Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery 9781501726835

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Creole Crossings

Creole Crossings Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery

Carolyn Vellenga Berman

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2006 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2006 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berman, Carolyn Vellenga. Creole crossings : domestic fiction and the reform of colonial slavery I by Carolyn Vellenga Berman. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4384-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: o-8014-4384-9 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Creoles in literature. 2. Slavery in literature. 3. Antislavery movements in literature. 4· Domestic fiction--History and criticism. I. Tide. PN3426.C74B47 2005 809'.933552--dc22 2005017719 Cornell University Press strives to use envirornuentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in d1e publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

AcKNOWLEDGMENTs

ix

INTRODUCTION

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery CHAPTER ONE "Creoles and Creolified"

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27

CHAPTER 1\vo

Creole Nation: Paul et Virginie

57

CHAPTER ThREE

Revising Virginia: Belinda, Indiana, and LA Pille aux yeux d'or

88

CHAPTER FouR

Colonial Madness in Jane Eyre

122

CHAPTER FIVE

Legitimate Families: Uncle Tom's Cabin and

Inddents in the Life of a Slave Girl

144

CHAPTER SIX

Indicting Domestic Fiction: Wide Sargasso Sea CoNCLUSION NoTES WoRKs CITED

215

INDEX

231

Acknowledgments

Most of my intellectual debts will be clear from the following pages, but some quieter influences merit a special mention. First, I must thank Nancy Armstrong for reading, interrogating, and helping to shape this manuscript at every stage. If the bits and pieces, the errors and the arguments, are mine, Nancy deserves all the credit for the magic that has brought this project to life. Reda Bensmaia, Pierre Saint-Amand, and Ellen Rooney also played a crucial role in the early stages. I am grateful for their careful scrutiny and probing questions. For the desire to start down this path, I must gratefully acknowledge Prabhakara Jha, along with Maria Brewer, Rey Chow, Sheila Gaudon, Neil Lazarus, Jan Miel, Karen Newman, Maria Paganini, F. D. Reeve, Leonard Tennenhouse, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, andJack Zipes. Since the writing of this book coincided with a withdrawal from an active campus life to the confines of a busy, working home, I am doubly grateful to a host of colleagues, friends, and students for keeping me connected to the scholarly worlds beyond my desk and for reminding me why such writing matters. Sara Beliveau Cohen and Denise Davis were my first audience, reading multiple versions of some chapters. Their kind and astute comments by mail kept me writing. Many other fellow travelers from Brown University provided moral support, among them Caroline Reitz, Ivan Kreilkamp, Teresa Langle de Paz, and Laura Pirott Quintero. At Yale and at the New School, I have been blessed with wonderful colleagues, including Oz Frankel, Noah Isenberg, Catherine Labio, Deborah Landau, David Quint, Rose-Myriam Rejouis, Elaine Savory, Jonathan Veitch, Gina Walker, Abby Zanger, and Ahnaz Zelleke. I also thank all of my students and, in particular, the members of my seminars on the Brontes, "The

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AcKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Emancipated Woman," and "Dreaming of Freedom," for working through this material with me. Thanks are due to the City University of New York Graduate Center's eighteenth-century group and its Victorian seminar, especially to Amanda Claybaugh, Anne Humpherys, Gerhard Joseph, and Shuchi Kapila, as well as Cindy Weinstein, for discussions of my work in progress and various kindnesses. Bernhard Kendler and Alison Kalett of Cornell University Press have been marvelous editors, making the process of publication delightful from start to finish. I am very grateful to Elsie B. Michie and Carla Peterson, who read the manuscript for the press. I can only hope that I have done justice to their excellent suggestions. I also thank the editors Susan Barnett, Amanda Heller, and Karen Hwa for their hard work and patience. I am very grateful to Jean-Michel Racault for sharing with me the image from an earlynineteenth-century edition of Paul et Virginie that appears on the jacket of this book. The librarians at Brown University and New York University also deserve my gratitude. Special thanks are due to Robert Parks at the Pierpont Morgan Library for giving my class access to its collection of Bronte manuscripts, and to Andrew Kimball for arranging a desk in the Wertheim room at the New York Public Library. A grant from Brown made possible my initial research at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The editors of the following journals have generously granted permission to reprint new versions of previously published articles in chapters 4 and s: "Undomesticating the Domestic Novel." Genre 32-4 (winter 1999): 26796. Reprinted with permission. "Creole Family Politics." Novel 33-3 (summer 2000): 328-52. Copyright NOVEL Corp. © 2000. Reprinted with permission. But of course this book could not have taken shape as it did without the support-and the formative influence-of my earliest and most patient readers, the ones who raised me. I thank my mother, Kathleen Vellenga, who combined domesticity and politics in an exemplary way, for her truly remarkable attentiveness to every scrap of my writing, from childish verse to footnoted prose. I thank my father, Jim Vellenga, a temperamentally conservative businessman, for his magnanimous interest in my wildest theories. I thank my brother, Tom Vellenga, for sharpening my points, and my sister, Charlotte Vellenga Landreau, for exploring the world with me. (With Charlotte, I first read the Reader's Digest condensed version ofJane Eyre and wondered what I was missing.) Jennifer Arenson, Rachel Margolis, and a host of other friends offered key encouragement in the passage from speculation to writing. I am also grateful to Michele and Allan Berman

Acknowledgments

xi

for their support, along with M. J. Berman, Preemwatie (Moenija) Bhagolie, Aviva Gerson, Carlos Landreau, and Julie Schmid. Greg Berman, my husband, deserves a multitude of thanks for generously cohabiting with this book-not to mention reading it and wresting clarity from scholarly obscurity, when asked. Above all, I thank Greg and my daughters, Hannah and Milly Berman, born along the way, for giving me what Harriet Jacobs called "another link to life" and for graciously participating in my own domestic experiments.

Creole Crossings

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

Introduction

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery God Ahnighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. WILLIAM WILBERFORCE,

diary entry ( 1787)

Fiction played a powerful role in two major ideological events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of these was the repudiation of colonial slavery by the preeminent slave-trading and slave-owning nations of the period, France, Great Britain, and the United States. The "literary campaign" against slavery has been called the "first propagandistic literature of modern times" (Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings 9, 24). Efforts to gain public backing for ameliorating slavery by regulation, ending the slave trade, and finally abolishing slavery produced an outpouring of descriptive fiction and nonfiction narratives, both religious and secular, which depicted and condemned aspects of slavery as a moral outrage. The circulation of these works linked "the influence of literature, morals, and religion" to the "instrument of Political Power" in a new way, as Senator Charles Sumner reminded his fellow Americans in 1854 (24). And it did so in nation-states still experimenting with the forms of democratic political representation. In prose fiction and poetry, proponents of slavery reform addressed themselves specifically to citizens who could not (yet) vote, from the young and the landless to women, encouraging them to play a role in shaping national morality and public opinion. Drawing on events in the colonies (or in southern and western territories) and responding to the actions of colonial subjects, antislavery literature worked hard to establish slavery as a principle of wrong action to be spurned by free nations.

2

INTRODUCTION

The second change in attitudes and judgments that I have in mind was the enshrinement of a nuclear family household, with a "domestic" woman at its center, as a national norm. As a number of critics have argued, the spate of novels about seduction and ordinary domestic life in this period were no less potent than antislavery fiction in their political effects. They were, in fact, part of an equally powerful campaign to repudiate aristocratic rule and aristocratic family values. Domestic fiction was instrumental in producing the British middle class, since what allowed men at disparate points in the social hierarchy to identifY themselves as a class worthy of ruling the nation was the embrace of a common ideal: the domestic wife and her well-superintended home. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels about seduction and the family home thus did not merely reflect but actually helped to produce the "fabric of common sense and sentimentality" that rendered "the success of repeated pressures to coax and nudge sexual desire into conformity with the norms ofheterosexualmonogamy" a readerly delight (Armstrong, Desire 7). Nor was this function confined to Britain. Discourses of domesticity, long considered peripheral to the major pioneer and gothic (male) traditions of American literature, in fact preoccupied nineteenth-century American fiction. 1 Women of the governing classes could learn from British as from American fiction why and how they were to nurse and rear their own children, to become moral exemplars to their children and husbands, and to devote themselves to governing orderly homes. French fictions of "families in jeopardy," too, imagined into being the bourgeois class as center and essence of the French nation. As Roddey Reid has shown, the French bourgeoisie defined itself by new norms of domesticity which were ritually endangered by its most cherished fictions. At first glance, these two campaigns effected through prose fiction may appear to be unrelated. After all, one was colonial and the other domestic. One marked a public battle over the laws governing the colonies, the other a seemingly apolitical discussion of private life. One campaign produced images of unfamiliar scenes in overseas territories, while the other yielded familiar images of families at home. At the very least, we might expect them to occupy separate genres. But they do not. On closer inspection, we will see how the new focus of middle-class women on domestic life was often justified by the context of empire, or even viewed as the ascension to governance over an "empire." At the same time, feminists linked women's issues to colonial reform differently, decryingthe "slavery" of(free) women's lives. For reformers of slavery as for its adherents, meanwhile, slavery was viewed as a "domestic" problem, both in the sense of national (a source of national shame) and in the sense of household or family (a deviant or acceptable variant

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

3

of household or family life). Thematic cross-overs between domestic and colonial reform become less surprising when we recognize that the two campaigns addressed the very same readers. Both sought the reform of national manners through an appeal to bourgeois women readers as the moral "heart" of expanding nation-states. 2 My central project in this book is to trace the convergence of discourses of colonial and domestic reform in fiction and politics of the antislavery era. One possible approach to this subject would be to examine discourses of antislavery reform in domestic fiction. Another approach would look at discourses of domestic reform in antislavery fiction. What interests me, however, is a figure that crosses between them. This figure, which is crucial to both literary campaigns, allows us in turn to travel from antislavery fiction to fiction aimed at domestic reform and back again. What I have in mind is the figure of the Creole woman. The Creole was a synecdoche for the slave colonies within the domestic space of expanding nations. 3 The Oxford English Dictionary has defined the "Creole" as "a descendant of European settlers, born and naturalized in ... colonies or regions" including "the West Indies and other parts of America, Mauritius, etc:' or "a Negro born in the West Indies or America, as distinguished from one freshly imported from Africa:' I look more closely at this definition in chapter 1, but for now I simply note that the term refers to the offSpring of both settlers and slaves in the slave-and-settler colonies. In French, creole has referred to a similar range of people, with overlapping but distinct geographical parameters. In American English, "Creole" came to refer particularly to the offspring of French settlers and slaves in the French-speaking territories of Louisiana, as we shall see. In each of these cases Creoles were colonial subjects associated with slavery under national jurisdiction. The Creole was thus a paradigmatic subject of colonial slavery in the antislavery era. At the same time, the Creole was also an object lesson demonstrating the effects of early childhood education. As the OED goes on to declare, Creole descendants of settlers and slaves were "more or less modified in type by the climate and surroundings." Jane West's 1793 Advantages q{Education . .. A Tale for Misses and their Mammas strikes a common theme by stressing how important it is to send the Creole daughter of a Jamaican planter to England for an education so that her mind will not be "vitiated by ... pernicious examples of pride, cruelty, and luxury;' by "the common vices of the island" and "irregularities at which an English libertine would blush" (Sypher, "WestIndian" 513). When the Creole is an alien (or half-alien) to the community of the novel, as she is in the texts I consider in this book, she almost always

4

INTRODUCTION

furnishes evidence of the importance of a proper education by illustrating the consequences of its absence. One 1835 review of George Sand's Indiana commented: "In our day education is making itselffelt everywhere; nobody escapes from it. Indiana could thus only be imagined as a Creole, that is to say, someone born and raised in the heart of a society that in terms of its moral development is almost nonexistent." 4 Honore de Balzac gives this signification of the Creole figure an interesting twist when he employs the term creole to describe the married courtesan Valerie Marneffe in La Cousine Bette as a flawed domestic product of Paris. Valerie's identification as a "Creole of Paris" (133) might possibly designate her as part of an exiled American community in Paris. 5 More likely, however, it marks her as too truly a child of Paris, (de)formed by its culture just as Creoles abroad were thought to be (de)formed by the twin influences of tropical climate and colonial slavery. Disfigured by her improper upbringing, as we shall see, the Creole figure in general made a compelling case for domestic fiction as a technology for female education in the national interest. A focus on the figure of the Creole thus permits (and requires) us to practice a kind of double vision, seeing every Creole twice, within the field of antislavery and the field of domestic fiction. It also requires (and permits) us to practice this double vision within a transnational frame. Ati:er all, the Creole's national belonging is always in question. Who and what is a Creole? In British texts, the Creoles in question usually come from the British or French Caribbean--or, better yet, from an island that had belonged to both countries. 6 In French writing, les creoles were generally residents of the French and Spanish Caribbean, or alternatively the occupants of French islands off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. For Anglo-American writers, Creoles tended to be the French- and Spanish-speaking residents of the Louisiana territories, including the lands not yet incorporated into the United States as states. The blurred national identity of Creole characters testified to the shifting borders of overseas empires, where colonial possessions oti:en changed hands. The title of this book, Creole Crossings, suggests the complexity of the historical relationship between the heterogeneous groups known as "Creoles" and the French, British, and Anglo-American communities addressed by the fictions I examine. All of the novels in this book feature the literal crossing of boundaries-from ocean crossings to river crossings-whether these are glossed as an escape from slavery or as a new confinement. Passing back and forth, the transplanted Creole figures in these works remind us of "the constant movement of people and ideas" from the "colonial periphery" to the European "center" (Pratt 90) as well as the lateral movements of colonials

