Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in British Literature, 1720-1850

Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in British Literature, 1720-1850, by Rajani Sudan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. 200. $45.00 cloth.

Rajani Sudan's Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in British Literature, 1720-1850 insightfully extends a growing body of criticism that examines the shaping force ideas about the Other (national, colonial, gendered) exerts on British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Bronte. Somewhat less successfully, the book participates in (without discussing) another movement that seeks to extend the romantic period back into the eighteenth century, by arguing that romantic patterns of imagining the colonial and gendered other--and by extension the subject--can be traced back to Robinson Crusoe. Sudan's contribution to this scholarly inquiry is her articulation of how xenophobia and xenodochy "work as an economy because they are mutually constitutive" (6-7). This subtle theoretical paradigm suggests that, far from operating as a corrective to xenophobia, xenodochy (the welcoming and entertainment of the foreign) works in cooperation with it to construct both the foreign and the domestic. She further argues that national and cultural identity are manifested through this economy. This ambivalence, which is "particularly resonant with romantic discourse," establishes a distinct place for the self" (7). The book's argument focuses increasingly on gender, domesticity, and the maternal, culminating in the final chapter on Frankenstein and Villette.

Although Sudan apparently recognizes the difficulty involved in trying to make a case about romanticism by concentrating on marginalized figures (18), she offers no sustained justification for this emphasis, only suggesting that the ideology in question "may have been more dramatically exemplified by its outcasts than by the main characters themselves" (18). Ultimately, she only makes a handful of references to the poets most closely identified with the period (Wordsworth, five or six; Coleridge, one or two; Blake, one; Percy Shelley, one or two; and Byron, one or two). And some of these references are erroneous. For example, in the introduction she discusses Wollstonecraft's interest in the "political causes Wordsworth and Coleridge ended up discussing in their Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" (21). The preface was written by Wordsworth. Although Coleridge wrote to a mutual friend that "Wordsworth's Preface is half a child of my own Brain," he did refer to it as "Wordsworth's Preface" (see the "Editors' Introduction" in Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], xlvii). What is more, there is no "the" in Lyrical Ballads. This is a trivial issue, but the trivial errors accumulate. She rightly enough dates Blake's "The Tyger" to 1794, then argues that it was drawn between 1792 and 1798 (72). In a note to an earlier passage, she refers to Gulliver's Travels as "Swift's novel" (155 n. 17). In some of these cases there may be an argument that would defend these choices, but none is offered. I can think of no explanation for the gaffe in her discussion of Frankenstein that purports to describe "Walton's sister Safie's role in the De Lacey family" (128). Walton's sister, in fact, is suggestively named Margaret Walton Saville; Safie is the "fair exotic" imported into the French family's domestic scene. These errors are trivial enough that it is embarrassing to discuss them in a review, but they add up and undermine the credibility of the argument, especially one attempting to define elements central to romantic discourse. I frequently found myself questioning interpretive moves because of these slips that are, by themselves, insignificant.

The large number of solecisms (comma splices and problems in both tense and number agreement), editorial oversights (words and syllables repeated), factual errors and fuzziness (problems in chronology), mangled quotations (omitted words and introduced grammatical problems), and overly complicated sentences make reading Fair Exotics a frustrating and time-consuming experience. I found myself dwelling on sentences, trying to discover if the confusion was a function of my own inattentiveness or the sentences' structure. This makes it difficult to follow the argument at times, which is a shame, because the book's argument is occasionally compelling.

Sudan begins her introduction with a brief reading of Robinson Crusoe, focusing on Crusoe's perverse refusal to go without clothes, suggesting that clothing is the mark of distinction between a civilized Briton and savages. Similarly, Crusoe's weakness--his inability to endure heat--is evidence of his superiority, his inability to be a savage. This concern for the skin which is at once naturally fair and in need of policing to prevent it from appearing like a "Mulatto"--explains why Crusoe sees his goatskin umbrella as "the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun." The umbrella and the gun are both crucial to his dominance the umbrella providing a "visible sign of ideological dominance based on the color of his skin" (1-2). What makes Robinson Crusoe romantic, however, is his "compelling--and romantic--desire, his desire to give himself over to the other." This desire, she speculates, makes his xenophobia necessary as a protection of the integrity of his self (5).