Enchanted Islands: Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France

By Mary D. Sheriff

In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day—islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and Fénelon’s, Telemachus. Other islands—real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue—the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée. Writers such as Fénelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art’s purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226483245

Mary D. Sheriff

Mary D. Sheriff is W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor and chair of the art department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her many books include The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Ar and Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France.

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Enchanted Islands

Enchanted Islands

PICTURING THE ALLURE OF CONQUEST IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

Mary D. Sheriff

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48310-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48324-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226483245.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sheriff, Mary D., author.

Title: Enchanted islands : picturing the allure of conquest in eighteenth-century France / Mary D. Sheriff.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038265 | ISBN 9780226483108 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226483245 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Islands in literature. | Islands in art. | French literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Art, French—18th century.

Classification: LCC PQ265 .S58 2018 | DDC 840.9/372—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038265

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface, by Keith P. Luria

Introduction: Called to Islands

1. Thinking with Islands

2. Domains of Enchantment

3. Royal Power, National Sentiment, and the Sorceress Undone

4. Calypso in the Regency

5. The Transformations of Armida

6. On the Persistence and Limits of the Enchanted Island

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1  Les métamorphoses d’Ovide

2  The Age of Gold Returns

3  N. Thomas, Portrait du Comte de Saint-Germain

4  Louis Halbou, after Johann Eleazar Schenau, Credulité sans réflexion

5  Nicolas de Larmessin, Portrait de F. A. de Rochechouart

6  Antoine Coypel, Portrait de La Voisin

7  Louis Ferdinand II Elle, Portrait de Madame de Montespan

8  C. Van Meurs, after C. Netscher, Portrait présumé de Madame de Montespan

9  Charles-André Van Loo, Jason and Medea

10  Charles-Antoine Coypel, Destruction du palais d’Armide

11  Frontispiece to Henri Decremps, Supplément à la magie dévoilée

12  Israël Silvestre the Younger and François Chaveau, Les plaisirs de l’Isle enchantée in 1664, Première journée (frontispiece)

