Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French (review)

Sharpley-Whiting, T.Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Pp. 184. ISBN 0-8223-2340-0

In Black Venus, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting makes a much-needed contribution to nineteenth- and twentieth-century French cultural and literary studies, examining representations of race and gender in notable and not-so-well-known texts/films of the period. Black Venus is a compelling feminist study of the particular place that Black Venus narratives - narratives centering on black femininity - occupy in French male literary, scientific, cultural and filmic productions of the era. The work sets out to demonstrate how black females were used both to invoke desire and fear in the French cultural imagination in order to ensure France's superiority, especially during this period of extensive colonialism-inspired literary and scientific production.

The book's theoretical framework is a mixture of feminist discourses and what the author defines as a blend of Fanonian and Morrisonian insights. She asserts that Black Venus narratives are part of a large discourse of what Toni Morrison calls Africanism. Morrison states that the use of Africanism in Eurocentric discourse serves the purpose of "contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear" (6-7). In order to maintain power and superiority, Eurocentric discourse reinvents Africanism to suit its truths. Appropriating Morrison, Sharpley-Whiting affirms that the idea of sexual, and racial differences inspired acute fears in the French male psyche. This explains why nineteenth century and pre-WWII writers and scientists produced eroticized and exoticized narratives, thus creating "Black Venus narratives" in order "to maintain a position of moral, sexual and racial superiority" (7). Readers interested in Frantz Fanon will undoubtedly recognize Sharpley-Whiting's earlier work on the famous Third World theorist. In Black Venus, she embraces Fanon's appropriation of Sartre's concept of overdetermination, which Fanon applies to black subjectivity and concludes "The Negro has no ontological existence in the eyes of the white man" (see Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs).

The first two chapters constitute the most compelling and original analysis of Black Venus narratives. They document a specific cultural phenomenon in early nineteenth century France, initiated by the arrival of Sarah Bartmann, the "Hottentot Venus." Subtitled "Creating the Master Text on the Hottentot Venus," Chapter 1 critiques the Naturalist Georges Cuvier's methodical observations of Bartmann. Cuvier wrote and read black femininity as excessive, exaggerated and abnormal, anatomically different and overdeveloped. Hence, Cuvier's findings reassured French people of their human superiority. Chapter 2 discusses a vaudeville play, "La Vénus hottentote où haine aux françaises," in which the Hottentot becomes "the butt of the joke" in order to de-eroticize the white man's gaze upon the black woman's body. This affirms the white woman's racial and sexual superiority over the primitive, savage, and grotesque black female. Similarly, Chapter 3, a study of Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, pits the white woman against the non-European woman. In this instance, black femininity includes creole women, indeed all non-European women. The process of creolization is racialized to exemplify the deadly mixing of racial and sexual otherness as embodied in the murder of the creole heroine Paquita. The idea of perilous mixing is repeated in Chapter 7, a critique of Maupassant's short story Boitelle. Chapter 4, on de Pons' Ourika, and Chapter 6, on Zola's Thérèse Raquin, reiterate the stereotype of the evil, animalistic, sexually perverse black female. Black Venus analyzes the compounding element of class in Thérèse Raquin where, in the naturalist tradition, Laurent's lower class background is also depicted as dangerous and primitive. Chapter 5 poses the problematic of identification for black females seeking validation in the white world. Sharpley-Whiting concludes that black women can only mimic whiteness but can never be. As evidenced in...