This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan ... more This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures-the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is "duly punished"-by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained "unrepresentable" in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist.
Apparent antagonists, assumed to be ideological opposites, Rousseau and Dostoevsky actually share... more Apparent antagonists, assumed to be ideological opposites, Rousseau and Dostoevsky actually share profoundly similar moral outlooks . 1 Each attempts to demonstrate the inadequacy of the rationalism, individualism, scientism and optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment . Their writings marked by an underlying pessimism, both authors argue that human beings are born to suffer ; each sees history as essentially tragic . In the case of Dostoevsky, this tragic quality is mitigated by Christian transcendence . For both, the rejection of certain varieties of rationalism is paralleled by an emphasis on faith and on the value of religious belief, though Dostoevsky's mystic Christianity is very different from the civil religion of Rousseau . Both portray moral goodness as tied to the heart, feelings and true conscience . Each warns that reason twisted by pride may distort moral judgment, yet neither rejects rationality proper . While Dostoevsky depicts characters like Raskolnikov, St...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was deeply impressed by Defoe's 1719 story of Robinson Crusoe-indeed, he wa... more Jean-Jacques Rousseau was deeply impressed by Defoe's 1719 story of Robinson Crusoe-indeed, he was charmed, captivated and, at the same time, troubled by the novel. Rousseau's correspondence of the early 1760s contains the intriguing revelation that during this period he considered writing his own version ofRobinson Crusoe. Not only does an admirer explicitly recommend this idea, but, in addition, Rousseau's publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, asks him, in August 1763 and again inJanuary 1764, whether he should send along a copy of Crusoe so that Rousseau may commence work on it. But Rousseau was deterred from the project mainly by the difficulties he suffered following the condemnation by French and Swiss authorities of the Social Contract (1762) and Emile (1762). In March 1764, Rousseau informs Rey that he will abandon the Robinson project because he no longer has the courage or strength for such work. I Although Rousseau never wrote his own full-length version of Crusoe, his writings are replete with Crusoe references. Best known is the influential and extraordinary praise given to Robinson Crusoe in Emile where the tutor lauds Defoe's novel as "the most felicitous treatise on natural education" ever written .z Rousseau was apparently the first to indicate the broad philosophic value of Crusoe and his remarks in Emile prompted a number of new translations and imitations of Defoe's novel. Robinson is also mentioned in the Social Contract and an implicit link is drawn to Crusoe in La Nouvelle Heloire (1761) : St. Preux, who earlier spent several months on a desert island, likens Julie's secret garden to Juan Fernandez, the very island where Crusoe's prototype, Alexander Selkirk, was marooned. 3 Finally, there are the powerful statements of self-identification with Crusoe which Rousseau makes in each of his major autobiographies, The Confessions, the Dialogues, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Careful study of these references suggests that Rousseau did begin to refashion Defoe's novel to suit his own purposes. The Robinson Crusoe so admired by Rousseau is, in many ways, not the character to be found in Defoe's novel. Rather, Rousseau seems to create two new Crusoes, one for Emile and another for himself as portrayed in his personal writings. Furthermore, each figure represents not simply a modification of Defoe's character, but a new type. It was most likely the inaccurate and incomplete translation of Robinson Crusoe by Saint-Hyacinthe and Van Effen that Rousseau read, yet the failings of this translation cannot alone account for Rousseau's treatment of the story. It seems that Rousseau read the book, for the first time at least, when he was only about fifteen-long before he began serious writing. There is a passage in his ROUSSEAU'S PRAISE OF ROBINSON CRUSOE Confessions which suggests that Rousseau read a copy of Robinson Crusoe from a lending library in Geneva sometime between 1725 and 1728. Though Rousseau mentions no specific titles from this library, he declares that he avidly read all of its contents and that some of the books forcefully affected his imagination : What it [my imagination] did was to nourish itself on situations that had interested me in my reading, recalling them, varying them, combining them, and giving me so great a part in them, that I became one of the characters I imagined, and saw myself always in the pleasantest situations of my own choosing. So, in the end, the fictions I succeeded in building up made me forget my real condition, which so dissatisfied me. My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.' Along with the ideas of self-identification and