Consciousness of the exotic and exotic consciousness in Chateaubriand.
Le temps a fait un pas, et la face de la terre a ete renouvelee.--Chateaubriand, Rene
Chateaubriand's historical, social, and personal situation led him to ambivalent, self-contradictory depictions of Native Americans in Les Natchez, Atala, and Rene. In places, he treats them with empathy and respect; elsewhere, he represents them with factitious stereotypes. Formidable obstacles hampered his attempts at authenticity in portraying Native Americans. The dominant fictional models at his disposal were maudlin, sensationalistic, or potentially subversive: sentimental, melodramatic eighteenth-century works, with their extreme moral polarizations, or social critiques filtered through the eyes of a naive foreign visitor, as in Candide, L'Ingenu, or the Lettres persanes. (1) Moreover, to make his stories intriguing for a potential French readership, Chateaubriand had to invent exceptional instances of cross-cultural hybridization and failed assimilation. To make these topics acceptable in an age of censorship, he had to graft on edifying Christian themes.
As etymology suggests, a text weaves together the feelings, thoughts, and words of various virtual minds, which, for brevity, one can call "voices." In Chateaubriand's many works set in exotic places, the voices most oflen discussed have been those of l'enchanteur, the spell-binding descriptive poet and rhetorician; of the scholar, carefully studying the accounts of a few travelers and historians; and of the covert autobiographer who artfully transforms his real-life experience. Less attention has been paid to Chateaubriand's representations of the voices of the ethnic other, particularly those of Native Americans. (2)
The body of this essay will focus on specific instances when those voices seem patently ventriloquized, distorted, or subverted; the conclusion will argue that in a general way, Chateaubriand's apocalyptic vision nevertheless conveys certain real affinities between the experience of French aristocrats under the Revolution, and Native American tribes facing colonization and expropriation of their lands, as well as genocide. Being a displaced person from a vanishing class allowed him at times to feel sympathy for Native Americans, if only through psychic projection and fantasized identification.
My chiasmic title, "Consciousness of the Exotic and Exotic Consciousness," centers the exotic to suggest Chateaubriand's vision: the mutual alienation of two cultures that meet only to encounter impenetrable barriers to communication, negotiation, and cooperation, concluding--rapidly or gradually--with genocide. The phrase "consciousness of the exotic" refers to the reactions of a narrator or character to various manifestations of ethnic Otherness, or to a natural setting whose strangeness makes it anticipate and later frame the appearance of the exotic other.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Chateaubriand's original intentions in the epic Les Natchez, from which he extracted Atala and Rene and revised them as separate publications, before he further modified them for publication in Le Genie du Christianisme, seem more enlightened--ethnographic rather than colonialist: "je concus l'idee de faire l'epopee de l'homme de la nature, ou de peindre les moeurs des Sauvages, en les liant a quelque evenement connu." (3) Instead of composing a new triumphalist version of the Conquest of Mexico, but set to the North of that country, he would shift the traditional focus from the European victors to the Native American victims of colonization, while celebrating the heroism and the historical importance of Indian history. Politically, the preface to Atala demonstrates empathy with the Natchez Indians in Louisiana, massacred in 1727 to suppress an insurrection of "toutes les tribus indiennes conspirant, apres deux siecles d'oppression, pour rendre la liberte au nouveau monde" (3). Chateaubriand explains that he wanted to see the places where these events occurred before depicting them in writing.
