Marriage, "Métissage", and Women's Citizenship: Revisiting Race and Gender in Claire

de Duras's "Ourika"
Author(s): ADELINE KOH
Source: French Forum , FALL 2013, Vol. 38, No. 3 (FALL 2013), pp. 15-30
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

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 Marriage, Métissage , and
Women's Citizenship
Revisiting Race and Gender in Claire de Durass Ourika

ADELINE KOH

"Qui voudra jamais épouser une négresse?"1

Many critics consider Claire de Durass 1823 novel Ourika to b

most penetrating portrayals of racism of its time. In the brief no
black Senegalese girl is savedat a young age from a life of slave
by a white woman in an aristocratic French milieu as an adopt
Petted and praised by members of her benefactress's salon unt
of age, she remains blissfully unaware of any form of racial pr
is, until she realizes that she will never be able to marry a w
man because she is black. She then descends into a depressive
which she never completely recovers. Literary scholars often p
for its sensitive insight into the psychological plight of its you
nist, frequently comparing her to the alienated narrator in Fr
Black Skin , White Masks.2 At the same time, critics celebrate D
insight into the black condition. Alison Finch has praised Dur
"humanely free of racism" and declared that "no other French w
far-reaching or imaginative on the question of birth-disadvanta
Joan DeJean and Margaret Waller argue that when Ourika is co
other works of its time, "its originality and its authors daring ar
In what follows I will argue that Durass Ourika is not as sy
towards the condition of black people as has been commonly
In particular, I will concentrate on revisiting the marriage devic
and show that the way Duras deploys the marriage trope reveal

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l6 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

anxiety as it represents the potential for social equality between black and
white women. Through a historical examination of political changes to mar-
riage for French women after the Revolution, a survey of the historical status
of métissage in the colonies and a close reading of two scenes in the novel,
I seek to demonstrate that the way Duras eradicates all possibility of her
black protagonists marriage in France is indicative of a larger apprehension
towards the black female subject.
Current scholarship has neglected the political dimensions of mar-
riage in the novel.5 Except for Chantal Bertrand-Jennings,6 who has argued
that marriage in Ourika provides a way for the narrative to give voice to
the silenced feminine subject, scholars such as Lucy Schwartz,7 Sylvia
Romanowskie,8 and Alison Finch9 look at marriage under the umbrella
of German Romanticism, arguing that marriage- or Ourikas inability to
marry- is a simple plot element within narratives of this movement, or, as
Doris Kadish and Françoise Massardier- Kenney suggest, that it functions as
a critique of racism as marriage is intertwined with a critique of patriarchal
interests.10 However, in the following analysis I shall contend that marriage
and race combine to form a threatening possibility: that black women have
the potential to become the civic peers of white women within the French
social contract via marriage.
In this manner, this paper contributes to a growing reassessment of
Durass racial sympathies. Christopher Miller has recently introduced
ambivalence into Duras criticism by arguing that Duras s inherited colonial
holdings in Martinique and their profits complicate current interpretations
of Ourika , going so far as to ask: "As she was creating one of the most sym-
pathetic representations of an African in French literature, did she still hold
title to hundreds of slaves in Martinique?"11 My strategy in this essay is to
build on Miller s exploratory study through this reading of Ourika.
My intention is not to recast Duras as a pro-slavery figure. Neither is it to
argue that Duras was unsympathetic towards the plight of African slaves in
the French colonies. Rather, it is to show how a historically informed post-
colonial reading practice can illuminate the ways in which even a canonical
anticolonial text such as Ourika may still be fundamentally ambiguous in
terms of civic equality between blacks and whites.

Race, Sex, and Marriage in Ourika

Ourika was inspired by the story of a real-life woman who was purchased
as a child as a gift for the Duchess of Orléans by the colonial administra-
tor of Senegal, the Chevalier de Buffons, in or around 1786.12 The Chevalier