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

5

within and between shifting imperial borders. For the readers of these texts, the Creole figure represented a broadening of horizons. Imported from text to text, it thus permits us to follow the transnational production and reception of propagandistic fiction in this period. A crossing is, of course, also an intersection. In this sense the Creole is a pure product of what Mary Louise Pratt has called the colonial "contact zone." Creoles were the progeny of a vast colonial experiment in crossing European and African populations with a new climate and/or hemisphere. They thus lent themselves to the kinds of speculation that had long been confined to domestic animals and agricultural produce. What kinds of human "stock" are there? What is the "nature" of a community or population? What can be altered, and what remains constant despite uprooting and new combinations? Natural historians and their intellectual heirs, ethnologists and anthropologists, produced new theories of human types, cultures, and "races" based on the Creole experiments. Obviously inflected by local politics (not least, the practices of colonial slavery), these theories were enthusiastically reimported to the "mother countries" and applied to those "at home" as well-often by Creoles and their families. Thus W. F. Edwards, a white Jamaican Creole, went to Paris for medical training and stayed to found the Societe d'Ethnologie in 1839. His theory of"the crossing of races" held that "the racial course of British and French history was still actually detectable in living national populations:' 7 To cross is not only to intersect, however; it is also to obstruct, betray, or confront in a troublesome manner. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century depictions of the Creole woman, we find this kind of crossing as well. Metropolitan portraits of the Creole respond in detail to all kinds of Creole resistance to French, British, and even Anglo-American rule. As Benedict Anderson has reminded us, many of the earliest genuinely "national" revolutions occurred not in Europe but in the colonized Western Hemisphere between 1776 and 1838. These revolutions pursued what Pratt has called "the liberal creole project" of founding "an independent, decolonized American society and culture, while retaining European values and white supremacy;' grappling with "the claims for equality of subordinated indigenous, mestizo, and African majorities;' and "the blatant neocolonialist greed of the Europeans" (175). Stressing the importance of this colonial history in the emergence of modern concepts of nationhood, Anderson has gone so far as to dub white setders in the Americas the "creole pioneers" of modern nationalism. By defining these "creole pioneers" as exclusively white setders in the Americas, however, Anderson occludes a significant aspect of the impact of colonization

6

INTRODUCTION

on its "mother countries" and their concepts of national belonging. 8 We can begin to remedy his narrow focus by supplementing it with recent theories of creolite and "creolization:' Like Anderson's approach to nationalism, these theories emphasize the novelty of the "New World" and its impact on modern history, but they break open the fiction of racial purity which Anderson left intact. Instead, the theorists of creolization canvas the complexity of colonial encounters and their legacy of (inter)racial and (inter)cultural mingling. Drawing on linguistic theories about Creole languages, they celebrate the unpredictable emergence of new languages and new cultures in the colonial contact zone, with an anti-national and anti-racial conception of productive cultural mixing. 9 Although Pratt, like Anderson, appears to exclude those whom she might call Afro-Americans from the category of the Creole, she nonetheless enumerates political questions pertaining to the "mixed-race" groups who were (also) called Creoles with a set of separate questions: "Would they provide leadership to the revolted underclasses, or would they ... side with the white elites? ... Would they side with creole-led independence movements, or with the European colonial powers?" (101). Creole characterization in the metropolitan novel wrestles with these questions about the potential affiliation with, or opposition from, Creoles of color, in tandem with the peculiar challenges of the Creole "white elites." As we shall see, in fact, questions about "mixed-race groups" were particularly pertinent to the delineation of "the" Creole character. Adopting a strategic approach to landscape description and romantic plotting in the nineteenth-century novel, this book thus asks, with regard to the literary Creole, what do such characterizations do? Historians of colonial slavery have argued that slavery came to define freedom by concrete "antithesis" in this period, contrasting personal and physical coercion with impersonal market forces, involuntary labor with voluntary contracts, and a lack of legal protection for persons and property with equal protection under the law (Holt 25-26). Thus "the power in the antislavery movement" derived from "the fact that slavery was such a convenient foil for free markets, free labor, and free men" (Holt 26). Ann Laura Stoler leads us to consider how colonial slavery helped to shape the European middle classes' family values as well, describing how the overlapping vocabularies of "race" and "class" in nineteenth-century bourgeois discourse "place the making of racial discourse and a discourse on slavery, in particular, as formative in the making of a middle-class identity rather than as a late nineteenth-century addition to it" (123-24). The field of postcolonial studies still tends to paint with a broad brush; it is time to complicate its terms by reintroducing the

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

7

history of antislavery activities not as an alibi for imperialsim but as a complex and decisive moment in the history of nationalism, imperialism, and the bourgeois family. If a discourse on slavery shaped modern middle-class identity, then the characterization of the Creole woman becomes central to the story of this (re)formation. To recover the etymological sense of the "Creole" (meaning "brought up domestically"), as I am proposing here, is to reassert the significance of the colonial mother and her child-raising function in the history of colonial slavery and its effects on modern culture. It reintroduces the importation of childbearing women, both slave and free, to the colonies as a crucial component of this history; it reminds us of the interplay between colonial reforms and "domestic" propaganda; and it focuses our attention on the educational roles of the nanny, the governess, the mother, the church, the state, and the "family" in their national and transnational dimensions. This is what motivates my inquiry into a series of literary texts and the discourses of discrimination that they transpose, consolidate, or invent. By focusing on the representation of the Creole in these works, I hope to elucidate the critical juncture occupied by the antislavery movement in the history of the modern (bourgeois) family as well as the history of the modern (imperialist) nation for which it often stands.

What's in a Name? A focus on the literary representation of the Creole allows us to historicize race and nationality as well as gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century fiction. Like previous studies of the politics and poetics of representation, this book contributes to a field that we might call identity politics criticism. In the early stages of this undertaking, literary critics studied how paradigmatic "others" were represented in fiction: for instance, racial others (blacks), national others (the French), gender others (women), and sexual others (homosexuals) in British Victorian literature. For this kind of criticism, which took the depiction of existing groups as its starting point, the figure of the Creole could have only minor interest-if the Creole in question appeared to be black, French, female, or lesbian. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's approach to Charlotte Bronte's Creole lunatic in The Madwoman in the Attic, their still unsurpassed study of "The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination;' may be taken as a good example of this kind offirst-wave criticism. Reading Bronte's Creole as the representation of a woman, Gilbert and Gubar interpreted her

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INTRODUCTION

as Jane Eyre's "truest and darkest double," "the ferocious secret selfJane has been trying to repress" since childhood (360). In this reading the Creole woman's gender identity is paramount, while her designation as a Creole is attributed in a note to the cultural requirement that "when the passionate uninhibited self is a woman, she is more often than not dark": "Bertha, of course, is a Creole--swarthy, 'livid,' etc." (68on21). Although Gilbert and Gubar place this Creole lunatic at the center of their reading of "female realities" in Bronte's fiction and women's fiction generally (336), Bronte's categorization of the Creole as Creole is unimportant to their analysis, since it indicates neither gender nor sexuality, and it designates the lunatic's race and nationality only in the most oblique fashion. In subsequent identity politics criticism, by way of contrast, the construction of the major social categories themselves (race, nation, gender, and sexuality) has become the primary critical object. Rather than measuring fictional depictions of women's lives against "female realities,'' we now tend to ask how fictions distinguish women from non-women in the first place-from ladies, females, and colonial subjects, for example, as well as from men. This question presumes that literature is effective not only in relaying experiential truths but also in shaping our apprehensions of the world we experience. Nineteenth-century fiction did not just depict a prior reality, in this view, but played a role in producing the modern ideas of race and nation, gender and sexuality within which we live even now. Once the construction of social categories comes under scrutiny in this way, it becomes clear that the social classifications in question are not separate systems but interlocking ones. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's seminal essay on the convergence of feminism and imperialism in Jane Eyre provides an example of this second-wave approach. Six years after The Madwoman in the Attic appeared, Spivak used the figure of the Creole madwoman in Jane Eyre to take on the "high feminist norm" of "basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America" (243). She faulted Bronte's novel not for lying about female realities but for employing the "unquestioned ideology" of imperialism to produce the new feminist norm of womanhood celebrated by Gilbert and Gubar (248). Pointing to the Creole lunatic's role in the text, Spivak noted how "the 'native female' as such (within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded from any share" in the British novelist's emerging "female individualist" norm (244-45). Yet the crucial signifier in Jane Eyre is not "native" but rather "Creole." Bronte's text employs the word three times, with decreasing neutrality, first introducing it as an official social classification in a legal proof of prior marriage ("Antoinetta his wife, a Creole," 255); then linking it to undesirable

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

9

inheritable traits ("Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!" and "Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points." 257); and, finally, employing it as a moral-geographical term of opprobrium: "I longed only for what suited me-for the antipodes of the Creole" (274). Spivak herself comments in a note to her reading ofjane Eyre: "I use the word 'native' here in reaction to the term 'Third World Woman.' It cannot, of course, apply with equal historical justice to both the West Indian and the Indian contexts nor to contexts of imperialism by transportation" (26on6). The inapplicability of the word "native" to the context of colonial slavery nevertheless makes it all the more critical for us to understand the use of the word "Creole" in Bronte's text. 10 As Edward Said observed with regard to Jane Austen's reference to Antigua in Manifield Park, we must "understand concretely the historical valences in [this] reference ... we should try to understand what she referred to, why she gave it the importance she did, and why indeed she made the choice" (Culture and Imperialism 89). Taking the work of Said and Spivak as well as Homi Bhabha as an inspiration, I accordingly ask what difference the term "Creole" makes. The discourse on Creoles in metropolitan fiction furnishes an excellent example of the ways in which the "authoritative representations" of, say, "Englishness to itself" are disturbed by "the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural, and even climatic differences" in colonial discourse (Bhabha, Location of Culture n3). In efforts to dismantle the authority of such selfrepresentations, the fact that the term "Creole" now names an opaque social classification becomes a strength. Once the power of social categories has been established, it can be liberating to learn about discourses of discrimination that did not stick, giving us a perspective on the contingent formation of the ones that did. The history of slavery, says Stuart Hall, involves more than "a general psychology of racism;' for "the question is not whether men-in-general make perceptual distinctions between groups with different racial or ethnic characteristics, but rather, what are the specific conditions which make this form of distinction socially pertinent, historically active" ("Race, Articulation" 338). This question is all the more pressing in the case of the Creole classification. The term "Creole;' as we shall see, was strictly a colonial, not a racial, label. That is, rather than identifYing a group on the basis of racial or ethnic characteristics, the "Creole" classification in the early nineteenth century encompassed all kinds of individuals born and raised in the European slave colonies. It distinguished between Creole children and their European settler parents, just as it distinguished between Creole slaves and slaves who came to the colonies as adults. The discourse of discrimination against

10

INTRODUCTION

Creoles thus differs fundamentally from the European/"native" distinction and the corresponding colonizer/ colonized binary that have dominated discussions of colonialism since Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon.1 1 Now that we have glimpsed the enduring power of these colonialist discourses, so aptly mimicked by Fanon, it is worth taking a second look at the curious alternatives that coexisted with them-including the category of the "Creole," which distinguished Europeans from colonists of European descent while failing to discriminate between colonists and slaves. 12 In examining the literary representation of Creoles, I accordingly stress the fortuitous history of the Creole name itself. Slavoj Zizek has helpfully elucidated the rift between those linguists who "emphasize the immanent, internal 'intentional contents' of a word" and those who "regard as decisive the external causal link, the way a word has been transmitted from subject to subject in a chain of tradition" (92, 90). For the latter group, it would be folly to take a dictionary definition of the "Creole" (even from such an authority as the Oxford English Dictionary) and expect it to account for all usages of the term-and, indeed, it is not difficult to find usages that challenge the OED version of the term's meaning. Yet the chain of tradition establishing these sometimes surprising usages does reveal a (shifting) core of meanings that may look "intentional" or "internal" in retrospect. This is because "naming itself retroactively constitutes its reference" (Zizek 95). As Zizek explains, what guarantees "the identity of an object in all counterfactual situations-through a change of all its descriptive features-is the retroactive fjfect of twming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, that supports the identity of the object" (94-95). In other words, each usage of the word "Creole" (or its French forebear, creole) is an adoption-or, rather, a transposition-which refers to prior usages, and in so doing constructs its (evolving) referent in retrospect. This is important to bear in mind when we consider a name such as "Creole;' which simultaneously invokes a particular geographical reference and transcends it. Implicitly the Creole, like the "native," is always a Creole of some colonial locale (e.g., "a Creole of Saint-Domingue"), but the connotations of the term accrued by its history of usage nonetheless exceed this referential function. Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son (1844-46) describes an English lady in England as "quite content to classify" a "dark" servant "as a 'native; without connecting him with any geographical idea whatever" (144). As this description indicates, the social categories of colonial discourse refer not to actual geographical terrains so much as to geographical "ideas," in such a way as to infuse them with further meaning.B When Bronte's Englishman seeks the "antipodes of the Creole;' or when

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

II

George Sand's narrator comments, "Women of France, you do not know what a Creole is" (Indiana 150), we are confronted with just such an excess of signification, a floating cluster of meanings made possible by a chain of previous references. By examining literary texts alongside travel narratives, journalism, government reports, medical discourses, and pro- as well as antislavery writing, I elucidate just how the term "Creole" crossed from one discursive instanceand one language-to the next. In the process, I reveal how it shifted from designating practices that preserved European origins in diaspora to designating practices that defiled or obliterated those origins.