The extraordinary adventures of Chateaubriand's most fully realized exotic character, Chactas--the protagonist of Atala, who reappears in Les Natchez and in Rene--transform his exotic consciousness into a transparent lens that allows him to become an intermediary between French and Native American culture. As a young, wounded warrior rendered to the Spanish settlers in Florida to be sold into slavery, Chactas inspired pity in one of them, Lopez, who hired many teachers to instruct the youth in European languages and arts. (4) After thirty months, Chactas missed the forest so much that he begged to be allowed to return there. Years later, however, his involuntary sojourn in France led him to reassess the differences between Native American and European languages and cultures. (5)
Retenu aux galeres a Marseille par une cruelle injustice, rendu a la liberte, presente a Louis xiv, il avait converse avec les grands hommes de ce siecle et assiste aux fetes de Versailles, aux tragedies de Racine, aux oraisons funebres de Bossuet: en un mot, le Sauvage avait contemple la societe a son plus haut point de splendeur. (38)
Memories of captivity provide a pretext for Chactas' giving Rene an ethnographic description of the Seminoles who captured him when he returned to the forest. "Tout prisonnier que j'etais, je ne pouvais, durant les premiers jours, m'empecher d'admirer mes ennemis" (47). The implied author, however, divided between his eighteenth-century French literary tradition of sensibilite and his more recent ethnographic interests, initially depicts the squaws among Chactas's captors as sharing the tender susceptibility one finds in pre-Romantic and Romantic French literature, weeping repeatedly to think that this young man will be burnt alive--although he recovers verisimilitude later when he has Chactas observe that they revert to their primordial savagery when he must run the gantlet prior to being actually led to execution (72). He notes that a growing Christian influence on his captors leads to a debate as to whether he should be killed or simply enslaved. The tribe meets in a kiva, whose architecture Chactas describes at length as if observing it for the first time. The details of its construction are anti-climactic here, and Chactas's wonderment at the imposing structure seems artificial, since he had lived near the enemy tribe for seventeen years. He must acquire some of Rene's and our cultural naivete in order to find local customs newsworthy and thus indirectly report them to Chateaubriand's readers. (6)
When he meets Atala, the Seminole chieftain's adopted biracial daughter, Chactas discovers that a shared cultural background can magnify difference: although she and he are both Native Americans, their tribes are at war; although they both have been acculturated to Europe, Atala was converted to Catholicism, whereas Chactas, while being raised by Lopez (the unknown Hispanic father of Atala), had refused to convert. Paradoxically, thinking in Catholic terms, Atala can characterize him only with the phrase "un mechant idolatre," which applies to her own people, but not to him. (7) Nevertheless, unable to resist her Christian pity for a victim, and her personal attraction to him, Atala returns and urges him to flee. He blackmails her emotionally by saying he won't leave without her. They kiss, but she recovers her self-control and retorts with an equivocal statement: "Ma religion me separe de toi pour toujours" (55). This obstacle proves more serious even than in Le Dernier Abencerage, because Atala has subscribed to her mother's vow that her daughter will be chaste for life if God let her recover from a serious illness. In a third meeting, Atala again tries to persuade Chactas to escape, and resists her attraction to him by praying.
The two voices of Chactas--those of the infatuated young admirer and of the mature, well-traveled, condescending man of the world--blend awkwardly in his reaction: "Ah! qu'elle me parut divine, la simple Sauvage, l'ignorante Atala, qui a genoux devant un vieux pin tombe, comme au pied d'un autel, offrait a Dieu ses voeux pour un amant idolatre!" (63) During the night before his execution, when Chactas has already been tortured, Atala frees him, dresses his wounds, and flees with him. A storm rises, wild animals howl, and a forest tire breaks out--an appropriate accompaniment to the irresistible passion that brings Atala and Chactas to the point of intercourse. To save her mother from hell, as she thinks, she secretly takes poison. A lightning bolt strikes near them, conveniently preventing their sexual union, and in the sudden silence that follows, they hear a church bell. The aged missionary Aubry and his dog find them, and Chactas wonders at such charity toward strangers.
Chactas's surprise suggests that he has forgotten his adoptive father Lopez's exceptional kindness toward him. This affective erasure is strategic. For Chateaubriand to keep Chactas's exotic consciousness that of a tourist, independent of what he observes, he must ensure that the Natchez youth remains always in, but not of, the successive milieus where he finds himself: that of the Spanish settlers in Florida, the Seminoles somewhat to the Northwest, the French at the court of Louis <<<<<<xiv, and, finally, back within his own Natchez tribe, where he adopts Rene, assuming the benefactor's role as he reenacts the original relationship between himself and Lopez.
