Abstract
This article examines the convergence of medical discourse, colonial politics, and the role of fantastic literature in fin-de-siècle France, through the lens of Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 tale Le Horla . Entangling the Horla in the complex history of the French engagement with Brazil, while simultaneously mobilizing the specter of tropical disease, Maupassant doubly evokes a colonial frustration surrounding the ability of European powers to maintain control of colonized nations and the dangers threatened by the encounter with “primitive” lands. I argue that the “corps inconnaissable” of the Horla functions as a screen onto which the narrator projects a slew of anxieties concerning racial otherness and the future of Western civilization—anxieties that resonate strongly with those that infused the discourse of tropical pathology in the late-nineteenth century.
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