solitude contained in this passage, the enormous popularity of Crusoe at the time supports this dating of Rousseau's reading. Yet since Rousseau's alterations are neither haphazard nor casual they do not seem to be the result of a fallible memory. On the contrary one strongly suspects that Rousseau reread Crusoe as he was writing about it. My thesis is that Rousseau recreates Crusoe in one way in Emile and in another in his personal writings. (My interest here is with Rousseau's interpretation of the Crusoe tale, not the Defoe novel itself.) For scrutiny of Rousseau's treatment of Crusoe sheds light on his criticism of nascent capitalism and its relation to modern culture. It also suggests that Rousseau considered the recasting of popular literature as a significant moral strategy, one which might serve as a complement to the Platonic censorship defended in the Letterto M. D'Alembert on the Theatre (1758). Finally, study of Rousseau's handling of Crusoe helps to clarify his attitudes toward nature : neglect of Emile has often meant forgetting that the "pere du romanticisme" held a practical as well as an amorous attitude toward nature. The Solitary Walker as Crusoe The image of Crusoe recurs throughout Rousseau's personal writings. For example, in the Confessions Rousseau describes how, when quarantined at Genoa, he chose to be confined alone in the lazaretto and felt "like another Robinson Crusoe" in making arrangements for his stay.5 Rousseau further
This paper will include reflections on my experience working as a political theorist in art museu... more This paper will include reflections on my experience working as a political theorist in art museums, art collections, and art libraries in the US and Europe. What does it mean to work on visual art as a political theorist? How does one go about it? What are some of the treasures and challenges a political theorist is apt to encounter working in places like the Louvre or the Cabinet des Estampes et de la photographie of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France? Does it make sense to count training and expertise in art research methods as a basis for partial fulfillment of the methodology requirement for a Ph.D. in political theory?
This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan ... more This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures-the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is "duly punished"-by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained "unrepresentable" in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. E ver since Carol Duncan identified a crisis in white masculinity in visual images of authority in pre-Revolutionary France (1981), art historians have recognized "male trouble" in French paintings and prints from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A variety of white men who are not adequately masculine according to earlier standards make their appearance in art, including "fallen fathers" disobeyed by their sons and unable to 742 Political Theory carry out their duties, strikingly beautiful highly feminized male adolescents (ephebes), and wounded and defeated veterans of the Napoleonic wars. 1 Culturally valorized codes of white masculinity were thrown into confusion with the weakening of the monarchy, regicide, and the failure of Napoleon's military campaigns. But what about "race," a topic not addressed in this art history literature on altered or failed masculinity? Codes of white masculinity were destabilized in French visual culture just as France was forced to confront new possibilities of black male freedom and agency. A rich new interdisciplinary scholarship on race and slavery in the Francophone Atlantic world is now developing, but not much work has been done on how French visual representations constructed race. 2 In this essay I focus on images of black men and trace changes in the racialized regime of vision that developed in France during the long eighteenth century.
SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Jun 1, 1999
amously analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the restructuring of the socio-symb... more amously analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the restructuring of the socio-symbolic economy of illegalities was a crucial element in the rise of the middle classes in eighteenth-century France (1979). In this essay I explore how art practices participated in this bourgeois "redistribution of illegalities" (Foucault 1979, 87). In my view, the cultural work of recoding criminality in France may be usefully understood as part of a larger cultural "project" of middle-class self-representation.' As the middle classes gained hegemony in eighteenth-century France, the urban poor, particularly the female domestic servant, were increasingly coded in new moral terms as the low other of the bourgeoisie. Middle-class opposition to violations of their own property rights found expression in new visual tropes of homo criminalis, which publicly circulated in paintings and engravings. In a complementary way, by the 1770s and 1780s, the moralizing and politicizing codes operating in bourgeois art practices tended to decriminalize certain acts committed against seigneurial and monarchical privilege.
Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Jan 1, 1994
has recently been published.1 Long needed, this is the first translation to appear in English; it... more has recently been published.1 Long needed, this is the first translation to appear in English; it is a superb translation accurate, lit eral, and highly readable. There are three (or perhaps four) complete manuscripts of Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues and an additional manuscript of the part called the "First Dialogue."
International Political Science Review, Apr 1, 1991
Eighteenth-century France experienced a major shift in the position of women, with new value plac... more Eighteenth-century France experienced a major shift in the position of women, with new value placed on domestic virtue. Analysis of seven representative eighteenth-century French paintings and prints suggests how cultural myths of female identity variously served to uphold and subvert the political, social, and economic status quo. The female gender continues to be reduced to the status of the Other, but now the female Other is increasingly portrayed in a domesticated and privatized way, rather than through gutted classical myths. Non-aristocratic concepts penetrated aristocratic culture through visual art. Spinning and reading become signs which identify middle class females with private domesticity. While feudal folktales and traditional gender inversion images remain popular, representations of poor women produced for privileged audiences begin to change in important ways. For example, the plates of Diderot's Encyclopedie suggest that wage labor outside the home is neither boring nor deforming; the large tractable force of cheap labor demanded by modernity's dreams of rationalist efficiency, new technology, and the industrial age appear in the Encyclopedie plates.
Montesquieu. The analysis shows how the differences between the two authors reflect their differe... more Montesquieu. The analysis shows how the differences between the two authors reflect their different understanding of the value of Christianity. Insofar as Rousseau's attack is directed largely at Montesquieu's prescription for stimulating female vanity as a means of promoting commerce, the disagreement between the two writers points up the complex relationship between femininity and commerce and, as the author argues, translated into contemporary terms, between sexism and capitalism.
This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan ... more This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures-the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is "duly punished"-by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained "unrepresentable" in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist.
Apparent antagonists, assumed to be ideological opposites, Rousseau and Dostoevsky actually share... more Apparent antagonists, assumed to be ideological opposites, Rousseau and Dostoevsky actually share profoundly similar moral outlooks . 1 Each attempts to demonstrate the inadequacy of the rationalism, individualism, scientism and optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment . Their writings marked by an underlying pessimism, both authors argue that human beings are born to suffer ; each sees history as essentially tragic . In the case of Dostoevsky, this tragic quality is mitigated by Christian transcendence . For both, the rejection of certain varieties of rationalism is paralleled by an emphasis on faith and on the value of religious belief, though Dostoevsky's mystic Christianity is very different from the civil religion of Rousseau . Both portray moral goodness as tied to the heart, feelings and true conscience . Each warns that reason twisted by pride may distort moral judgment, yet neither rejects rationality proper . While Dostoevsky depicts characters like Raskolnikov, St...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was deeply impressed by Defoe's 1719 story of Robinson Crusoe-indeed, he wa... more Jean-Jacques Rousseau was deeply impressed by Defoe's 1719 story of Robinson Crusoe-indeed, he was charmed, captivated and, at the same time, troubled by the novel. Rousseau's correspondence of the early 1760s contains the intriguing revelation that during this period he considered writing his own version ofRobinson Crusoe. Not only does an admirer explicitly recommend this idea, but, in addition, Rousseau's publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, asks him, in August 1763 and again inJanuary 1764, whether he should send along a copy of Crusoe so that Rousseau may commence work on it. But Rousseau was deterred from the project mainly by the difficulties he suffered following the condemnation by French and Swiss authorities of the Social Contract (1762) and Emile (1762). In March 1764, Rousseau informs Rey that he will abandon the Robinson project because he no longer has the courage or strength for such work. I