SOURCE: Wang, Ban. “Writing Self, and the Other: Chateaubriand and His Atala.” French Forum 22, no. 2 (May 1997): 133-48.

In the following essay, Wang claims Chateaubriand offered an Orientalist approach to foreign culture in Atala. Wang examines the work's aesthetics through the concept of chinoiserie—or the dual elements of grotesqueness and disorientation—to argue that Chateaubriand both exoticized and sexualized the New World.

The notion of the grotesque often figures prominently in the way one culture thinks about its radical other. In his classic study of the grotesque the German literary theorist Wolfgang Kayser recalls an instance in eighteenth-century France. The meaning of the grotesque, he says, was extended to apply to some strange aspects of Chinese culture under the rubric of chinoiserie. The term designates “the fusion of spheres, the monstrous nature of ingredients, and the subversion of order and proportion which characterizes them.” Kayser cites a critic's...