“The Ocean of Futurity, Which Has No Boundaries”: The Deconstructive Politics of Helen Maria Williams's Translation of Paul and Virginia

Abstract

In 1795, Helen Maria Williams published an English translation of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's popular novella Paul et Virginie. Playing Bernardin's text against contemporary Anglo-French hostilities, colonial interests, and the French Revolution, and insistently crossing supposedly separate levels of narration, Williams opens up Bernardin's novella in new political directions. Confronting the aporias and double-binds of colonial and revolutionary politics in a fully deconstructive way, Williams summons the future into the present of Bernardin's text, augmenting Bernardin's considerations of “the ocean of futurity” to turn what had been a romanticized and sentimental story into a meditation on horticulture, friendship, and monolingualism. In the process, Williams's Paul and Virginia offers an uncharacteristically ambiguous representation of chattel slavery, one that, in refusing to separate the horrors of plantation slavery from the erotics of the pastoral setting, undercuts the reader's attempts to sympathize with the enslaved. As it confronts the contradictions inherent in its own representation of slavery, Paul and Virginia seeks political solutions in the study of comparative literature. Literary study is asked, here, to mediate between conflicting ways of understanding cultural difference and the global movement by which such difference becomes apparent.