13  Silvestre and Chaveau, Les plaisirs . . . Première journée . . . Entry of the King

14  Silvestre and Chaveau, Les plaisirs . . . Première journée . . . Sidekicks of the King

15  Silvestre and Chaveau, Les plaisirs . . . Première journée . . . Course de bague disputé

16  Silvestre and Chaveau, Les plaisirs . . . Première journée . . . The Four Seasons

17  Silvestre, The Feast of Les plaisirs de l’isle enchantée

18  Silvestre, The Festival Les plaisirs de l’isle enchantée

19  Silvestre and Chaveau, Les plaisirs . . . Troisième journée . . . Le palais de l’enchanteresse

20  Silvestre and Chaveau, Les plaisirs . . . Troisième journée . . . May 7, 1664

21  Antoine Coypel, The Alliance of Bacchus and Cupid

22  Antoine Watteau, Fêtes Vénitiennes

23  Edmé Jeaurat, after Nicolas Vleughels, Telemachus on the Isle of Calypso

24  Fan with scene from Vleughels, Telemachus on the Island of Calypso

25  Jean Dolivar, after Jean Berain, frontispiece to Armide

26  François Boucher, The Fountain of Love

27  Attributed to Boucher, Hercules and Omphale

28  Correggio (Antonio Allegri), Danae

29  Yvart fils, Chastelain, and Belin de Fontenay, Rinaldo and Armida

30  Robert de Cotte, fountain design for Parterre at Versailles

31  Antoine Watteau, The Judgment of Paris

32  Charles Eisen, illustration Devil of Pope-Fig Island

33  François Lemoyne, Messengers of Godefroy de Bouillon . . .

34  Charles-Nicolas Cochin fils, Public Audience Granted to the Turkish Ambassador . . .

35  Cochin fils, Masked Ball in honor of the marriage of Louis . . .

36  Maurice-Quentin Delatour, Portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour

37  Ludovicus Surugue, after Francois de Troy, allegorical representation of Henri IV

38  J. Aliamet, after Charles Eisen, frontispiece to canto 9, Voltaire, La Henriade

39  A. J. Duclos, after J. M. Moreau le Jeune, Henri IV and Gabrielle d’Estrées . . .

40  Philibert Commerson, illustration for Voyage autour du monde

41  François Boucher, Shepherd Piping to a Shepherdess

42  François Boucher, The Judgment of Paris

43  François Boucher, Venus Playing with Two Doves

Plates

1  Pierre-Antoine Baudouin, Séance: A Visit to the Medium

2  Louis Elle le Jeune, Portrait of Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart . . .

3  Nicolas Vleughels, Telemachus on the Island of Calypso

4  Jean Raoux, Telemachus Recounts His Adventures to Calypso

5  Domenichino, Rinaldo Holding a Mirror for Armida

6  Antoine Coypel, Rinaldo and Armida

7  Charles de La Fosse, Rinaldo and Armida

8  Louis de Boullogne, Rinaldo and Armida

9  François Boucher, Rinaldo and Armida in Their Pleasure

10  Jean-François de Troy, Armida on the Verge of Stabbing Rinaldo . . .

11  François Boucher, The Toilet of Venus

12  Charles Nicolas Dodin, after Boucher, Rinaldo and Armida in Their Pleasure

13  Charles-André van Loo, Sultana Drinking Coffee . . .

14  François Boucher, Triumph of Venus

Preface

Mary Sheriff started transforming her love of islands into a scholarly endeavor over a decade ago. But as she puts it in the introduction, she really had been thinking about islands since her childhood after seeing a 1963 production of the musical South Pacific. It captivated her. I can attest from our years together—from viewing the 1958 film, from listening to recordings, from seeing the musical’s 2008 revival—that the show’s music, story, and its critique of racial prejudice stayed with her throughout her life. But Mary had a fascination with islands that went beyond James Michener’s tales and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs. In the 1980s she visited Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. And while our work brought us often to France or elsewhere in Europe, we also frequently visited islands, enjoying their scuba diving and snorkeling, eating their wonderful food, and being fascinated by their mix of peoples and cultures. Islands called to Mary, and it was a call she answered with great enthusiasm.

Mary finished the final revisions of the Enchanted Islands manuscript just before her tragic death in October 2016. Seeing it through the publication process has been a joint effort of Mary’s close friend, colleague, and collaborator Melissa Hyde of the University of Florida and me. Melissa sacrificed work on other projects, including those on which she and Mary were working together, to see Enchanted Islands through to publication. Readers of the book will be grateful for her efforts, as am I. We have endeavored to follow Mary’s intentions and her vision for Enchanted Islands, and we ask readers’ forbearance for any errors that remain. Our task was made easier by Mary’s completion of the book as she wanted it. Our job concerned primarily the book’s illustrations and its scholarly apparatus. It is Mary’s voice that will call you here, not ours.

Mary’s great insight was to realize how much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French culture, often presented as quite insular (in the narrow-minded rather than the geographic sense of the term), drew on exotic islands, mythical and real. Islands showed up continuously in French art, literature, theater, opera, and political symbolics. Indeed, as Mary shows, islands were central to how the French thought about their monarchy, gender relations, and place in the world—all topics this book addresses. To describe these issues Mary deployed her skills as a writer of vibrant, imaginative prose and as an indefatigable, resourceful researcher. She pursues her themes along many sea-lanes, from court festivals to epic poems to travel literature as well as to art. The book displays her well-known talents as a close describer and interpreter of paintings and drawings along with her skills as an analyst of literary and theoretical texts. She was, of course, an art historian, but her work throughout her career also involved close examination of and thinking about texts. And so here we read about Tasso, Fénelon, and Bougainville as much as about Boucher, Raoux, and Coypel. And we also read about a host of less well-known artists and writers whose works filled French minds with dreams of islands. What serves as the link that ties all the enchanted islands together are the enchantresses—Armida, Calypso, Tahitian Venuses, and the mixed-race women of Saint-Domingue—island women pictured as seducing and threatening French manliness and domination.