Chateaubriand's depiction of the Christianized Native American farming community of Father Aubry's mission that now welcomes Chactas and Atala (Letessier 97-150) represents a radical shift from Atala's sentimental adventures to a proselytizing Catholic focus. Aubry not only inculcates his monotheistic religion in his flock, but also helps them evolve from the wandering, warring life of hunters to the settled, peaceable existence of farmers. Thus a new formally titled section, LES LABOUREURS, supersedes the initial section LES CHASSEURS. Provisionally, a specious reconciliation of the "savage" and the "civilized" occurs; order reigns. Chactas's consciousness, melodramatically foregrounded during the ensuing scenes of Atala's suicide and burial, is at the same time overridden by a structuring, authorial, thematic self-consciousness--represented by Father Aubry's religious counsel and admonitions, which apparently triumph over cultural and religious diversity.
All seems well: Aubry promises to instruct Chactas in the Christian religion so that he can marry Atala, and Chactas daydreams about this happy future (l00, 110-11). But this joyful prospect is a leurre, impossible of realization according to the laws of the author's pessimistic, apocalyptic imagination. In this universe of discourse (consisting of the supersegmental body of Chateaubriand's stories and their implications), four major obstacles implacably oppose happiness. First there is the personal conflict between love and duty within Atala. Second, the treachery of the French toward Native Americans (in Les Natchez, the Governor of Canada breaks his word to Chactas, has him falsely accused, condemned, and sent to the galleys in Marseilles). Third, the sav agery of certain tribes: one of these later massacres Aubry, Chactas, and all the peaceable farmers of the mission, as reported in the EPILOGUE to Atala. And fourth, the unsustainability of the slash and burn agriculture practiced by all the European settlers, including Aubry himself. Such farming not only desecrates nature, but also will soon ruin the land for the future: "la gerbe d'un ete remplacait l'arbre de trois siecles. Partout on voyait les forets livrees aux flammes pousser de grosses fumees dans les airs, et la charrue se promener lentement entre les debris de leurs racines" (111). Chactas's beatific reaction exemplifies tragic irony. (8)
The immediate context of Atala reveals only the personal obstacle to happiness. In LE DRAME, the heroine explains that she has poisoned herself: there is no remedy. She did not know that a priest could have released her from her mother's vow. Her "primitive" and superstitious misprision of Catholicism is at least plausible, although it seriously detracts from Chateaubriand's project of recommending that religion; but the author's multiple, conflicting aims destroy any possibility of authentically representing Chactas's exotic consciousness. Proselytism and the tropes of the European Neoclassical tradition both create static in the author's message. The voices of Aubry, disparaging mere worldly hopes for happiness and human constancy, and of the ventriloquizing Chateaubriand, borrowing Chactas's voice to acknowledge the triumph of Catholicism that can calm passions in the lovers' hearts, supersede the Indian chief's voice (remember that he is sharing his story with Rene and Father Souel fifty years after the event, and that he still has not even been baptized). Next, in LES FUNERAILLES, the author as rhetorical enchanteur channels his artifice into heightening pathos through adunatons attributed to Chactas. (The rhetorical device of adunaton typically asserts that the speaker's love feelings are so powerful that they will endure even after the end of time: Chactas says that the moon will tire of shining of the Kentucky wilderness, and the river that carries our pirogues will cease to flow before my tears cease to flow for Atala. For some more recent examples, see the lyrics of George Gershwin's "Our Love Is Here to Stay."). (9) Until now, Chactas had hardly seemed to advocate virginity; and the rhetorical flourishes appear as foreign to his consciousness as Emma Bovary's impression of sheets of Florentine bronze as she watches reflections on a stream. When celebrating Atala's "golden" hair, the author entirely forgets himself--or to speak more indulgently, Chactas's consciousness finally fades away completely.
Although Chateaubriand respects and sympathizes with Native Americans, the denouements of Atala and Rene alike strongly suggest, on several levels of social and individual organization, that any hybrid of Native American and European cultures cannot long survive. The character Atala illustrates the disastrous combination of Catholic and Native American civilizations in one person; in Les Natchez, Rene and Celuta reveal the impossibility of a suc cessful mixed marriage (Rene insists on naming his daughter by her "Amelie," refusing assimilation to Indian customs, memorializing his mutual incestuous passion for his late sister, and expressing his irremediable nostalgia for Europe). More broadly, the fate of the saintly Aubry and his flock objectively--that is, with historical reference to Indian assaults on the encroaching settiers--demonstrate the disasters that await a culturally mixed community surrounded by tribes that understandably resent Europeans' religious proselytizing and exploitive intrusions on Native American territory. Despite Chateaubriand's humanistic principles, his ingenious, varied dramatizations of the exotic consciousness suggest that its discourses can survive, in Western literature, only by being travestied in European dress, borrowed from Voltaire's L'Ingenu, Charlevoix, and Le Hontan's travel journals. Otherwise, the Other can be captured only through generalizations such as positing the decline and fall of all civilizations, revealing the ineluctable affinity of all humans joined by a shared rate.
