The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and Nineteenth-Century French Theater (review)

The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and Nineteenth-century French Theater. By Angela C. Pao. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; pp 256. $39.95 cloth.

Since its publication in 1978 Edward Said's seminal book, Orientalism, has not only inspired a number of important studies of the West's representations of the Orient, but has also served as the founding model for a new field of criticism, postcolonial studies. Angela C. Pao's book contributes to this growing field by reexamining the evolving representations of the Orient on the stages of the popular boulevard theaters of Paris from the early nineteenth century until their destruction during Haussmann's urban renewal projects of the 1860s. Of course, the depiction of the Orient in the French theatre did not originate with the nineteenth century. Extending Said's theory of Orientalism to the theatre, a cultural arena neglected in his study, Pao argues that the Orient frequently invoked in the plots, characters, or settings of the tragedies of classical dramatists such as Voltaire served not only the generic needs of dramatic conflict but also the purposes of an Enlightenment ideology that judged Oriental politics and culture unfavorably through and against its own values. Napoleon's campaign to Egypt in 1798, however, inaugurated a new rapport with the Orient upon which France's imperialistic designs would be modeled. As the French empire steadily expanded during the first half of the nineteenth century, and as the reality of these military campaigns were graphically reported in journalistic accounts, the cultural and political representations of what the Orient signified in relation to France evolved. If the conventions of neoclassical drama had lent themselves particularly well to representing an exoticized, fictionalized Orient, this new image of the Orient would be fashioned on the stages where the new genre of melodrama was transforming both theatrical practices and audiences.

Seeking to identify and capture an elusive phenomenon, the image that the French public had of the Orient during the time of France's colonial expansion, Pao analyzes an eclectic group of archival materials to demonstrate how these various cultural institutions all contributed to altering historical accounts of events in the Orient in the public's mind. The protocols of censorial reading, for example, reflected the protocols of public spectatorship, thus leaving a trace of public reaction to the evolving image of the Orient. Journalists and reviewers, despite their claims to objectivity and impartiality, displayed particular political ideologies that, in turn, colored their judgments and reviews of cultural manifestations as well as of political events. Finally, the conventions of melodrama reconfigured historical facts and reality to conform to dramatic needs as well as to changing notions of national identity.

Pao rightly opts to focus not on the "high art" drama of the state-sponsored theatres, but rather on the popular theatre of the boulevards where classical melodrama originated and flourished from 1800 until about 1830 and then, under the influence of the popular military dramas and reviews, developed into historical and national melodrama. In doing so her book makes an important contribution to redressing official literary histories of the period, which have tended to dismiss the theatrical activities of the boulevard theatres and have thus ignored the tremendous creativity and vitality of these enterprises as well as their success and influence among a broad public that crossed class distinctions. Indeed, as Peter Brooks argued in The Melodramatic Imagination, the Romantic theatre of the 1830s cannot be understood without acknowledging the crucial role that the poetics and the rhetoric of melodrama played in its dramaturgy (91-92).

Given Pao's recognition that the dramatic conventions of melodrama were crucial in shaping the public's image of France's relation to the Orient, it is unfortunate that she limits her analysis of the oriental topos in melodrama to only two plays, Guilbert de Pixerécourt's classic melodrama, Les Ruines de Babylone (1810...