In Enchanted Islands Mary’s long-standing involvement with feminist theory and feminist interpretations of art connects to newer interests. While her concern with eighteenth-century French art remained central, she was in recent years also thinking more and more about cultural contacts between Europe and the rest of the world and the way that these interactions reshaped European art. Here we see the results of her thinking about these contacts, particularly in her analysis of the process of enchantment and the enchantresses who appeared so often in the contact zones, as French artists imagined them. The encounters could be real, as in Bougainville’s experience with Tahitians, or they could be fictional, as in the story of the crusader Rinaldo and the Saracen princess Armida, as Tasso and many French painters following him presented it. We see here how these contacts changed French art but also how art prompted Europeans to think about these contacts. Or to pose the question the way Mary did in the introduction to the essay collection Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration, if cultural contact can tell us something about art, what can art tell us about cultural contact? In thinking about this question, Mary was also contemplating two more issues to which she had devoted much attention over the years—historicizing the analysis of art works while also being aware of their agency in the world over time. She often turned to the philosophy, psychology, and anthropology of art to reflect on this inquiry. It magnifies our sense of loss even more to imagine what Mary might have accomplished in pursuing such issues in future work, but at least with Enchanted Islands we can see what she had already accomplished. And thus while Mary never intended this book to be her last, it stands as a fitting culmination of her work as a scholar with its new questions about vital issues, its grounding in feminist analysis, its theoretical sophistication, and its enchanting writing.

Melissa Hyde and I would like to thank for their help in bringing this project to completion Mandy Paige-Lovingood, Kelsey D. Martin, Alexandra Deyneka, and Franny Brock from Chapel Hill, Alec Moore from Gainesville, Françoise Jaouën, and Liz Kurtulik Mercuri from Art Resource. And we would also like to thank Susan Bielstein and James Toftness of the University of Chicago Press for helping us through the process of publishing Enchanted Islands. It is difficult for me to reconstruct now the list of others with whom Mary worked on this book, but I trust they know how grateful she was to them. Similarly, it is hard to list all the audiences who listened to Mary’s thinking about enchanted islands over the years, but they are found in various places—from the United States to Europe to Australia. She received financial assistance from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust.

Mary left no instructions as to whom this book should be dedicated, but we feel we know that she would have liked to see it dedicated to her students, many of whom traveled with her to these islands in their seminars together.

Thus you have before you a work that is the culmination of years of research and reflection but also of a lifetime fascination with islands and with their potential for changing how we think about ourselves. It is our hope that Mary’s enchanted islands will call to you, just as Bali Ha’i first called to her in 1963.

Keith P. Luria

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

INTRODUCTION

Called to Islands

Bali Ha’i may call you, any night, any day.

In your heart you’ll hear it call you, come away, come away.¹

Bali Ha’i called me in July of 1963. It happened close to home, in Lambertville, New Jersey, at a local production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. I am not certain what enchanted me so: the music, the sets, the love story, or the heroic tale? Most likely it was all those combined with the electricity of live theater, which I experienced for the first time that summer. Now half a century later, Bali Ha’i still beckons. Its call has drawn me across space and time; it has landed me on islands both real and imagined. And it has led me from the travels of Emile de Becque to those of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who claimed the island of Tahiti for France in 1768. Although my project is moored in the seductive effects of South Pacific, its more immediate origins lie in my fascination with Bougainville’s account of his sojourn on La Nouvelle Cythère, which was what he called the island of Tahiti. As that naming suggests, Tahiti was for Bougainville both a real and imaginary place. It was his enchanted island.

Today the term enchanted island resounds globally with the promise of fantasy and pleasure. At the same time it has become thoroughly banal and emptied of specific content. Enchanted Island, or, in French, L’île enchantée, names things as diverse as a gourmet restaurant in Normandy, an amusement park in Phoenix, a bar in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, a game on Facebook, a 2002 animated film by Alejandro Rojas, and a 1954 American adventure movie. It figures in the titles of children’s books, literary works, and pulp fiction. It is widespread, however, in print and online advertisements for any number of real places hoping to attract tourists searching for an adventure in paradise.

