significant silence of race: La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno", The

Comparative Literature, Summer 1994 by Colatrella, Carol

The emphasis on the Shakespearean intertext in La Cousine Bette creates a kind of cognitive dissonance as the reader configures the Brazilian's situation as a version of what happens to Othello.(11) Like Iago's provocation of Othello, Madame Saint-Esteve's manipulation of the baron has deadly consequences for his lover. Othello's tragedy is not strictly imitated by Montejanos, who kills Valerie and preserves himself, but the Brazilian's actions are like the Moor's in that both are cultural outsiders. Because the baron deliberately murders and manages to escape punishment, he acts like a "Negro"; the French nobles who take advantage of his action to maintain their power respect the dangerous qualities that make him "other" and the narrative audience follows suit. The appearance of "apes" in a narrative episode marking jealous revenge as a sign of race associates romantic passion with Montejanos's "primitive" nature, a biological instinct. Yet, because ValErie, unlike Desdemona, has been unfaithful, the Brazilian's passionate rage and revenge appear less tragic than overdramatic. Despite his status as less-than-civilized in Paris society, Montejanos acts like an aristocrat in the eyes of the narrative audience by crushing an ambitious and deceitful woman of dubious birth; he achieves nobility because his association with blacks makes him powerful enough to vanquish Valerie, an illegitimate child of a marshal.

But Montejanos's character also gains in stature because the authorial audience sees him as more forgiving than the proud Othello; Montejanos remains loyal to Valerie in expressing his willingness to forgive her for her infidelities. She refuses to marry him and go to Brazil, indicating that she could never settle down with someone so dark. Because Montejanos murders her, his revenge provokes the authorial audience to question only tentatively the ideological assumptions of the theory of racial superiority (Rabinowitz 163-64). As in Shakespeare, the other is valorized by the authorial audience as better than those who manipulate him because he acts from the heart, but he is not rewarded in the text because the narrative audience knows and the authorial audience must accept, at least for the purposes of following the plot of Balzac's narrative, that assumed biological difference justifies social inequality.

The revenge strategy designed by Madame de Saint-Estve and enacted by Montejanos assumes that animal, Negro, jealousy, passion, criminality, and the New World are metonymically linked qualities. After Montejanos realizes that Valerie has betrayed him by becoming engaged to Crevel, the Brazilian takes his revenge by poisoning her and her new husband. The method of poisoning is complicated, demanding that the Brazilian administer it to Cydalise, his new lover supplied by Madame Saint-Esteve. After Cydalise infects Montejanos, he transmits the disease to ValErie, who passes it on to Crevel. Montejanos returns to Brazil to receive the rare antidote, but ValErie and her husband are destroyed by the strange Brazilian poison that Montejanos obtains from his Negro servants. Montejanos's race and his jealous rage are connected to his participation in a New World order invoked by the narrator as a haven where one can enact revenge unfettered by moral law.(12)