SOURCE: Moscovici, Claudia. “Hybridity and Ethics in Chateaubriand's Atala.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 29, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 2001): 197-216.

[In the following essay, Moscovici argues that Atala challenges French Romanticism's dichotomy between nature and culture in its representations of Western and Native American cultures. Rather than positioning these cultures as ethical opposites—with the implicit superiority of Western culture—Chateaubriand's work offers a model of hybrid cultural identity.]

The figure of the noble savage constitutes one of the defining features of French Romanticism. As contemporary criticism points out, this figure is riddled with ambivalence. While savage cultures may epitomize an innocent state of nature by way of contrast to a dissolute Western civilization, they also represent a less developed social organization that makes Western societies appear superior by comparison. Rousseau's works perhaps best capture the philosophical ambivalence of early Romantic representations of savage cultures.¹ On the one hand, Rousseau praises the supposed moral innocence of the noble savage. He regards this figure as the origin of Western civilization before it became corrupted by private property and the greed, artifice, and despotic governments that developed as a result of it. On the other hand, Rousseau maintains, the noble savage cannot be considered either moral or immoral.² Rather than making ethical choices between good and evil, he is motivated by both positive (or other-regarding) and negative (or selfish) impulses.³ As Rousseau indicates in Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), only civilized man has the potential to function as an autonomous and group-oriented moral and political being who interacts on a par with other citizens in a republican society.⁴ Consequently, Rousseau's seemingly paradoxical representation of the contrast between nature and civilization—whereby he simultaneously praises and deprecates the noble savage—depends largely upon a binary normative model.

From one perspective, Rousseau's ethical vision may appear nuanced and even impartial. Both civilized and savage people are capable of positive and negative sentiments; both can engage in good and bad actions. From another perspective, however, it is clear that only civilized man can be judged good or evil; the noble savage is simply amoral. The true opposition established by Rousseau is therefore not, as it would seem, between the virtue of nature and the evil of culture or vice versa, but rather between the applicability of normative standards to culture and their irrelevance in nature. The notion of civilized man—be he depicted as good, evil, or a mixture of both characteristics—entails, quite literally, the negation of the amorality associated with the state of nature. Otherwise put, the savage represents the lack of morality. Because only the ethical status of civilized man matters, the noble savage acquires an admittedly instrumental function in Rousseau's works.⁵ That is, the figure of noble savage is not an object of study in itself, but rather, as Rousseau himself indicates, a hypothetical model employed to imagine the origin of Western civilization and to identify errors in its moral development.

While Rousseau may be the best known philosopher of the early Romantic dichotomy between nature and culture, Chateaubriand gives this distinction its most popular literary voice.⁶ Unlike Rousseau, however, in his descriptions of the contrast between “l'homme sauvage” and “l'homme civilisé” Chateaubriand is concerned with the moral status of both. He assumes that, whatever their differences may be, so-called civilized and primitive societies are not ethical opposites.⁷ The recognition of all cultures as forms of civilization may be attributed, in part, to Chateaubriand's travels throughout the world. More specifically, in 1791 Chateaubriand visited North America. Upon his return to France, he wrote a travel narrative that he subsequently transformed into the novels Atala (1801) and René (1802).⁸Atala in particular, I will argue, challenges a representation of Western and Native American cultures as ethical opposites. While beginning Atala with the familiar contrast between savage nature and European culture, by the end of the novel Chateaubriand transforms this polarity into a more complex model of hybrid cultural identity. What does the concept of hybridity entail and how is it formed? To address this question, it is necessary to take a brief detour into contemporary theory. Thus, before turning to Atala, I will set up the theoretical framework of my argument by explaining how both modern and contemporary texts share a dialectical, or “hybrid,” model of cultural identity.

In Colonial Desire, Robert Young traces the genealogy of the “hybrid” from its botanical, zoological and anthropological origins during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to its contemporary use in postcolonial criticism as a trope of subversion of colonial discourse. Young observes that eighteenth-century discourse employed the term “hybrid” to describe a biological grafting together of different plants to the point where their difference is no longer discernible. During the nineteenth century, the term hybridity acquired racial connotations by referring to the union of different species or races understood as opposites. In both cases, according to Young, hybridity “describes a dialectical articulation” (23). He elaborates:

At its simplest, hybridity … implies a disruption and forcing together of any unlike living things, grafting a vine or rose on to a different rootstock, making difference into sameness. Hybridity is a making one of two distinct things, so that it becomes impossible for the eye to detect the hybridity of a geranium or a rose. … Hybridization can also consist of the forcing of a single entity into two or more parts, a severing of a single object into two, turning sameness into difference.⁹

What does Young mean by depicting the formation of hybrid identity as “dialectical”? Let us unpack this statement. As criticism on the subject of race demonstrates,¹⁰ in colonial discourse racial categories are produced by means of a process of negation that begins with a Western subject who is assumed to be the standard of humanity. This subject acquires specific cultural characteristics by rejecting (or negating) the qualities associated with other, non-Western subjects.¹¹ To offer a typical example, the category of a “rational” Western subject is created by negating irrationality from its definition and projecting that quality upon a non-Western subject. In this semiotic relation, the non-Western subject has no identity of its own acquired, in turn, by means of the negation of Western characteristics. Colonial discourse therefore utilizes what could be called a “single dialectical process” to depict non-Western subjects as non-subjects.