The Enchanted Island as Paradigm

Although I cannot entirely isolate my enchanted islands from the flood of banalities surrounding the notion, my project focuses on the representation of fictive and real islands charmed in a particular way. All are the domain of beguiling women who captivate men through both literal and figurative enchantments. On these islands the charms of the site enhance the seduction: the climate is warm but refreshed with gentle breezes, the landscape is one of remarkable beauty, and a bountiful nature bears fruit without toil. Amid this luxurious fertility the enchantress promises sensual and sexual pleasures but deploys her charms with the aim of control through amorous conquest. I invoke the notion of conquest deliberately: long-standing descriptions of military and sexual encounters drew on a shared rhetoric of attack and defense. In what was considered the natural course of events, a woman was defeated and a man victorious when he overcame her modesty and hence her resistance to sexual adventure. The enchantress, however, reversed this dynamic, for she captivated and thus captured a hero who fell prey to her physical charms and magical arts. To fulfill his destiny, the hero had to break the bewitchment holding him and often his knights in thrall and defeat the enchantress through battle, cunning, escape, or divine intervention. The enchanted island was the battleground for these struggles.

Taken as independent concepts, island and enchantment each condenses a set of political and moral concerns central to French culture throughout the ancien régime. I argue that far from being escapist reveries, representations of the enchanted island embodied those concerns in an especially powerful way that mobilized fantasy and directed readers and viewers toward particular moral, political, and cultural identifications. Often the desired ends were those authorized by prevailing hierarchies, but at other times the enchanted island presented alternatives that rubbed against the grain of dominant ideals.

I position my account of the island as a geographical real and metaphorical figure in a general islomanie, an overall fascination with islands that reached its apex in the eighteenth century. It is not my goal to explicate the many different sorts of islands that captured the attention of writers and readers (uninhabited islands, islands of love, utopic islands, to name just a few). A broad discussion of every island type could easily constitute a significant monograph in and of itself. Some scholars, moreover, have already illuminated general notions of islandness, and others have offered important analyses of particular island types.² Although the enchanted islands that concern me are part of a larger domain, I frame my chapters to focus on issues specific to enchanted islands as I define them. To aid in this endeavor, I draw on an early essay of Gilles Deleuze that resonates with eighteenth-century concepts of the island in general and offers a structure in which to explore the dynamics particular to the enchanted isle.

My concept of enchanted island derives from sites that have been part of the European tradition since Homer sent Odysseus to the isles of Circe and Calypso. Such islands eventually migrated into French culture, appearing not only in other epics but also in ballets, operas, fetes, and all genres of the literary and pictorial arts. In the reign of Henri III (1574–1589), court entertainments depicting the king’s victory over the mythical Circe transformed enchanted island narratives into allegories of sovereign authority and turned them to political ends. Such motives remained explicit through Louis XIV’s royal celebrations. They were most evident in his first fete, Les Plaisirs de l’isle enchantée (1664), in which the power of Alcina, the witch drawn from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532), was broken. From that time forward, the dispersal of enchanted islands was extensive, and images proved ready to support traditional hierarchies but were equally adaptable to changes in social and cultural as well as political circumstances. When eventually the struggle of hero and sorceress was transported into representations of real islands, that struggle figured not the certainty of sovereign power but anxieties raised by the desire to maintain dominance over distant islands, be they new discoveries or established colonies. Those anxieties were often represented in sexual terms as the inability either to possess or control island women deemed as metaphoric, and sometimes literal, agents of enchantment.

Although politics never left the enchanted island, political goals varied with changing circumstances. The representations of ideals, such as those of gender, morality, or national identity, remained more constant, along with images of sovereignty that were also on offer in the entertainments that introduced enchanted island themes. Although many of the ideals may have originated in courtly culture, they became accessible to a broader range of French men and women. The dissemination of enchanted islands in widely read texts; in operas, plays, and vaudevilles; in engravings and book illustrations; in paintings exhibited at the Salon and those shown in other public venues created an audience that extended far beyond the confines of royal châteaux.

I argue that stories and scenes situated on enchanted islands exerted their influence by staging a series of conceptual oppositions that devolved from the conflict of divine authority and diabolical power vested in the struggle of hero-king and sorceress. By associating the male body with the divine and the female body with the diabolical, this opposition set into play a structure of differential values in which masculinity was opposed to femininity; master to slave; duty to pleasure; virtue to corruption; French to Other; and truth to illusion.³ These terms often lined up so that enchanted islands mirrored the ideals of the real world from which they emerged, with French masculinity properly aligned with mastery, duty, virtue and truth. Yet within and among enchanted island representations, the terms of opposition crossed one another in ways that belied the prevailing hierarchies: some images, for example, tied French masculinity to mastery and pleasure with virtue nowhere in sight. The positions of master and slave were often in motion: sometimes mastery was, as expected, attached to the masculine and the French. At other times it migrated to the feminine and the racial or cultural other. Crossings were also initiated when representations of the enchanted island tacitly proposed both differences and similarities between hero and sorceress. And even if an enchanted island was designed to promote the status quo, the play of oppositions produced misalignments. Visual images that rendered only one scene of a story were especially prone to slippages since without a surrounding narrative, cultural ideals proved difficult to stabilize. Thus, some representations of the enchanted island actuated, if only inadvertently, the creative potential of the island to offer the possibility of something new, something that did not re-create the established values of the real world.

Enchanted islands performed not only significant political and cultural work but also that of a more psychic nature. Some representations triggered processes of identification that allowed performers, readers, and viewers to assume the imaginary coherence of ideal types and thereby adopt the norms of sex, gender, virtue, and national identity promoted in the particular image or role. Other representations offered complexity, even contradiction, as the qualities available for assumption did not resolve themselves into unified ideals. Part of this complexity came from the multiplication of enchanted island images with one differing from the next, and part came from the internal division within the ideals themselves, which were never as singular as they might have appeared or been presented. The contradictions within enchanted island representations opened the possibility that performers, readers, and viewers might escape temporarily from the illusion that ideal norms were singular, coherent, and embodied eternal truths.

What makes the enchanted island a paradigmatic formation is precisely its ability to contain the play of oppositions within an apprehensible form, and this quality renders it an image easily transmitted through time as well as across the divide of fictive and real. My understanding of the enchanted island as a closely defined thematic with internal complexity is analogous to conceptions of the island, in general, that understand the island as having both an abstract definition (e.g., landmass surrounded by water) and an actual site. Isolatable and comprehensible in its abstract definition, the real island is often labyrinthine, with intricate patterns of intersecting pathways marking its internal space.⁴

In seeking the complexities of the enchanted island, my research has extended to the multiple domains in which discourses of island and enchantment are manifest. These include texts and images from the eighteenth century and well before, scholarship that has interrogated everything from sixteenth-century court ballets to eighteenth-century plans for racial engineering, and contemporary theoretical texts ranging from Gilles Deleuze to Alfred Gell. I analyze concepts of island and enchantment in the first two chapters and then turn to case studies of two types: those that take up mythical and fictive enchanted islands in chapters 3, 4, and 5, and those that demonstrate the transference of enchanted island themes onto actual sites in chapter 6. In the latter case, I am especially interested in how paintings that invoke enchanted island imagery facilitated the visualization of unknown places, peoples, and situations.