Indeed, we may question whether Chateaubriand succeeds in representing the exotic consciousness at all. Rene himself, despite his adoption by a Native American tribe, seems to perceive Native Americans other than Chactas prejudicially. Their very attraction to him is their unattainable Otherness, which would allow him to escape the morbid delectation of his thoughts of incest with his sister Amelie. Not only does he seem to feel little connection to Native American culture, but he does not worry that his wife Celuta must be unhappy--if not publicly disgraced--because he is not actually living with her. Celuta herself never speaks, thinks, or appears directly in the present rime and place of narration within the tale Rene. Half-heartedly embracing extreme difference in order to escape the sinful excess of sameness in incest, Rene's counterphobic reaction--a panicky flight from what he fears, in ignorance that its source is within himself--only locks him into an incurable melancholia for the narcissistic dream of codependence he has lost.
Like the couple of Chactas and Atala fleeing from her tribe to Aubry's mission, the narratives Atala and Rene themselves were torn out of their original context, the Native American epic Les Natchez, to be inserted into the proselytizing Genie du Christianisme. If it is by their fruits that we can know them, as exemplars of Catholic faith their outcomes--Atala's superstitious suicide and the morbid delectation of Rene's incestuous fixation on his sister--are hardly edifying. What happened next? In the EPILOGUE to Atala, an implausible coincidence brings the story full circle. The frame narrator claims to have accidentally encountered Rene's granddaughter and her dead infant, part of the remnants of the Natchez tribe in exile, near Niagara Falls. She tells him the fate of le Pere Aubry, Rene, and other members of the mission. Other Indians massacred them. The two cultures, Native Americans and Europeans, remain totally alienated.
In a final episode, an epilogue to the epilogue of Atala, the veneer of Chateaubriand's pseudo-Catholicism splits apart as well. The frame narrator piously returns to Aubry's mission to recover his, Chactas's, and Rene's bones, but cannot find them until the supernatural, in a pagan guise, intervenes. A doe, which had taken shelter in Aubry's cave with her faun, leads him to the remains. He carries these off in a bearskin and restores them to the surviving Natchez. Afterward, he laments that as he writes he finds himself also in exile, in England, without even the comforting presence of his own ancestors' bones.
To create a definitive conclusion, the author's simplified ending expediently reduces the complex legends and historical reports collected in Les Natchez. Rene concludes oddly: "On montre encore un rocher ou il [Rene] allait s'asseoir au soleil couchant" (245). Because by then everyone who knew Rene had died or fled, it can only be the implied author who "is still pointing out" Rene's boulder to us. Allegorically, that stone figures the exegi monumentum topos (the commonplace literary claim that "my aesthetic achievement, like a monument, will live long after me"), thanks to which the author salvages an artistic victory from his protagonist's defeat.
The text of this monument pessimistically deconstructs the notion of an exotic consciousness by demonstrating, in effect, that once the existence of that consciousness has become known to "us" members of the observing culture, it has by its very nature already had contact with our culture--if only a visual contact. We can know it only once it has already become mixed or contaminated with elements of our own awareness. Chateaubriand emplots an interplay between French and Native American culture in which Atala and Chactas have both been educated as Europeans, but in disparate ways that only aggravate the difference of their belonging to mutually hostile tribes. Chactas's European education allows him to communicate with Rene, Aubry, and us, but leaves him in an intercultural limbo. As the author's preface explains, "Il doit donc s'exprimer dans un style mele, convenable a la ligne sur laquelle il marche, entre la societe et la nature" (9).