The goal of reaching a pure Western subject by means of a dialectical process of negation of non-Western characteristics, however, is doomed to failure. In fact, reading cultural identity in terms of the dialectic leads us to acknowledge the fundamental hybridity of cultures. When one culture requires the exclusion of qualities associated with another culture to create its own semiotic and national boundaries, the excluded culture becomes part and parcel of its own definition. In depending upon the negation of other cultural identities, it stands to reason that the category of “us” simultaneously incorporates the concept of “non-us” or “them.” If we pursue the logic of the dialectic, we are led to the conclusion that the categories “us” and “them” used to draw racial, ethnic or national distinctions are not only semantically interrelated, but also inseparable.¹² In other words, insofar as it depends upon a dialectical articulation, cultural identity is inherently hybrid.

So far, however, we have only examined one kind of hybridity, achieved by means of a single dialectic, whereby two cultures are positioned in hierarchical and oppositional relations to each other. This observation raises the following question: is there a way of conceptualizing cultural relations without relying upon a dialectical model suitable for describing only cultural hierarchies? In other words, how are more symmetrical power relations between radically different cultures formed? This is precisely the line of inquiry pursued by contemporary postcolonial scholarship.

Twentieth-century criticism that addresses the subject of race has identified the problems inherent in conceptualizing the relationship between Western Self and non-Western Other as a single dialectic. Nonetheless, as Young observes, by regarding racial categories as unchangeable, the criticism of Sartre, Fanon, and Memmi, for example, “has constructed two antithetical groups, the colonizer and the colonized, self and Other, with the second only knowable through a necessarily false representation, a Manichean division that threatens to reproduce the static, essentialist categories it seeks to undo” (5). Cultural contact and fusion, Young maintains, follow a more complicated semiotic process that unsettles such binary racial categories. According to Young, by way of contrast to early twentieth-century criticism, contemporary theory employs the concept of hybridity to challenge both the notion of harmonious intercultural unity and that of absolute cultural distinctions.¹³

Edward Said, for instance, notes that in a dialectical relationship between two “opposite” cultures, races or societies,

Hybridity … becomes a third term which can never in fact be third because, as a monstrous inversion, a miscreated perversion of its progenitors, it exhausts the differences between them. This doubled hybridity has been distinguished as a model that can be used to account for the form of syncretism that characterizes all postcolonial literatures and cultures.¹⁴

What does Said mean by describing hybridity as “a third term,” “a monstrous inversion” and “doubled”? I believe that he is taking the dialectical process that produces racial categories in colonial and even postcolonial discourse a step further than his theoretical predecessors, most notably Sartre and Fanon. In so doing, Said literally doubles the single dialectic. We have already seen that a single dialectic describes hierarchical relations between “us” and “non-us.” To reiterate, such a model describes the semiotic process whereby one group acquires a positive identity by negating the qualities that it projects upon another group.

By way of contrast, a doubled dialectic describes the semiotic process whereby two groups acquire cultural identity by excluding from their self-definition qualities that are associated with a so-called “opposite” group. Because the double dialectic describes relations of reciprocity, it shifts away from a paradigm of cultural identity that revolves around a Western subject. Indeed, as contemporary scholars justifiably point out, postcolonial societies do not represent themselves only in terms of lacking Western characteristics, as a single dialectical model of culture would suggest. Insofar as they differentiate themselves from the West, postcolonial societies do so in order to establish what could be called a “positive identity”—that is, their own cultural characteristics. The fact that two cultures—let us say, for example, a former colony and a former colonial power—define themselves in opposition to each other does not, of course, necessarily imply that they have equal power once decolonization takes place. It does suggest, however, that despite a potential difference in power, they both regard themselves as unique and important societies in their own right. The double dialectic is thus particularly appropriate for mapping out both the hierarchical and the non-hierarchical relations between cultures which define our postcolonial world. In addition, the double dialectic depicts a process of cultural mixture that poses a challenge to models of cultural purity. As noted, the dialectic depicts the process whereby two cultures that are regarded as opposites simultaneously negate and incorporate the qualities associated with their counterparts. In so doing, the double dialectic outlines a semiotic process of cultural mixture or hybridity. If we assume cultures to be inherently hybrid, however, are we led to the conclusion that we have reached a postmodern era beyond cultural identity? Even those scholars who are most sympathetic to the deconstruction of identity respond with caution. Young, for example, identifies the continuities between what could be called the single dialectical models of culture that characterize colonial discourse and current double dialectical ones:

Hybridity in particular shows the connections between the racial categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourse: it may be used in different ways, given different inflections and apparently discrete references, but it always reiterates and reinforces the dynamics of the same conflictual economy whose tensions and divisions it re-enacts in its own antithetical structure.

(27)

Clearly, Young cautions, the hybrid is not a utopic (or dystopic) concept beyond race, ethnicity or other forms of cultural identification. On the contrary, the dialectical process of forming a hybrid identity illustrates that even a fusion of two cultures does not eliminate their differences, as a facile understanding of the dialectic as a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis would suggest. Rather, by simultaneously incorporating and negating select qualities of its component cultures, a hybrid culture simultaneously preserves and cancels the difference between them.

We are therefore led to conclude, along with Young, that the concept of hybridity—be it understood as an asymmetrical power relation between two societies (as in the single dialectic) or as a potentially symmetrical one (as in the double dialectic)—“shows that we are still locked into parts of the ideological network of a culture that we think and presume that we surpassed” (27). Having described the two ways in which relationships between cultures can be conceptualized in terms of the dialectic, let me now turn to the second line of inquiry pursued by this essay: namely, how does an understanding of culture as intrinsically mixed provide some viable ethical solution to the impasse between universalism and cultural relativism? More specifically, Atala considers the following problem: if we assume that no culture is pure, what are the ethical implications of cultural hybridity upon the manner different societies represent and interact with each other?