Although Rousseau never wrote his own full-length version of Crusoe, his writings are replete with Crusoe references. Best known is the influential and extraordinary praise given to Robinson Crusoe in Emile where the tutor lauds Defoe's novel as "the most felicitous treatise on natural education" ever written .z Rousseau was apparently the first to indicate the broad philosophic value of Crusoe and his remarks in Emile prompted a number of new translations and imitations of Defoe's novel. Robinson is also mentioned in the Social Contract and an implicit link is drawn to Crusoe in La Nouvelle Heloire (1761) : St. Preux, who earlier spent several months on a desert island, likens Julie's secret garden to Juan Fernandez, the very island where Crusoe's prototype, Alexander Selkirk, was marooned. 3 Finally, there are the powerful statements of self-identification with Crusoe which Rousseau makes in each of his major autobiographies, The Confessions, the Dialogues, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Careful study of these references suggests that Rousseau did begin to refashion Defoe's novel to suit his own purposes. The Robinson Crusoe so admired by Rousseau is, in many ways, not the character to be found in Defoe's novel. Rather, Rousseau seems to create two new Crusoes, one for Emile and another for himself as portrayed in his personal writings. Furthermore, each figure represents not simply a modification of Defoe's character, but a new type. It was most likely the inaccurate and incomplete translation of Robinson Crusoe by Saint-Hyacinthe and Van Effen that Rousseau read, yet the failings of this translation cannot alone account for Rousseau's treatment of the story. It seems that Rousseau read the book, for the first time at least, when he was only about fifteen-long before he began serious writing. There is a passage in his ROUSSEAU'S PRAISE OF ROBINSON CRUSOE Confessions which suggests that Rousseau read a copy of Robinson Crusoe from a lending library in Geneva sometime between 1725 and 1728. Though Rousseau mentions no specific titles from this library, he declares that he avidly read all of its contents and that some of the books forcefully affected his imagination : What it [my imagination] did was to nourish itself on situations that had interested me in my reading, recalling them, varying them, combining them, and giving me so great a part in them, that I became one of the characters I imagined, and saw myself always in the pleasantest situations of my own choosing. So, in the end, the fictions I succeeded in building up made me forget my real condition, which so dissatisfied me. My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.' Along with the ideas of self-identification and solitude contained in this passage, the enormous popularity of Crusoe at the time supports this dating of Rousseau's reading. Yet since Rousseau's alterations are neither haphazard nor casual they do not seem to be the result of a fallible memory. On the contrary one strongly suspects that Rousseau reread Crusoe as he was writing about it. My thesis is that Rousseau recreates Crusoe in one way in Emile and in another in his personal writings. (My interest here is with Rousseau's interpretation of the Crusoe tale, not the Defoe novel itself.) For scrutiny of Rousseau's treatment of Crusoe sheds light on his criticism of nascent capitalism and its relation to modern culture. It also suggests that Rousseau considered the recasting of popular literature as a significant moral strategy, one which might serve as a complement to the Platonic censorship defended in the Letterto M. D'Alembert on the Theatre (1758). Finally, study of Rousseau's handling of Crusoe helps to clarify his attitudes toward nature : neglect of Emile has often meant forgetting that the "pere du romanticisme" held a practical as well as an amorous attitude toward nature. The Solitary Walker as Crusoe The image of Crusoe recurs throughout Rousseau's personal writings. For example, in the Confessions Rousseau describes how, when quarantined at Genoa, he chose to be confined alone in the lazaretto and felt "like another Robinson Crusoe" in making arrangements for his stay.5 Rousseau further
This paper will include reflections on my experience working as a political theorist in art museu... more This paper will include reflections on my experience working as a political theorist in art museums, art collections, and art libraries in the US and Europe. What does it mean to work on visual art as a political theorist? How does one go about it? What are some of the treasures and challenges a political theorist is apt to encounter working in places like the Louvre or the Cabinet des Estampes et de la photographie of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France? Does it make sense to count training and expertise in art research methods as a basis for partial fulfillment of the methodology requirement for a Ph.D. in political theory?
