Curating Zilia: The Temple du soleil in Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne

Abstract

Abstract: Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne repeatedly highlights a collection of Peruvian treasures. Graffigny's description of these objects, both when they are on display in Zilia's private room in a French convent and in the Temple du soleil in her country house at the end of the novel, invokes a vocabulary drawn from eighteenth-century French standards of stylish interior design and private collecting. Social status in eighteenth-century France was performative; demonstrating one's own good taste with the displays in a well-decorated room or a private collection communicated that one belonged to the elite. Graffigny's contemporaries would have recognized that the descriptions of the arrangement of the Peruvian objects affirms Zilia's social value—and also that of her would-be lover, the chevalier de Déterville. Déterville, disinherited so that his older brother could keep the family wealth intact, is not able to easily demonstrate his belonging. However, his curation of the Temple de soleil helps rehabilitate his social status, and, at the same time, further contributes to his control over Zilia. Paying attention to the ways in which the Peruvian objects are displayed in the context of contemporary interior decoration and private collections ultimately destabilizes the dominant feminist interpretation of Zilia's final independence.