'Ourika mania'

The Duchess de Duras heard about a little black girl who had, in 1788, been purchased as a house pet by the Governor of Senegal and given to his uncle, Monsieur de Beauvau. In 1820, the Duchess began writing a novel about the child (creating the first black female protagonist in European literature). Fifty anonymous copies of ?Ourika? were privately published in 1823, but the copies did not remain in the shadows for long. This essay examines how and why this black girl became such a potent representation, so popular that she inspired a brief but important period of hyper-visibility in Paris: ?Ourika Mania.? What interrogations of categories and spaces in early nineteenth-century Paris open up through our investigation of both the real and fictional ?Ourikas?? The dilemmas sparked by representations of Ourika reiterated that no matter how ?proper? the body, blackness precluded inclusion into definitions of Frenchness.