chapter Seven Voltaire’s L’Ingénu and Claire de Duras’s Ourika: The Aristocracy’s Betrayals 186 L’Ingénu, or Nature Confirmed 195 Ourika, or Nature Denied 210 Conclusion Ambiguous Strangers and the Legacy of the Enlightenment 219 Notes 233 Bibliography 253 Index ...