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 Koh: Race and Gender in Ourika 17

de Buffons presented the real-life Ourika to his uncle, M. de Beauveau, the

Duke of Orléans, as a gift to thank him for helping him to become a gov-
ernor. The real Ourika was raised by M. de Beauveau and his wife, and was
much beloved by both of them, until she died at the age of sixteen of a mys-
terious illness. The life of the little girl raised by the Duke and the Duchess
of Orléans provided much conversation fodder for the salons of nineteenth -
century Paris, in which Duras was an active and important participant.
In Durass rendition of the Ourika story, the African girl is brought to
France as a gift for Madame de B., an aristocratic woman, who raises Ourika
as if she were her own child. After she is taken in as Madame de B.s adop-
tive daughter, Ourika has a happy childhood, learning "tout ce qui devait
former une éducation parfaite"13- music, dance, and literature. Her idyl-
lic innocence is shattered one day when she learns that she will never be
able to marry a white man of her class because of the color of her skin. She
suddenly realizes what it means to be black, and becomes traumatized by
her skin color. She calls her skin "le signe de ma réprobation," responsible
for condemning her to eternal isolation.14 This omen finds its expression
in Ourikas doomed love for Charles, Madame de B.s grandson. Towards
the end of the novel, Charles is asked to marry a young heiress, Anaïs de
Thémines, who has lost her family to the Terror. Towards the end of the
novel, Charles and Anaïs marry and have a son, and Ourika becomes a nun
to mourn her unrequited love. Ourika eventually dies of depression, alone
in a convent. She relates her story through a frame narrative of a doctor who
is trying to save her during her last moments, and whose voice opens and
closes the novel. When first published, Ourika was a huge hit and gave rise
to many imitations. These included novellas of the same name, or deriva-
tives such as La nouvelle Ourika , ou les avantages de leducation ; Ourikay ou
Ibrpheline africaine , performance pieces, literary criticism by Sainte-Beuve,
and poetry. In 1824, an Ourika vogue ran through Paris, and in the spring
four plays called Ourika opened in the boulevard theaters.
Marriage plays a pivotal role in Ourika. The protagonists declared mel-
ancholia and eventual death are caused by her realization that she will never
marry. This realization takes place near the beginning of the novel, right
after Madame de B. organizes a ball to "montrer"15 Ourika and her many
accomplishments. Significantly, up to this point in time Ourika claims
to be completely ignorant of racism. However, she loses her naïveté right
after her dance, when she overhears a conversation where her benefac-
tress is being chastised for raising Ourika as if she were white. The Mar-
quise, one of Madame de B.s friends, declares that this foolish choice now

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l8 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

means that Ourika will never able to marry: "Qui voudra jamais épouser
une négresse? Et si, à force d'argent, vous trouvez quelqu'un qui consente
à avoir des enfans nègres, ce sera un homme dune condition inférieure, et
avec qui elle se trouvera malheureuse. Elle ne peut vouloir de ceux qui ne
voudront pas delle."16 Upon overhearing this, Ourika is shattered by a forced
self-consciousness of her race: "Eeclair nest pas plus prompt: je vis tout; je
me vis négresse, dépendante, méprisée sans fortune, sans appui, sans un être
de mon espèce à qui unir mon sort, jusqu'ici un jouet, un amusement pour
ma bienfaitrice, bientôt rejetée dun monde où je netais pas faite pour être
admise. Une affreuse palpitation me saisit, mes yeux sobsurcirent, le batte-
ment de mon cœur mota un instant la faculté d'écouter encore. . . ."17

This important scene is where Ourika first realizes that her skin color
serves as an impermeable barrier between her and French civil society.
She is filled with agony, declaring her sudden realization that her race has
doomed her to a life of complete social isolation. Significantly, Ourika has
no consciousness of her skin color prior to the ball. She narrates: "J arrivai
jusqu'à läge de douze ans sans avoir eu l'idée qu'on pouvait être heureuse
autrement que je ne l'étais. Je n'étais pas fâchée d'être une négresse: on me
disait que j'étais charmante; d'ailleurs, rien ne m'avertissait que ce fût un
désavantage . . ."18 Despite her ignorance of her skin color, the dance scene
emphasizes Ourika's blackness and difference. The dance is structured as
"un quadrille des quatre parties du monde" and Ourika is to "représenter
l'Afrique."19 She dances the "danse nationale" of her country, and remarks:
"Mon danseur mit un crêpe sur son visage: hélas! Je n'eus pas besoin d'en
mettre sur le mien; mais je ne fis pas alors cette réflexion."20 This indicates
that her race is doubly signified by her dance- through her performance
of her "danse nationale" and her elaborate costume. Additionally, the black
mask that Ourika's partner wears physically highlights her difference from
his. The fact that her partner has to wear a crêpe mask to become Ourika's
representational "equal" transmutes Ourika's skin color into an additional
layer, or a barrier between her and the white members of her mistress's
salon, one which is as fragile and delicate as crepe.
At the same time, the dance displays Ourika's budding sexuality, signi-
fying her availability for marriage. This is connoted through the manner
she uses her body to express emotions in the dance: "La danse d'ailleurs
était piquante; elle se composait d'un mélange d'attitudes et pas mesurés;
on y peignait l'amour, la douleur, le triomphe et le désespoir. Je ne con-
naissais encore aucun de ces mouvemens violens de lame; mais je ne sais
quel instinct me les faisait deviner; enfin je réussis."21 Through the dance,