Chateaubriand's models, he says, were Homer and the Bible. With these he intended to create a neoclassical work, "rappeler la litterature a ce gout antique, trop oublie de nos jours," dignifying the Native American experience by narrating it in a solemn poetic prose, within an epic framework. But the episodes Chateaubriand selected from Les Natchez to construct Atala and Rene are sentimental rather than warlike. In Atala, he admits, "tout consiste dans la peinture de deux amants qui causent et marchent dans la solitude" (6). Morbidly tainted with an incongruous late-eighteenth-century European attitude of sensibilite, on hearing Rene's confession Chactas weeps and embraces the young Frenchman, exclaiming: "Helas, pour moi, tout me trouble et m'entraine" (241). Acculturation seems to have afflicted him with a post-traumatic stress syndrome. And only to the extent that Chactas shares Rene's weaknesses can the self-absorbed youth respond to the older man's expressions of sympathy. To paraphrase Jean-Pierre Richard's famous statement about Flaubert, "on pleure beaucoup dans les romans de Chateaubriand." The cultural hybridization of Chactas has dissolved him in tears. (10) In short, reading Chateaubriand's exotic works set in North America leaves one with a contradictory impression: he seems by turns sensitive to the rights and sufferings of Native Americans, or unaware of them except as picturesque tokens that can be exploited to pique French readers' curiosity.
What may have been the situational roots of such inconstancy? As a writer, person, and political figure, Chateaubriand was a chameleon. He was successively dispossessed as a younger son of the nobility; as a political exile; and finally, as a conservative in a constitutional monarchy. To realize his ambitions, he had continually to reinvent himself and his works. Initially, he seemed to have few literary ambitions. Under the rule of primogeniture before the Revolution the younger sons of noble families, such as Chateaubriand, did not inherit the family estates, and received only a small inheritance. At first, Chateaubriand seemed content to live as an elegant parasite devoted to pleasure. Obliged to frequent the court of Louis XVI in order to help advance his elder brother's career, he adopts the attitude of a cynical, epicene roue. A letter to his friend Chatenet, in early 1789, proposes the homosocial bonding of a prolonged partie de plaisir, reinforced by a potential exchange of sisters:
J'ai souvent songe a toi depuis notre separation, et trouve de plus en plus otre idee de caserne charmante: avec deux ou trois etres tels que toi et une maitresse (car c'est un mal necessaire), une campagne bien retiree a quelques lieues de Paris ... nous coulerions des jours doux et delicieux.... Je te promets de rendre a la comtesse Lucile [Chateaubriand's sister] tout ce que tu me diras de lui dire; sur le tableau que je lui ai fait de toi, elle desire bien te connaitre; menage-la, si tu la seduis, mon cher Chatenet, songe que c'est une vierge. Adieu, je t'embrasse et te prie de me rappeler au souvenir de tes soeurs en leur offrant mes respects. Mande-moi tout ce que t'a dit Eugenie [Chatenet's sister], mais tu es un roue, tu me trahiras! (Chateaubriand, Correspondance t 45-46 [cited in Moisan 47-48])
He vacillates among prospective careers as a sailor, a priest, a soldier, a poet--but when the Revolution breaks out, rather than follow the court in exile to Koblenz--for his lack of attractive opportunities within the French monarchical system has depoliticized him--he decides to follow the example of his father by seeking his fortune in America. In the eighteenth century, the Chateaubriand family had lost its noble title owing to a decline in its wealth. Chateaubriand pere had requalified for the title by enriching himself through trade in arms and slaves. Less practical and far less entrepreneurial, the son entertains vague projects of winning fame by discovering the Northwest Passage--or by becoming a writer of popular exotic tales (like a Rousseau who would have actually lived with the "primitives" about whom he speculated), or both. Eventually, Chateaubriand mused, the returning explorer's writings could create publicity that might open the door to other careers (see Painter 189-209). To understand the exotic writings that eventually emerged from the imperfect realization of this project, one must recognize, first, the unique historical context. Atala and Rene were published during the brief period between 1800, when Spain returned the Louisiana territory to France, and 1803, when Napoleon sold that territory to the United States in order to find funds to pursue his continental ambitions. During these three years, "dreams of the French as an overseas colonial power were not only on the agenda but also seemed capable of realization." Nostalgia for this vast former empire in North America also fueled Chateaubriand's policies twenty years later, when as the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, "he hoped to see the Latin American colonies [of Spain] develop into French-dominated Bourbon states" (Smethurst 60).
