White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity
Tracey Jean Boisseau
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
$21.95, 258 pages, ISBN 0-253-21669-9 (paperback).
$50.00, 258 pages, ISBN 0-253-34389-5 (hardback).

Elisabeth Lamothe
Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux III

First full-length volume to be authored by Tracey Jean Boisseau, White Queen weaves interdisciplinary and theoretical strands in a very enlightening manner. Extensive work on French-Sheldon (several articles and a new edition of the latter’s travel narrative) endows Boisseau with the authority to develop a convincing argument based on an cross-disciplinary approach including African, Belgian and American history, women’s studies, colonial history, and cultural as well as film studies, her main theoretical ambition being to challenge received ideas about French-Sheldon’s involvement in colonial ventures and relationship with first-wave feminism. Refraining from passing hasty judgment on her subject, Boisseau examines the latter’s clever manipulation of the emerging mass media to earn fame as a feminist foremother when her exploratory ventures failed to secure her long-lasting acclaim and recognition.

The author is especially intent on deconstructing American feminism as a discourse that produces subjectified and subjected positions: dissenting from the idea that French-Sheldon was a pioneer in the women’s liberation movement, as previous scholars would have her be, Boisseau argues that such biased view misses the crucial fact that French-Sheldon used the movement to suit her personal agenda and for purposes of self-aggrandizement. She construes French-Sheldon’s rhetoric and career as a colonial imposition and shows that the American feminist subject has been constructed through drastic exclusions, taking pains to demonstrate how the excluded “return to haunt the union and integrity of the feminist ‘we’” [209]. Boisseau’s careful documentation of French-Sheldon’s travels and writings succeeds in disrupting a popular history of feminism that denies its relation to colonial history by erasing its complicity with imperial ideologies.

In 1891, May French-Sheldon’s trek from East Africa to Mount Kilimanjaro earned her the somewhat overblown title of “first woman explorer of Africa.” Then began the public career of a woman who bewitched the imagination of a generation of late Victorians and managed to cast an even more powerful spell over the minds of New Women, demonstrating her talent for giving inspiring performances of her self. Determined to do away with French-Sheldon’s self-branding as “pioneer for feminism,” Tracey Boisseau shows “how certain patterns in American mass culture have positioned feminism as a set of discourses that constitute an imperial threat to colonized or post-colonized people” [18].

In the introduction, Boisseau’s concern consists in demonstrating how the image of emancipated and adventurous womanhood, ushered in by French-Sheldon and her like at the end of the nineteenth century, played a crucial role in “mass-media presentations of American womanhood” [3]. She proposes to read the emergence of American feminist identity partly as the result of the interplay between the colonial ideology and racist assumptions French-Sheldon used to suit her purposes. The introduction gives the opportunity to learn that the book’s title comes from the extravagant costume donned by French-Sheldon on her African venture: shrouded in impeccable white cloth, her forehead graced with a sparkling tiara and armed with a whip and a pair of pistols slung on her hip, French-Sheldon fashioned quite an odd regal figure for herself in the African wilderness. Claiming that this “hyper-racialized” fantasy of white womanhood represented by French-Sheldon’s costume and demeanor was directly linked to colonial power, Boisseau sets off to deconstruct the link between colonial fantasies and popular ideas about feminist liberation.

White Queen falls into three parts divided into numerous chapters, which contain photographs taken by French-Sheldon in Africa. The first part, entitled “First Woman Explorer of Africa: The 1891 Expedition,” details telling elements of French-Sheldon’s coming of age and decision to embark on her African trek, much to the dismay of her conventional social circle, before giving an insightful reading of the ethnographic narrative she wrote to represent her experience. Boisseau contends that the White Queen performance given by French-Sheldon in Africa was an idealization of new womanhood, which owed its existence to the conviction of the white race’s superiority and to the nation’s eagerness for conquest. “The Caravan Trek to Kilimanjaro” opens with her stay in Africa, as well as the discovery of a more public sense of self, before turning to the analysis of Sultan to Sultan, the book she wrote about the challenge she had successfully met. In the chapter titled “Self-Discovery,” the author sheds light on the way French-Sheldon fashioned a persona for herself, resorting for the most part to self-aggrandizement while always managing to straddle the Victorian gender divide without a single faux-pas. To Boisseau, such achievement deserves close scrutiny, for she managed to accommodate the image of explorer as well as that of respectable woman and national heroine, while endowing herself with masculine authority, purchased by virtue of her race, class and nationality. A minute examination of French-Sheldon’s rhetorical skills follows in “Forging a Feminine Colonial Method,” where Boisseau stresses her subject’s simultaneous use of new-womanhood and reformist ideology to “craft her White Queen persona” [13] before turning to the sexual politics of French-Sheldon’s textual representation of herself in “Sex and the Sultans.” Drawing from the popular taste for orientalist clichés, French-Sheldon wove the languages of sentiment and science together in order to give a genteel character to her heroism, even though her only claim to fame as an explorer was the “discovery” of a small and quite insignificant lake in Africa. What’s more, building on the rhetoric of true womanhood, racial uplift and the civilizing mission of the West, French-Sheldon concealed her colonialist ambitions by passing them off as humanitarian. Boisseau draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s analysis of “the mystique of reciprocity” to show that French-Sheldon depicted relations between Europeans and Africans as mutually beneficial and claimed that her ethnographic writings on African civilization aimed at exploring the methods for civilizing Africans so as to solve the problem of industrial training impeding the continent’s progress. The following chapter, “Confessions of a White Queen” efficiently nails down the contradictions and loopholes of French-Sheldon’s rhetoric in Sultan to Sultan, a text in which she poses as a respected, awe-inspiring and even glorified white goddess, relying all along on the orientalization of Africa, the demeaning of African women and the emasculation of African men to give a performance of her own empowered womanhood.

The second part of the book covers five years of French-Sheldon’s life somewhat too quickly, or so it seems. “Agent for Empire: Interventions in Central and West Africa, 1903-1908” examines the dubious part French-Sheldon played in the colonization of Africa. Fading fortunes led her to accept financing from the Congo Reform Association to investigate Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo Free State. Purported to put an end to the ruthless exploitation of Africans in rubber plantations and to contribute to King Leopold’s downfall, her mission failed, not because she wasn’t up to the task, but because of her own duplicity: French-Sheldon, as it turned out, was acting as a double agent for the King. “An Imperial Spy in the Congo” therefore investigates French-Sheldon’s racist positions. Bound to produce letters suitable for publication to shed light on the evils of colonization, she never denounced the abuses of colonial power she could observe daily on rubber plantations and the depopulation caused by torture and enslavement but extolled Belgium’s civilizing influence instead. Entrusted with the mission of describing the plight of African women, French-Sheldon shunned from championing their cause and blamed the victims instead by stigmatizing their so-called laziness and inferiority to white women, while portraying King Leopold as a munificent hero forced to shoulder a “white man’s burden.” The last chapter, “A Plantation Mistress in Liberia,” gives a somewhat sketchy account of her attempts to repatriate black Americans from the South to Liberia, where she planned on running a plantation. Her proposal to indenture Blacks from the South met with staunch opposition and the ambitious undercover spy failed to secure money for the purchase of the “farm in Africa” that would make Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen famous. She left the limelight for a few years, only to make a spectacular come-back on the public platform after the First World War.

Entitled “Feminist for a New Generation: Mastering Femininity in 1920s America,” the third part of Boisseau’s book rests on convincing theory which links French-Sheldon’s success in tailoring a new public persona for herself to the emergence of the American mass media. Far from assuming the pose of an aging “exploratress,” French-Sheldon whetted her rhetorical tools to rise to prominence again in the 1910s. In “Taking Feminism on the Road,” Boisseau examines how French-Sheldon’s used her experiences in Africa to promote herself as a representative new woman and a modernizer of Africa. The author dissents from general theory about first-wave feminism, claiming that it was not political organizing and networking for suffrage which helped French-Sheldon rise to fame, but the widespread belief that the innate, superior character of American womanhood had earned women legal protection and economic opportunity. Drawing from the work of historian Nancy Cott, Tracey Boisseau shows that French-Sheldon dreaded being associated with feminists because “feminism and political militance” tended to be linked at the time. Despite her reluctance to incorporate a feminist agenda and to adopt an openly political rhetoric which would have smacked of feminism, French-Sheldon presented herself as interested in the achievements and the points of view of women, and claimed that such opinions gave her credence as a feminist foremother. Thus given a free rein, French-Sheldon gleefully reinvented herself, gave sold-out speaking performances all over the country, had a particularly smashing success at universities and enjoyed increasing fame thanks to the help of the press which contributed to constructing her as a national icon, a feminist role model and a modern woman. Thanks to carefully selected primary material (newspaper clippings and speech excerpts), Boisseau shows that college women were manipulated into considering French-Sheldon as a feminist pioneer and a “renegade exploratress” [160], even though she had never departed from conventions and did not deserve the scientific recognition she had so eagerly sought and managed to usurp.

Boisseau’s use of theory in subsequent chapters, particularly those of the fetish, cross-dressing and the masquerade expounded in “Masquerading as the Subject of Feminism,” is quite convincing. After giving an overview of the scholarship dealing with the theory of the fetish, she examines the social practices and psycho-sexual processes presenting French-Sheldon’s female audiences with a way to construct a feminist position by identifying with her “as an exceptionally feminine heroine participating in the typically masculine realms of exploration and travel-writing, French-Sheldon fit the notion of the masquerade as it was conceptualized by Freudian analysis” [166], claims Boisseau. She became a feminist fetish, the author concludes, thanks to her costume, which resorted on the hyperbolization of femininity, and because new female models were erected and their images manufactured by the media industry; moving from margin to center, the emancipated woman was increasingly portrayed in films. Boisseau gives an interesting reading of the erotic excitement surrounding French-Sheldon’s public appearances in the light of feminist film theory in “The Queen, the Sheik, the Sultana, and the Female Spectator,” showing how she elicited lesbian desire on the part of her audience: by assuming the phallus, overcoming woman’s “lack,” her cross-dressing enabled her to become what Boisseau compares to a sex goddess.

White Queen contains about a dozen photographs of French Sheldon’s African trek and a couple of drawings of her famed costume. However, we could make a slight reproach regarding the author’s iconographic choices: the snapshots included in the volume merely illustrate a trip which was no feat from a scientific point of view and have little impact on the book’s argument. No photographs of French-Sheldon’s numerous stage performances during the later part of her life are provided, although chances are that their inclusion would have added depth to Boisseau’s analysis of her as a performer. Despite this minor fault, Boisseau’s book is a major contribution to the study of the relationship between feminism and colonial history, challenging previous interpretations of that highly colorful personality and bringing to light the weight that the interplay between race, class and gender on the one hand, and their representation in the media on the other hand, had on the construction of American feminism.