Shifting Edenic Codes: On Two Exotic Visions of the Golden Age in the Late Eighteenth Century

The topos of Edenic far-flung islands seems a self-explanatory cliché rooted in contemporary popular mythology. However, the archaeology of its origins across eighteenth-century travel writing reveals the existence of two strongly contrasted models of the exotic golden age: the eroticized social utopia depicted in Bougainville's account of Tahiti and the chaste exotic pastoral world which provides the backdrop to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie. By revisiting these two seminal texts and their legacy, this article strives to account for the drift or derivation of Edenic codes from the eighteenth century onwards, while sketching the unsuspected lineage that links the two image-generating models to modern exoticism.