The novel provides an illuminating answer to this question by depicting the relationship between the allegorical figures of Chactas, a Natchez who was raised by a Spanish general, and Atala, an American Indian princess, who, as it turns out, is the natural daughter of that general. I call the characters of Atala and Chactas “allegorical” because they clearly represent more than two Romantic figures coping with the consequences of Spanish colonialism. Chateaubriand uses the ethnically mixed characters of Atala and Chactas to reflect upon the ethical implications of any colonial ventures, anticipating France's own expansion under the Napoleonic empire.¹⁵ The clashes between two radically different cultures which are manifested on a psychological level in the moral struggles of Chactas and Atala raise the following, more general, questions: is Europe's own civilizing mission ethically justified? If so, on what grounds? Is cultural union possible in a colonial context? If so, what form does it take? This essay will examine how Atala¹⁶ observes a dialectical narrative process to lead from an understanding of identity as hybrid¹⁷ to what could be called an ethics of cultural complexity, which assumes that no society is either evil or ideal.

The novel begins with a prologue that expresses a nostalgia for the Spanish colonial period. “La France possédait autrefois, dans l'Amérique septentrionale,” the narrator informs us, “un vaste empire qui s'étendait depuis le Labrador jusqu'aux Florides, et depuis les rivages de l'Atlantique jusqu'aux lacs les plus reculés du haut Canada” (39). The middle part of North America appears, at the outset, not only as the absence of the advanced culture represented by colonial Spain, but also as the lack of any civilization whatsoever. America, in other words, represents an empty wilderness. The nostalgia for empire is thus cast not in terms of conquest of other societies, but rather in terms of the civilized man's return to the purity of nature.¹⁸ Nature symbolizes the universal cradle of humanity, an Eden where civilized man may rediscover his lost innocence: “Mais la grâce est toujours unie à la magnificence dans les scènes de la nature,” continues the narrator (40). “[T]andis que le courant du milieu entraîne vers la mer les cadavres des pins et des chênes, on voit sur les deux courants latéraux remonter le long des rivages, des îles flottantes de pistia et de nénuphar” (40). No sooner has the narrator sung this éloge to an unpopulated, nurturing nature that lacks any signs of civilization, however, than he anthropomorphizes the natural scene. Nature no longer symbolizes the absence of civilization. Instead, it mirrors the opposition between the two cultures that populate the North American territory: the Orient and the Occident.

Correspondingly, nature adopts the supposed characteristics of its inhabitants on each side of the river that divides the North American territory. On the Spanish side, the lush, orderly and prosperous landscape invites a proprietary and admiring glance “sur la grandeur de ses ondes, et la sauvage abondance de ses rives” (41). The Oriental side of the river displays features that are the very contrary of the Occidental natural environment. “Telle est la scène sur le bord occidental,” the narrator pursues, “mais elle change sur le bord opposé, et forme avec la première un admirable contraste” (41). On this side, nature is disorderly, entangled, blending incongruously yet beautifully a vast array of wild trees and flowers to create an enticing pallette of colors and odors: “Suspendus sur le cours des eaux, groupés sur les rochers et sur les montagnes, dispersés dans les vallées, des arbres de toutes les formes, de toutes les couleurs, de tous les parfums, se mêlent, croissent ensemble, montent dans les airs à des hauteurs qui fatiguent les regards” (41).

Chateaubriand's description of the animal kingdom dramatizes the same striking contrast between Orient and Occident as the vegetation. Whereas,

tout est silence et repos dans les savanes de l'autre côté du fleuve, tout ici, au contraire, est mouvement et murmure: des coups de bec contre le tronc de chênes, des froissements d'animaux qui marchent … des bruissement d'ondes, de faibles gémissements, de sourds meuglements, de doux roucoulements remplissent ces déserts d'une tendre et sauvage harmonie.

(42)

The polarization between Occident and Orient (or civilization and savagery) delineated by the description of the natural environment conforms, I would argue, to the logic of the single dialectic. That is to say, the text begins with a description of the Occident and depicts the Orient only as its negation. According to this paradigm, if the Occident is orderly, then the Orient is disorderly; if the Occident is calm and quiet, then the Orient is frenetic and noisy. The Occident thus acquires cultural characteristics only insofar as it excludes certain qualities—such as disorder and noise—that are projected upon the Orient. I intend to show, however, that Atala begins with this binary opposition between Occident and Orient only to set up the single dialectical model of culture which it will subsequently undermine and double.

Indeed, the characters who populate this polarized setting are the products of cultural mixture. Chactas, for instance, has not only been brought up by a Spanish father and an American Indian mother, but also has lived in both Europe and North America. In a fast-paced biographical introduction, readers are informed that Chactas was,

Retenu aux galères à Marseille par une cruelle injustice, rendu à la liberté, présenté à Louis XIV, il avait conversé avec les grands hommes de ce siècle et assisté aux fêtes de Versailles, aux tragédies de Racine, aux oraisons funèbres de Bossuet, en un mot, le Sauvage avait contemplé la société à son plus haut point de splendeur.

(43)

Clearly, Chactas is both insider and outsider to European society. Initially perceived as an outsider and enemy by the French, he was arrested and imprisoned. At the same time, when it served French colonial interests, Louis XIV regarded Chactas's hybrid background as a useful liaison between France and North American Indian tribes and consequently invited him to Versailles.

