ABSTRACT
The incestuous nature of Bernardin's world and its attendant overtones of racial "purity" are examined in this chapter against the actual realities of racial formations in French colonial islands in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, which bore the marks of racial mixing—metissage—from their very inception. The analysis that follows is divided into three sections: the first section explores "insularity" as a necessary condition for the universe that Bernardin creates; the second section studies the racial construction of the "white native"; and the third section investigates the workings of "incest," an inevitable consequence of the insular indigenism of Paul et Virginie. With little contact with the outside world, inevitably, incest is presented as its governing sexual and reproductive mode of functioning. Renata Wasserman notes that in Paul et Virginie, the theme of incest, or "extreme endogamy," lies in opposition to the socially exogamous unions into which the two mothers had entered back in France.