The limitations I put on the enchanted island allow me to focus on works of the visual arts that were highly significant when created but have heretofore received little attention. I aim to provoke interest in a body of images that although not as celebrated as either Antoine Watteau’s fêtes galantes or Jacques-Louis David’s history paintings are just as important for calculating the pleasures and politics invested in eighteenth-century French art. You will not discover in this study many of the islands well known in eighteenth-century France—the island of Robinson Crusoe to name just one. I have excluded from my chapters those islands that do not represent in an appreciable way the enchanted island as I define it. Islands of love as a generic category may seem a glaring omission, but I do not land on isles that replace a real or metaphoric sorceress who bewitches heroes and kings with gallant couples immersed in their fantasies. And for this reason you will not find works such as Watteau’s Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère (1717) among those I discuss even though the mythical Cythera and La Nouvelle Cythère are part of my archipelago.

Archipelago: Another View of the Enchanted Island

Seen as a related group, my islands form two overlapping clusters within a larger archipelago conceived not as an ocean space punctuated by islands but as a space within the collective imaginary of ancien-régime France, an imaginary that extended from elite society through the learned and literate ranks into larger groups such as artisans, merchants, seamen, and travelers of every ilk.⁵ In this archipelago float my enchanted islands. Exploring those islands, I have come to see each as akin to the physical reality that according to the Encyclopédie gave rise to the mythic isles flottantes, islands that actually moved from place to place. According to the entry, it was the misapprehension of natural forms that gave birth to the floating island, and poetic metaphor solidified belief in the myth. (I note in passing the power attributed here to metaphor.) What some travelers perceived as floating islands were, the entry claimed, merely concretions of spongy earth, either alone or mixed with grasses and plant roots, blown together by winds, waves, and currents.⁶ Yet this real floating island aptly describes how my islands were formed as persistent elements in the French imaginary. Neither the limits nor the aspects of each island were securely fixed: they moved around, pushed from one text or image to another. They survived through the continual attaching and detaching of content-matter that adhered to or separated from the initial mass. Indeed, their contours metamorphosed and solidified only to break apart and form again as they were blown hither and yon on the proverbial winds of time.

No enchanted island shows the stability that the simple definition of the island as a landmass surrounded by water would suggest. In one way or another, all my enchanted islands evince a complicated layering of real and fictive, and demonstrate that even contradictory notions of the same island could be held simultaneously. Yet within my archipelago certain islands float in proximity to one another, allied not simply through the general idea of enchantment but also through imagined equivalences, creative naming, and descriptive modes. At the center of one cluster I place the island of Tahiti. Given its position in the South Seas, Tahiti can be located both physically and imaginatively in the largely mythical Terra Australis, a mass of islands that remained mostly undiscovered and unclaimed. At the same time Tahiti, as La Nouvelle Cythère, is metaphorically close to Cythera, an actual island in the Aegean Sea that the ancient Greeks mythologized as the sacred realm of Venus. Bougainville and his officers renamed Tahiti the new Cythera because they imagined the inhabitants as given over to sexual pleasure and hence commensurate with the ancient devotees of Venus. Yet Tahiti in no way resembled the actual Cythera/Cérigo, which travelers had demystified as a rocky, desolate place bereft of natural beauty. I also associate Bougainville’s La Nouvelle Cythère with Calypso’s island as described in Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), because the navigator opined in both his journal and the published Voyage that to describe adequately all that he saw in Tahiti he would need to borrow Fénelon’s pen. That pen was famous for its seductive rendering of what Telemachus experienced on Calypso’s isle and for its pointed condemnation of the island’s effeminizing effects. Homer called that isle Ogygie; ancient geographers insisted it was a real place; savants disagreed with one another on the point; and travelers persisted in their attempts to find the island by consulting old maps.⁷

A second cluster of islands shows an even deeper play of real and fictive, natural and magical. At its center is the island taken over by the Saracen sorceress Armida in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), which tells the story of the crusaders’ reconquest of the Holy Land. It is to an island that Armida flies, carrying in her chariot a bewitched Rinaldo, the crusader-hero who has captured her heart. On the island Armida conjures a magic garden, a love nest where they enjoy their pleasures. Tasso located Armida’s realm in the Fortunate Islands, which we know as the Canaries, and which in antiquity were alternately imagined as site of the elysian fields where the Age of Gold persisted, the uppermost peaks of the lost continent of Atlantis, and the Garden of the Hesperides. Both the real Canaries and the mythic Fortunate Islands were well known and cited multiple times in the Encyclopédie. Armida, then, brings Rinaldo to a known geographical site, but one already imagined as a mythic space.