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 Koh: Race and Gender in Ourika 19

Ourikas body becomes an important instrument used to convey meaning;

it becomes the audiences primary focal point. Through the audiences gaze,
Ourikas body is sexualized, and through her imitation of these adult ges-
tures, Ourika learns to become aware of the erotic appeal of her body.
The display of young women's bodies through dance has tradition-
ally represented their entrance into the marriage market. Ourikas dance
accordingly denotes her potential to enter into French society through the
institution of marriage. In this manner, her dance embodies a rite of initia-
tion into a feminine form of citizenship, or the possibility of her becoming
a French citoyenne.
That both Ourikas race is highlighted along with her sexuality suggests
that the problem does not lie with Ourikas sexuality alone. If Ourika had
been a white woman, she would have encountered the same opposition, as
her dance would have simply signaled a traditional rite of passage. As such,
unlike Eileen Warburton,22 who argues that it is merely Ourikas sexuality
that is troubling, the emphasis on Ourikas performance of blackness sug-
gests that both elements work in tandem. Ourikas sexuality is problematic
precisely because she is black, because her potential marriage connotes the
possibility of racial intermarriage in metropolitan France. Her dance evokes
a dark reminder of colonized subjects .clamoring both for the end of slav-
ery and for equal citizenship with the métropole. I will show that a similar
dynamic of sexuality and race is repeated in a later scene, where Ourika falls
in love with her adoptive brother Charles, after analyzing this scene in rela-
tion to the history of marriage and métissage in France and the colonies.

The History of Marriage and Citizenship:

Inventing la Citoyenneté
An examination of historical changes to women's rights and marriage in the
post- Revolutionary years may reveal to what degree Ourikas dance func-
tions as symbol of equal citizenship for black Francophone women. The
dominant current within feminist historiography on the French Revolu-
tion has been that the French Revolution crippled women's rights. Joan Wal-
lach Scott noted that the French Revolution was paradoxical for women:
it promised liberation through the creation of a universal rights-bearing
individual, but immediately particularized this universal figure in the body
of a man.23 Similarly, Joan Landes asserted that Rousseau's impact "y°ked
[women] to a conservative and ultimately passive function."24 Olwen Huf-
ton also decried the Revolutionary concept of women's roles which were
embodied by Sophie, the female helpmeet in Rousseau's treatise on educa-

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20 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

tion, Êmile.25 Indeed, despite the universalizing agency seemingly granted

by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in autumn 1789, the
National Assembly eventually restricted women from "active citizenship" in
1791, thus making the citoyenne , or the feminine form of citizen, a politically
empty category.
However, scholars such as Jennifer Heuer, Suzanne Desan, and Stephen
Traer argue that the Revolution may have opened up a space for citoyennes
within the social sphere.26 Specifically, such work documents that that some
French women actually did enjoy considerable advances to their political
rights due to the Revolution- but only within the so-called "private" sphere
of marriage and family law. On September 20, 1792, laws were passed to
allow women to marry and divorce under the same rules as men. At the
same time, the new republic abolished the systems of lettres de cachet , or
signed letters from the king that were often used by parents to compel their
children to obey them in their choice of marriage. A family court was also
established, effectively guaranteeing wives almost equal rights with their
husbands over their children. Finally, in a series of modifications of succes-
sion law, women were guaranteed equality of inheritance with their brothers
and other male relatives.
In other words, women experienced many improvements to their rights
through the sphere of marriage and the family. Through marriage, women
became "citoyennes," or the feminine counterpart to male citizens. Indeed,
as William Sewell points out, the Revolutionaries did not create the cate-
gory of citoyenne for the purpose of enfranchising women, but its linkage to
citoyen inadvertently created a political space for women in the new Repub-
lic.27 For Ourika to marry, ultimately, would be for her to be able to simulta-
neously gain access to these rights and privileges.
Thus, marriage served the ironic function of both "limiting" women
politically, while granting them their only access to the public sphere. French
women found this image of the domestic-but-political citoyenne extremely
attractive, in spite of how the majority of feminist political philosophers
have termed marriage a form of political disempowerment.28 Jennifer Pop-
iel notes that this ideal of the citoyenne , drawn from Rousseau, was "predi-
cated on the active participation in civic life rather than their banishment or
silencing."29 Popiel and Helen Rosenblatt30 argue that French women were
interpellated by the role of the citoyenne and the partial citizenship it con-
ferred, drawing their evidence from the massive popularity of Rousseau
among women from the eighteenth century. Rousseau cast the citoyenne as
the genetrix of the new society, a wife and mother who would create the