Emancipation The lasting effectiveness of the ideological work of prose fiction may be measured in the seeming self-evidence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's demonstration in Uncle Toms Cabin that the sentimental fainily cannot survive the "corrosive institution of slavery" (Fisher 101)-a truth that was less than self-evident when Uncle Toms Cabin first appeared. For Philip Fisher, who considers the incompatibility between sentimental domesticity and chattel slavery to be the "central analytic point" of Stowe's novel, "that slavery destroys the fainily is a political as well as a psychological fact" (102). But what sort of fainily could not coexist with slavery? Proslavery ideologues argued at the time that slavery was part and parcel of familial happiness. Indeed, planters managed to construe their dependence on the sexual reproduction of slaves as a pleasant domestic scheme. As a St. Vincent planter commented, the work of missionaries among his slaves benefited his bottom line by fostering "cleanliness, propagation in well contented families ... and an increasing capital in an increasing gang to the proprietor" (Craton, Testing 245-46). 14 Not only did planters speak of"well contented families" among the slaves, but also proslavery writers characterized the plantation household as itself a (metaphorical) family consisting of a generous patriarch, nurturing mistress, and grateful childlike slaves (Warner, "Harriet Jacobs" 26). A proslavery article in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836, for example, interpreted the phrase "domestic slavery" in this way, lauding the "degree of loyal devotion on the part of the slave" and "the master's reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependant" ("Slavery" 338). This portrait of slavery as a sentimentalized familial structure paradoxically pervades Stowe's own novel. It shows up, even more oddly, in earlier works intended to discourage slavery, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's

12

INTRODUCTION

Paul et Vi~s:inie. Saint-Pierre's idealized family, credited by Roddey Reid with producing and disseminating the norms of domesticity around which a new kind of French nation would assemble, consists of two French single mothers, their two Creole (male and female) children, a dog named Fidele, and two loyal (male and female) black slaves. Such depictions of slavery as a (happy) family household coincided with feminist portraits of the family as a (sad) household of slaves in asserting that the family as sentimental core of the national community was not all that different from the supposedly alien and distant institutions of colonial slavery. After all, with the rise of antislavery sentiment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women had become the subjects of an emancipationist discourse linking colonial slavery to domestic servitude as well as sexual subjection in marriage. Mary Wollstonecraft's famous pronouncements on the slavery of woman at the end of the eighteenth century meshed with those of Olympe de Gouges across the channel, and inspired sincere efforts to win not only economic but also sexual rights for women, as in William Thompson's aptly titled 1825 Appeal qf One Half the Human Race, VU>men, aRainst the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. Like many others, Thompson highlighted the wrongs of marriage law by comparing, and then discounting, the injustices of colonial slavery. For him, the truly imprisoned breeding machine was not a female slave but a legally married (British) wife: "The wife is compelled silently to witness and to smother her repinings, whatever extravagancies of unbridled libertinism the husband may think proper to indulge in .... The house is his house with everything in it; and of all fixtures the most abjectly his is his breeding machine, the wife. In his house he imprisons her or opens the doors at his option" (85). Colonial slavery thus provided the template for a surprisingly radical critique of married women's civil and political status. Yet the argument for female emancipation rested on a counterintuitive disavowal of the facts of colonial slavery. Passing over the planters' increasing reliance on "breeding machines," Thompson declared that "no female slave in the West Indies is compelled to submit to such petty domestic despotism as this" (85). Since it resembled the institution of the family in many particulars, slavery could not be immediately demarcated as something separate and apart. Both were forms of domestication, in the sense of adapting humans-like domestic animals-into intimate relations, to the advantage of (a class of) man, within the confines of a household. The "Creole" name made this association all the more explicit and complete. As a "domestic" individual, in the sense of bred at home rather than purchased abroad, the "Creole"

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

IJ

revealed colonial space as itself a domesticated home-comprising tamed bits of the wild, with intimately subjected peoples and breeding "wives." In the abolitionist era, as we will see in the chapters that follow, fictions ofboth sexual and national emancipation frequently depended the figure of a Creole to invoke colonial slavery as a "deeper wrong:' In novels such as Bronte's Jane Eyre, Sand's Indiana, and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a Creole woman serves as a powerful reminder of slavery, exposing the effects ofEuropean and American women's subordination within the home by likening it to colonial modes of bondage. In each case the Creole figure incarnates and imports colonial slavery into a home in the ruling country, bringing to narrative life the trope of "domestic slavery" or its French equivalent, l'esclavage de lafemme. 15 The Creole woman's metonymic association with colonial slavery lends depth and resonance to the narrative exploration of this ideologically potent trope. Sand's Creole heroine, for example, brings the background of a childhood "among slaves" to her complaint to her husband in France that "I know that I am the slave and you the lord. The laws of this country have made you my master. You can bind my body, strap my hands, govern my actions. You have the power of the strong [le droit du plus fort], and society confirms it" (Indiana 89, 232).16 Jane Eyre's discovery of a lunatic Creole wife confined in the attic ofher prospective husband's English mansion similarly resonates with her own childhood resistance, like that of a "rebel slave," to her household tormentors (32). In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the American household likewise reveals its "darkest" face on a Creole frontier--in the formerly French and Spanish territories ofLouisiana. As in the case ofBronte's Creole madwoman and Sand's Creole heroine, the French Creole background and "partial insanity" of Stowe's Louisiana slave Cassy function to harness the rebellious image of West Indian slave revolts to a wife's possible desire for flight and vengeance (567). To be sure, it was feasible to write about domestic slavery without introducing a Creole woman. The "slavery of women" could be--and frequently was-depicted in nineteenth-century literature not as a colonial phenomenon but as a custom typical of alien, usually Eastern, cultures. Balzac's 1834 novella LA Pille aux yeux d'or, for example, describes a "Georgian" character ("la Georgienne") as a woman "from a country where women are not beings, but things to do with what you will, to be bought, to be sold, to be killed, in short to be used for every passing fancy, as you use your furniture here" (348). Bronte's Jane Eyre responds to this sort of prurient fascination with female slavery, while sharing its assumption that female slavery is a distant and foreign custom, when she compares herself to a righteous Roman

14

INTRODUCTION

slave, and later declares that if her lover has a "fancy" tor "a seraglio," he ought to make "slave-purchases" in "Stanboul"-though if he did so, she would seek out the "harem inmates" in order to "stir up mutiny" (237)_17 Yet the introduction ofa Creole character, in Balzac's fiction as in Bronte's, served as a powerful reminder that the supposedly foreign practices of slavery could be found within the expanding (usually Western) borders of avowedly "free" nations. After all, women-along with men and children-were legally held as slaves, bought, sold, used, and sometimes killed with impunity, in certain French colonies until 1848, in certain British colonies until 1834, and in some of the United States territories under national jurisdiction until 1862. 18 Slavery loomed large in national self-consciousness during the political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 19 Revolutionary France struggled with the place ofboth women and colonial slaves in its vaunted "liberte, egalite, fraternite," abolishing slavery and liberalizing divorce laws by decree in 1794 only to restrict divorce and reintroduce slavery under Napoleon-prompting the loss of the lucrative colony of Saint-Domingue in the ensuing Haitian revolution. Great Britain, cast as the enemy of freedom in its effort to maintain control over the Anglo-American colonies, rediscovered its moral mission by abolishing the slave trade in r8o7 and emancipating British colonial slaves in 1833. Dubbing itself the worldwide liberator of slaves, Great Britain successfully established a global empire in the wake of this retrenchment. For its part, the newly "emancipated" United States would resolve its differences over slavery as a component of national "manifest destiny" only by civil war less than a century later. As these preeminent slave-trading and slave-owning powers began to repudiate slavery as something that ought to be foreign to "free" nations, slavery in the outlying territories under their jurisdiction became a widely acknowledged source of national shame. 20 Creoles invoked this national dishonor with special force because they were products of the colonial system: not slaves and slave owners in general (for example, in ancient Rome, contemporary Algeria, or Istanbul), but the local inhabitants of colonial settlements attached to particular European nations. They included such diverse subjects as the pale, Spanish-speaking Indiana of George Sand's novel by that name, who had grown up in a French colony off the east coast of Africa "living among slaves," and also her servant Noun, a "Creole in the widest sense [creole dans l'acception la plus etendue]" with "Negro black [d'un noir negre]" hair (Indiana 89, 321, 192). In America and Britain as in France, the Creole embodied "slavery, where we are parties to it-where we are responsible for it-everywhere

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

15

within our jurisdiction." I take this description from Senator Charles Sumner's 1854 speech on establishing territorial governments for Nebraska and Kansas within the vast swath ofland "ceded by France to the United States, under the name of Louisiana" (24, 2). In this speech, Sumner carefully distinguished between the "slavery which exists under other Governments ... or in other States of the Union" and slavery "within the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government ... within the sphere of our own personal responsibility" as he argued for upholding the 1820 act that had prohibited slavery "in all that territory ceded by France ... which lies north of 36°30' of north latitude," insisting that "the Missouri Compact, in its unperformed obligations to Freedom, stands at this day as impregnable as the Louisiana Purchase" (24, 2, 14). To grasp the significance of the Creole figure in Anglo-American literature, we must recall the importance of the Louisiana Purchase to federal debates over slavery. For Anglo-Americans as for the British and French, Creoles were the exotic residents of"our jurisdiction," as in the case of the New Orleans bride, a "pretty little waxen plaything, as fragile and as delicate as the white Petunia blossom;' and her slave, "a young girl, elegantly formed, and beautiful as a dark velvet carnation," in "Slavery's Pleasant Homes;' a short story by Lydia Maria Child (148). One way of targeting colonial slavery for reform was thus to repudiate the Creole as its paradigmatic subject. If slavery did not belong in the modern nation, for many writers neither did the subjects of colonial slavery-whether slaves or slave owners, or some strange mixture of the two. A late-eighteenth-century British poem on imperial excess, "Tea and Sugar, or the Nabob and the Creole," makes the metropolitan observer's anguished sense of responsibility for the scandalous Creole clear: Now in his native pride the CREOLE view, SLAVERY's Prime Minister, of swarthy hue And sickly look; of various tints combin'd, A true epitome ofjaundic'd mind; By whom the plunder'd, from old Afric's shore Are made to sweat, nay bleed through every pore; Whom every generous feeling hath defy'd To whom, sweet, social love, is unally'd; Whose flinty heart, but more obdurate mind, No Woe can penetrate--No Virtue find; Who, under British Laws,-with griefl speak, A greater tyrant is, than Algier's Chief. 21

!6

INTRODUCTION

As slavery became a touchstone of the moral fiber of "free" nations, the sickly and darkened Creole became (as in this verse) a synecdoche for the morally dubious practices of slavery in the outlying territories. 22 Creole characters illustrated for readers how and why these deviant practices needed to be geographically confined, "ameliorated;' or, finally, abolished-not only in Great Britain but also in France and the United States. Forcing the major slave-trading and slave-owning powers to acknowledge slavery as a domestic problem, as opposed to someone else's concern, the Creole figure in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature placed European mores and colonial practices into sharp relief, revising the moral criteria for membership in the body politic of "free" modern nations. As my survey of novels by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Maria Edgeworth, Sand, Balzac, Bronte, Stowe, and Jean Rhys will demonstrate, however, the Creole woman in particular served as a curiously changeable test case for both sexual norms and national belonging. The discourse of Creole characterization in these works is far from uniform. Perverted and mad in one novel, the Creole woman appears in another as ingenuous and impossibly chaste; wealthy and mulatto in one text, she appears elsewhere pale as a ghost and sexually enslaved. Nor do these differences between individual texts break down predictably along national lines. My analysis of these narratives is thus rooted in specific historical contexts, while pursuing threads of intertextual allusion and historical reference across (nation-) state lines. Tracing a volatile tr:Uectory, I emphasize the ways in which the Creole woman unleashes a kind of wildness in each text, unsettling and revising the boundaries of family and nation-along with the very concept of the "domestic." What these Creole narratives both document and perform is the attempt to define colonial slavery as deviance and to disentangle it from the familial norms at the proverbial "heart" of the modern free nation. This effort was more difficult than it might at first appear. Both slavery and the family, after all, involved adapting human subjects into intimate advantage, cemented with laws of inheritance, capital, property, and affective ties. The contest over the difference between slavery and family would shape both the imagined community of the nation and the normative figures for (white and black) womanhood that emerged in the abolitionist era. For in the struggle to enact this disassociation, the family (and national) norm itself-and the domestic woman who embodied its ideal-was "corroded," or opened to curious ruptures. This is what is at stake in the "ever-changing cluster of descriptive features" and the "fantasmatic richness" of the Creole's traits (Zizek 94, 99).

