Michele Longino. Orientalism in French Classical Drama.

(Cambridge Studies in French, 69.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xii + 274 pp. index. illus. bibl. $70. ISBN: 0-521-80721-2.

Michele Longino's absorbing investigation is innovative in the field of French studies. Studies on the Greek theater have explored similar areas, for example in Edith Hall's Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition Through Tragedy (1989), which links the staging of the "other" to the formation of an Athenian identity. Such connections are clearly worthy of exploration in relation to seventeenth-century France, another highly "theatrical" era. Longino examines ways in which the staged presence of the Ottoman armed seventeenth-century France to undertake colonial endeavors throughout the world by presenting the French with an image of themselves. At this time, France required the rhetorical and ideological tools to begin colonial projects in the New World. The device for this was the Mediterranean Ottoman. The theater was the place in which the French defined themselves in relation to this other, and by extension all outsiders. In short, the staging of the "other" leads to a sense of "Frenchness." This moment in French history, thus, with its fascination for the exotic, "represents a crucial phase in the development of a collective French identity" (1). Longino links her thesis to modern concerns by noting that this narrative remains part of France's identity, and that it "requires dismantling or at the least close scrutiny if colonialism is truly to be relegated to the past" (8).

Each of the five sections treats ways in which audiences received notions necessary for colonialism. In chapter 1, "Medee and the traveler-savant," Longino composes a portrait of theater's role in the creation of a "traveler-informant / nascent civil servant / anthropologist" through Corneille's early play (9). From here, chapter 2 treats Le Cid and "the usefulness of the 'Other' as the alien yet essential coalescing force in mediating domestic politics" (9). The following section discusses translation, diplomacy, commerce, and class structure in Moliere's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Chapter 4 places Corneille's Tire et Berenice and Racine's Berenice in juxtaposition and examines geography, gender, and East-West relations. The final chapter is a reading of Racine's Bajazet in relation to correspondence, lines of contact, the double standard, and questions of military policy.

Longino is a careful and innovative reader of texts. Her convincing analysis of Medee, for example, sees Corneille's version of the title character as a way in which the French are introduced to the figure of "the 'barbare,' the freak, the outsider who reassures others of their normalcy--their insider status" (68). In another instance, she interestingly treats Pollux's presence in the play by reading him as "the early incidental anthropologist" (35). Each chapter begins with a description of the play or plays at hand, and a series of pertinent "questions to ponder." For example, following her descriptions of Tire et Berenice and Berenice, she attracts the reader's attention to textual anomalies by asking "representation of East-West rivalry in the setting up of Judea/Palestine/Commagene tensions with Rome" (149). These prefatory elements serve to focus her argument, but they also have a second function: they enlarge the possible audience of the text to readers outside of the relatively small circle of dix-septiemistes by keying them in on the major elements of the plays, and pointing them to areas of possible reflection.

The text left this reader with a lingering question concerning the New World. Longino convincingly argues that these plays served the necessary formation of French "colonial identity in other parts of the world," born of the establishment of footholds in "the Chesapeake Bay (Annapolis, 1603), in Quebec (1608), in Guyana (1609)," among other enterprises (225, 2-3). If this is the case, then what were the applications of this collective French identity in the New World (225)? In sum, how did the French act out on the stage of America the notions of themselves and the "other" provided by the theatrical Orient? Although Longino might have discussed these applications, it is true that they are peripheral to her major argument. By leaving these elements out, as with all important studies, her focused, clever, and accessible work leads to questions which will certainly elicit further research in this area.

BRIAN BRAZEAU

The American University of Paris 

France