Flaubert’s “Quidquid Volueris”: The Colonial Father and the Poetics of Hysteria

WRITTEN IN OCTOBER 1837 WHEN FLAUBERT WAS NOT YET SEVENTEEN, “Quidquid volueris” articulates a peculiarly modern version of the grotesque. During a visit to South America, a French anthropologist, Paul de Monville, mates a Brazilian slave and an orangutan as an interspecies experiment. The woman dies a horrific death in childbirth. Sixteen years later, the scientist sends for her monstrous offspring, Djalioh, to live with him in France. The hybrid, described as excessively sensitive and imaginative but mute, falls in love with Addle, his “father’s” fiancee. Two years after the wedding, he kills their child, rapes and kills Addle and kills himself. The anthropologist has him stuffed and exhibited as a zoological curio and soon forgets the entire episode. Through a colonial rewriting of the Oedipal plot, Flaubert thus dramatizes the dilemma of the anachronistic Romantic in a positivistic world.