Tenebrous Femme Fatale: The Making of the Métisse in Nineteenth-Century Metropolitan French Literature
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Date
2007Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
00/-2/31-1Author
Weitmann, Susan
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Abstract
This thesis examines representations of the ‘métisse’ in nineteenth-century metropolitan
French literature to determine the figure’s function and significance in the texts that
display her and the larger society that imagines her. By ‘métisse’, I refer specifically to a
woman of ‘black’ and ‘white’ ‘racial’ mixture whose identity, in the context of the texts
that figure her, both legitimates and deconstructs distinct and discrete ‘racial’ identity.
As such, she is a useful figure through which to investigate and unpack conceptions of
‘race’. I will suggest that her innate performative ability – a product of her deceptively
white exterior – demonstrates the discursive nature of identity that can be seen as
constructed and parodied rather than as a simple ontological category. I use the term
‘tenebrous’ to describe the ‘métisse’ because it conjoins the two constitutive aspects of
her signification – her ambiguity and her colour. Her fundamentally ambiguous identity
is crucial to her figuration as an erotic and dangerous femme fatale. Unknowable and
protean, she attracts and simultaneously disconcerts or terrifies her prey. Concurrently,
the term ‘tenebrous’ highlights the explicit colouring of her body by all of the authors
who imagine her so as to mark her as identifiably different, and to explain her essential
bestial, primitive, and dangerous sexuality.
This thesis locates the ‘métisse’ at the crossroads of discourses of race, class, gender,
and sexuality. In an era when fears of personal and social degeneracy and decline were
capturing the collective imagination, the ‘métisse’, as a figure of frightening alterity and
deceptive similitude, embodies deviancy. Primarily portrayed as a natural courtesan due
to her essential yet hidden ‘black’ blood, the ‘métisse’ attracts ‘white’ men with her
seductive body, but her malign sexuality corrupts, dilutes, or kills them. Associated with
the working-class, the prostitute, the criminal, and the savage, the ‘métisse’ fits into a
larger discourse that seeks to postulate the normative identity of ‘white’, bourgeois
masculinity. Her ability to dilute the ‘purity’ of her ‘white’ male victim articulates a general contemporary fear of pathological sexuality and, through it, invisible
degeneration.
Using the comparative framework of ‘case studies’, I will examine Eugène Sue’s Les
Mystères de Paris, Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Arthur Gobineau’s Essai sur
l’inégalité des races humaines, Pierre Loti’s Le Roman d’un spahi, a selection of poems
from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, as well as the critical and biographical
studies centring around the figure of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s long-time and muchmaligned
‘métisse’ partner. The wide variety of texts and the diverse list of authors will
demonstrate the surprising currency of this literary figure in the collective imagination
of nineteenth-century metropolitan France, as well as twentieth-century literary
criticism. By focussing upon well-known and significant French authors, I will reexamine
the cultural heritage to which these writers contributed with specific attention
to the investigation of cultural assumptions, desires, and fears pivoting around the theme
of mixed-race.