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

17

Domestic Fiction As a peculiarly "domestic" colonial subject associated with slavery, the Creole figure enabled novelists to address the problem of slavery's place in the expanding modern nation. This problem was two-pronged, involving the question of the moral (un)acceptability of colonial bondage in an age offreedom, on the one hand, and the question of the national citizenship claims of settlers, slaves, and their (potentially free) offspring, on the other. This last question was a major concern for emancipationist discourse. It was one thing to demonstrate "that commerce itself shall have moral boundaries" by outlawing the trade in slaves (Clarkson 2:583) and quite another to confer membership in the body politic on the freed offspring of exploited peoples, giving them access to the expanding claims of citizens on the state, from voting rights to poverty relief. The question of Creoles of color qualifying for citizenship complicated the already dubious national status of their white counterparts, the colonial settlers and their Creole children. To what body politic did colonial subjects actually belong? Whereas the expansion of voting rights in Britain notoriously did not extend to residents of the colonies, French colonists petitioned for colonial representation in the French Estates General as early as 1788. Because of this, the colonial franchise-and the voting rights of free people of color in particular-were major questions for the French republic, often dwarfing those of the slave trade and slavery. While British antislavery groups focused on the latter issues, their French counterparts in the Amis des Noirs "concentrated their main attacks" on "attempts to exclude free people of colour from political and social rights" (Blackburn 172-3).23 Creoles generally, with their motley cultural inheritance and dubious political affiliations, tested the contours of national belonging and the criteria for political representation in national as well as local governing bodies. If the proper status of both colonial slavery and its subjects in the modern nation was far from self-evident at this time, the novel was a genre perfectly suited for grappling with just this sort ofproblem. To begin with, as Benedict Anderson has forcefully argued, the novel as a form "provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" (25). The modern nation is "boundary-oriented and horizontal" rather than "centripetal and hierarchical" like previous communities organized by sovereignty or faith (15); it is a "sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time" rather than a divine community inhabiting an "omnitemporal" here and now marked by "prefiguring and fulfilment" (26, 24). The novel made it possible to imagine such a community by

18

INTRODUCTION

moving solitary characters "through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside"; anchoring "characters, author, and readers" in "the solidity of a single community" by means of authorial address, verb tense, and references to known locales; and, finally, representing characters' simultaneous adventures, unknown to one another, with a "complex gloss upon the word 'meanwhile"' (30, 27, 25). Anderson's analysis has usefully reversed the conventional wisdom about literature and its contexts, which views literary texts as imaginary works produced by real nations. On the contrary, as "print-capitalism" grew in power, Anderson suggests, it was the visible consumption of novels and newspapers (which he reads as the novel's extreme form) that ''reassured" readers that "the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life ... creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations" (35-36). Before there were nations governed by "the people;' in other words, there were first novel and newspaper readers. 24 Once we credit novels with a role in producing modern nationalism along these lines, it should not surprise us to find that individual novels were deeply concerned with establishing the criteria for membership in a given nation. Novels regularly worked out who belonged (and who did not) in the communities they addressed. In so doing, they implicitly determined who would (and who would not) participate in the new forms of democratic governance, and whose claims on the nation-state would be honored (and whose would not) by its nascent institutions. While novels were adept at determining the contours of modern nations by their internal structures of address, they were also highly proficient in posing moral questions. Indeed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, novels were widely understood to be studies of contemporary morals and manners with a reforming edge. As Samuel Johnson wrote in 1750, "works of fiction" are "written chiefly to the young, the ignorant and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct"; thus, "these familiar histories may perhaps be made greater use of than the solemnities of professed morality" (quoted in Ellis 201). The novel as a genre, Henry Mackenzie explained further in 1785, enlarged and refined "the code of morality" by providing examples "of a refinement which virtue does not require" but which suited the newly cultivated "state of manners" appropriate for "highly-polished nations" (quoted in Ellis 205). The novels that made up Balzac's Etudes de moeurs au XIXe siecle (Studies of Manners in the Nineteenth Century) thus sought, much like his early succes de scandale, Physiolo.~ie du mariage (The Physiology of Marriage), to address morals and manners as problems of"our national character and our

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

19

legislation" (Physiologie 143). 25 In the Physiologie, for example, he objects that the French custom of raising girls "in a kind of seraglio defended by mothers, by prejudices, and by religious ideas" prepared them very badly for "the absolute freedom [1a plus entiere liberte]" granted to French wives (107). In view of this target problem, Balzac posed a rhetorical question that would generate novels for years to come: "But seriously, would the emancipation ofyoung women [!'emancipation des ftlles], after all, entail so very many dangers?" (105). Novels did not just raise moral issues; they targeted the mores of particular communities for intervention. Balzac, presciendy, did not expect his own proposed "emancipation," which involved granting sexual freedom to unmarried Frenchwomen, to take place until the twentieth century, "for manners are reformed so slowly!" (So). Yet he could take comfort in the efficacy of the novel for this slow work of reforming national manners. As Bernardin de Saint-Pierre remarked in his 1806 "preambule" to Paul et Virginie: "Novels [Les romans] are the most agreeable, the most universally read, and the most useful books. They govern the world" (23). Indeed, a single novel-(Don Quixote)-according to Saint-Pierre, "produced, two centuries ago, the greatest revolution in European manners [1a plus grande revolution dans les moeurs de !'Europe]" (Discours 95). Despite Charlotte Bronte's disclaimer that a "mere domestic novel will, I fear, seem trivial to men of large views and solid attainments;' novels could so efficiendy intervene in national and transnational mores precisely because of their "domestic" scope. 26 A few years after Bronte made this comment, George Sand would praise Uncle Tom's Cabin for being truly "domestic and of the family," explaining that "mothers of families [housewives], young girls, litde children, servants even, can read and understand" the book's "long discussions, its minute details, its carefully studied portraits;' and "men themselves, even the most superior, cannot disdain them" (Review 460). Sand had good company in this view of the novel. Henry Mackenzie had similarly declared that "because it represents domestic scenes and situations in private life;' the novel is "most open to the judgement of the people" (quoted in Ellis 204). Domestic novels solicited political opinions and participation from a readership that was unusually wide, and they submitted moral and political questions such as the problem of colonial slavery to the judgment and feelings of a group of people extending beyond the actual political franchiseincluding young people, those without substantial property, and women. 27 Domestic novels thus reshaped political communities both by their structures of address and by their content. By modeling and critiquing contemporary modes of sexual and fainily life, fainily-oriented fictions established not

20

INTRODUCTION

only who belonged in the (national) community they addressed but also hmv the (national) community would reproduce itself. As Nancy Armstrong has suggested, with regard to the peculiar conundrums of the (Anglo-American) "creole family" in North America, the sexual concerns of family-oriented fictions posed central questions for the nation: "In what sense might our national identity have actually depended on the sexual behavior of young English women? How can English identity remain the same when it has to be reproduced outside of England?" ("Why" 10, 12). By canvassing sexual and familial mores, novels actively determined the contours of a (good) family and a (good) nation for future generations. To grasp just how representations of colonial life helped to reform domestic life in fiction of the antislavery period, we must therefore begin by considering the colonial subject as domestic-that is to say, as Creole. In making this suggestion, I mean "domestic" not in a metaphorical sense but in a material sense, designating the familial social practices shap~ng nations and empires. ClarifYing the links between sexual politics, class politics, nationalism, and racism with an incisive analysis of administrative discourse on such apparently diverse subjects as prostitution laws and the promotion of kindergartens, Ann Laura Stoler introduces us to a politics of sexuality that is widely understood, comprising a set of practices that determined membership in a political body newly aligning physical health with fitness to rule. Stoler particularly emphasizes the effects on European mores of the "racialized economy of sex" fostered in the colonies, where "European women and men won respectability by steering their desires to legitimate paternity and intensive maternal care, to family and conjugal love;' while attributing desires for "opulence and sex, wealth and excess" to "creole ... and lower-class Europeans." The colonial environment produced a discourse in which "persons ruled by their sexual desires were natives and 'fictive' Europeans, instantiating their inappropriate dispositions to rule" (182-83). The Creole woman helps us to discern this wider field of sexual politics in early-nineteenth-century fiction because she highlights the role of upbringing as well as sexual behavior, stressing the importance of early childhood education, household mores, mothers, governesses, and children's nurses in the (re)production of nations. Understandably mesmerized by the "domestic" themes of familyoriented narratives, critics of the nineteenth-century novel have not yet fully grasped the significance of colonial debates in efforts to modernize the family and the nation through fiction. For one thing, by successfully contributing to the antislavery movement, domestic fiction demonstrated its capacity for "widening the boundaries of the political nation." This is how Robin

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

21

Blackburn characterizes the British antislavery movement, a "novel kind of reform movement" which involved the masses with widely circulated petitions to Parliament, including some solicited and even signed by women (144, 138). 28 Whereas the playwright Richard Cumberland, author of The ~st Indian, worried in the late 1780s that even novelists without "immoral designs" might yet "be apt to lead young female readers into affectation and false character;' and the Reverend Edward Barry complained in 1791 that novels were an "incentive to seduction" (quoted in Ellis 207-8), the political success of anti-slavery themes eventually contributed to the defense of fiction as a moral form suitable for women, as both readers and authors. By June 1841, an editorial in the American magazine Godey's Lady's Book would be calling for [more] pictures of domestic life which will convey to the young of our own sex a vivid impression of their home duties and their moral obligation to perform them; also impressing on their minds the power which intellectual attainments, when united with moral excellence and just views of the female character, give to woman to promote the refinement, the purity and happiness of society, and even decide, as it were, the destiny of our country. (quoted in Baym, Novels 2o6)

Although Godey's was surely not seeking antislavery fiction with this appeal, the transnational antislavery movement had played a substantial role in shaping these ideological aspirations. 29 Because of its political success, which soon mingled with patriotic pride, the British antislavery movement dignified prose literature and its female readers by providing them with a moral mission of national stature. As Sarah Stickney Ellis proudly declared in 1840, "how intimate is the connexion which exists between the women of England, and the moral character maintained by this country in the scale of nations" (quoted in Colley 276). What better proof of this than the full emancipation of British slaves two years before, which was celebrated in 1840 as Britain hosted the frrst International Anti-Slavery Conference?30 My exploration of a colonial social classification thus entails the reexamination of domestic fiction as a literary genre. The Creole narratives in this study lie on the border, rather than in the center, of this genre. These marginal novels nevertheless reveal the genre's wide reach, allowing us to tease out some of its presuppositions. Despite their widely divergent views of "female character;' these novels rely on a set of common elements and techniques.

