The Frontiers of Popular Exoticism: Marie Bonaparte's New Orleans Crossings

Popular novelists played a remarkable role in transforming the female traveler into a heroic model of cosmopolitanism for Second Empire readers. One of the least known and most prolific writers of the popular exotic, Marie Bonaparte-Wyse, published her works with Hachette and in reviews like Revue des deux mondes. In the short story "Maxime: Récit des mœurs créoles" (1874) and the book-length travel account Les Américaines chez elles (1895), Bonaparte-Wyse turns her exotic gaze to Reconstruction New Orleans as a cultural crossroads for female settler, traveler, and slave. This essay will shed light on the unique contribution of this prolific and outspoken femme de lettres and voyageuse, showing that Bonaparte-Wyse's notions of race and foreignness rely consistently upon her conflation of the slave descendent and the settler woman as equal victims of Reconstruction era politics. (HB)