Impressed with the splendor of European courts as much as he is disappointed by their despotism, Chactas displays an ambivalent attitude toward Europe, combining criticism and respect. Based upon his life experiences, Chactas ultimately decides to regard each culture as composed of a series of relatively unique individuals rather than as a homogeneous and unified mass. At the same time, he only identifies one virtuous Frenchman—Fenélon—among many who are unjust.¹⁹ Based upon this particular example, “Malgré les nombreuses injustices que Chactas avait éprouvées de la part des Français, il les aimait. Il se souvenait toujours de Fénelon, dont il avait été l'hôte, et désirait pouvoir quelque service aux compatriotes de cet homme vertueux” (38).

Understanding culture as both ethnically mixed and ethically complex, Chactas implies, does not involve either denying cultural differences or blurring the moral distinction between good and evil. Chactas invokes the trope of the chiasmus to explain to René the dialectical process that transformed both of them into hybrid individuals:

C'est une singulière destinée, mon cher fils, que celle qui nous réunit. Je vois en toi l'homme civilisé qui s'est fait sauvage; tu vois en moi l'homme sauvage, que le grand Esprit … a voulu civiliser.

(47)

What does Chactas mean by describing their destiny in terms of the chiasmus? As is well known, in poetics, the figure of the chiasmus refers to a structure in which elements are repeated in reverse. Employing this figure as a dialectical scheme, Chactas regards himself and René as ethnic inverses. Whereas René rejected (or negated) his European heritage to acquire a Native American identity, Chactas rejected (or negated) his Native American identity to become Europeanized. Clearly, the chiasmic inversion between Chactas and Atala only makes sense if one assumes Native American and European identities to be semantic and cultural opposites. That is, the distinction between men like René and men like Chactas depends upon a process of reciprocal negation which I have called a double dialectic. Producing European identity—or the attributes of “l'homme civilisé”—requires negating the qualities associated with “l'homme sauvage” and vice versa.

Despite its reliance upon binary distinctions, the logic of the double dialectic undermines the stereotypical contrast between “l'homme civilisé” and “l'homme sauvage” that it initially creates. First, as mentioned, the very opposition between civilized and savage men requires selective incorporation. The concept of civilization semiotically necessitates, and thus includes, the negation of the concept of the savage and vice versa. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Chactas both incorporates and negates elements of his American Indian heritage in order to become Europeanized. Similarly, René both incorporates and negates elements of his European heritage in order to become Native American.²⁰ This process of mutual negation and selective incorporation of opposing qualities therefore obscures, without completely eliminating, cultural differences. In so doing, the double dialectic creates what I have called hybrid individuals and societies. Because they assimilate and reject elements of two distinct cultures, hybrid individuals have a unique vantage point from which to understand and criticize both their own and foreign societies: “Entrés l'un et l'autre dans la carrière de la vie par les deux bouts opposés,” Chactas remarks, “tu es venu te reposer à ma place, et j'ai été m'asseoir à la tienne: ainsi nous avons dû avoir des objets une vue totalement différente” (47).

Chactas's reflections concerning the inverse paths pursued by himself and René disclose yet another advantage of understanding the formation of cultural identity as a double dialectic. As we have seen, such a process of reciprocal negation and incorporation of given cultural characteristics between savage and civilized men does not have to imply hierarchy. In a double dialectical relationship, both cultures are taken as “positive terms”—meaning concepts that acquire meaning by eliminating characteristics associated with their cultural opposites. Assuming the European and Native American cultures to have equivalent value, Chactas identifies the advantages of hybridization without, however, deciding who—himself or Réne—has benefited most from cultural mixture. He thus concludes the description of the chiasmus (or double dialectic) with the genuinely open question: “Qui, de toi ou de moi, a le plus gagné ou le plus perdu à ce changement de position? C'est ce que savent les Génies dont le moins savant a plus de sagesse que tous les hommes ensemble” (47).

Chactas's personal history further explains how he came to regard cultures as intrinsically hybrid. At seventeen years of age, we are told, Chactas and his father fought with the Spanish against several Indian tribes. In that battle, Chactas was injured and his father was killed. The young man was subsequently found by the Castillian General Lopez who treated him like a son and educated him to appreciate both American Indian and Spanish cultures. Although he respected both societies, Chactas initially regarded them as dialectical opposites. In his estimation, Spanish culture excluded the natural life of Natchez society and, conversely, savage life excluded any form of civilization. After visiting Spanish cities, however, Chactas began to endow this binary opposition with normative implications. He became increasingly disenchanted with his European heritage and longed to obliterate all traces of Western education: “Ne pouvant plus résister à l'envie de retourner au désert,” he recalls, “un matin je me présentai à Lopez, vêtu de mes habits de Sauvage, tenant d'une main mon arc et mes flèches, et de l'autre mes vêtements européens. Je les remis à mon généreux protecteur, aux pieds duquel je tombai, en versant des torrents de larmes. Je me donnai des noms odieux, je m'accusai d'ingratitude: ‘Mais enfin, lui dis-je, ô mon père, tu le vois toi-même: je meurs, si je ne reprends la vie de l'Indien’” (49). His father replies: “Va … enfant de la nature! reprends cette indépendance de l'homme que Lopez ne te veut point ravir” (49). By framing the distinction between Spanish and Natchez cultures as a contrast between the constraints of civilization and the freedom of nature, Chactas and Lopez appear to follow Rousseauistic stereotypes.