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 Koh: Race and Gender in Ourika 2 1

conditions that were necessary to raise new, ideal, and uncorrupted little
citizens. An ideal citoyenne would shield her children against the corrupt-
ing forces of social conventions, and serve as her husband s moral guiding
force- thus serving one of the most important roles for the reproduction of
civil society.
After the Revolution, the specter of a woman dancing to "enter society"
becomes more clearly linked to her becoming a citoyenne , one who would
be able to serve as a critical guide to creating a new moral society. Ourikas
dance thus represents possibility of a black woman's political enfranchise-
ment within metropolitan French society- a potentially traumatic possibil-
ity for white women.
Some might argue that the political effects of the marriage trope in
Ourika were mitigated by the establishment of the Code Napoléon in
1804 and the later conservative changes enacted by the Bourbon Restora-
tion, which reversed many of the revolutionary freedoms and innovations
granted to women. However, the repressive measures undertaken during
the Restoration and the more paternalistic aspects of the Code were quickly
challenged in practice by administrators and jurists who were confronted
with the legacies of past decisions.31 Thus, during Ourikas composition,
women continued to enjoy considerable agency from marriage compared
with l'ancien régime.

Métissage and the Discipline of Sex within the French Empire

If Ourika were to marry, she would become "white": she would assimilate
into French society. Significantly, Duras removes this narrative possibility
by making Ourikas first hints of her marriage potential coincide with her
racial trauma, and suggests, via the unnamed Marquise, that this has "brisé
l'ordre de la nature."32
The reasons behind Duras's narrative choice become clearer when

unpacked in relation to the legal history of prohibitions against métissage

(mixed-race marriage) within the history of the French Empire. The mainte-
nance of racial boundaries was critical to what Partha Chatterjee has termed
the "rule of colonial difference" in eighteenth- and nineteenth -century
colonial European empires: the simultaneous justification for the need for
colonization, as well as the underlying assumption that the colonial mis-
sion would never be completed, because of the intrinsic racial limitation of
the colonized.33 One of the biggest threats to maintaining the "rule of colo-
nial difference" was métissage : the children born out of interracial unions.
Because they were partially white, métisse groups demanded the rights and

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22 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

privileges of their white ancestry. These groups problematized the strict

boundaries of the "rule of colonial difference" through their racial fluidity
and posed deep-rooted problems to the constructed barrier between Euro-
peans and the colonized populations. For Ourika to marry and have chil-
dren would be for her to produce métisse children in France- a prospect that
conjured up tremendous anxieties within the larger colonial imagination.
Critics have argued that the fear of the métisse first manifested in the
eighteenth century as colonial administrators began to grow wary of the
political power of this population. This fear is present in many discourses
of "moral degeneration": ranging from Doris Garraway s reading of the
creation of the "libertine colony" in the French cultural imaginary, which
blamed non-white women for "infecting" the French race with their métisse
offspring,34 to Françoise Vergèss analysis of how motifs of the fear of ste-
rility and deviance were used to racially control the spread of métissage in
colonial Réunion.35 These anxieties appeared in various forms throughout
French literature. Pratima Prasad has shown that Bernadin Saint- Pierre s

novel located the colony s eventual destruction in the "morally contami-

nated milk" that black wet-nurses passed on to their white charges.36
This anxiety towards métissage was also clearly expressed by changes in
colonial legislature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the
earlier 1685 Code Noir of Sainte- Domingue only prohibited nonmarital rela-
tionships between free men and enslaved women, and even provided legiti-
mation for these liaisons through marriage,37 the 1724 Code Noir expressly
prohibited interracial marriage regardless of whether the Africans were
slaves or gens de couleur libres. "Article 6 of the 1724 Code Noir explicitly
stated: "We forbid our white subjects of either sex [nos Sujets blancs , de lun
et de lautre sexe] from contracting with the Blacks [les Noirs], under penalty
of punishment and arbitrary fine; and all cures, priests or secular mission-
aries, and even the chaplains of ships, from marrying them. We also forbid
our said white subjects, and even the manumitted or free born Blacks [Noirs
affranchis ou nez libres ], from living in concubinage with slaves."38 This colo-
nial anxiety was compounded in France in 1778, when Louis XVI outlawed
marriages between whites and non-whites, and reached its height in an 1803
ministerial decree which officially banned marriage between blacks and
whites within metropolitan France itself.39
For the nineteenth -century French reader, the spectacle of a well-bred,
Europeanized black woman dancing in a Parisian salon would connote the
menacing scenario of legalized métissage in metropolitan France- and this
is strongly suggested through the Marquises seeking out Madame de B. to

