Fair Exotics by Sudan Rajani;

Author:Sudan, Rajani;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

4 Fair Exotics: Two Case Histories

in Frankenstein and Villette

Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail-paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly … nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ whom am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.

—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

In this chapter I continue to examine the problems gender poses to ideological configurations of romantic identity by examining two novels. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Brontë’s Villette are narratives that mark the perimeters of feminine domesticity as national affiliation. Both novels demonstrate to varying degrees the ways in which the trajectory of romanticism is domestic. As in the case of De Quincey, Shelley and Brontë coopt foreign ideas of exoticism in order to enrich the native larder; however, unlike De Quincey, they also situate representations of romanticism outside the cultural confines of imperial England.

The extent to which nationalism functions as a domesticating shield, protecting the mutability of feminine identification from irrevocably falling into the foreign, is arbitrated on foreign soil—at least soil that the cultural imaginary has fashioned as alien. But questions of how that shield gets established as a shield as well of the relationship between nationalism and domesticity continue to vex romantics through early Victorian representations of the foreign vis-à-vis an anglicized household. Unlike Crusoe’s negotiations with alternative island commerce, both Frankenstein and Villette imagine domesticity as the final site for national propagation. Early Victorian mediations of national identification station Englishness as an unmistakably coherent entity to be pitted against its colonial brethren; romantic desires to incorporate the exotic, however, complicate imperial injunctions for national purity.

Monstrosity’s Issue

“Like the flowers that are planted in too rich a soil,” writes Mary Wollstonecraft, “strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.”1 So Wollstonecraft begins her vindication, clearing the ground for a more fruitful discussion of the “rights of woman.” Mobilizing aspects of women’s work as an arena of women’s power, she sought to undo myths about sensibility that enervated and debilitated women rather than sharpened their capacities for feeling. Twenty-four years later Mary Shelley appropriates Wollstonecraft’s metaphors to describe a very different scenario—the idealized relation between Caroline Beaufort and her husband, Alphonse Frankenstein: “Every thing was made to yield to her wishes and her convenience. He strove to shelter her, as a

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