The implied narrator, however, treats such distinctions with irony. For instance, shortly after his visit to Europe, Chactas gets captured by two rival tribes whose members enchain and plan to sacrifice him. Despite this horrific experience, in the beginning young Chactas continues to idealize Native American cultures, claiming, in a manner that calls to mind Rousseau's famous aphorism “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” that he prefers savagery in chains to freedom in civilization. He declares:

Tout prisonnier que j'étais, je ne pouvais, durant les premiers jours, m'empêcher d'admirer mes ennemis. Le Muscogulge, et surtout son allié le Seminole, respire la gaieté, l'amour, le contentement. Sa démarche est légère, son abord ouvert et serein. … L'âge même ne peut ravir aux Sachems cette simplicité joyeuse: comme les vieux oiseaux de nos bois, ils mêlent encore leurs vieilles chansons aux airs nouveaux de leur jeune postérité.

(50)

Even as he praises Native American cultures, however, Chactas observes European stereotypes. Adopting the binary opposition between Seminole nature and European culture, he regards all Indian tribes as unified by the same natural demeanor and way of life.²¹ According to his idyllic description, nature is not only a part of the American Indian environment. The Native Americans represent the mirrors of nature, living freely as the birds in the trees, preserving and transmitting their “joyous simplicity” from generation to generation.

As in Rousseau's works, so in Atala gender oppositions play an important role in drawing the boundaries between nature and culture. In Europe, Chactas observes, gender differences are obscured by artifice. By way of contrast, in the Seminole tribe women epitomize the very qualities that men lack. While the men are silent and unsympathetic to his plight, the women seem concerned about his fate, ask many questions about his feelings and past, and feel moved by his praises: “Ces louanges faisaient beaucoup de plaisir aux femmes,” Chactas notes approvingly. “[E]lles me comblaient de toute sorte de dons; elles m'apportaient de la crème de noix, du sucre d'érable, de la sagamité, des jambons d'ours, des peaux de castors … et des mousses pour ma couche. Elles chantaient, elles riaient avec moi, et puis elles se prenaient à verser des larmes, en songeant que je serais brûlé” (51).

No sooner has Chactas considered himself American Indian as opposed to European, however, than he finds out that being Native American—or, as he puts it, “sauvage”—does not entail a homogeneous and unified identity. The Seminole men prepare for his sacrificial ritual. Likewise, despite their show of sympathy, the Seminole women abandon the young prisoner to his fate. In retrospect, Chactas bemoans the human condition to René, stating: “Plaignons les hommes, mon cher fils! Ces mêmes Indiens dont les coutumes sont si touchantes; ces mêmes femmes qui m'avaient témoigné un intérêt si tendre, demandaient maintenant mon supplice à grands cris; et des nations entières retardaient leur départ, pour avoir le plaisir de voir un jeune homme souffrir des tourments épouvantables” (67).

Among all the American Indians of the rival tribe, only one person perceives Chactas as a kindred spirit: the Seminole chief's beautiful daughter, Atala. She lays aside her feelings of loyalty to both tribe and family in order to free Chactas and guide him away from danger. One would expect that Chactas would be grateful to Atala for saving his life. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Once freed, the young man claims to prefer bondage to freedom:

Qu'ils sont incompréhensibles les mortels agités par les passions! Je venais d'abandonner le généreux Lopez, je venais de m'exposer à tous les dangers pour être libre; dans un instant le regard d'une femme avait changé mes goûts, mes résolutions, mes pensées! Oubliant mon pays, ma mère, ma cabane et la mort affreuse qui m'attendait, j'étais devenu indifférent à tout ce qui n'était pas Atala. Sans force pour m'élever à la raison de l'homme, j'étais retombé tout à coup dans une espèce d'enfance.

(57)

Chactas's apparently contradictory reaction becomes comprehensible once we observe that at this point in the narrative gender becomes Chactas's main way of establishing dialectical cultural distinctions. After being freed by Atala, Chactas no longer considers European culture as the representative of civilized bondage and American Indian culture as the representative of natural freedom. Now both European and Native American cultures come to represent masculine freedom in contradistinction to the emotional bondage inherent in his love for Atala. Consequently, while cultures become particularized, gender roles become universalized. All the important elements of Chactas's existence—his culture, family, and values—begin to signify the lack of Atala who, by way of contrast, becomes a figure of universal plentitude.²² Despite this change in values and desires, however, at this point in the narrative Chactas obviously continues to rely upon a (single) dialectical model of identity: one that regards femininity as the negation or absence of masculine characteristics.²³ In his estimation, Atala represents an ethereal, emotive and quasi-divine being that is the very opposite of the self-reliance and rationality which he associates with masculinity.

While being Chactas's foil in terms of gender roles, however, Atala mirrors his cultural background. Like Chactas, Atala is a hybrid. She is born of an American Indian mother and a Spanish father, who, as noted, is none other than Lopez himself. Influenced by her dual heritage, Atala fosters a deep sympathy for American Indian and European cultures that is tempered only by her criticism of both societies. She considers herself simultaneously pagan and Christian, blending and confusing the two traditions in her sacrilegious love for Chactas. Atala describes herself as “fière comme une Espagnole et comme une Sauvage. Ma mère me fit chrétienne, afin que son Dieu et le Dieu de mon père fût aussi mon Dieu” (81). Although Atala's education may have been intended to subsume the Native American tradition into the Christian one, this goal was not reached. It soon becomes clear that, rather than either effacing one tradition or combining two distinct heritages, Atala selectively incorporates and rejects elements of both cultures.

