114 REVIEWS

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana. By
SOPHIE WHITE . (Early American Studies). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

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Press, 2013. x + 330 pp., ill.
In this study Sophie White focuses on the importance of the clothed body as a site of
ethnic and identity negotiations. White suggests that the Illinois Country, with its rela-
tive tolerance of intermarriage between Frenchmen and Native women, provided a
vision of identity that was more ‘flexible and mutable’ (p. 232) than the proto-racial dis-
courses emerging in the French Caribbean and in Lower Louisiana during the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first part of her study White’s analysis of
probate and succession records shows clearly that Indian women married to
Frenchmen according to Catholic customs appropriated French dress and cultural ma-
terialism. Rather than a form of French acculturation, White views this appropriation as
the wielding of ‘symbolic capital’ (p. 98) and as a continuation of Native traditions of
cultural borrowings. This borrowing is meant to be one of the ‘less obvious ways of
using objects to retain aspects of tribal culture’ (p. 101). While provocative, this claim is
somewhat belied by White’s own evidence. The Indian convert Marie Rouensa’s use of
her will to coax her eldest son back to the French and Catholic fold, for example, seems
to suggest cultural assimilation rather than negotiation. The second part of White’s
study turns to Lower Louisiana and the limits of identity flexibility. White highlights the
story of Marie Turpin, a convert of Indian and French heritage who was allowed to join
the Ursuline religious order in New Orleans, but only at the lower rank of converse
nun. Similarly, White sees confirmation of identity anxiety in the example of Jean
Saguingouara, a mixed heritage voyageur whose 1739 contract included the only known
laundry clause. Contextualizing this preoccupation with cleanliness within the frame-
work of European conceptions of identity, White draws the link between clean clothing,
as opposed to clean bodies, and Frenchness. In contrast, White argues that body grease
and Native attire, worn by the French in a purely functional manner in the colonial hin-
terland, were merely a ‘temporary yielding to a cross-cultural identity’ (p. 227) that was
easily reversible. Despite this final chapter on French sartorial choices in Louisiana, the
‘Frenchified’ Indians are the true focus of this work. Yet White does not succinctly
define the term ‘Frenchified’. Indeed, her attention to the heterogeneity of the Native
Americans is not extended to the French, flattening the differences between Canadians,
metropolitan Frenchmen, and French colonists in Louisiana. Moreover, while White’s
attempt to draw larger conclusions from these case studies is admirable, at times her
rhetorical analysis proves more persuasive than the underlying evidence. The laundry
clause in Jean Saguingouara’s cancelled contract, for example, does not convincingly
demonstrate (at least for this reviewer) that the cleanliness of clothes was of widespread
concern to mixed ancestry individuals in Louisiana. Nonetheless, White’s approach is
innovative and her conclusions are intriguing. This study represents an important con-
tribution to identity studies in the context of French colonial Louisiana and is certain to
provoke lively discussions and responses.

NATHAN D. BROWN
doi:10.1093/fs/knt264 U NIVERSITY OF V IRGINIA

Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts. Edited by TILI BOON
CUILLÉ and KARYNA SZMURLO. (Transits: Literature, Thought and Culture).
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. xii +
334 pp., ill.
Tili Boon Cuillé’s Introduction situates Staël in relation to Enlightenment thinkers and
their treatments of sensibility as it pertains to politics, art, and relations between the two.
 REVIEWS 115
It presents Staël’s philosophy of the passions both as a culmination of an eighteenth-
century tradition that yields an ‘affective revolution’ (p. 2) and as an alteration of that

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tradition that transposes an ‘Enlightenment project [. . .] into a Romantic ideal’ (p. 9).
Only Nanette Le Coat’s ‘The Virtuous Passion’ fulfils the promise of this perspective,
carefully laying out Staël’s ‘reconfiguration of the semantic field of the passions’ (p. 51).
Amid too many discussions of Corinne (and redundant plot recapitulations across the
essays), C. C. Wharram’s ‘Aeolian Translation’ stands out for its interest in ‘De l’esprit de
la traduction’ and De la littérature. Almost all the contributions in the volume derive from
papers presented at an International Germaine de Staël Symposium that the editors
organized in 2009. This would account for the seemingly haphazard collection of essays
here, which, taken together, unfortunately fail to do the work that Cuillé’s Introduction
invites us to expect: a substantial reassessment of the importance of Staël for nineteenth-
century French intellectual, political, and aesthetic culture. Readers will learn some inter-
esting things: what Corinne owed to ‘The Wild Irish Girl’, an 1806 tale by Sydney
Owenson (M. Ione Crummy), British legacies of Corinne (Kari Lokke), the specific
virtues of the glass harmonica for Staël and romanticism generally (Fabienne Moore),
and subtle differences between painted portraits of Staël (Mary D. Sheriff). But without a
powerful sense of this figure’s capital importance within the context of an emergent ro-
manticism in the wake of the French Revolution, these insights appear scattered, even in-
cidental. When Napoleon, before he exiles her, asks Staël what she wants, hoping to
appease her political resistance by an appeal to her self-interest, she replies that what
matters is not what she wants but what she thinks. This strong sense of her thought —
philosophical, political, social, as well as literary — is too slight here. We need a clearer
sense of why the nineteenth century would not have been the same without her (consider
Staël’s impact on Guizot, Hugo, and Constant, for a start). The two editors have made
crucially important contributions to the advancement of Staël studies, and their generous
encouragement of young scholars, who are well represented here, is exemplary.
However, a volume is yet to be written that invites us to consider how Staël the thinker
and writer confronts unprecedented historical change — almost a decade of revolution-
ary activity in which the foundations of all extant social and political institutions in
France were radically altered — with powerful ideas for inventing the future, ideas that
remain vital in the comparably unprecedented circumstances that we find ourselves in
today as we enter the Anthropocene age.

SUZANNE GUERLAC
doi:10.1093/fs/knt262 U NIVERSITY OF C ALIFORNIA , B ERKELEY

Chateaubriand face aux traditions. Par MARIKA PIVA . (Biblioteca, Studi, 3). Passignano sul
Trasimeno: Aguaplano, 2012. 176 pp.
The origins of the four essays collected in this volume lie in various conference presen-
tations, but the book still offers a coherent and often original reading of
Chateaubriand’s dynamic interaction with literary traditions and illustrious predeces-
sors. Marika Piva presents Chateaubriand’s relationship with Montaigne, his debt to
sundry tourist literature, the medieval inspiration in his work, and the theme of exile in
the Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Montaigne is well known for the abundant use of quotations
from antiquity in his Essais; by reproducing an eclectic selection of these quotes
(twenty-three in all in his memoirs), Chateaubriand creates a mise-en-abyme effect, which
he then subverts in order to tackle more contemporary figures such as Rousseau and
his idiosyncratic ideas about the innate goodness of savages or about the goals of auto-
biography. To enhance his description of foreign venues, Chateaubriand incorporates
citations from travel literature, including the first tourist guides, borrowing from such