22

INTRODUCTION

First, in each of these works a good wife's household management, moral influence, and conscience--or the absence thereof-take on national stature. (Not every domestic novel features a good wife as a major character, but if a novel cannot teach us what would make a good wife, even by counterexample, then it is probably not a work of domestic fiction.) 31 Second, whatever their rank or political status, the characters in these novels are first and foremost mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, aunts, or uncles-that . is to say, members of family households characterized by heterosexual monogamy and its offspring. Third, readers typically learn not only what was said at breakfast, but who was present, what was served, and on what sort of tablecloth. The nineteenth-century term for this feature of the novel is tableau de moeurs, and as we have seen in the case of Balzac, it is not primarily a neutral description but rather a model of new norms or a target problem. Fourth, these novels construe their readers as "domestic" both implicitly and explicitly. They address themselves to housewives, young girls, and "servants even," in Sand's phrase, presuming that these readers will be more concerned with household and family matters than with public or philosophical ones. Finally, the novels solicit this audience for political or moral purposes by (re)presenting political struggles neither in the theater of political institutions (Congress or court) nor in the public arena (the press, town meetings) but in conversations between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants. 32 In each case, novelistic efforts to champion oppressed women coincide with ambitious attempts to shape expanding imperialist nations by means of domestic reforms. The chapters that follow will illustrate how the figure of the Creole enabled writers to modernize marriage practices and concepts of national belonging in the age of antislavery reform. Chapter I sets the stage for a series of close readings of specific texts and contexts by establishing what is at stake in Creole characterization, with a brief survey of the meanings of the word in French and in British and American English, as well as the depiction of Creoles in fiction and nonfiction. How and why was the Creole crucial for determining the limits of national belonging in this period? Regarding the contested history of the term "Creole," I argue that it served as a racial cover at times precisely because it was not what we would now consider a racial term. Rather than signifying whiteness, blackness, or mixed-race identity, the "Creole" name described colonial subjects as "domestic" in a problematic way. In so doing, however, Creole characterization helped to develop and refine nineteenth-century ideas ofboth racial and national belonging. At the same time, Creoles illustrated the crucial importance ofboth education and sexual life for the future of particular nations. Examining descriptions

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

23

of Creole nursing and Creole sexuality in the context of the political history of slavery reform, I suggest how colonial family mores shaped political history-and how political concerns over settlers and slaves, in turn, influenced domestic mores in the colonies as well as their "mother countries." The next two chapters show how the Creole figure served to emphasize the link between female education and the social reproduction of nations in the early period of slavery reform. In chapter 2, I take a closer look at the role played by Creole protagonists in an enormously influential, explicitly antislavery work of fiction, written before colonial slavery was abolished for the first time in France. My reading ofBernardin de Saint-Pierre's 1788 bestseller Paul et Virginie alongside his writings on fiction and female education and his voyage to the colony oflle de France demonstrates the role played by pictures of colonial life in shaping modern concepts of domesticity and the nation. Technically a pastoral romance gone awry, this narrative of two Creole children raised by their mothers in Ile de France defies generic classification as a novel. Yet, as I argue, it deserves a central place in the transatlantic history of domestic fiction. The author of Paul et Virginie set out to show the domestic woman "the extent and the beauty ofher empire [son empire]" by setting middle-class domesticity in a neglected colonial landscape (SaintPierre, Discours 1o6). By testing its virtues in colonial space, however, the normative domesticity of Paul et Virginie became powerfully attached to its deviant counterpart, the domestication of colonial slavery. Paul et Virginie reveals how domestic and colonial reform intertwined in the late eighteenth century, with important implications for modern family values and modern concepts of national belonging. In chapter J, I consider the role played by Creole characters in novels written during the transitional period of early European abolition and concerned with the emancipation of (free) women rather than slaves. Why did British and French novels advocating widely divergent familial reforms, from maternal breast-feeding to legalized divorce to the social acceptance of premarital sex, end up featuring Creoles? How did fictions offunilial reform and female emancipation draw upon contemporary events in the colonies and legal struggles over slave emancipation? My readings of novels by Maria Edgeworth, George Sand, and Honore de Balzac stress both their allusions to the contemporary history of colonial reform and their references-and responses-to the domestic ideals of Paul et Virginie. Together these novels demonstrate how colonial slavery had come to haunt its European "homes," and in so doing produced a radical moment in narrative sexual politics. They also illustrate the transnational impact of antislavery works like Paul et Virginie on domestic fiction of all kinds. My object in documenting this influence

24

INTRODUCTION

is to expose the colonial aspects of what might be called the Rousseauian revolution in manners and to show how it (already) depended on the linking of family practices to racial qualifications for national belonging. The two chapters that follow illustrate how the Creole figure served to emphasize this nexus between family practices and the (racial) qualifications for national belonging in the later period of slavery reform. Chapter 4 examines the reconfiguration of family and nation in Jane Eyre, a domestic novel written after Britain's emancipation of colonial slaves. What is the function of the Creole lunatic in this fiction, and what does Charlotte Bronte target for reform through the Creole figure? To answer this question I analyze Bronte's careful linkage of two distinct discourses-on madness and on the Creole-in the light of contemporary reform movements, both domestic and colonial. By omitting an explicit racial designation from her Creole lunatic, I maintain, Bronte combines in this synecdochal figure discourses about both colonial blacks and colonial whites. I emphasize how domestic and colonial reform remain linked in this post-emancipation fiction. The Creole figure still establishes relations between female education and social reproduction, even as domestic reform consolidates its gains and moves in new (imperialist) directions. Contemporary debates about slave emancipation, parliamentary reform, governesses, colonial prisons, and British lunatic asylums provide the framework for my reading of Bronte's allusive text. In chapter 5, I turn to representations of domestic space (family and nation) in antislavery writing by American women prior to the emancipation of slaves in the United States. In the work of both Harriet Beecher Stowe and the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs, efforts to imagine an American nation free of slavery proceed by restructuring the "Creole" family-that is to say, the settler-and-slave family of the former colonial frontier. In my reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, I emphasize the French-speaking "quadroon" Cassy's escape from slavery in Louisiana by "personat[ing] the character of a Creole lady" (Stowe, Uncle Tom 597), which proves crucial to Stowe's project of reimagining the Anglo-American nation and its formerly French and Spanish frontier. Stowe contests the "patriarchal institution" of slavery by canvassing French colonial family practices that undermine Anglo-American racial categories. By championing maternal over paternal custody of children, however, she ultimately repudiates the French model and reinscribes AngloAmerican classifications. When, by contrast, Harriet Jacobs revisits the story of a female slave's sexual abuse and confinement in her 1861 autobiography, the concept of the American family undergoes a fundan1ental alteration. Jacobs's narrative reclaims the Creole inheritance carefully elided by Stowe when it envisions an alternative An1erican nation modeled on the family

Domestic Fiction and Colonial Slavery

25

consisting of her fatherless mulatto children and herself. In both Jacobs's and Stowe's narratives, as in Bronte's, I show how the connections between female education and social reproduction evoked by the Creole are carried forward and subsumed under the problem of (re)defming the family, race, and nation in the age of emancipation. The final portion of the book places my own study of Creole characterization within an ongoing history. Chapter 6 examines the stakes in Jean Rhys's vindication of the Creole character from Jane Eyre. Domestic fiction worked hard to redefine normal family life in such a way as to disentangle it from the deviant practices of colonial slavery, as I will show. But slavery comes back with a vengeance to haunt the modern family and the British nation for which it stands in Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. In my reading, I consider the Creole politics ofRhys's modernist revision. Staging a twentieth-century white Creole reader's tragic encounter with her role in a predetermined script, Rhys transforms Bronte's lesson of Creole madness into a problem of identity for a maddeningly domesticated, twentiethcentury self. By indicting the normative function of domestic fiction in this way, however, Wide Sargasso Sea rejects both the radical thrust of familialist sentimentality and the emancipatory potential of the freedom narrative it displaces. Examining Rhys's project in the light of efforts to reclaim Creole culture and identity for whites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that Wide Sargasso Sea does not stand outside the tradition of Creole characterization represented by Jane Eyre, as it would appear, but rather deploys Creole otherness in a similar manner. It does so particularly in its representation of the "blue-black" Martinican nurse Christophine Dubois, a Creole in all but name. What, then, might lie outside this tradition, if not Jean Rhys? I reconsider the critical and fictional context for these discussions in a brief conclusion. My understanding of the novels in this survey inevitably runs counter to the assumption of officially separate spheres dividing nineteenth-century women at home from men at work, national affairs from those overseas, the family from slavery and other political questions, and literary writings from political reform. It is not that I am blind to the formation of the ideology of separate spheres in the nineteenth-century novel. I am not, however, convinced that these divisions were as entrenched or as unquestioned as they may seem today. 33 With this in mind, I have tried to emphasize that the separation of the bourgeois family from colonial slavery was difficult, provisional work. Domestic slavery, in my reading, is not just a hackneyed metaphor but a

26

INTRODUCTION

complex trope-and more. I get at the more-than-figurative meanings of the phrase by stressing not the separation of spheres but rather the promiscuous crossings of vocabulary, concepts, literary allusions, and literary texts across linguistic borders and political lines. By attending to such crossings, mapped alongside the transatlantic history of colonial slavery, I gauge the impact of discourses of colonial reform on reformist images of domestic life, and vice versa. Above all, I focus on the consequences of this convergence for the transnational traditions of domestic fiction-its ideological aims, its contours, its prescriptions for women, its formulas for family life, and its "emotional secret gardens" of personhood, family, nation, and race. 34 When the former slave Harriet Jacobs borrowed the language of domestic fiction in order to articulate her story of subjection and escape, in short, she drew upon a tradition already informed by colonial slavery. The figure of the Creole woman allows us to grasp the transatlantic coordinates of this tradition.

Chapter One

"Creoles and Creolified" We fancy that much of the languor and inactivity of the Creoles and creolified, might be prevented, and stronger health enjoyed, were they to accustom themselves, more freely, to habits of exercise. Against our theory they urge experience, remarking that all Europeans ... gradually lapse into the same indolent indulgence as the natives. GEORGE PINCKARD,

Notes on the West Indies

(1806)

Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea offers a descriptive theory about English views of the white Creoles living in British islands after Britain emancipated its slaves. Early on in his narration, the unnamed English husband in Rhys's novel introduces the key theme of his account, his growing alienation from his Creole bride: "I watched her critically. She wore a tricorne hat which became her. At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and can be disconcerting. She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark, alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either" (67). The staccato syntax of this stream-of-consciousness narration, with its ambiguous grammatical antecedents, allows Rhys to make explicit the mystery of the Creole's half-foreign body: how can she be so foreign despite her supposedly "pure English descent"? What disturbs the composure of the gazing Englishman is this uncanny alienness, detectable in her dark, unblinking eyes. They-her eyes-are "not English or European either;' confounding both national and racial belonging. But if this is true of the eyes, it is also true of the Creoles generally. The apparently banal "tricorne hat," with its penumbra of French connotations, does not in the end conceal but rather reveals the Creole's disturbing capacity for shape-shifting, alluding as it does to this particular Creole woman's degenerate French descent: it became her in more than one sense. By the final

28

CHAPTER ONE

sentence fragment of this passage, it has become clear that Englishness itself is disconcerted or dis-composed by its Creole shadow. Teasing out the Englishman's progressive estrangement from his Creole wife, Rhys's novel hypothesizes a nineteenth-century metropolitan discourse of Creole degeneracy, combining fears of the white Creoles' viciousness with anxieties about their sexual mores, illicit families, inherent madness, and "bad blood." "They don't tell you what sort of people were these Cosways," writes the Creole bride's self-proclaimed colored half-brother in a devastating letter to the English husband: "Wicked and detestable slaveowners since generations-yes everybody hate them in Jamaica .... There is madness in that family. Old Cosway die raving like his father before him .... This young Mrs. Cosway is worthless and spoilt, she can't lift a hand for herself and soon the madness that is in her, and in all tf1ese white Creoles, come out .... [Antoinette] is no girl to marry with the bad blood she have from both sides" (95-96; my emphasis). Daniel Cosway's charge goes a long way toward accounting for-and confirming-the Creole wife's strangeness, to her husband's (dis)satisfaction: "I folded the letter carefully and put it into my pocket. I felt no surprise. It was as if I'd expected it" (99). In so doing, it provides a motivation for the horrific ending of the English-Creole marriage from Bronte's Jane Eyre, which Rhys took the liberty of rewriting. Just as important as Rhys's hypothesis about nineteenth-century English views of the Creoles is the form in which she presents it. The English husband's (mis)perceptions of his Creole wife are tellingly animated by an incendiary combination of his own direct-(and paranoid)-observations of her and the information provided by what anthropologists would call a "native informant." That this informant provides local, rather than metropolitan, knowledge is emphasized by the creolified English syntax of Daniel's account. In both passages Rhys makes explicit what remained implicit in her novel's Victorian precursor. In Jane Eyre, after all, although Jane's beloved, Edward Rochester, had traveled to Jamaica and married his Creole wife at a time prior to emancipation (according to the implied chronology), Rochester never mentions colonial slavery, even when he describes the West Indies as hell. With her reference to "wicked and detestable slave-owners," Rhys connects the dots. Similarly, while there is clearly madness in the Creole family in Jane Eyre, the link between this social classification and the family's hereditary illnesses seems almost accidental in Bronte's text. It is Rhys who makes it a madness "that is in all these white Creoles;' a generalized, ifhidden, hereditary flaw marking an entire (bio)political class.

"Creoles and Creolified"

29

Did English observers-or European ones-really find white Creoles this uncanny? Did they consider them degenerate products of the (English) species? The short answer is yes. But if so, why, and with what consequences? And how did this perception differ, if at all, from the post-Darwinian racial apprehensions of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In this chapter, I begin to test Rhys's claims, while defining the limitations of her descriptive theory-what it attempts to, and what it ultimately cannot, make us see.