On the one hand, Atala's effort to save Chactas's life reflects her critical stance toward the American Indian rituals of sacrificing captured enemies. By helping Chactas escape, we could say that she negates important elements of her tribe's ethics. Adopting European ideals, she not only proclaims the superiority of private love over public war, but also, and more importantly, the sanctity of human life. In addition, considering herself Chactas's sister, Atala refuses to marry him in part because of her reluctance to violate the incest taboo. On the other hand, Atala also rejects (or negates) European ethics. Despite her passionate love for Chactas, Atala poisons herself in order to be able to keep the promise of chastity made to her mother. By attempting to keep her vow, Atala intends to manifest her loyalty to the American Indian culture, to which her mother belonged. At the same time, her very refusal of marriage and promise to remain chaste represents an attempt to follow Christian rather than Seminole ethics. To complicate this chiasmic inversion even further, Atala's adherence to her native heritage indicates a misguided loyalty to the Christian religion. Which is to say, her mother bargains with God, in a rather un-Christian fashion, to preserve her daughter's chastity in exchange for saving her life.²⁴ By poisoning herself in order to keep her filial promise, Atala thus not only fulfills a misconstrued obligation but also violates Christian ethics in disposing of her own life. Perceptively, Chactas describes Atala's moral contradictions as a tension between maternal and paternal values which intermix, but never harmoniously blend in her moral character: “Les perpétuelles contradictions de l'amour et de la religion d'Atala, l'abandon de sa tendresse et la chastété de ses moeurs, la fierté de son caractère et sa profonde sensibilité, l'élévation de son âme dans les grandes choses, sa susceptibilité dans les petites, tout en faisait pour moi un être incompréhensible” (75). Chactas claims not to understand Atala's moral struggles. His perceptive analysis of her personality, however, points to his identification with her divided loyalties. Like Atala, Chactas constantly oscillates between espousing and rejecting both Western and American Indian values.

For instance, after fleeing from captivity with Atala, Chactas begins to feel disappointed by American Indian practices. He thus rejects (or negates) elements of his native culture and, like Atala, turns for solace and guidance to the other side of his heritage: namely, the Catholic faith of his father. Both Chactas and Atala become greatly influenced by a Christian missionary, père Aubry, who hides the lovers in his abode to protect them from the pursuing Seminole Indians. The young couple immediately notices that père Aubry's hands had been mutilated, as it turns out, by members of an American Indian tribe. When Chactas and Atala express outrage at this act, the missionary replies, “Si les Indiens idolâtres m'ont affligé, ce sont de pauvres aveugles que Dieu éclairera un jour” (88). Under his influence, Chactas perceives Christianity as a universal religion, capable of adapting to and improving any society.

Nonetheless, true to his hybrid upbringing, Chactas is not prepared to forsake his American Indian roots. Like Atala, he wishes to combine the best elements of both societies in order to create a superior ethics, albeit one deeply influenced by the Christian religion. Commenting upon the lifestyle of a small group of Indians who had converted to Christianity, Chactas exclaims:

O charme de la religion! O magnificence du culte chrétien! Pour sacrificateur un vieil hermite, pour autel un rocher, pour église le désert, pour assistance d'innocents Sauvages … Là, régnait le mélange le plus touchant de la vie sociale et de la vie de la nature … J'admirais le triomphe du Christianisme sur la vie sauvage; je voyais l'Indien se civilisant à la voix de la religion; j'assistais aux noces primitives de l'Homme et de la Terre.

(94-95)

Chactas continues to regard American Indian and European cultures as the products of mutual negations: the former symbolizing nature, the latter civilization. This vision of cultural synthesis—one which, according to my reading, corresponds to a misunderstanding of the dialectic of cultural formation as a process of union of opposites—is nonetheless short-lived. Chactas becomes disillusioned with both cultures once he sees that combining two cultures does not necessarily lead to the peaceful and harmonious life he had envisioned.²⁵ After he finds out that Atala has poisoned herself to obey what she (mis)understood to be a Christian vow, Chactas abruptly changes his mind about the universality of Christian ethics and its applicability in all contexts.²⁶ He exclaims: “Là voilà donc cette religion que vous m'avez tant vantée! Périsse le serment qui m'enlève Atala! Périsse le Dieu qui contrarie la nature! Homme prêtre, qu'es-tu venu faire dans ces forêts” (101)? Père Aubry explains that Christian morality did not dictate that Atala obey the vow of chastity. He observes that, had Atala properly understood Christian morality, she and Chactas could have married and led a blessed and happy existence.

Père Aubry's message, however, as well as the apologia for the ethical superiority of Christian over savage life, remains unpersuasive.²⁷ Unlike the more explicitly polemical Génie du Christianisme (1802),²⁸Atala conveys a more contradictory and even pessimistic attitude toward the possibility of establishing any ethical standards as universal. Instead of offering an a priori and generally applicable normative system, Atala outlines a dialectical narrative process that advises a critical attitude toward all cultural standards.²⁹ This questioning of values, which has been associated with le mal du siècle, however, should not be equated with nihilism. Quite the contrary, Atala's main characters epitomize and encourage the search for lasting, or at least meaningful, moral standards that can function as the basis for a good life. Their failure to reach absolute answers does not imply that the quest is meaningless itself.

On the one hand, Chactas's and Atala's cultural hybridity—their often incongruous mixture of Native American and Western values—motivates the fatal plot of the novel. On the other hand, despite this classically tragic ending there is also an overwhelmingly positive side to Chateaubriand's allegorical representation of identity as mixed and internally divided. Such an understanding of cultures as hybrid discourages efforts to purify cultures of their others or to propose any cultural identity as ideal. In addition, Atala changes the Rousseauistic connotations of the concept of the noble savage. For if no society is the model of perfection and, furthermore, if all people, even so-called savages, are considered capable of ethical judgment and error, then all societies and people are subject to both internal and external ethical evaluation. Once we assume the ethnic and ethical hybridity of culture, the idealization of any society—be it one's own or another—becomes as difficult as its complete deprecation.