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 Koh: Race and Gender in Ourika 23

discuss Ourikas marriage impossibility right after the dance. Furthermore,

métissage in France was a very real possibility, as the 1803 ban on intermar-
riage had quietly disappeared between 1818 and 1819, while Duras was col-
lecting material for Ourika.40 Indeed, the historical record shows that even
the earlier decrees had proved ineffective against restricting intermarriage,
as Pierre Boulle has documented several cases of mixed marriages in the
French registrar after the 1778 ban.41 Thus, by hinting at her potential mar-
riage, Ourikas dance alludes to the production of a metropolitan French
métisse : a half-black, half-white citoyen completely schooled in the French
discourse of civility. Being located in metropolitan France makes the pros-
pect of this even more disturbing. All of Ourikas fictional counterparts from
this time period remained safely in the confines of the colonies or Africa-
ranging from the black woman heroines in Olympe des Gougess Zamora et
Mirza (1785) to Germaine de Staëls Mirza (1780s) and Marceline Desbordes-
Valmores Sarah (1821).
Ultimately, Ourikas dance is so provocative because it signals the tri-
fold possibility of a black citoyenne , schooled in the culture and rites of the
French elite, and the potential growth of a privileged métisse population in
France. Significantly, a year after Ourika was published, Charles Bisette pub-
lished La Revue des Colonies (1824), demanding civil rights for free men of
color in the colonies.

Ourika : Daring to Disrupt

The ball scene thus represents a convergence of two major items: race and
sex within the French social contract. Ourika desires to marry into French
society, to enjoy the freedoms, rights, and responsibilities of a French citoy-
enne. Her desire for marriage represents the possibility of a claim for equal-
ity with white women through métissage. Indeed, scholars have noted that
Ourika speaks like a salonnière.42 Ourika poses the following: if a black
woman is raised as though she is white, can she possibly become like a white
woman , and fulfill all the obligations of a white woman? Through marriage
and métissage , Ourika represents a black woman's demands to receive equal
status and citizenship as their white counterparts. The fact that Duras jet-
tisons this potential scenario- Ourika being a French citoyenne through
marriage - from all possibility is meaningful.
This connection between marriage, citizenship, and race relations is a
repeated motif in Ourika. First evoked by the dance scene analyzed at the
beginning of this essay, the problematic merging of all three issues is repeated
in a later scene where Ourika falls in love with Charles. Charles returns to

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24 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

Paris from his studies in 1793 as many members of the nobility either meet
the guillotine, or flee abroad or to the provinces. Once Charles arrives, he
retreats with Madame de B. and Ourika to hide in the country province of
Saint-Germain. There, Ourika and Charles have intellectual conversations on
their daily walks in the forest, and Ourika falls in love with Charles.
Several important elements are critical to the construction of this scene.
First of all, Charles and Ourika are made to appear as Émile and Sophie, the
ideal new citizens in Émile , Rousseaus treatise on education. Like Émile and
Sophie, they reach their intellectual maturity in the countryside, away from
the corrupting influence of the material world. Charles represents a com-
bination of the aristocracy and the new Republic- the aristocracy through
his lineage, and the new Republic through the description of his character:
"Charles avait les deux belles passions de son âge, la justice et la vérité. J ai
dit qu'il haïssait jusqua lombre de l'affectation; il avait le défaut den voir
quelquefois où il n'y en avait pas."43 Conversely, Ourika appears as Sophie,
Émile's ideal helpmeet. Like Sophie, Ourika is modest and simple. Even
more importantly, she gives up the idea of her own intellectual self in favor
of her mates: "Depuis si longtemps il comptait sur moi, que mon amitié
était pour lui comme sa vie; il en jouissait sans la sentir; il ne me demandait
ni intérêt ni attention; il savait bien qu'en me parlant de lui, il me parlait de
moi, et que jetais plus lui que lui-même . . ."44 Like Sophie, Ourika is content
to be a mirror of the man she loves; she knows not to speak in public, but
to wield her power in the domestic sphere and serve as her husband s silent
moral compass.
Once again, Ourikas potential citizenship and integration into French
society is hinted at through her sexuality, then her racial barrier evoked and
the possibility of this integration removed. Ourikas narration of her falling
in love with Charles- "je lecoutais, et ces conversations avaient sur moi je
ne sais quel effet magique, qui amenait loubli de mes peines"45- is quickly
juxtaposed by her painful reminder of her skin color as a functional bar-
rier: she uses the evening conversations to forget thinking about her skin
color, removing the mirrors from her bedroom, wearing gloves and dresses
to cover up her arms and neck, and a hat with a large veil even when she
is indoors.46 Thus, as in the beginning of the novel, Ourika is both given
the possibility- and the potential- of new Republican citizenship, and
reminded of the color of her skin being an impossible barrier to cross.
It might be suggested that this motif- of Ourikas potential citizen-
ship and accompanying barriers- is more indicative of the novels Roman-
tic tragic aspect than of Duras's discomfort with the civic equality of white

