Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Volume 28 Issue 2 Article 2 6-1-2004 Hesitating Between Irony and the Desire to be Serious in Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem: Maryse Condé and her Readers Sarah E. Barbour Wake Forest University Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Barbour, Sarah E. (2004) "Hesitating Between Irony and the Desire to be Serious in Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem: Maryse Condé and her Readers ," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 28: Iss. 2, Article 2. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1580 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Hesitating Between Irony and the Desire to be Serious in Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem: Maryse Condé and her Readers Abstract In writing her fifth novel, a fictive autobiography of the title character, Maryse Condé has said that she "felt a strong solidarity with Tituba," and at the same time she admits hesitating "between irony and a desire to be serious" in the invention of this "mock-epic character." This article explores the reader's relationship to the novel as a variation on this hesitation. Once Condé sets up Tituba's authority to narrate her story, the reader is left in the precarious position of hesitating between getting the author's irony and desiring to be serious about Tituba's narrative of a painful history.