Another Race By stressing the Englishman's critical inspection of his Creole wife and his avid interest in supplementing his own deliciously frightful discoveries with local expertise, Rhys conjures up a long novelistic tradition of examining Creole bodies with the aid oflocal information. But it is usually white Creoles who finger Creoles of color, rather than the reverse, in this tradition. In Helena Wells's Constantia Neville; or, the west Indian (18oo), for example, the white Creole heroine casts aspersions on two "Afric creoles" received well in England by revealing the status of such "natural children" of Englishmen back home. In Barbados, this white Creole expert proclaims, "there was no instance of any resident having a white mistress; all men of fortune, who were not married, had their brown women; but such connections were kept among domestics, the issue of them being brought up as slaves" (2:267-68). 1 What Constantia Neville suggests is that the Creole body belongs to a system of social classification that is alien from the English one; the English gentry may well recognize the "Afric creoles" as such and understand them to be "natural children;' but they have failed to grasp what this means for a Creole. Eugene Sue's runaway best-seller Les Mysteres de Paris (r843) similarly summons a hypothetical Creole observer to interpret the physical features of a Creole woman, since "it would require a Creole's pitiless eye to detect the sang mele in the imperceptible dark shade that lightly colors the crowns of that Mulatto woman's rosy fingernails" (n9, trans. Sollors 142). 2 Only a Creole's eye would detect an imperceptible shade that might not seem socially significant for the French (or the Europeans either). Gustave de Beaumont's novel Marie, ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis (1835), likewise, describes the classificatory system in the United States as both "pitiless" and alien. In the States, Beaumont's narrator remarks, "public opinion," while "ordinarily indulgent to fortune-seekers who conceal their

30

CHAPTER ONE

names and previous lives, is pitiless in its search for proofs of African descent."3 Beaumont illustrates this pronouncement by recounting the fate of a New Orleans Creole woman who is exposed as a woman of color by another Creole. Denouncing American racial prejudice as a "pitiless hatred which pursues a whole race of men from generation to generation" (Marie, or Slavery, 1999: 58), he sarcastically concludes that "there is but one crime, of which the guilty bear everywhere the penalty and the infamy; it is that of belonging to a family reputed to be ars in the French VI-est Indies for "the first writing of what would become Wide Sa~~asso Sea" (85). "I wrote this book before!" said Rhys. "Different setting--same idea. (It was called 'Le revenant' then)" (Wyndham and Melly 213). This affiliation requires us to take another look at Rhys's project. We thought we knew what Rhys was doing: in the words of the Caribbean novelist Michele Cliff, she was "using the lens of a colonized female questioning colonization" (42). But on closer inspection, Rhys's project, like

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177

Hearn's, seems to mourn the passing of"domestic slavery" as the cradle of Creole civilization. How exactly does Rhys manage to reclaim Bertha Mason's madness by transforming what was a colonial incapacity for governance in Jane Eyre into a colonial identity crisis? Bronte's depiction of the Creole lunatic, as I have argued, stragetically conflates images of madness and colonial subjects in order to conjure a sufficiently terrible target for reform. In Wide Sargasso Sea, by contrast, Creole madness is first of all a slur propagated against Creole whites by colonials of color. Rhys unpacks the suggestion of Creole degeneracy in Bronte's novel by spelling out Rochester's post-honeymoon discoveries in a letter from a "coloured" man claiming to be Antoinette's half-brother. As Rochester explains in Jane Eyre, "my bride's mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead. The honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too, a complete dumb idiot" (269). Wide Sargasso Sea makes the link between Creole wickedness, Creole licentiousness, and Creole madness more explicit than in Bronte's text, while also specifying these as the attributes of Creole whites in particular. "They tell you perhaps that your wife's name is Cosway, the English gentleman Mr. Mason being her stepfather only;' Daniel Cosway writes, introducing a new father to Bronte's cast of characters, "but they don't tell you what sort of people were these Cosways. Wicked and detestable slave-owners since generations" (95). Daniel's own relationship to Antoinette testifies to the effects of Creole licentiousness: "I am your wife's brother by another lady, half-way house as we say. Her father and mine was a shameless man" (96). Despite this kinship, however, Daniel exempts himself from the "madness in that family" by glossing it as a degeneracy peculiar to colonial whites: "Old Cosway die raving like his father before him .... Young Mrs. Cosway is worthless and spoilt, she can't lift a hand for herself and soon the madness that is in her, and in all these white Creoles, come out" (96; my emphasis). White Creole madness is not just a fabrication in Wide Sargasso Sea but also a reality produced by the aftermath of emancipation. Rhys contradicts Daniel's allegation of an inherent degeneracy by providing motivation for white Creole madness in the experiences of Antoinette and her mother. Challenging the English husband to ask his brother-in-law whether his wife's mother is "a raging lunatic and worse besides," his wife's brother "an idiot from birth, though God mercifully take him early on;' and his wife "herself going the same way as her mother," Daniel warns the Englishman that he will be told "a lot of nancy stories, which is what we call lies here, about what happen at Coulibri and this and that. Don't listen" (98--99). But

CHAPTER SIX

these "nancy stories" about what happened at Coulibri are precisely the "real story-as it might have been" in the opening third of Rhys's novel (Wyndham and Melly 153), and they serve to explain white Creole madness as an abandonment neurosis of the sort discussed by Fan on. At Coulibri after emancipation, Antoinette's mother proclaims, "Now we are marooned" (18). Antoinette's reduced family is abandoned and isolated from their home country-like the maroon fugitives of African descent in the wilder parts of the island, as Rhys emphasizes by repeating the term: "('Marooned,' said her straight narrow back, her carefully coiled hair. 'Marooned')" (26). 8 Antoinette's mother transmits her neurosis by rejecting her daughter: "She pushed me away,'' says Antoinette, "not roughly but calmly, coldly, without a word, as if she had decided once and for all that I was useless to her" (20). The remainder of the novel demonstrates just how such "affective rejection ... brings the abandonment-neurotic to an extremely painful and obsessive feeling of exclusion, of having no place anywhere, of being superfluous everywhere in an affective sense," as Fanon emphasized (61; 76, trans. modified)Y The key episode of this portion of the book is the fire at Coulibri, which kills Antoinette's little brother. This fire demonstrates the infidelity of servants after emancipation (personified in the nurse who leaves the boy in a burning house), while also demonstrating the violence engendered among colonial blacks by the prospect of a renovated alliance between white Creoles and Englishmen (in Annette's second marriage). It fully justifies the neurotic sense of exclusion that undergirds Antoinette's response to the name of"white cockroach": "That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So ... I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all" (102). "Where do I belong" is a plaintive query, sometimes quoted admiringly as the summation of the Creole position. Yet abandoning herself to this sense of exclusion, as in Fanon's scheme, produces the most dreaded catastrophe. The "abandonment-neurotic," Fanon points out, experiences "an overwhelming feeling of impotence in relation to life and to people, as well as a complete rejection of the feeling of responsibility" (59; 73). 10 What makes Antoinette so convincingly susceptible to the terrible script of Bronte's fiction-her abandonment neurosis-covers over the agency of her white Creole forefathers, who were, in her words, "here before [the slaves') own people in Mrica sold them to the slave traders" and therefore ought not to be held responsible for slavery. As in proslavery propaganda of the abolitionist period, the critique of imperialism in Wide Sargasso Sea generally takes the form of a white colonial

Indicting Domestic Fiction

179

subject's claims of English hypocrisy. "You abused the planters and made up stories about them, but you do the same thing;' the Creole Antoinette typically complains to her English husband (146). "Slavery ... was a question of justice," he retorts (146), but Antoinette evinces a nostalgia for the "old time" of slavery, when "our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible;' not "wild" and "gone to bush" (19). Although Antoinette claims not to be "saddened" by the condition ofher family estate because "I did not remember the place when it was prosperous;' her childhood is shaped by a sense of loss: "(My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed-all belonged to the past)" (19, 17). "No more slavery-why should anybody work?" she adds (19). While Antoinette's viewpoint does not necessarily represent that of the novel, the narrative itself suggests that Englishmen simply do not understand the difficulty of dealing with colonials of color. Like Antoinette's own husband, her mother, Annette's, second husband is an Englishman who fails to understand how dangerous it could be to live among the former slaves. "They're too damn lazy to be dangerous;' Mr. Mason says, only to be proved wrong by a black riot culminating in the burning of his estate and the death of Antoinette's brother (32). "I told you what would happen again and again," Annette cries during the fire. "You would not listen, you sneered at me, you grinning hypocrite" (40). Paradoxical as it may seem, Wide Sargasso Sea exposes the imperialist and racist presuppositions ofBronte's account all the better by defending the white Creole planters from the English abolitionists and their sometime allies, the Creoles of color.

Creole Folly Antoinette's apparent obedience to the script that precedes her should not blind us to the liberties Rhys has taken with the scenario of Bronte's fiction. Hulme divides the changes that Rhys made to the material from Jane Eyre into three categories: chronology, topography, and family relationships. For example, Wide Sargasso Sea is set in the years after British slave emancipation, in the late r83os and early r84os. This is not consistent chronologically with Rochester's West Indian marriage in Jane Eyre, but it is the time period in which Bronte wrote her novel. It was also an odd window of time in the Caribbean between British emancipation in 1833 and the final French emancipation of slaves in 1848, when Rhys's native Dominica was a destination for fugitive slaves from the neighboring French island of Martinique, as in Hearn's Youma.

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CHAPTER S1x

Rhys emphasizes the relationship between French and British Caribbean islands in Wide Sargasso Sea by taking up the anglicized Frenchness of Bertha's middle name and her mother's name, Antoinetta, in Jane Eyre. By making Antoinette Bertha's real name, describing her Creole mother as an imported bride from a French island, and sending Antoinette to a convent for her education, Rhys highlights the overdetermination by which Creoles in English literature tend to be of French descent, just as Creoles in French literature tend to be of Spanish descent, following the linguistic itinerary of the word "Creole" and its corollary, the historical itinerary of European slavery. As we saw in chapter 1, Antoinette's disconcerting alienness is "shadowed" by a French symbol, the "tricorne hat which became her." Rhys further underlines Antoinette's French Creoleness by making a topographical shift from Bronte's Jamaica to a honeymoon in "one of the Windward Islands;' presumably Dominica. Finally, Rhys emphasizes Antoinette's Creole Frenchness by introducing a character who has no equivalent in Jane Eyre: the Martinican nurse, or da, named Christophine Dubois. For a sense of the key role Christophine plays in Rhys's novel and its response to Jane Eyre, we must bear in mind the historical relationship between the English governess and the Creole as cultural figures.l 1 Drawing on the historical convergence between the Creole and the governess, the mad Creole in Jane Eyre, as I have argued, represents a terrifYing failure of the kind of social reproduction and conversion attempted on Jane's little charge, the illegitimate French girl Adele. This makes it all the more crucial to consider how Antoinette is raised in Wide Sa~f?asso Sea. Deprived of an education in English culture, Antoinette generally makes sense of her world as it is interpreted by her Martinican da, Christophine. The third sentence of the novel indicates this reliance: "The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, 'because she pretty like pretty self' Christophine said" (17). If Fanon's schematic black man is, on a "historico-racial" level, "woven out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories" by "the white man" (90; 111), Antoinette's sense of self is similarly woven from, among other things, her black Martinican da's stories and opinions. Christophine is a favorite of anti-imperialist critics, who often cite her as a voice resisting her author or even contesting the limits ofRhys's white Creole project. Christophine speaks from a distinct local position when she "asserts herself as articulate antagonist of patriarchal, settler and imperialist law" (Parry 38): "No more slavery! She had to laugh! 'These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing. They got Magistrate. They got fine. They got jail house and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up people's feet. New ones worse than old ones-more cunning, that's all'" (Wide Sargasso Sea 26).

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181

It is also true that Christophine "judges that black ritual practices are culturespecific" (Spivak 252-53), telling Antoinette upon her request, "So you believe in that tim-tim story about obeah .... All that foolishness and folly. Too besides, that is not for beke. Bad, bad trouble come when beke meddle with that .... If beke say it foolishness, then it foolishness. BCke clever like the devil. More clever than God. Ain't so? Now you listen and I will tell you what to do" ( II2, II7). Christophine is clearly mistress of that local knowledge, which she menacingly dubs an "other" knowledge in her last utterance in the text: "Read and write I don't know. Other things I know" (r6r). But in the context of a Creole vindication, we should not neglect the literary pedigree of this loving nurse who is blacker than black and more Creole than Creole. For like the fire at Coulibri, the character of Christophine relates to Rhys's family history by a kind of compensatory inversion. Hearn's novel Youma instructively defines and memorializes the Martinican da as a "Creole negress,-more often ... of the darker than of the lighter hue," "at once foster-mother and nurse" to "the Creole child" (1). Celebrating the "affection for the da" as a "love" that "lasted through life," even after "the child had become old enough to receive . . . lessons from a . . . governess, to learn to speak French;' Hearn employs the figure of the da to dramatize the nurse's role in the transmission of Creole stories and folk culture (3). His novel about a da named Youma proclaims admiration for the da to the point where a nostalgia for slavery becomes imaginable: "Her special type was a product of slavery, largely created by selection: the one creation of slavery perhaps not unworthy of regret,-one strange flowering amid all the rank dark growths of that bitter soil" (5). This idealized da, Youma, differs radically from the childhood nurse Meta, whom Rhys described in her autobiography as "the terror of my life" (Smile, Please 24). Her "face turned away" from the child, she "muttered curses;' "talked ... about zombies, soucriants and loups-garous (werewolves)" and "taught me to fear cockroaches hysterically" (22-23). (Interestingly, Meta taught the child to fear both cockroaches and centipedes-two slurs for white people in Wide Sargasso Sea [e.g., 23, 43]). Meta also "got her own back by taking me by the shoulders and shaking me violently. Hair flying, while I still had any breath to speak I would yell, 'Black Devil, Black Devil, Black Devil!' ... Meta had shown me a world of fear and distrust, and I am still in that world" (Smile, Please 24). The childhood nurse ofRhys's autobiography resembles the terrible guardians of little Jane Eyre far more than she does Antoinette's wise protector, Christophine, in Wide Sargasso Sea. Yet there is one overlap between Rhys's accounts of Meta and of Christophine. When Antoinette has witnessed the

