de Duras, Clare. Ourika (1823). Trans. John Fowles. New York: MLA, 1994.

This is a novella that was assigned to me to read before my first session of the 19th-century French novel class I'm taking this semester. I've never been assigned pre-semester reading before. I guess I don't mind, seeing as how this took me all of an hour to get through. A very strange book, though. Told in the first person, it's about a girl who is taken from Senegal and sent to live with a member of the French aristocracy. This is in, oh, the 1770s/1780s. She's given an education and lives very much like everyone else around her. Then, one day, she overhears another woman wondering aloud what will happen to Ourika when she is fit for marriage; no one would stoop to marry a black woman. This, supposedly, is the first time that Ourika is made aware of her racial difference.

She spends the rest of the novella in a near-suicidal state, wishing for God to bring her death, rather than live in the misery of her feelings of exclusion. Then she realizes she's been in love with her adoptive brother all along, and decides to channel this feeling into a love for God. She becomes a nun. The end.

Fowles in his introduction speaks highly of the ways this text is revolutionary and moving, but I think we're reading it mostly to get a historical context for the beginning of the 19th century in France. I hate reading books for this reason.