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 Koh: Race and Gender in Ourika 25

women. As Lucy Schwartz has pointed out, Ourika is very similar in struc-
ture to Duras s two other novels, Olivier and Êdouard , where the tragic hero
is prevented from fully integrating into society because of a tragic limitation
that cannot be overcome.47 For Ourika, this is her skin color, for Edouard,
it is his class, and for Olivier, it is his impotence. Along these lines, Syl-
vie Romanowskie argues that Duras uses "dramatic irony" in the Romantic
form to directly critique the social mores of French society.
But the claim that Duras used these Romantic narrative conventions to

shape a progressive vision of black enfranchisement is weakened by a closer

examination of the text. Ourikas character appears narratively inconsistent.
Her deep sorrow about never being able to marry, lamenting that "la pensée
qui me poursuivait le plus, cest que jetais isolée sur la terre, et que je pou-
vais mourir sans laisser de regrets dans le cœur de personne,"48 is contra-
dicted by the fact that it would have been possible for her to marry a white
man of a lower class, outside the aristocracy, or marry a free man of color in
France - a small population that did in fact exist.
But Ourika refuses to marry a lower-class white man, declaring: "Un
homme, à prix d argent, consentirait peut-être que ses enfans fussent nègres!
Tout mon sang se soulevait d'indignation à cette pensée."49 Duras addition-
ally does not have Ourika consider the choice of marrying a free black man.
Ultimately, despite being so adamant about not wanting to be alone, Ourika
prefers to retreat to a convent- a highly charged symbol of the renuncia-
tion of her sexual availability and ability to marry. Instead of exploring her
deep-seated desires to marry and procreate, Ourika chooses to sequester
herself away and die. Indeed, she goes so far as to romanticize slavery as
a life preferable to her being "alone" - and regrets ever being saved from
that life: "mais j aurais mon humble cabane pour me retirer le soir; j aurais
un compagnon de ma vie, et des enfans de ma couleur, qui m'appelleraient:
Ma mère! Ils appuieraient sans dégoût leur petite bouche sur mon front;
ils reposeraient leur tête sur mon cou, et s'endormiraient dans mes bras!"50
Why would a character like Ourika not marry a Frenchman of a lower class
if she is so adamant about not wanting to be alone that she romanticizes
slavery? In this manner, Duras removes all possibility of Ourika marrying
and procreating in France, to the point of narrative inconsistency.
At the same time, it is unclear why Duras has Ourika acquiesce to her
social restrictions. At no point does Ourika attempt to resist these bound-
aries or contest them; at no point does she attempt to call them into ques-
tion. The viewpoint of Duras's unnamed Marquise, the symbol of the rein-
forcement of the social hierarchy, is not unique within the novel. All social

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26 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

