Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems, and Adoption by Judith Still

Abstract

in the Netherlands, we learn that the author was greatly admired by the Dutch neoRomantic writer Arij Prins. Noëlle Benhamou compares the satirical representation of peasants in Huysmans’s En rade (1887) and Maupassant’s little-known Mont-Oriol, published the same year, while Samuel Lair compares Satanism, possession, hysteria, and the symbol of the bell in Huysmans and Mirbeau. Part two examines how the various Huysmansian ‘fictions’ are traversed by their own desires and obsessions like food, prostitution, hysteria, and bachelorhood. Laurence Decroocq treats Huysmans’s unique take on gastronomy while Éléonore Reverzy and Jeannine Pacque analyze representations of women. Céline Grenaud’s essay on hysteria in Là-bas (1891) sees Charcot and Lombroso as influential sources, but emphasizes how Huysmans took his depictions beyond facile scientific explanations. Sylvie Thorel explores fresh terrain in her essay on the Huysmansian flâneur while Jean Borie compares the notions of travel and luxury in Huysmans and Larbaud. The volume also contains two invaluable contributions that treat little-known or unedited works. Solal’s essay on Huysmans’s compassionate portrayal of a female protagonist in the unfinished novel La faim provides refreshing new insights into an author known for his bachelor heroes, while Philippe Barascud’s contribution on the ephemeral journal Les cloches de Paris (1877) unveils the behind-the-scenes world of the nascent naturalist movement plunged into a kind of media circus. The collection is a highly diverse and stimulating addition to the body of scholarship devoted to an author who may have abandoned the ideology of Naturalism but never quite abandoned its methods. University of New Orleans Juliana Starr Still, Judith. Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems, and Adoption. SVEC 2011:03. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7294-1010-6. Pp. ix + 310. 74 a. The interdisciplinary, multi-cultural perspective of this work challenges our concept of “hospitality,” broadly defined as “a complex economic, social, political, affective,and psychic structure and practice”(4).Focusing on eighteenth-century France but in dialogue with Europe, the New World, and the Orient, the author problematizes the relationship between hosts and guests, reciprocity and power, the interplay between public and private spaces, and the treatment of women. Informed by the works of Derrida, Grosrichard, Kant, Lestringant, Levinas, and Todorov, among others, the author approaches hospitality across space, time, and cultural contexts. Referencing our modern era, Still presents Enlightenment hospitality as conceived by Jaucourt in his Encyclopédie article “Hospitalité” and experienced by Rousseau in his Confessions, thereby introducing the themes of sexual difference,predation,and women’s oppression. Her analyses of Lahontan’s Dialogues, Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes and Supplément 244 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 245 au voyage de Bougainville, Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, and Voltaire’s L’Ingénu focus on issues such as property rights, colonialism as domination, economic manipulation , and racial or sexual differentiation.In chapter three,“The New World: Eating the other,”Still challenges our conception of cannibalism as a form of incomprehensible, savage aggression. She asks whether cannibalism is “more about the object seen or described, or about the seeing and describing subject” (88). Basing her arguments on the Encyclopédie,Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique,Bougainville’s Écrits sur le Canada, Le Jeune’s Les relations des Jésuites, the correspondence of Marie de l’Incarnation, and the anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Still suggests a nuanced interpretation of cannibalism that incorporates communal practices and necessity. Cannibalism can also be conceptualized as a metaphor for religious, racial, and cultural intolerance. Chapters four and five focus on “Enlightenment Persia” and Turkey. Still begins by discussing Jean Chardin’s travels in Persia and his interest in commerce as well as crosscultural understanding, a concept unique for his time. The description of the “caravanserai as a key example of oriental hospitality” gives new meaning to the concept of community (155). These simple structures provided shelter and camaraderie for travelers from East and West, bringing together different classes, nationalities, and races as they searched for hospitality and economic success. The confrontation between “Oriental despotism” and “the European struggle for power” (147) frames Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu...