Monkey-girls of Old Regime France: Babiole and Ourika

Abstract

In her introduction to a 1994 edition of the 1823 novel Ourika, Joan Dejean explains the text's origins in this way: 'It was in her salon that [Claire de Duras] first told the true story of a black child brought back from Senegal shortly before the Revolution by the chevalier de Boufflers (who had served as governor of the colony), whose aunt, the princess of Beauvau, raised the child along with the princess's two orphaned grandsons,' 1 In the rest of her introductory remarks, Dejean concentrates less on the text's inception than on its reception, placing Ourika in the context of the racist legislation of the Code Noir and analyzing the story's success in the current of abolitionist efforts in the early years of the nineteenth century. If Dejean attributes much ofthe novel's initial popularity to its topicality at the time of its publication, the success of her re-edition of this text may owe much to its own context as well. Preparing Ourika for the press of the Modem Language Association, Dejean and her co-editor Margaret Waller respond to academe's increasing demand for texts that address the concerns of twenty-firstcentury readers, as Carla Peterson's comment explains: 'The MLA edition of Ourika is exciting news not only for scholars who teach nineteenth-century French literature but also for comparatists, feminist critics, and those interested in the intersecting representations of gender, race, and class in literary texts. '2 Duras's novel has thus been appreciated for its pertinence in its own time and also its prescience in relation to the problem of identity politics almost two centuries later. In reexamining Ourika, however, I am less interested in the novel's relationship to our present than in how it relates to texts that preceded it. Although most readers identify Ourika as a highly original work (Dejean affirms that '[Ourika is] the first black heroine in a novel set in Europe and the first black female narrator in French literature'J), I will show that Duras belongs to a long literary tradition. While some scholars have seen sources for Ourika in other fictional figures, specifically Galatea and Cinderella,s I will examine the striking resemblances between the