change is depicted as dangerous and ineffective. There are no positive asso-

ciations to any groups of people that attempt to reshape inequality within
society; Ourika herself has no sympathy with the political groups who have
the potential to change her social conditions; she denounces the Revolu-
tionaries ("J apercevais les ridicules de ces personnages qui voulaient maî-
triser les événemens, je jugeais les petisses de leurs caractères, je divinais
leurs vues secrètes; bientôt leur fausse philantrophie cessa de m abuser . . . ,"51
and denounces the Haitian Revolutionaries as "une race de barbares et
d'assassins."52 Ultimately, Durass Ourika neglects to hint, however subtly
or tentatively, at an alternative frame of reference from which Ourika can
imagine a life of French social integration outside of death.
Some may pose the question: if Ourika manifests so much anxiety
towards the civic equality of black and white women, why has this not been a
part of existing criticism on the novel? Part of the reason lies in the fact that
since the publication of Doris Kadish and Françoise Massardier- Kenney s
influential text, Translating Slavery , Ourika criticism has been more focused
on the subject of slavery rather than citizenship. Importantly, Ourika was
published amid a flurry of abolitionist publications, including Madame de
Staëls pamphlet, Appel aux Souverains réunis à Paris pour obtenir Vabolition
de la Traite des Nègres (1814), Victor Hugos Bug-Jargal (1820/1826) and Mar-
celine Desbordes-Valmores Sarah (1821).
Because so many of Ourikas contemporary texts are read as abolitionist
tracts, the temptation to read Ourika purely as an abolitionist text, rather
than a text dealing with the possibilities of equal citizenship, is understand-
able. But there are elements of the novel that suggest otherwise. For one,
Duras does not set Ourika in the Restoration, but rather in the years in
between the French and Haitian revolutions (arguably between 1787-1804),
when blacks were demanding not simply claims for emancipation but also
of civic equality.
All of this complicates the dominant perspective of Duras being the ulti-
mate champion of black Africans for her time. It might be contended that
the attitude towards the African in Ourika is not Durass but that of the fic-
tional characters the Marquise and Ourika herself, and that far from endors-
ing it Duras might be holding it up to irony and criticism. Yet, as Pratima
Prasad has shown, the many spin-off versions of Ourika such as La Nouvelle
Ourika and La Négresse offered up "models of black subjects who, while not
exempt from alienation and discrimination, are able to see themselves as
sovereign subjects with legal rights," while in Durass Ourikay "the protago-
nists options as a citizen with rights before the law were obscured behind

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 Koh: Race and Gender in Ourika 27

rigid social stratifications and aristocratic bienséance "53 These other exam-
ples attest that the French imperial imagination was indeed capable of creat-
ing more sovereign black subjects than Duras does in Ourika.

Revisiting Duras and Race

This essay has attempted to recast marriage as a politically charged sym-
bol in Claire de Durass 1823 novel, Ourika. While critics commonly con-
sider Duras one of the most sympathetic allies of blacks in early nineteenth -
century France, I argue that when a reading of Ourika shifts from a strictly
abolitionist focus to one which also explores equal citizenship between black
and white women, a different picture of Duras emerges. Ourikas condition
evokes additional questions regarding civil equality and not simply slavery.
Ultimately, Ourika is a clear indication that white women were cogni-
zant of the threat towards the exclusivity of their limited forms of citizen-
ship within the new French social contract. Through the careful linking of
race and sex in the narrative, Duras was making a strong argument that
although slavery was a problematic institution, black women could not pos-
sibly take part in the social contract through marriage. This fatalist approach
to understanding race forms the crux of the novels inner logic: that race is
an insurmountable barrier, particularly for black women and marriage, to
prevent potential equality between black and white women. The way Duras
constructs this, particularly through the representation of marriage of citi-
zenship, is representative of deep anxieties white French women displayed
towards black women.

This article has tried to cast some ambiguity on the canonization of a

white French author as being one of the most sympathetic proponents of
Africans in the nineteenth century. By overlooking Ourika's specific history
in relation to citizenship, current criticism on Ourika has insufficiently the-
orized and challenged Durass anxieties towards feminine black subjectiv-
ity. Through a reading of the changing terms of marriage in French wom-
en's history, and a close reading of how marriage functions in the novel,
I have argued that Duras uses race and marriage as barriers to separate
black women from white women. In addition to grappling with the ques-
tion of whether or not Ourika fits into a generalized schema about aboli-
tion, we also need to consider how Durass construction of Ourika replays
longstanding anxieties about the control and regulation of black women and
their agency within French colonialism.

Richard Stockton College

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28 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

