Abstract
In stories and novels designed primarily for female consumption and published throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, popular novelists played an essential role in transforming the female traveler into a heroic model of cosmopolitanism for Second Empire female readers and travelers. In contrast to the canonical literature of Nerval, Gautier, and Flaubert, the highly charged exotic fiction of popular novelists remains little understood. Female authors such as Anaïs Ségalas, the Countess Dash, and Raoul de Navéry made significant contributions to the genre, publishing their works with Hachette and in reviews like the Revue des deux mondes. The most prolific writer of the popular exotic, Marie Bonaparte-Wyse, turns her exotic gaze to Reconstruction New Orleans as a cultural crossroads for female settler, traveler and slave. At this key moment of rebuilding post-Civil War US and modern France, Bonaparte-Wyse's short story "Maxime: récit des moeurs créoles" (1874) and book-length travel account, Les Américaines chez elles (1895) dwell on similarities between the man of color's lack of freedom and the colonial woman's social retreat. My comparison of these two texts written more than twenty years apart will shed light on the unique contribution of this prolific and outspoken femme de lettres and voyageuse to contemporary notions of race and foreignness. 1
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