This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan ... more This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures-the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is "duly punished"-by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained "unrepresentable" in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. E ver since Carol Duncan identified a crisis in white masculinity in visual images of authority in pre-Revolutionary France (1981), art historians have recognized "male trouble" in French paintings and prints from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A variety of white men who are not adequately masculine according to earlier standards make their appearance in art, including "fallen fathers" disobeyed by their sons and unable to 742 Political Theory carry out their duties, strikingly beautiful highly feminized male adolescents (ephebes), and wounded and defeated veterans of the Napoleonic wars. 1 Culturally valorized codes of white masculinity were thrown into confusion with the weakening of the monarchy, regicide, and the failure of Napoleon's military campaigns. But what about "race," a topic not addressed in this art history literature on altered or failed masculinity? Codes of white masculinity were destabilized in French visual culture just as France was forced to confront new possibilities of black male freedom and agency. A rich new interdisciplinary scholarship on race and slavery in the Francophone Atlantic world is now developing, but not much work has been done on how French visual representations constructed race. 2 In this essay I focus on images of black men and trace changes in the racialized regime of vision that developed in France during the long eighteenth century.
SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Jun 1, 1999
amously analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the restructuring of the socio-symb... more amously analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, the restructuring of the socio-symbolic economy of illegalities was a crucial element in the rise of the middle classes in eighteenth-century France (1979). In this essay I explore how art practices participated in this bourgeois "redistribution of illegalities" (Foucault 1979, 87). In my view, the cultural work of recoding criminality in France may be usefully understood as part of a larger cultural "project" of middle-class self-representation.' As the middle classes gained hegemony in eighteenth-century France, the urban poor, particularly the female domestic servant, were increasingly coded in new moral terms as the low other of the bourgeoisie. Middle-class opposition to violations of their own property rights found expression in new visual tropes of homo criminalis, which publicly circulated in paintings and engravings. In a complementary way, by the 1770s and 1780s, the moralizing and politicizing codes operating in bourgeois art practices tended to decriminalize certain acts committed against seigneurial and monarchical privilege.
Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Jan 1, 1994
has recently been published.1 Long needed, this is the first translation to appear in English; it... more has recently been published.1 Long needed, this is the first translation to appear in English; it is a superb translation accurate, lit eral, and highly readable. There are three (or perhaps four) complete manuscripts of Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues and an additional manuscript of the part called the "First Dialogue."
International Political Science Review, Apr 1, 1991
Eighteenth-century France experienced a major shift in the position of women, with new value plac... more Eighteenth-century France experienced a major shift in the position of women, with new value placed on domestic virtue. Analysis of seven representative eighteenth-century French paintings and prints suggests how cultural myths of female identity variously served to uphold and subvert the political, social, and economic status quo. The female gender continues to be reduced to the status of the Other, but now the female Other is increasingly portrayed in a domesticated and privatized way, rather than through gutted classical myths. Non-aristocratic concepts penetrated aristocratic culture through visual art. Spinning and reading become signs which identify middle class females with private domesticity. While feudal folktales and traditional gender inversion images remain popular, representations of poor women produced for privileged audiences begin to change in important ways. For example, the plates of Diderot's Encyclopedie suggest that wage labor outside the home is neither boring nor deforming; the large tractable force of cheap labor demanded by modernity's dreams of rationalist efficiency, new technology, and the industrial age appear in the Encyclopedie plates.
Montesquieu. The analysis shows how the differences between the two authors reflect their differe... more Montesquieu. The analysis shows how the differences between the two authors reflect their different understanding of the value of Christianity. Insofar as Rousseau's attack is directed largely at Montesquieu's prescription for stimulating female vanity as a means of promoting commerce, the disagreement between the two writers points up the complex relationship between femininity and commerce and, as the author argues, translated into contemporary terms, between sexism and capitalism.
Uploads
Papers by Mary Bellhouse