Orientalism in French Classical Drama by Michèle Longino (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.1, 2004 193 Rome and the Republic, with her personal grief for her loved ones being a reflection of a greater grief forthe fate of Rome itself,and the loss of liberty.All in all, this is an excellent edition of one of Garnier's least-known and least-studied tragedies. Penarth Richard Griffiths Orientalism in French Classical Drama. By Michele Longino. (Cambridge Studies in French) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. xii + 275pp. ?47-5?ISBN 0-521-80721-2. The key word in this title is 'classical', and its precise meaning in context is crucial to Michele Longino's thesis. For this is indeed an essai a these,and any reader hoping to broaden the range of his or her knowledge of oriental works written forthe stage in the French seventeenth century will bedisappointed. 'Classical', rather,means something adopted by the French nation as a tool of self-definition and, indeed, of self-assertion, and what the seven canonical plays treated are deemed to effectis an understanding of Frenchness as mediated by and yet superior to the 'Other', as incarnated by the Muslim Turk. Longino begins by presenting Corneille's Medee as offeringlessons for new merchant-travellers and diplomats in the scholarly figure of Pollux, as opposed to the plunderer Jason. Two motifs of the whole series of essays are also introduced at this stage: the role of Medee as a foreign woman, seen thereby as doubly an outsider; and the subliminal mental preparation which the ethos of such plays affords for subsequent colonialist expansion. Le Cid is then interpreted as containing a commentary on contemporary politics, with Fernand as absolute monarch, and Rodrigue, like a seafaring merchant, standing up against the age-old threat of the piratical Moors. The single comedy treated, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, is taken back to its origins in recent memoirs, in particular those of the 'envoye extraordinaire' D'Arvieux, charting as they do the developing if fragile French trading links with the Ottoman empire. The two Berenice plays offerstudies in 'gendered geography' (p. 163), and here Longino convincingly demonstrates parallels between East/West and female/male polarities. Within that pattern, France sees itself reflected in Rome as a 'phallic centre', Racine's Antiochus is emasculated, and 'the East [is] a woman, good for the having' (p. 177). There are caveats to be expressed about some details of this chapter, but as a whole it carries conviction. The same is less true ofwhat follows, as Longino investigates occurrences of the word 'detour' in Bajazet and Mithridate, and concludes somewhat opaquely that the two plays offer'a one-way detour through the "Other" in order to arrive at "France"' (p. 223). Yet here too there is fascinating contemporary material about the encoding of letters, a persuasive argument that Bajazet is fundamentally a play about communication, and a reassertion of the staging of political issues in Mithridate, in the figure of whose hero the ambiguity of French attitudes towards Turkey is incarnated. Overall, the mastery of the complex etat present which informs the whole area of debate is impressive, as is the range of contemporary material cited. Plot summaries are provided at the head ofeach chapter, together with a quaintly pedagogical list of 'questions to ponder'. And if on several occasions Longino's arguments seem to be straining at their limits, this is none the less a book which has the merit of acknowledging its more tendentious hypotheses, and at the very least of offeringa cumulatively argued sequence of 'answers to ponder'. St Catherine's College, Oxford Richard Parish ...