Ecocriticism avant la lettre: human–animal encounters in colonial travelogues by Gautier, Fromentin, Lorrain, Loti and Maupassant

ABSTRACT

Ecocritical human–animal encounters, animal semiotics and literary depictions of human–animal relations in French colonial accounts of travel to Algeria and Morocco in the nineteenth century are the focus of this essay. Authors studied include Guy de Maupassant (Au Soleil), Eugène Fromentin (Une année dans le Sahel), Théophile Gautier (Loin de Paris), Jean Lorrain (Heures d’Afrique) and Pierre Loti (Au Maroc). Human–animal encounters decisively shape the travellers’ perception and understanding of the people and culture they encounter. They are a synecdoche for the French colonisers’ encounter with North Africa, its people, nature and customs. Highlighting their conquering mind-set, the travellers feel the need to write in great detail about these encounters which must be textualisés [inscribed], rationalised and thus safely “contained” in order to be intellectually possessed by the travellers. To date, ecocritical scholarship has neglected Orientalist travel writings, which were stigmatised for perpetuating imperialist discourse and serving the imperialist colonial project.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecocriticism
• orientalists
• travelogues
• Maghreb
• semiotics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All English language translations from the works of Gautier and Lorrain are mine. Translations from the works of Fromentin, Loti and Maupassant are taken from the published English language translations listed under References. In several instances, the English translation of Loti’s Au Maroc (Morocco) deviates considerably from the original French (animal references are changed or even left out altogether). In these cases, as indicated in the text, I provide my own translation.

2 As historian Patricia Lorcin notes, the 1860s were difficult to weather, in particular in Kabylia, which experienced “a decade which brought locusts, cholera, poor harvests and famine on an unprecedented scale” ([1995] 2014: 87).