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CHAPTER SIX

sexual puppetry ofher crazed, zombie-like mother in the arms of a "fat black man" sometime after the fire (134), she returns home in tears and finds Christophine waiting. "'What you want to go up there for?' she said, and I said, 'You shut up devil, damned black devil from Hell.' Christophine said, 'Aie Aie Aie! Look me trouble, look me cross!"' (Wide Sa~~asso Sea 134-35). Taking after Youma rather than Meta, Christophine as a trustworthy da domesticates the dangers of a "black devil from Hell" responsible for Creole social reproduction. Faithful and utterly trustworthy, Christophine reverses Meta's "world of distrust and fear" while preserving the da's creolizing impact, thereby merging Rhys's childhood memories with Hearn's project of celebrating Creole culture. In contrast to Youma, however, Christophine Dubois is not an impossibly faithful melange of primitive passion and reasonable civilization but rather an outspoken voice addressing truth to power. Does this mean that Christophine transcends Rhys's authorial control, rebuking Rhys's white Creole project, as some have argued? On the contrary, it is precisely in her ability to speak truth to power that Christophine becomes Rhys's own Creole spokeswoman. To consider Christophine a mouthpiece for Rhys is to risk minimizing her otherness and perhaps to concede too much to the idea of authorial control. Yet it is crucial to disentangle the strands that make up "otherness" in Rhys's text if we are to comprehend the stakes ofRhys's own Creole characterization. Christophine is a kind of ur-Creole for Rhys: a multilingual master of obeah (or voodoo) named after a local delicacy "of the woods" (du bois). "Her songs were not like Jamaican songs," as the English narrator explains, "and she was not like the other women. She was much blacker-blue-black with a thin face and straight features. She wore a black dress, heavy gold earrings and a yellow handkerchief-carefully tied with the two high points in front. No other negro woman wore black, or tied her handkerchief Martinique fashion ... and though she could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as they talked" (21). It may be more than coincidence that a witch cooks a pot full of"yams, christophines, bananas, devil's egg-plants (melot1gene-diabe)" in one of the Creole folktales recounted in Youma (51). Christophine even speaks a disconcertingly creolized language. In so doing, Christophine nonetheless serves as a partly disguised conduit for other voices. On the first morning of his honeymoon, for example, the Englishman recounts a startling scene that resembles a ventriloquist's performance: "Antoinette was leaning back against the pillows with her eyes closed. She opened them and smiled when I came in. It was the black

Indicting Domestic Fiction

woman hovering over her who said, "Taste my hull's blood, master.... Not horse piss like the English madams drink. . . . I know them. Drink drink their yellow horse piss, talk, talk, their lying talk" (85). As this morning coffee scene suggests, Christophine is free from verbal censorship, like a ventriloquist's doll--or like Jane Eyre, the uncanny child with the voice of an angry adult, who "declared aloud" the "parallels" she had earlier "drawn ... in silence" (Bronte, jane Eyre 8). It is, accordingly, not miserable Antoinette but Christophine who confronts the English husband in her rude, dummy-like fashion with the novelist's own opinions: "It's you who come all the long way to her house-it's you beg her to marry. And she love you and give you all she have. Now you say you don't love her and you break her up.... You want her money but you don't want her. It is in your m.ind to pretend she is mad" (158-60). Christophine thus "encompasses a 'reality principle' in a world in which most of the characters express difficulty in determining what is real" (O'Connor 197). Rhys acknowledged her reliance on Christophine's voice in a backhanded way in a 1966 letter, where she suggested that "the most seriously wrong thing with Part II is that I've made the obeah woman, the nurse, too articulate ... but after all no one will notice. Besides there's no reason why one particular negro woman shouldn't be articulate enough, especially as she's spent most of her life in a white household" (Wyndham and Melly 297). The notion that a "negro woman" would have to spend "most of her life in a white household" in order to express herself as Christophine does is racist, and yet it also contains a certain truth: for Christophine expresses her white author's ideas. "All women, all colours, nothing but fools;' she says. "I keep my money. I don't give it to no worthless man" (109-10). Inasmuch as she speaks for Rhys, offering a more articulate critique of the English husband than anyone else in the novel, the super-Creole Christophine is the lynchpin ofRhys's white Creole defense. Just as Jane Eyre could not commit a murder as a Creole woman could, so too the white Creole Antoinette cannot speak truth to power as her Martinican da can. This is why, despite her alien costume and her "other" knowledges, Christophine is in my view a kind ofJane Eyre voice in Creole drag, whose reasonable truths will be misapprehended in the topsy-turvy world of colonial encounters. Like a ventriloquist's dummy or, better yet, a Renaissance comedy Fool, Christophine expresses powerful judgments in Wide Sargasso Sea in a seemingly foolish language.l2 According to Foucault, "in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself;' the madman/Fool represents "comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton's language which makes no show of

CHAPTER

S1x

reason, the words of reason" (Madness 4, 14). Rhys's innovation is to place this traditional guardian of truth in the middle of a thoroughly modern tragedy. As in a Renaissance farce, Christophine's Fool's disguise-her clothing, her color, her imagined attributes, and her use of languagt.~overwhelms her audience, distracting them from her simple truths. When Antoinette turns to Christophine for assistance with her troubled marriage, for example, Christophine attempts to set her straight with some clear advice: "A man don't treat you good, pick up your skirt and walk out. Do it and he come after you. . . . Speak to your husband calm and cool, tell him about your mother and all what happened at Coulibri and why she get sick and what they do to her. Don't bawl at the man and don't make crazy faces" (no, n6). This sensible counsel renders manageable a disturbing situation which the English husband's narrative has gone to great lengths to convey. Yet Antoinette cannot hear it, distracted as she is by Christophine's disguise: "I stared at her, thinking, 'but how can she know the best thing for me to do, this ignorant, obstinate old negro woman, who is not certain if there is such a place as England?' ... 'Christophine,' I said, 'I may do as you advise. But not yet.' (Now, I thought, I must say what I came to say)" (rrz). Taking Christophine to be (only) what she appears, that is to say, an "ignorant, obstinate old negro woman" whose wisdom is confined to the occult practices of obeah, Antoinette requests a love potion that will produce one final wanton night, then estrange her from her English husband forever. Gayatri Spivak points to Christophine as the limit ofRhys's fiction, speculating that she exits suddenly from the novel because it "cannot ... contain her" (253). Benita Parry disagrees, suggesting that "when the novel transfers to England ... her craft is outlawed, which is why . . . 'She walked away, without looking back"' (39). I would retain both of these glosses, with a clarification: Christophine must exit because Antoinette must be disarticulated, by the very logic of the inevitable ending.B Moving toward its English conclusion, Rhys's text cannot contain either otherness or reason, as we see when Christophine's words echo foolishly in the Englishman's head in their final encounter: "I give her something for love." (For love) "But you don't love. All you want is to break her up. And it help you break her up." (Break her up.) "She tell me in the middle of all this you start calling her names. Marionette. Some word so."

Indicting Domestic Fiction

185

"Yes, I remember, I did:' (Marionette, Antoinette, Marionetta, Antoinetta) "That word mean doll, eh? Because she don't speak. You want to force her to cry and to speak." (Force her to cry and to speak.) (154) 14 Only when the conversation returns to the question of money can the Englishman withdraw with a diagnosis of Christophine: "She's as mad as the other, I thought, and turned to the window" (161). Antoinette's fate may be a cautionary tale for literary critics: if we look too hard for "native" knowledges in Christophine's characterization, we, like Antoinette, may mistake the voice of reason in the costume guarding Rhys's truths. 15 Or if we treat Wide Sargasso Sea as something "other" to the tradition of Creole characterization represented by jane Eyre, we may miss its own deployment of Creole otherness in Christophine. For much like Youma, in the end, Wide Sargasso Sea mourns the loss of a Martinican da as part and parcel of white colonial belonging to a native country and its Creole culture(s). Unlike Antoinette's ill-fated narrative, Rhys's novel has proved to be a potent antidote to the narrative of domestic emancipation that it indicts and yet also mourns. Wide Sargasso Sea convincingly implicates literary feminism in an exclusionary nationalist project consistent with imperial power. As Rhys's fiction demonstrates to great effect, the modern communities of national and racial belonging, familial in form, can bring devastating "trouble" to those who fall outside the lines. "They say when trouble comes close ranks;' says Antoinette at the outset, "and so the white people did-but we were not in their ranks." Turning Bronte's lesson of Creole madness into a problem of identity for the maddeningly domesticated twentieth-century self, Rhys's Creole heroine comes to personifY the "troubles" ironically produced by emancipation as an imperial project. Invoking earlier political allegories about British-Creole alliances, Rhys explores these difficulties through the narrative of a bad (political) marriage of tragic proportions. In so doing, she implicates the rise of domestic sentiment as a centerpiece of modern national belonging in her critique of Creole characterization. By indicting the normative functioning of domestic fiction in this manner, however, Wide Sargasso Sea rejects both the radical thrust of familialist sentimentality and the liberating potential of the freedom narrative it displaces. Rhys's novel witnesses the difficulty of stepping outside the narrative of domestic emancipation. Only by embracing white Creole passivity and non-responsibility can Rhys indict the narrative of national and familial

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CHAPTER S!X

freedom without producing another in its place. As Fanon might argue, Antoinette's tragic fate is not the inevitable effect ofjane Eyre on an unwitting Creole reader but rather in part the consequence of Rhys's own rejection of modern nationalism and its corollary, utopian family feelings. The Creole heroine's greatest loss in Wide Sargasso Sea may thus be not that of her husband's or her mother's love but instead that of the articulate voice represented by an outspoken Martinican who combines, we might say, the righteous articulateness ofJane Eyre with that of another Martinican, Frantz Fanon. Christophine must, in the last analysis, be understood as a creolized version of what Rhys herself has lost in her attack on the narrative of domestic emancipation: the claims to governance implicit in the righteous voice of the governessing heroine.

Conclusion Rule Britannia I Britannia rules the waves Britons never, never, never shall be slaves. These words, rousing and affirming, resonated through the imperial enclaves of my childhood. In the colonial girls' school I attended, we sang loudly, thinking the promise belonged to us .... Who knew it was a sea chantey, sung by sailors plowing the Atlantic during the Middle Passage, cutting south into the Caribbean on the Windward Passage? ... And we sang and thought the song applied to us. Which it did, by negation. MICHELE CLIFF, "Caliban's Daughter" (1991)

As Frantz Fanon wrote descriptively in I952, "the middle class in the Antilles never speak Creole except to their servants. In school the children of Martinique are taught to scorn the dialect. One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid the use of Creole, and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it" (Black Skin 20). Decolonization has required the unlearning of such colonial values, as the Jamaican novelist Michele Cliff emphasized in describing her own efforts to narrativize the Caribbean. For writers of Creole literature and criticism in our own time, Creole languages and cultures are no longer a scorned patois but a rousing and affirming paradigm of the modern human condition. Drawing upon developments in linguistics, which have discovered in Creole languages the cradle of linguistic innovation in the modern period, Edouard Glissant and the theorists of creolite now celebrate the unpredictable emergence of vibrant new language-cultures in the colonial encounter. Thus Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant declare of the slave storyteller, "at the outset, even if he seeks to call up in himself only mother Africa, he is Creole-that is to say already multiple, already mosaic, already unpredictable-and his language is the Creole language, itself already, as we will see, mosaic and open" (47). This book has grown out of the current flowering of Creole literature and criticism.1

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CoNCLUSION

In the preceding chapter I disputed Jean Rhys's claim to "describe Bertha from the inside" as "a colonized temale questioning colonization," as Cliff somewhat infelicitously describes it (42). Yet I am nonetheless convinced that Rhys did identify with Bertha-and by extension with Virginie, Indiana, Noun, and Paquita-as a Creole foreign body living in France and England during the complex period of decolonization. This is why, despite the somewhat reactionary (and even proslavery) aspects of her work, Rhys's vindication of the Creole has opened up spaces for the difficult and necessary work of reevaluating colonial privileges and traditions. With this in mind, I have posed a simple question: What is the tradition of Creole representation to which Creole literature and criticism must respond? If today the Creole can stand for the marvelous possibilities of modern humankind-bringing something new and unexpected from old combinations-what were this figure's prior functions? What did the category signify, and to whom? My answer is that for writers in the major slave-owning and slave-trading nations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Creole signified an uncanny kind of"domestic," for both the family and the nation. As an experimental subject "brought up" in the slave-and-settler colonies, the Creole woman represented the promise-as well as the limitations-of domestication. At the same time, and increasingly, with the reform of colonial slavery, the Creole woman represented the effects of colonial importation, and thus the promise-as well as the limitations-of"domestic" political enfranchisement within expanding nations. The Creole, I have argued, served as a test case for national belonging generally, as well as for the sex and/ or gender norms that were thought to ensure the future of nations. The Creole woman in particular served as a crucial nodal point in efforts to think through the challenges of emancipation within families and within nations. The characterization of the Creole is thus connected to the end of colonial slavery, the reform of family life, and the reform of national governance through experiments in democracy-that is, it is linked to a complex set of events staggered across geography and time. Understanding this signification of the Creole enables us to historicize the study of "race" in literature, and to broaden the horizons of domestic fiction. Catherine Hall has .suggested that "a focus on national histories as constructed, rather than given, on the imagined community of the nation as created, rather than simply there, on national identities as brought into being through particular discursive work, requires transnational thinking" (9). Similarly, a focus on racial difference as constructed, rather than given, requires transracial thinking. A transracial and transnational type such as the