Second, Chateaubriand clearly seems to have been inspired, when composing Atala, Rene, and Les Natchez, by a powerful narcissistic projection merging the perceiving subject with its exotic object. As Moisan points out, Chateaubriand signals the affinities between himself and his work with the protagonists' names in Atala and Rene, which inscribe the historical author in the deep structure of both narratives. The name Chactas, the hero and narrator of Atala, nearly echoes the first syllable of the author's own family name, and Rene was one of his middle names. The name Atala also echoes the sounds of l'Atlantique and of Canada, the ocean Chateaubriand crossed to reach America, and the Northern territories he intended to explore, vividly embodying the foreign adventure he was undertaking. But as the titles Atala and Rene also imply by pairing a Native American with a European, Chateaubriand shows himself keenly aware of the sharp distinctions between the representation of the ethnic Other as seen from the outside, and as felt from the inside.
More broadly, the central episode of Les Natchez posits Chactas's rate as a consoling, prospective inversion of Chateaubriand's. Betrayed and imprisoned by the governor of Canada, Chactas is sent to the galleys at Marseilles. Eventually exculpated and released, he is invited to visit the court of Louis XIV before returning to the New World. He observes the corruption of the powerful, and the wretchedness of the people, with shock and disgust. He meets Fenelon, who instills in him a religion of love and tolerance, and La Bruyere, who together with Chactas serves Chateaubriand as a surrogate to condemn the oppressive society that has rejected the author. When Chactas returns to America, he will rediscover a corrupt and victimized aristocracy there as well (cp. Moisan 54-56).
Chateaubriand's emplotment in all three works--Atala, Rene, and Les Natchez --demonstrates that he finally dismisses the tempting dream of idyllic cultural and ethnic fusion. Atala--half Native American, half Hispanic--commits suicide owing to her inner conflicts between her natural love for Chactas, and her misapprehended Catholicism. Two generations later, the Frenchman Rene cannot find happiness with the beautiful Native American Celuta, who loves him devotedly. And two generations after that, when the personified narrator of Atala meets Celuta's granddaughter near Niagara Falls, the infant has just died, and with her, symbolically, all hope of survival for her wandering, fugitive tribe, far from home. The extinction of these three potential families corresponds to the collapse of the ideal missionary community of Father Aubry in a massacre by another tribe, in which Rene, Chactas, and the priest perish. Even the natural stone arch at the entrance to the community, symbolizing both the doorway to a utopia and a covenant with a protective God, has collapsed and can no longer be seen when the narrator returns there. Finally, when the historical author, wounded, destitute, and condemned as a traitor to France after fighting with the counterrevolutionary forces at the battle of Thionville, retreats to exile in England (1793-1800), he tries and fails to marry Classical European and Native American culture by recasting Les Natchez as a conventional epic in twelve books (like Vergil's Aeneid or Milton's Paradise Lost) that reduplicate the struggle between Native Americans and colonists on a supernatural plane (cp. Moisan 63-68). The story becomes thematically incoherent, because although Satan incites the Indians to revolt, the colonists' abrogation of their treaties, and their insatiable demands for more farmland, are patently unjust.