Notes

1. See Jacques Derrida's analysis of Rousseau's aporia between the primacy and superiority of nature versus that of civilization in “… That Dangerous Supplement,” Of Grammatology.

2. In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau traces the development of civilization in terms of three distinct stages: the state of nature, the transitional period of the Golden Age, and different kinds of civilizations that emerge with the notion of private property. He imagines that in the state of nature human beings are driven by egocentric rather than social impulses while still feeling pity for the suffering of their fellow men: “At first it would seem that men in that state, having among themselves no type of moral relations or acknowledged duties, could be neither good nor evil, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless, if we take these words in a physical sense, we call those qualities that can harm an individual's preservation ‘vices’ in him, and those that can contribute to it ‘virtues’” (34-35).

3. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau argues that only during the Golden Age, the period when human beings invented tools, built dwellings and cultivated crops, did they depend upon each other sufficiently to unite into groups and foster moral feelings. By way of contrast, primitive men lived isolated and amoral lives. Rousseau paints the following picture of primitive humans: “Let us conclude that, wondering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwelling, without war, without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and correspondingly with no need to do them harm, perhaps never even recognizing any of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to that state; he felt only his true needs, took notice of only what he believed he had an interest in seeing; and that his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity” (41).

4. Rousseau regards Geneva as the paradigm of an ethical republican civilization while identifying aristocratic France as the paradigm of corrupt civilization.

5. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau openly acknowledges that his description of the state of nature is an explanatory myth or, at best, an educated hypothesis: “[I]t is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of man, and to have a proper understanding of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, and probably never will exist, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our own present state” (10-11).

6. Atala was a huge and immediate success. As Richard Switzer documents in Chateaubriand, Atala was supposed to be published as part of the larger work, The Genius of Christianity. Instead, the author decided to publish Atala sooner and separately. The appearance of Atala transformed Chateaubriand from an unknown to a famous author. “Thus it was,” observes Switzer, “that in 1801 appeared Atala, an ‘Indian’ tale vaguely inspired by his travels in America and by his readings. … There are not many examples of such immediate and total success of a work of literature as in the case of Atala. From a penniless émigré hiding behind an assumed name, Chateaubriand suddenly became the proverbial toast of Paris literary society” (29).

7. Chateaubriand expresses this opinion even more emphatically in Travels in America, stating: “From the examination of these languages alone, it is clear that the peoples named by us as savages were far advanced in that civilization which involved the combination of ideas” (120).

8. See Tsvetan Todorov's more detailed description of Chateaubriand's travels to America and his discussion of their possible literary and philosophical implications in On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought.

9. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 26.

10. As David Theo Goldberg observes in Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, “primitive societies were theorized in binary differentiation from a civilized order: nomadic rather than settled; sexually promiscuous, polygamous, and communal in family and property relations rather than monogamous, nuclear, and committed to private property;—illogical in mentality and practicing magic rather than rational and scientific” (155).

11. We can therefore state that the racial categories produced by colonial discourse emerge from a dialectical relation where only the Western subject functions as a “positive term.” That is, only the Western subject acquires a specific cultural definition by rejecting the qualities of its non-Western “Others.”

12. As Robert Young notes, “Fixity of identity is sought only in situations of instability and disruption, of conflict and of change. … In each case identity is self-consciously articulated through setting one term against the other” (4).

13. For example, Homi Bhabha uses the term hybridity to indicate the textual moments where colonial discourse subverts its own authority. More specifically, in “The Commitment to Theory,” the term hybridity describes moments of counter-authority that dismantle various binary hierarchies between Self and Other constructed along the lines of race, class or gender. Bhabha refers to the “hybrid” moment of political change, stating: “Here the transformational value of change lies in the re-articulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides which contests the terms and territories of both” (13).

14. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 24-25.

15. The socio-political questions raised by Atala are not far removed from Chateaubriand's political interests. As Richard Switzer explains in Chateaubriand, “Historically, Chateaubriand played important roles in three areas. In the political world he was an ambassador, cabinet minister, and statesman, and his many pamphlets in support of the principle of legitimate monarchy made him one of the outstanding supporters of the French legitimate monarchy. Except in America, where the different conditions allowed little comparison with France, Chateaubriand had slight experience with democracy, and he shared the ideas of the eighteenth-century theorists who found in the constitutional monarchy the ideal from of government” (ii).

16. All references to Atala are to the 1971 Gallimard edition.

17. As Jean-Pierre Richard notes in Paysage de Chateaubriand, the figure of the hybrid character is prevalent in Chateaubriand's allegorical fictions: “Sangs divers, sangs mêlés, nous sommes toujours dans la figure syncrétique de l'hybride. Mais quel va en être le destin? Le métis parviendra-t-il à soutenir sans drame la fonction médiatrice que sa nature l'oblige à assumer” (143)? As Richard continues to answer his own question, “Rien ne paraît moins sûr. Toutes les affabulations de Chateaubriand semblent même conclure à l'issue fâcheuse, voire désastrueuse du métissage” (143). In agreement with Richard, I will argue that Chateaubriand uses hybrid characters to provoke thought about the problems of cultural difference rather than to identify easy solutions.

