Maps to the Other: The carte galante Tradition and Émile Zola’s ‘Dossiers préparatoires’

Abstract

Abstract The deployment of natural spaces as explicit metaphors for the female body dates, in the western tradition, to Plato’s Timaeus. In French literature, this femino-spatial commonplace is at least as old as the Roman de la rose and endures into the present. Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie (1654–60) represents a pivotal moment in this tradition by expanding the novel’s textual metaphor to include a map of the fictional nation of Tendre. The landscape shown on the ‘Carte de Tendre’ resembles an anatomical drawing, a representational feature carried forward into other examples of the carte galante genre. Current scholarship has observed, though not yet thoroughly investigated, the importance graphical representations such as the ‘Carte de Tendre’ held over later authors. This study will demonstrate such influence by examining Émile Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875), where the garden, Le Paradou, figures as an explicit metaphor for the central female character’s body. The carte galante influence is evident when read in conjunction with the author’s hand-drawn sketches and maps included in the ‘Dossier préparatoire’. Zola’s exploration of gender-coded spaces reaches beyond his literary influences and extends toward the graphical tradition of the carte galante.