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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - Recycling and Reembodying, Twining and Untwining

  • Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Embodied Experience in British and French Literature, 1778–1814
    Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025, pp 159-209
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  • Summary

    This chapter charts how Paul et Virginie manifests the degradation in the human – thing relationship from intimacy to estrangement; I further show how later artists and writers reincarnate the novel in “after-books” and in “after-art”—wallpaper, paintings, fans and plates. The novel’s insistence on splitting body from spirit, sexuality from virtue, and human from nonhuman leads to sacrificing the heroine’s life to reinforce the illusion of female purity. This sacrifice reinstates binaries partially transcended in the novel’s earlier sections when the characters’ respect for and kinesthetic engagement with the environment intensifies love and gives them the right to belong with each other and with the nonhuman. The chapter argues that after-things reimagine Bernardin’s novel in fresh ways, all of them contending with Paul et Virginie’s ultimate dualism: some recapitulate or complicate that binary thinking; some obliterate Bernardin’s protest against enslavement; and others forge a belonging with between human and nonhuman by restoring Paul and Virginie to life and happiness.