19 - Colonial Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Summary

From Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) to colonial literature at the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the French novel is marked by the experience of colonialism. It responds to anxieties about individual and national identity as well as about its own generic proximity to scientific narratives, oriental tales and travel writing. Many nineteenth-century novels use colonial love plots in which the – almost always doomed – relationships are situated along an axis stretching from incest, real or symbolic, at one extreme, to racial mixing or miscegenation at the other. The first half of the century also sees novels dealing with political themes in the form of slavery, revolution, or inter-colonial rivalry. In the later decades of the century the novel responds to the rise of scientific racialism and, after 1870, to national anxieties about decadence and the birth rate: colonialism is generally held up as a source of renewal and national re-energisation, though some writers reflect anxiety about cultural and racial mixing in the colonies. French colonial literature seeks to justify itself in theoretical writing, hampered by a sense of inauthenticity compared to its British imperial rival, and frequently tempted towards ironic self-deprecation or doubt.