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The Sentimental Fictions of Empire in Eighteenth-century England and France

Lynn Mary Festa

出版	University of Pennsylvania, 2000
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=HekTOAAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋

"Sentimental Fictions of Empire" traces the relations between the English and French sentimental novel and the eighteenth-century exploration of the non-Western world. Eighteenth-century writers on empire borrow images of the sentimental family, its benevolent head and virtuous women, to rescript relations of domination and property in terms of the innocent mastery of affect and reciprocity. The thesis draws on travel writings, political philosophy, natural histories, law tracts, and marriage treatises to examine how images of women crafted in the sentimental novel work to consolidate Enlightenment oppositions between civilized and savage, person and property, European and other. As emblems of a domestic sphere purportedly exempt from the proprietary interests of commercial empire, sentimental women screen contradictions between the polite, civilized ideals of the Enlightenment and the exploitative nature of colonial practices. Chapter one, "Civilization's Discontents in Graffigny's Lettres dune Peruvienne," addresses the role of women in four-stages theories of graduated progress, which paradoxically depict women simultaneously as sign of a society's advancement and cause of its decadence. The novel's Peruvian heroine questions the civilized values of European commercial society by demonstrating how French property relations produce vacuous women. The second chapter, "The Properties of Femininity: Clarissa and the Caribbean Slavewoman," examines the ways white and African women destabilize systems of classification by confounding hierarchies of race and gender. As the juxtaposition of Clarissa with the prostitutes in the Sinclair brothel suggests, and the presence of a growing population of 'mixed race' children in the colonies demonstrates, sexuality and reproduction tamper with the gender and racial classifications that maintain property. Chapter three, "Tahiti and the Problem of Jouissance " takes up the overlapping language of sexual and personal property through the two senses of the word jouissance: as sexual ecstasy and the right of property use. Focusing on late eighteenth-century texts on demography and marriage, I examine how the notion of a world without private sexual and material property haunts both the seduction plot and the utopian community of Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise.