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A contribution to: Reframing Exoticism in European Literature

Edited by Claudia Dellacasa and Hannah McIntyre

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 14

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  An author of popular exotic novels, Elissa Rhaïs was a Jewish Algerian woman who set out to ‘narrate [her] country in the French language’ in the 1920s. Celebrated by her contemporaries for the authenticity of her exotic depictions from the inside, Rhaïs’s literary debut was nevertheless done under an enticing and problematic disguise since she was presented as a Muslim woman having escaped from a harem. To many scholars, Rhaïs is therefore somewhat of a phony oriental, whose deceptive presentation was nothing less than a ‘masquerade’ employed to sell conventional exoticism. Considering the complex historical position of Algerian Jews, this paper argues that Rhaïs’s authorial persona should be understood less as a commercial lie and more as the result of an impossibility for the colonized subject to situate herself, to be seen accurately, in France’s imperial culture, due both to her gender and to her ethnicity. As a result, this paper proposes to consider Rhaïs’s reflective treatment of the exotic gaze as a self-designating gesture, pointing at its own playfulness and artificiality, as can be seen in her novels Le Mariage de Hanifa (1926) and Le Sein blanc (1928). The exotic ‘masquerade’ is rather a resounding larvatus prodeo, which implicitly questions the validity of orientalist dichotomies.

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