Within Tasso’s epic, however, Armida’s island is doubly situated. On the one side it is rooted in the story of the crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem, and thus asks us to look east. On the other, its placement in the Canaries encourages us to gaze west. The ancients imagined the Fortunate Isles as the far western edge of the known world, and this is how Tasso initially describes their location. Setting sail from the Canaries in 1492, Christopher Columbus was the first to slip into unknown seas and onto new worlds, finally touching land in the Antilles. Tasso invokes Columbus in canto 15 of Gerusalemme liberata, putting his praise in the mouth of a magician who describes to Rinaldo’s rescuers the path to Armida’s island. He begins by addressing the would-be rescuers and foretelling what is to come.

This ocean, whose extension frightens you, will cease to be inaccessible. The Pillars of Hercules will then be regarded as a vain fable, incapable of stopping even the most timid navigators. . . . A man of Liguria will dare to be the first to put himself at the mercy of the unknown waves. The winds will in vain groan around his head; in vain will the storms foment around him. Nothing will deter him from his heroic plan. His great courage will render him discontent with the narrow limits prescribed by the Pillars of Hercules. He will cross the limits, and as vanquisher of the winds and tempests he will return to port. It is you, illustrious Columbus, who will set your course toward a new world, will make this world known to your contemporaries. The hundred voices of renown will scarcely suffice to announce to the surprised universe this marvelous event. Your enterprise, Columbus, worthy of holding the first rank in history and of being sung by the greatest poets, will forever earn you the admiration of those who come after you!⁸

Tasso’s positioning of Armida’s island thus asks us to look back to the East and onto the West to the Canaries and beyond. The Canaries, moreover, not only functioned as the launching point to the Antilles, they also provided a model for what lay ahead. They were the first islands that Europeans conquered and rebuilt as plantation islands manned with African slave labor. This metamorphosis never stripped the Canaries of their mythical past nor of their reputation as paradisiacal isles. They remained an active mythical site in the European imaginary despite the despoiling of the environment and the installing of a slave economy. At the same time, they provided conquerors from across Europe with a model for colonizing the islands of the New World, demonstrating that new crops—sugar in particular—could be grown in fertile and seemingly Edenic places. Thus, I include in this cluster the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue, which even after it was transformed into a plantation island retained vestiges of the idyllic land it once was. But as a plantation island, it was also seen as home to bewitching women—products of the very slave system installed there—mixed-race women whose allurements were said to charm and enslave European men. These hot-blooded women exercised power through beguilement; they were the adepts of love and often imagined as practitioners of vaudou. Aspects of the enchanted island—the island that was, for better or worse, charmed by sorceresses and demigoddesses—thus persisted in the most unlikely settings.

While Saint-Domingue and Tahiti may seem distant geographically, conceptually, and politically, these islands show what is common to both clusters. I take seriously Bougainville’s fear that the discovery of resources on Tahiti would lead to European exploitation and ultimately the island’s devastation. The colony of Saint-Domingue was the most prominent example of that fate. Yet even if Bougainville thought about misfortune in the Caribbean while anchored on La Nouvelle Cythère, it is useful to remember that he set off to found a new French Empire in the South Seas, an empire to replace the colonies France lost in the Seven Years’ War. His concern for Tahiti might seem ironic in view of this aim, especially since the war losses raised concerns over retaining French control of Saint-Domingue in the face of possible English aggression. Together, Tahiti and Saint-Domingue represent both the tenacity and the limitations of enchanted island mythologies, with the one making them ludic and the other making them grotesque.

Enchantment: The Sorceress and the Artist

Although the mania for islands has been well documented, much less is written about enchantment, magic, and the supernatural that marked enlightened Paris. The Affair of the Poisons revealed in 1678 that men and women of all classes participated in a criminal underworld of selling