Chapter 8

Before sentimental empire

This article seeks to historicize the eighteenth-century sentimental literature of slavery by examining theatrical performances of cross-cultural servitude from an earlier, markedly different historical context, that of seventeenth-century France. In contrast to the sentimental period, transatlantic empire was still more aspiration than reality for France in the 1600s, slavery more a Mediterranean than an Atlantic phenomenon, and racial discourse still in gestation. I demonstrate that the ways in which French seventeenth-century playwrights modeled their audience’s emotional response to cross-cultural slavery evolved over time, moving from the possibility of audience identification with enslaved characters to a foreclosure of that possibility. The mechanism for this tendency to prevent identification is what I call generic drift, the migration of representations of servitude from the tragic to the tragicomic and comic stages. To demonstrate the evolution of the theater’s modeling of emotional responses to slavery from possible identification to the prevention of identification over time, I analyze representations of servitude in Le More cruel, an anonymous tragedy from 1610, Scudéry’s 1636 tragicomedy L’Amant liberal and Montfleury’s 1663–64 comedy Le Mary sans femme. I show that the tragedy partially encourages the audience to feel compassion for the plight of the slave, whereas the tragicomic and comic plays incite erotic pleasure or scorn, reactions that distance the audience from the enslaved. I also relate the generic drift to the increased disciplining of compassion in the 1600s and to France’s growing participation in the Atlantic slave trade.