SOURCE: "Dis-Covering the Female: Gautier's Roman de la momie" in The French Review, Vol. LXVI, No. 5, April, 1993, pp. 718-29.

In the following essay, originally presented in 1988 at the Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages and Literatures at Rollins College, Florida, Hawthorne analyzes the inaccuracies found in the prologue of Gautier's Le Roman de la momie and exposes the gender bias inherent in his descriptions.

Théophile Gautier's Le Roman de la momie, once a canonical text of the French secondary school literature curriculum, is now seldom read, and then only as an illustration of aspects of Gautier's work developed elsewhere.¹ I do not intend to take up here the politics of the rise and fall of the novel's stock, which are tied to the rising and falling stock of orientalism and sentimental fiction; rather, I shall argue that a text which at one moment seems irredeemably sexist deserves a...