'L'autre chez nous': Defining the National Body in French Literature, 1800-184

In '''L'autre chez nous': Defining the National Body in French Literature, 1800-1848,'' I argue that prose, poetry, and theatrical works from the first half of the nineteenth century in France are haunted by a fear of the return of the ancien regime aristocratic past. France was engaged in the process of defining its post-Revolutionary national identity through discourses emphasizing bourgeois moral hygiene and (re)productivity. Literature expresses anxieties about various perceived threats to this nationalist project, frequently in terms of concerns about the aristocratic decadence and colonial adventures of France's past. The works in my corpus map French anxieties about interracial and interethnic sexual relations onto the specter of ancien regime aristocratic femininity, to suggest that the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as early nineteenth-century French imperial ambitions in South West Asia and North Africa, threaten to rupture the bourgeois social and economic order.;I begin by reading Chateaubriand's Rene (1802) and Duras's Ourika (1823) together to elaborate on Romanticism's intervention into constructions of the intersection of gender, class, race and colonialism. Known as the father of early French Romanticism, Chateaubriand portrays aristocratic sexuality as potentially sterile, and proposes colonial migration and interracial marriage as means of endowing upper-class French men with reproductive potential. A supposedly fertile indigenous woman is offered as a substitute for the barren sexuality of aristocratic French women. Duras, in contrast, re-mobilizes the typically masculinist genre of Romanticism to reincorporate aristocratic femininity into the French national body. This rehabilitated aristocratic womanhood reaches its limit, however, when it encounters Ourika, a black woman living in France. Ourika echoes contemporary French anxieties about miscegenation following the Haitian Revolution. In reading Duras's novel in conversation with Chateaubriand's, we see a shift in French literature's attitude regarding the compatibility of the colonial Other with the national project. Adaptations of Duras's work published between 1824-1826 generally call for a resegregation of the races in the name of maintaining France's racial purity.;By the time we reach Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin (1831) we see that nostalgia for the aristocratic past risks contaminating the body politic with the effeminizing influence of the ''Orient.'' Balzac's work invokes eighteenth-century Orientalist discourse to critique the very attempts of Romantic writers to resituate upper-class masculinity within the national body, as well as to challenge contemporary French imperial interest in North Africa and the Levant. Balzac represents the latter through the homogenizing notion of the ''Orient'' and suggests that imperial expansion threatens to drain the national body of its vitality.;The question of national strength is one that also preoccupies Merimee's La Venus d'Ille. In its treatment of the Paris-provinces antiquarian debate this short story embodies the threat of the past and the racial and sexual Other in the figure of the statue who brings death and sterility to the core of the nation by way of the marriage bed. Merimee's work takes to their logical conclusion the fears about miscegenation and aristocratic masculinity and femininity evinced in Rene, Ourika, the Ourika Mania corpus, and La Peau de Chagrin, portraying a hybrid aristocratic and racially Other woman as singularly and morbidly driven by erotic desire.