Notes
1. Claire de Duras, Ourika (Paris: LAdvocat, 1824), 48.
2. See David O'Connell, "Ourika: Black Face, White Mask," in The French Review 6
(1974): 47-56; Roger Little, "Peau Noire, Masque Blanc," in Ourika (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1998), vii-ix; and Grant Critchfield, Three Novels of Mme de Duras (Le
Hague: Mouton, 1975).
3. Alison Finch, "Rank and Race: Claire De Duras," in Women's Writing in Nineteenth-
Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61.
4. Joan DeJean and Margaret Waller, introduction to Ourika: An English Translation ,
trans. John Fowles (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994), xi.
5. The only critical exception is Michelle Chilcoat, who argues that marriageability
was a condition of "civility," and that because blacks were represented as unmarriageable,
they could not be given entry into French civil society. This study brings the historical
implications of marriage and racial intermarriage further from Chilcoats original discus-
sion. See Michelle Chilcoat, "Civility, Marriage, and the Impossible French Citizen: From
Ourika to Zouzou and Princesse Tam Tam," Colby Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2001): 125-144.
6. Chantal Bertrand-Jennings, "Problématique d'un sujet féminin en régime patriar-
cal: Ourika de Mme de Duras," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 23, nos. 1-2 (1994-
1995): 42-48.
7. Lucy M. Schwartz, Claire de Duras, in French Women Writers , ed. Eva Martin
Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994),
153-161.
8. Sylvie Romanowski, Through Strangers Eyes : Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime
France (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005).
9. Finch, Rank and Race.
10. See Kadish and Massardier- Kenney, 191.
11. Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave
Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 161-162.
12. Scholarship diverges on the exact dates of the purchase of the real Ourika. While
Thérèse de Raedt dates her purchase in 1786 ("Representations of the Real-Life Ourika,"
in Approaches to Teaching Durass Ourika, mla Approaches to Teaching World Literature,
[New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009], 57), T. Denean Sharpley-
Whiting argues that it took place in or around 1788. T. Denean Sharpley Whiting. "Black
Blood, White Masks, and Négresse Sexuality in De Pons 'Ourika. LAfricaine,'" in Black
Venus: Sexualized Savages , Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999), 52.
13. Duras, Ourika , 34-35.
14. Ibid., 57.
15. Ibid., 38-39.
16. Ibid., 48-49.
17. Ibid., 46-49.
18. Ibid., 32-33.
19. Ibid., 38-39.
20. Ibid., 39.

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 Koh: Race and Gender in Ourika 29

21. Ibid., 40-41

22. See Eileen Warburton, "Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down: Ourika, Cinderella, and
The French Lieutenants Woman," Twentieth- Century Literature 42, no. 1 (1996): 171.
23. Joan Wallach Scott, "'A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer: Olympe de
Gouges Claims Rights for Women," in Rebel Daughters : Women and the French Revolu-
tion , ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford University Press, USA, 1992), Kin-
dle edition. Location 1465.
24. Joan B. Landes, Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 89.
25. Olwen H. Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 4-5.
26. See Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and
the Nation : Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2007); and James Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century
France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 139.
27. William H. Sewell, "Le Citoyen/la Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity and the Revolu-
tionary Concept of Citizenship," in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern
Political Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), IL105-123.
28. Examples of these include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, 2nd
ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western
Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Carole Pateman, The
Sexual Contract, ist ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
29. Jennifer J. Popiel, Rousseau's Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in
Modern France (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), 9.
30. See Popiel, Rousseau's Daughters , and Rosenblatts rereading of Lettre d'Alembert.
Helena Rosenblatt, "On the 'Misogyny' of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Letter to
d'Alembert in Historical Context," French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002): 91-114.
31. Heuer, The Family and the Nation , 13.
32. Duras, Ourika, 50.
33. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1993).
34. Doris Lorraine Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French
Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
35. Françoise Vergés, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and
Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
36. Pratima Prasad, "Intimate Strangers: Interracial Encounters in Romantic Narra-
tives of Slavery," L'Esprit Créateur 47, no. 4 (2007): 2.
37. Jennifer M. Spear, "Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana," The
William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1, Third Series (2003): 97.
38. Ibid., 75. This prohibition was in place regardless of whether the Africans were
slaves, or gens de couleur libres, which is especially telling in Ourika's case, as she would be
considered a free person of color.

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30 FRENCH FORUM FALL 2013 VOL. 38, NO. 3

39. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, "The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in
Napoleonic and Restoration France," Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (2009): 515-516.
40. Ibid., 538-9
41. Pierre Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l'Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin,
2007), 183-184.
42. See Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier- Kenney, Translating Slavery: Gender
and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783-1823 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1994),
193. See for example Lucy Schwartz, 157.
43. Duras, Ourika , 94-5.
44. Ibid., 98-99.
45. Ibid., 99.
46. Ibid,, 103
47. Schwartz, "Claire de Duras," 154-7.
48. Duras, Ourika , 63-64
49. Ibid., 58.
50. Ibid., 145-146.
51. Ibid., 72-73.
52. Ibid., 78.
53. Pratima Prasad, "The Black Aristocrat: Ourika, or, Comment peut-on être noire?"
in Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2009),
125.

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