Conclusion

Creole serves as a key experimental field for the development of racial and national distinctions. To follow the Creole figure across nation-state borders in fiction, as we have done here, is to see not only how "public" problems permeate "private" fictions but also how fictions of "home" were themselves imported from abroad. This history of borrowing and translation makes multicultural knowledge as crucial for students of the literary "island" of Great Britain as it is for students of the literature-pirating Americas. 2 The Creole figure is important because she alters the customary atlas of domestic fiction. Every Creole is an import of some kind, or rather the child of an import-from culture to culture, or from text to text. She requires us to redraw two kinds of maps: both the terrains mapped out by the novels and the diffusion of the novels themselves across geographic borders. Amy Kaplan suggests in her reading of American writing in the 185os that "understanding the imperial reach of domesticity and its relation to the foreign should help remap the critical terrain upon which women's domestic fiction has been constructed" (6oo). This is precisely what the Creole figure has allowed us to do: take the geography of women's fiction (and thus its plots) seriously. I have sought throughout this book to consider not only how Creoles were depicted in changing cultural and political landscapes but also why specific works depicted them that way. What function did the Creole figure serve in a particular genre? If novelists such as Jane Austen were in fact preparing the ground for imperialism, as Edward Said claimed, what did they think they were doing? 3 What are we to make of the many Creoles who appear in novels written during the strange age of slavery reform preceding (and serving as a cover for) colonial expansion? My answer to this question is that novelists writing about Creoles were addressing urgent "domestic"-that is, national-problems. These included social reproduction through gender and family mores; economic sustenance through the interactions of capital and labor, on- and offshore, within moral limits; and irregular access to power through evolving forms of state rule. By addressing such national problems through fictional plots, domestic novels invited partially enfranchised members of the nation-state (their female readers) to participate in politics, if only indirectly, through the imagination. Like blood in a breathing social body, the Creole character linked peripheries to central organs, and central organs to peripheries. We have seen that images and models of colonial life were crucial to the project of female education and demonstrated its importance for social reproduction in domestic fiction. In efforts to enshrine, alter, or contest new concepts of domesticity and female education, the character of the Creole woman frequently

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CoNCLUSION

carried the question of colonial slavery into women's fiction, particularly in the early period of slavery reform. At the same time, gendered images and models of domestic life were crucial for domestic fiction's project of thinking through the moral and geographic boundaries of the modern nationstate and its government. The Creole woman thus also carried women's issues into antislavery fiction, linking a politics of family life to efforts to ameliorate, limit, or repudiate colonial slavery in expanding (or contracting) imperial nations. But colonial and domestic reforms were not tangled together only in fiction. From a metropolitan perspective, as we have seen, ending slavery was never about repudiating colonization. Rather, it involved demonstrating a "free" nation's capacity to govern transnational commerce "morally" and to promote "healthy" families. As the so-called colonial reformers in Britain in the 182os insisted, while colonial slavery and colonization by convicts were systems "full of evil," colonization by young (British) couples was desirable, since "to be single is contrary to the nature of a new colony, where the laws of society are labour, peace, domestic life, increase and multiply." 4 That the new bourgeois devotion to domestic life owed something to such optimistic images of colonization may be surmised from the fact that questions of race and lineage failed to disappear with the rise of bourgeois family values. Nor were all the domestic problems of colonial slavery solved by emancipation, as we can see in letters from the British governor ofJamaica written in 1865, just before he became infamous for crushing the Morant Bay rebellion. Lamenting that "the Creole labourer requires an amount of direction, supervision, and watching unknown in other Countries,'' Governor Edward Eyre sounds just like a character from Bronte or Stowe, as he blames Creole laborers for their "utter want of principle or moral sense,'' their "total absence of parental control or proper training of children," and their "Decadence and Decay," requiring a "fresh influx ofEuropean energy, intelligence, enlightened views and moral principles" (quoted in Hall, Civilising 6o). One effect of emancipation, in fiction as in government, was to define freedom at a very low threshold: as any condition other than slavery. Jane Eyre articulates this minimal expectation at a crucial moment in her tale: "I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: 'Then,' I cried, half-desperate, 'grant me at least a new servitude!'" (Bronte, jane Eyre 72). What Jane discovers is that she is free, in the very limited sense that she is not a slave, since she can advertise in the papers for a new position.

Conclusion As the Creole narratives in this study demonstrate, we must suspend our own preconceptions of what is "domestic" and what is not before we can fully comprehend the political interventions of domestic fiction. This means hesitating to sort "domestic" concerns from "political" or "colonial" matters, and halting before we isolate "domestic" from "foreign" literatures as well. If we read Bronte's novels in an English literature survey with Austen (whose work she disdained), we see one set of things, but if we read them with works by Edgeworth, Sand, Jacobs, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, we see others. This is well worth doing, not just because Bronte read their works or they read hers, but because the transnational and circum-Atlantic history they disclose lies just beyond our present, and belongs to us as well. As I write, the American president, George Bush, is, in his own words, "spreading liberty" through the invasion and occupation oflraq, while seeking to secure the borders of"the family" in America through a constitutional amendment to ensure gender difference within legal marriage. In a similar echo of nineteenth-century themes, American ideologues have reached a deadlock on the problems of the "inner city;' a significant synecdoche of our time: Is poverty (capitalism run amok) to blame, or is it "bad family values"? What I hope to have disclosed in my readings is the sometimes checkered past of attempts to spread freedom, to criticize capitalist excess, and to promote "family values"-but also, perhaps, some ways in which the pledges of such efforts might be reclaimed. This, in the end, may be the greatest promise of Creole literature and criticism in our time: to understand the ragout of our own cultural inheritance anew, as a gift; to glean from it a richer (if often cautionary) understanding of where we have come from, who we are, and where we find ourselves; and to widen the boundaries of our own imaginations.

Notes

Introduction 1. See, for example, Brown, Burnham, Romero. For British domestic fiction, see Cohen, Colby, Corbett, Langland, Poovey, and Trumpener. 2. These refonns were also sought by the same individuals; see the epigraph to this chapter, quoted in Walvin, "Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition" 149. 3. Throughout this book I use "domestic" as it was used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse, to refer not only to the household but also to the nation, in opposition not only to the "public" but also to the "foreign." See Amy Kaplan's excellent discussion of this range of meanings. 4· LA France litteraire Quly-August 1835): 84; quoted in Bongie 306. 5· Indeed, she ends up dying of "a disease ... peculiar to negroes and native Americans" (LA Cousine Bette 437). Uuless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French and Spanish in this book are my own. 6. By r8ro Napoleonic France had lost all of its remaining Caribbean colonies to the British; it also ceded the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius (formerly lle de France) to Britain at that time. The British governor ofJanlaica was recalled and appointed to Mauritius, to be replaced in turn by a former governor oflndia (Holt r12). 7· This is Robert Young's description (75-76). Young points out that Count Gobineau, author of the 1853-55 Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines, with its theory of "a permanence of types" that "can ouly be lost by a crossing of blood;' was married to a Creole woman (103, n5). 8. Anderson describes the "new American states of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" as "creole states, formed and led by people who shared a common language and common descent with those against whom they fought," glossing the "Creole" ( Criollo) as a "person of (at least theoretically) pure European descent but born in the Americas (and, by later extension, anywhere outside Europe)" (47). Pratt similarly defines "the criollos (creoles)" as "persons born in America and clainling European (or white) ancestry" (n3). Jose Juan Arrom has, however, demonstrated that in Spanish as in other European languages, criollo also described colonials of African descent during this period, at least until the end of the slave trade. 9· See Glissant and Brathwaite as well as Bernabe et al., Conde and Cottonet-Hage, and Bongie on creolite and "creolization." Bongie describes "creolization" as a near synonym of "transculturation" and "metissage"; all three terms name "the process of cultural mixing that has ... come to occupy the forefront of recent critical thinking about questions of (ethnic, racial, national) identity" (6). See Pratt for the theory of "transculturation"; and Lionnet and Marimoutou and Racault, Metissages, on "metissage."

194

NoTES To PAGES 9-15

TO. Peter Hulme comments that Spivak's "use of the word 'native' suggests an underlying difficulty: in the West Indies the 'native' is either for the most part absent -if what is meant is indigenous-or 'creole'-ifwhat is meant is 'born in the West Indies'" ("Locked Heart" 75). 11. In 'l11e Wretched of the Earth, Fanon parodies this schematic contrast in a manner reminiscent of Charles Dickens: "The settlers' town is a town of white people, offoreigners. The town belonging to tl1e colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how" (39). 12. I would thus second Huhue's call for postcolonial theory to "produce 'native' terminology" by exploring ''local name[s]" such as "the Caribbean notion of the 'creole,"' which "seeps across any attempt at a Mauichean dividing line between native and settler, black and white" ("Locked Heart" 75). My survey of the term's usage and etymology appears in chapter L 13. Edward Said wrote ofOrientalism: "Every writer on the Orient ... assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of ilie Orient, to which he reters and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient ajjiliate.< itself wiili other works, wiili audiences, wiili institutions, with the Orient itself" (Orimtalism 20). 14. This "increasing gang" became more vital to the planters after ilie antislavery movement succeeded in rendering the African slave trade illegal. In the fmal decades of ilie eighteenili century, familialist ideology coincided with ilie need for slave "capital" in new laws exempting from field labor slave rnoiliers in ilie British colonies who had successfully raised six children (Craton, 'Jesting 49). 15. Just as the multiple meanings of "domestic" allow "domestic slavery" to mean something municipal, familial, household-bound, and feminine all at once, so too does the French word femme allow for a certain slippage, associating slavery with both wometl in general and with the w!fo in particular. The French phrase may thus be translated as "the slavery of woman" or "the slavery of ilie wife." 16. Monique Wittig's essays testifY to the enduring power of this trope. Wittig argues that "the category of sex is tl1e category that ordains slavery for women" (8). Whereas most "women are 'heterosexualized' (the making of women is like ilie making of eunuchs, tl1e breeding of slaves, of animals) and subtnitted to a heterosexual economy," lesbians, for Wittig, are "escapees from our class in the same way as ilie American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free" (6, 20). 17. Joyce Zonana has detailed how such feminist orientalism "neutralizes ilie threat inherent in feminist demands and makes them palatable," since "the Western feminist's desire to change ilie status quo can be represented not as a radical attempt to restructure the West but as a conservative effort to make ilie West more like itself" (72). But while slavery is figuratively Oriental, in Bronte's novel as in many oiliers it is referentially British colonial; the repudiation of slavery, as I will argue, is as crucial to Bronte's vision of a transformed domestic space (both household and nation) as is the repudiation of despotic husbands and masters. 18. Parliament emancipated British slaves in 1833; the act went into effect in 1834 and called for an "apprenticeship" period for slaves until 1838. The antislavery movement in Britain took on international dimensions in the 1840s. The United States Congress officially prohibited slavery in territories under national jurisdiction in 1862, defYing ilie Supreme Court's /)red &ott decision, although it did not abolish slavery in every state until 1865, wiilithe enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. 19. See Davis and Blackburn for international histories of the antislavery movements. Thomas Holt makes the argument iliat "concrete slavery defined freedom by antithesis'' in tllis era (25). 20. Thomas Clarkson, for example, celebrated the abolition of tl1e British slave trade in 18o8 with relief iliat "ilie stain of the blood of Africa is no longer upon us" and "that we have been freed ..... from a load of guilt, which has long hung like a mill-stone around our necks'' (2:583-85). 21. Timothy Touchstone, Gent., "Tea and Sugar, or the Nabob and the Creole" (1792), quoted in Sypher, "The West-Indian" 519.

Notes to Pages

16-22

195

22. Sypher quotes a 1914 American history, The French Revolution in San Domingo by T. Lothrop Stoddard, as summarizing the very same '"creole' features" that were "delineated" in eighteenthcentury English literature: "The two main causes of the Creole's special nature were climate and slavery" (Sypher, "The West-Indian" 503). C. Duncan Rice agrees with Sypher that the "West Indian" character was "a useful shorthand for depravity" by the time of Sir Walter Scott's 1818 Heart