Voyages Towards Utopia: Mapping Utopian Spaces in Early-Modern French Prose

Voyages Towards Utopia: Mapping Utopian Spaces in Early-Modern French Prose

Voyages Towards Utopia: Mapping Utopian Spaces in Early-Modern French Prose By Bonnie Griffin Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in French Literature March 31st, 2020 Nashville, TN Approved: Holly Tucker, PhD Lynn Ramey, PhD Paul Miller, PhD Katherine Crawford, PhD DEDICATIONS To my incredibly loving and patient wife, my supportive family, encouraging adviser, and dear friends: thank you for everything—from entertaining my excited ramblings about French utopia, looking at strange engravings of monsters on maps with me, and believing in my project. You encouraged me to keep working and watched me create my life’s most significant work yet. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my adviser and mentor Holly Tucker, who provided me with the encouragement, helpful feedback, expert time-management advice, and support I needed to get to this point. I am also tremendously grateful to my committee members Lynn Ramey, Paul Miller, and Katie Crawford. I am indebted to the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, for granting me the necessary space, time, and resources to prioritize my dissertation. I wish to thank the Department of French and Italian, for taking a chance on a young undergrad. I also wish to acknowledge the Vanderbilt University Special Collections team of archivists and librarians, for facilitating my access to the texts that would substantially inform and inspire my studies, as well as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I also wish to thank Laura Dossett and Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller for helping me through the necessary processes involved in preparing for my defense. I must also thank Three Brothers Coffee, Red Bicycle, The Black Press, and 8th & Roast for providing the caffeine and working space necessary to undertake dissertation writing. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….iv Chapter Introduction ................................................................................................................................1 The Travel Narrative Tradition in Early Modern France ..........................................................2 The First Phase: “Real” Voyages..........................................................................................3 The Second Phase: Fantastic Imitations ................................................................................6 The Third Phase: Imagination Before Authenticity ...............................................................9 Imaginary Voyages and Utopia: Common Ground ............................................................... 11 My Approach: Gender and Sexuality in the Imaginary Voyage .............................................. 13 Methodology: Physical and Allegorical Voyages Towards Utopia ........................................ 16 Chapter Descriptions ............................................................................................................. 20 Chapter 1: Utopian Voyages to the Terre Australe: Writing Society on Blank Spaces ........ 20 Chapter 2: Achieving the Utopia of Ideal Masculinity with Moderation ............................. 24 Chapter 3: Mapping the Geography of Queer Utopia in L’Autre Monde ............................. 26 Chapter 4: The Utopian Function of Negativity: Anti-Social Refusal in Lettres d’une Péruvienne ......................................................................................................................... 27 Imaginary Voyages: Pertinence and Possibility ...................................................................... 29 1. Utopian Voyages to the Terre Australe: Writing Society on Blank Spaces ............................. 31 Mythology and Monsters of the Terre Australe ...................................................................... 34 Theories of the Terre Australe ............................................................................................... 37 Cartography of the Terre Australe ......................................................................................... 41 The Terre Australe in Voyage Accounts ................................................................................ 47 The (Austral) World, According to Veiras and Foigny ........................................................... 53 L’Histoire des Sévarambes, a Man’s World........................................................................ 54 La Terre Australe Connue: Societal and Personal Utopia ................................................... 80 2. Achieving the Utopia of Ideal Masculinity with Moderation .................................................. 97 The Danger of Lack: Threats to Masculinity on Venus’ and Calypso’s Islands .................... 107 ii King Pygmalion as the Embodiment of Excessive Masculinity ............................................ 128 Achieving Utopia: Télémaque’s Fulfillment of Ideal Masculinity ........................................ 135 3. Mapping the Geography of Queer Utopia in L’Autre Monde................................................ 151 Generating Possibilities: Male Pregnancy in L’Autre Monde ................................................ 174 Running with the Devil: Dyrcona and the Démon de Socrate ............................................... 181 Death (and Sex) at a Funeral: The Philosopher’s Death ....................................................... 186 Les Arbres Amants: Rewriting Love’s Origin Story ............................................................ 196 4. The Utopian Function of Negativity: Anti-Social Refusal in Lettres d’une Péruvienne ........ 208 Departure: Torn from Utopia ............................................................................................... 224 First Encounters: Zilia at Court ............................................................................................ 229 The (Mis)Education of Céline de Déterville ......................................................................... 234 Day-to-Day Duties in the French Court ................................................................................ 241 Marriage, Courtship, and Other Dystopia ............................................................................. 244 Achieving Anti-Social Utopia .............................................................................................. 259 5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 274 Appendix A: ........................................................................................................................... 296 Travel Narratives in Special Collections .................................................................................. 296 Yale Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library ........................................................... 296 Wachs Collection, Vanderbilt University ............................................................................. 296 Appendix B: ............................................................................................................................ 299 PhD Reading List .................................................................................................................... 299 Appendix C: Figures ............................................................................................................... 303 Maps and Images .................................................................................................................... 303 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 312 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1…………………………………………………………………………………………………302 2………………………………………………………………...……………………………….302 3……………………………………………………………………………………..…………..303 4……………………………………………………………………………...………………….303 5…………………………………………………………………………………………………304 6…………………………………………………………………………………………………304 7…………………………………………………………………………………………………305 8…………………………………………………………………………………………………306 9…………………………………………………………………………………………………307 10………………………………………………………………………………………………..308 11………………………………………………………………………………………………..309 12………………………………………………………………………..…………….………...310 iv INTRODUCTION “L’Homme ne porte aucun caractère plus naturel, que le désir de pénétrer dans ce qu’on estime difficile, & de comprendre ce qui paraît à plusieurs inaccessible.”1 In the chaos of a wild storm, a rogue wave drives Jacques Sadeur’s ship into a rock, cleaving it in half. He falls unconscious clinging to the wreckage. When he wakes, he finds himself floating near an uninhabited island. After eating strange fruit to restore his energy, he explores his surroundings. Suddenly, giant monstrous birds engage him in a fight to the death. He kills one of the birds but is severely wounded. Fortunately, a boat full of guards arrives from a neighboring land. The guards welcome him as their savior for killing the beast and tend to his wounds. As he recovers, he discovers that the inhabitants of this foreign land are all hermaphrodites; that is, they all possess “les deux sexes,” and only welcomed him into their hidden society because Sadeur is himself a hermaphrodite. After recovering from his harrowing journey and unexpected rescue, Sadeur proceeds to explore the austral society. While this story may read as a fever dream, Gabriel Foigny insists in his Au Lecteur that he shares

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