Affective Interventions of Family and Race in French Literature and Theater, 1783-1826

Engstrand, Emily Martin

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Affective Interventions of Family and Race in French Literature and Theater, 1783-1826 Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/2z10ws20t

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the convergence of kinship, race, and class in French literary and theatrical texts from the Revolutionary period through the 1820s. Through engagement with Queer theories, Feminist and Affect theories, and Critical Race studies, I contend that families formed through mutual feelings of love and care challenge the confines of European kinship structures and the limitations of racial difference. My project proposes that textual families formed through feeling in the French colonial world perform an intervention that disrupts boundaries of social class, physical difference, and geographical origin. However, these interventions fall short of modeling lasting social change within the confines of the texts. Each affective family is only a fleeting formation that either disintegrates or evolves to a more traditional structure upon contact with the external world. Furthermore, abolition and manumission are never fully possible; the people of color factored into the textual families through affectionate feeling retain their enslaved status and remain on the fringes of the family household. Consequently, the affective intervention does not necessarily provide an effective frame for social transformation.

In my first three chapters, I analyze Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil’s Lolotte et Fanfan (1788), and a selection of political and theatrical works dating between 1783-1793 by Olympe de Gouges. In their texts, these authors imagine unlikely familial ties, including a queer same-sex relationship, adoptive parent-child bonds, a matrilineal inheritance, and full inclusion of illegitimate children. The families have varying degrees of success transgressing class barriers, but each formation carefully avoids the possibility of freeing enslaved characters or representing mixed-race sexual intimacy. My fourth chapter studies rare examples of mixed-race families and child characters in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Empsaël et Zoraïde (posthumously published in 1818), Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur’s Hortense ou la jolie courtisane (1796), and Sophie Doin’s abolitionist short stories (1825-1826). I locate historical apprehensions of métissage to explain the spectral appearance of mixed-race child characters, while arguing that Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) can be read as the literary inheritor of metropolitan anxieties of interracial intimacies. In tracing a variety of different familial formations based in feeling, this project seeks to emphasize the critical role of kinship in expanded modes of belonging while also examining the limitations of the affective intervention.

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