Ironically, although Chateaubriand abandoned the manuscript of Les Natchez when he returned to France, he had to ask a friend to trace it down and return it to him a quarter-century later, when he had lost his post as Foreign Minister in 1824, and found himself in financial difficulties. And although he obtained a long-coveted post as Ambassador to Rome in 1828, he resigned it not long after rather than serve under the illiberal Prime Minister Polignac, whose appointment in 1829 precipitated the 1830 Revolution. The financial difficulties caused by Chateaubriand's refusal to compromise with the extreme right wing persisted for opposite reasons after 1830, when he refused to continue in the House of Peers or accept pensions from what he considered the extreme left wing Constitutional Monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Instead, he joined the shadow cabinet of the Duchesse de Berry, the daughter-in-law of the deposed Charles X, out of loyalty to her son "Henri V," the legitimist pretender to the throne. Twice arrested for conspiracy, he retired from politics in 1833 to write the Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, which glorify his political career and pursue a fantasized moral rivalry with Napoleon, but whose title perpetuates his lifelong topos of ruins resulting from a world-historical cataclysm. He had the satisfaction of living just long enough to witness the collapse of the constitutional July Monarchy that he had steadfastly opposed. The multiple exclusions from privilege that Chateaubriand had endured in his youth, and for which his exotic writings about North America had compensated through his two-fold stance as an outsider (both living in exile and writing about an alien culture), had finally led him to a reactive strategy: as an impenitent, diehard Legitimist supporter of Divine-Right Monarchy, Chateaubriand become the ultimate insider, to the point that his fidelity to the past produced a new, but this time self-imposed, exclusion.
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Vallois, Marie-Claire. "Exotic Femininity and the Rights of Man: Paul et Virginie and Atala, or the Revolution in Stasis." Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. Eds. Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 178-97.
Waller, Margaret. "Being Rene, Buying Atala: Alienated Subjects and Decorative Objects in Post-revolutionary France." Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. Eds. Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 157-77.
Yegenoglu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Laurence M. Porter
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East Lansing, MI 48823-3416
NOTES
(1) For historical information, he heavily used authoritative accounts by travelers and missionaries, most of which, however, were eighty years out of date.
(2) A few recommendations from among the numerous essays on Chateaubriand's Les Natchez, Atala, and Rene: cultural studies (Kadish); feminism (Schor, Vallois, Waller, Yenenoglu); genre (Hunt, Roulin); the history of ideas (Benichou, Hartog, Lowe); materialist and political criticism (Barberis); myth and ritual (Hamilton); psychoanalysis (Bailey, Bouvier, Glaudes); sources (Duchemin, Gillet, Pommier); "transatlantic" studies (Butor, Greenfield, Todorov). Moisan's combination of genetic, historical, and psychoanalytic criticism seems to offer the clearest guide to Les Natchez.
(3) Chateaubriand, Atala; Rene; Les Aventures du dernier Abencerage, ed. Letessier, "Preface de la premiere edition [of Atala]," 2. Completed during Chateaubriand's English exile in 1798, Les Natchez was published in full only in 1826. Berchet's notes provide an indispensable complement to earlier editions.
(4) Much later, we learn that Lopez was predisposed to feel sympathy for Chactas because he had had a Native American woman as a mistress.
(5) Lightly justified by the tale of a historical Indian who had been presented at court.
(6) Letessier's excellent, abundant footnotes (for the scenes of Chactas's captivity, see pp. 46-76) untangle the odd medley of Chateaubriand's sources in literature and art from the Metropole, incongruously juxtaposed with explorer's accounts, in his depiction of Native American customs.
(7) Indeed, the Seminoles remained among the least acculturated of all tribes, insofar as they were the only group never to surrender to or be exterminated by the U.S. government.
(8) Chateaubriand underlines the tragic irony of Chactas's situation by the Indian's naive reaction--immediately following the words just quoted--to this spectacle of destructive "civilization": "J'errais avec ravissement au milieu de ces tableaux, rendus plus doux par l'image d'Atala [who is about to die from suicide] et par les reves de felicite dont je bercais mon coeur. J'admirais le triomphe du Christianisme sur la vie sauvage; je voyais l'Indien se civilisant a la voix de la religion" [111; but these peaceable Indians will all be massacred by savage ones].
(9) 141. Note also the hypallage describing the dead girl's state as "le double sommeil de l'innocence et de la vertu" (143); through the allegory comparing her body to "la statue de la Virginite endormie" (143); and through the simile of the moon rising "comme une blanche vestale" (144) and, presumably, like Atala's soul.
(10) Concerning Chateaubriand's adoption of eighteenth-century sensibilite in his writing, see Pommier, and Smethurst 51-54 and 64-65.
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| Title Annotation: | Francois-Auguste-Rene de Chateaubriand |
|---|---|
| Author: | Porter, Laurence M. |
| Publication: | Nineteenth-Century French Studies |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUFR |
| Date: | Mar 22, 2010 |
| Words: | 5646 |
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