Anne-Marie Du Boccage’s La Colombiade (1756): A European Poem

Abstract

This chapter discusses an epic poem about the discovery of America, famous and of seminal importance at its time, but later reproved as a female work in a masculine genre, and finally written out of literary history. As a well-educated upper-class woman and celebrated author of poems and of ‘imitations’ of English poetical works, as well as the hostess of a salon frequented by the ‘Lumieres’, Anne-Marie du Boccage claimed a male-coded position in society. La Colombiade cautiously modernizes epic conventions; references to predecessors such as the Aeneid, the Argonautica, and the Odyssey connect the poem to the pagan canon, whereas on the other hand the ancient model is Christianized by means of allusions to Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as to the Bible. It is a political text that draws together elements of classical antiquity, the Catholic religion and Enlightenment thought in order to present the vision of a pan-European community united by a common history and culture. Due to the contradictory values projected onto the epic hero, Colomb becomes an ambivalent figure; a conqueror, yet a pacifist; a Christian missionary yet an enlightenment thinker interested in all the sciences, an ethnologist avant la lettre who deplores the destruction of the American Indian tribes which, however, he is unable to prevent.