Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism (review)

Book Review Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism. Stanford , CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Xiv+ 234 pp. Building on work by scholars such as Edward Said, Madeleine Dobie sets out a nuanced inclusive reading of the image of the Oriental woman in the Western imaginary. This highly readable study "exploréis] the specific historically changing agendas that Orientalist representation has filled" (4). Dobie reads beyond ultimately reductive although broader transhistorical studies of the Other to trace the genealogy of the "Oriental woman" as "a central category of Orientalist representation" by situating it within the history of European colonialism (3). Dobie's "double readings" take into account a text's historical reception along with ethnocentric readings arising from specific cultural contexts and underscores "the multivalence of textuality and its resistance to univocal meaning" (24). Not limited to texts, Dobie turns her eye as well to paintings and furnishings contributing to die oriental matrix. Dobie examines how "Western representations have not only feminized the Orient but also Orientalized the feminine" (2) from the 18th through the 19th century. The first two chapters deal with Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois and Lettres persanes. An imagined Orient deflected actual French involvement in the Americas through die transposition of discourse around moral and economic justifications of slavery onto an eastern landscape. This transposition allowed a sustained critique of both slavery and colonialism at the same time as it veiled complicity widi those very political and economic practices. She also demonstrates how issues of economic slavery bleed into the domestic sphere in his discussion of polygamy and forms of "domestic slavery." Chapter three, focusing on die erotic Oriental tale as written by CrébiUon fils and Denis Diderot, looks at die role of Oriental modes of décor diat reflect a "feminization" reflected by die engouement for Oriental décor in newly configured salons The shiñ from traditional hierarchical domestic reception arrangements to a more egalitarian model facilitated the new social promiscuity of class and gender. Chapter four turns to die travelogue, specifically die role of Gérard de Nerval who sets out "one of die earliest, boldest statements of die new sexualization of colonial discourse" in which die objective gaze becomes a subjective one through die introduction of fictional devices creating new and influential sexual and racial metaphors (129). In die mid-19tii century, "colonial expansion was advocated by groups that supported social and political reform" and oppositional parties backed colonial expansion as well albeit for very different reasons. Chapter five looks at die aesthetic sublimation of anxiety in die aftermath of die French defeat of 1870 and in die "Scramble for Africa" in die last quarter of the 19di century. Avant-garde artists use die figure of the Oriental woman in which to couch and veil tiieir disassociation from social and political concerns tiirough die use of die "dehistoricized representation" (151) of die woman as a figure for die autonomous artistic sign as exemplified in Théophile Gautier's writings. Foreign Bodies is a suggestive and often provocative, if occasionally uneven, study of die chronological and ideological connections and disconnections in literature, art, and history that make up die misleadingly homogenous rubric of French Orientalism. Antoinette Mame Sol University of Texas at Arlington Vol. XLV, No. 2 87 ...