Colonial Subjectivities: Cultural Hybridity in Nineteenth-Century French and English Imperial Fictions

This dissertation explores female figures in nineteenth-century French and English fictions of empire and the ways in which conceptions of gender and race both shaped and were shaped by the imperial project. Characters that I term "colonial hybrids" represent the confluence of anxieties around gender, race, and empire and present new and unique subjectivities through which writers could explore imperial and metropole values and practices. The first chapter discusses the metaphor of vexed cultural translation evoked to characterize the colonial encounter in three Romantic texts: Chateaubriand's Atala, Duras' Ourika, and Lady Morgan's The Missionary: an Indian Tale. The chapter examines the experience of the outsider, whether the colonizer in the would-be colonized land of India, or the colonized subject in France. The second chapter delineates the ways in which the cultural and ethnic meanings of "Creole" overlap and diverge in French and English colonial culture. "Creole" as a racial concept translates linguistically into French and English but contains very different nuances regarding slavery. While the term denotes people of European or African descent born in the colonies, for George Sand in Indiana, "Creole" differentiates slave-owners, whom she calls "colons", from non slave-owners, whom she calls "Creoles". For Sand, "Creole" comes to signify a gendered solidarity between the white heroine and her mixed-race servant. It is the opposite for Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre, for whom the Creole is a corrupted English subject due to her association with slavery. Lastly, the third chapter examines early novels by Conrad and Zola, Almayer's Folly and Therese Raquin respectively, that feature mixed-race heroines, an aspect of these texts that has largely gone unanalyzed and yet has ramifications for each authors' stylistic and generic contributions, particularly Zola's naturalism. I argue that Conrad's characterization of Nina differs from stereotypical representations of mixed-race women, and actually promotes cultural hybridity as an alternative to whiteness, while Zola's characterization of Therese adheres to them in order to substantiate his theory concerning the interaction of environment and temperament that for Zola determines behavior.