Abstracts

197

Claudia Moscovici, Hybridity and Ethics in Chateaubriand’s Atala

Chateaubriand’s Atala asks: what kind of human being is best prepared to represent an ethical attitude toward cultural difference? In raising this issue, Atala challenges the emerging Romantic view, popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that Western and native American cultures are ethical opposites. While beginning Atala with the familiar contrast between savage nature and European culture, by the end of the novel Chateaubriand transforms this polarity into a more complex model of hybrid cultural identity. The hybrid being, Chateaubriand illustrates, is formed by means of a double dialectical narrative process. The allegorical figures of Atala and Chactas incorporate and reject elements of two so-called opposite cultures – the Spanish and the American Indian – which they value equally. This essay argues the Chactas’s and Atala’s simultaneously critical and empathetic perspectives towards Spanish and American Indian societies enables them to negotiate cultural differences without lapsing into moral relativism. (CM)

217

Fernande Bassan, Une Amitié littéraire: Chateaubriand et Dumas père (A Literary Friendship: Chateaubriand and Dumas the Elder)

It seems surprising that two writers so far apart could have been friends: they were one generation apart; the first was a member of the nobility, supporter of Catholicism and the Bourbons, while the other – grandson of a Haitian slave – was not pious, and was a Republican. They differed also by their life-styles and careers. When they met in 1832, the older one was at the peak of his glory, while the younger had been famous for only three years. They met for the first time in Lucerne where they were both in temporary exile for political reasons: Chateaubriand had just been detained for two weeks in Paris, wrongly accused of supporting the Duchesse de Berry in a plot to overthrow King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans in favor of her son Henri, heir of the Bourbons; while Dumas had taken part in a Republican demonstration. Chateaubriand invited Dumas, and confessed that he remained faithful to the Bourbons by mere sense of duty, while not approving of their policy. Dumas, honored to be treated with confidence by his famous elder, was in awe to discover that they shared some political views. In 1840, François-René served as witness at the signing of the marriage contract of Alexandre and Ida Ferrier. When Chateaubriand died in 1848, Dumas devoted seven serial articles to his life and works, and noted that even Napoleon(his former enemy) spoke highly of him when he was exiled in Saint-Helena. (In French) (FB)

226

Evelyn Ender, “Une femme qui rêve n’est pas tout à fait une femme”: Lélia en rupture d’identité

In the first version of her novel Lélia (1833), George Sand raises the question of a woman’s identity to a crisis point by articulating it around the heroine’s frigidity. Drawing on the phenomenological work of the philosopher Denise Riley, this article shows that Lélia’s condition is symptomatic of a wider historical and philosophical construction of gender differences, which is still visible in Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of frigidity in Being and Nothingness. Since they are destined to sustain the whole edifice of gender, women must stay in their bodies at all times, and are thus denied the right to dream, or to think. Thus Sand’s experimental text dramatizes, in its very pathos and inconclusiveness, a question that has occupied feminist thinkers to this day, namely “which identities are truly viable for women?” (In French) (EE)

247

Dominique Laporte, “Ne m’appelez donc jamais femme auteur”: Déconstruction et refus du roman sentimental chez George Sand

As soon as she begins to write novels, George Sand distinguishes her works from something that critics run down: women’s novelistic literature, read by despised readers (generally women), and considered insipid or incredible. To prevent critics from linking her to female writers, she keeps her male pseudonym, disowns her sentimental stories and write novels where she discredits the novelistic genre. For instance, Jacques (1834), based on sentimental stories written earlier, parodies the style and topics of women’s epistolary literature. Also, it criticizes...