18. As Richard Switzer argues in Chateaubriand, the author does not idealize America univocally: “In a more strictly literary field, Chateaubriand's two other important roles came to the fore. In 1791 Chateaubriand traveled to America, and although there is evidence that in many ways he was disappointed by what he saw in the New World, he became, through his many writings dealing with America, one of the foremost interpreters of America to the European public in the early nineteenth century” (ii).

19. As Carlos Lynes argues in Chateaubriand as a Critic of French literature, “A strong Rousseauistic note is sounded here as Chactas expresses his disillusionment with French civilization and as he hastens to leave the hut. … In this mood, Chactas calls upon Fénelon, who succeeds in reconciling him with men and society by showing the brighter side of the picture in such a way that society, with all its flaws, seems to the Indian better than the state of nature” (16).

20. The novel René confirms Chactas's description of their life paths as chiasmic, or the negation of two opposing terms. While Chactas follows a dialectical process that leads him to respect both European and Native American cultures, René is too saddened by his personal experiences to appreciate either.

21. As Gilbert Chinard notes in L'Exotisme américain dans l'œuvre de Chateaubriand, “A la base même de l'exotisme, se trouve en effet un désir éternel d'échapper à son temps, à la civilisation qui nous entoure, de changer de milieu” (vi).

22. The universalization of the figure of Atala, which becomes so abstract that it is virtually emptied of content, is carried to an extreme by the conclusion of the novel, when Atala is reduced to a lifeless corpse that symbolizes self-sacrificial femininity. As Naomi Schor observes in “Triste Amérique: Atala and the Post-Revolutionary Construction of Woman”: “By making the lifeless corpse of the young Indian maiden an allegory of Virginity, Chateaubriand successfully manages to capitalize on the legitimating power of female allegory, while voiding the feminine form of female corporeality and desire and erasing from it the marks of racial difference. The allegorization of woman, a sort of degree zero of female representation, can only be brought about through a violent act of suppression of all particularities, not to mention life” (147).

23. I would agree with Schor's interpretation “Triste Amérique” that, ultimately, Atala becomes a figure of femininity which helps pave the way for the reactionary sexual (post)revolutionary regime that consolidates a strict division of spheres and excludes women from the public sphere. At the same time that Atala “founds the tradition of representing woman in the nineteenth-century as sexually stigmatized,” however, it also blurs gender distinctions to illustrate, by means of the similar experiences of Atala and Chactas, both the limits and promises of cultural mixture (138).

24. Although, as Schor notes, “the language of the mother is coextensive with that of the Christian apologist,” I would argue, against much criticism on the subject, that Chateaubriand does not use the figures of Atala, Chactas or her mother to rehabilitate Christianity or to synthesize harmoniously Christian and pagan life. Rather, if we follow the dialectical movements of the narrative, we arrive at the conclusion that the text finds both the neat distinction between pagan and Christian and their reconciliation problematic, if not impossible (143).

25. Some critics plausibly relate this disillusionment to the mal du siècle that Chateaubriand expresses much more in René. Switzer, for instance, describes this literary and even philosophical attitude in Chateaubriand: “At that point in which the desires and the passions of the individual have developed, but before these passions can be satisfied, there occurs this intermediate and confused state in which the individual does not know himself, cannot analyze his sentiments, cannot bring any remedy to his melancholy—all this for no reason that he can fathom” (48).

26. Charles Porter regards this normative ambivalence as the result of Chateaubriand's mixed narrative strategies: “It seems to me plain that Chateaubriand originally set out to write Atala as a demonstration of the havoc wreaked on the state of nature by the encroachments of civilization, in particular by ill-understood or poorly-proclaimed Christianity. Then, having decided to use Atala as an example of the ‘harmonies de la religion …’ he found himself constrained to … transform its message. From this shift remains a most uneasy diffusion of interest in the story”(82).

27. Although in many of his works, Chateaubriand attempts to offer Christianity as a moral solution to political and social problems, the logic of his texts repeatedly undermines such a solution. For instance, Le Génie du christianisme (1802) attempts to illustrate that only religion can satisfy man's quest for meaning. Yet the two most famous novels of Le Génie, namely Atala and René, undermine the possibility of any solace, be it religious or secular, and give voice instead the inconsolable mal du siècle.

28. Published in 1802, this text examines the history, art, and architecture of Christianity in order to reconsolidate its influence following the French Revolution. In so doing, Génie both anticipates and contributes to the growing influence of the Church during and following the reign of Napoleon I.

29. Todorov correctly points out in On Human Diversity that the dialectical process which yields moral standards in Atala does not involve a simple synthesis between the radically different values of European and American Indian cultures, but rather a selective incorporation and negation of elements of both cultures: “And yet Chactas's ideal, like Chateaubriand's, [is] not to embrace the life of society (and its highest form, Christian life) without reservation, but rather to attempt a synthesis between the good aspects of each state” (292).

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi. “The Commitment to Theory.” New Formations, 5 (1988): 5-23.

Chateaubriand. Atala. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

Chinard, Gilbert. L'exotisme américain dans l'œuvre de Chateaubriand. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1970.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chkravorty Spivak, tr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1993.

Lynes, Carlos. Chateaubriand as a Critic of French Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1946.

Porter, Charles. Chateaubriand: Composition, Imagination, and Poetry. California: Amma Libri, 1978.

Richard, Jean-Pierre. Paysage de Chateaubriand. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Donald A. Cress, tr. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993.

Schor, Naomi. “Triste Amérique: Atala and the Post-Revolutionary Construction of Woman.” In Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Switzer, Richard. Chateaubriand. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.

Todorov, Tsvetan. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought, Catherine Porter, tr. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995.