White Creole Print Culture, Community, and Identity
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IMAGINING THE CREOLE CITY: WHITE CREOLE PRINT CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ORLEANS AN ABSTRACT SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2013 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rien T. Fertel --- ABSTRACT ! ! This dissertation traces the development, growth, and eventual fall of a white Creole intellectual and literary community in New Orleans, beginning in the 1820s and continuing for a century thereafter. In histories and novels, poetry and prose, the stage and the press, white Creole New Orleanians—those who traced their parentage back to the city’s colonial era—advocated both an intimate connection to France and a desire to be considered citizens of the United States of America. In print, they consciously fostered, mythologized, and promoted the idea that their very bifurcated nature made them inheritors of a singularly special place, possessors of an exceptional history, and keepers of utterly unique bloodlines. In effect, this closely-knit circle of Creole writers, like other Creole literary communities scattered across the Atlantic World, imbued the word Creole as a descriptive identity marker that symbolized social and cultural power. ! In postcolonial Louisiana, the authors within this white Creole literary circle used the printed word to imagine themselves a unified community of readers and writers. Together, they produced newspapers, literary journals, and art and science-based salons and clubs. Theirs was a postcolonial exercise in articulating a common identity, a push and pull for and against their French and American halves to create a creolized Creole self. ! Looking to their American brothers and to their French motherland, they participated in idealistic, literary, and wider cultural movements witnessed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of the long-nineteenth century, these movements included romantic historicism, religious reformation, pan-linguistic nationalism, racial refashioning, a preoccupation with genealogy, and a social feminization. ! Though few of these white Creole authors are still read today, their fashioning of a city and state literature continues to resonate in most all literary representations of New Orleans and Louisiana. By the turn of the twentieth century, and the end of their era of prominence, the white Creoles had popularized the idea of a New Orleans centered in the city’s mythologized white, Gallic past. They had imagined the “Creole City.” IMAGINING THE CREOLE CITY: WHITE CREOLE PRINT CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ORLEANS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2013 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY APPROVED: Lawrence N. Powell, Ph.D. t::mily Clark, Ph.D. ©Copyright by Rien Thomas Fertel, 2013 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ! In addition to overseeing research, offering ideas in conversation, challenging my scholarly interpretations, and carefully reading each and every page, each member of my dissertation committee made a key contribution to the formulation and completion of this monograph. Knowing my interest in the nineteenth-century shifts in the meaning of the word Creole, Dr. Lawrence N. Powell encouraged me to take a look at white Creole-centric manuscripts collections that belonged to the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection at Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library. After watching me conduct archival research and read seemingly every book on the subject over a two year span, Dr. Emily Clark told me to “stop reading and start writing,” some of the best advice I have ever received. And finally, Dr. Randy J. Sparks, my advisor and dissertation director, advised me to take as many non-dissertation writing and research assignments as I could handle. Writing outside and alongside the topic of white Creole literary culture made me a better academic writer. ! Gratitude goes out to each and every individual who read various chapters and/or conversed with me on the subject of this dissertation. Dr. Jana K. Lipman was a superb doctoral examination committee member who pushed me to read deeply in the realms of fact and fiction. Dr. Thomas J. Adams read and offered ii rich commentary on the prospectus. Russell Desmond, proprietor of Arcadian Books in New Orleans, is a saint; he translated documents at moment’s notice, read several chapters, and has helped me hunt down down rare Louisiana books, aiding in research and adding to my collection since 2007. My Tulane History Department colleagues Liz Skilton and Walter Stern read various iterations of chapters and offered helpful commentary. Dr. Oz Frankel and Dr. Julia Ott, members of the Historical Studies faculty at The New School for Social Research in New York, inspired me to take up a scholarly career in the study of history. Among the conferences at which I’ve presented this work, the participants from the Toulouse Interculturalité: La Louisiane au carrefour des cultures conference (January 2012) were especially helpful—particularly Dr. Nathalie Dessens, Dr. Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, and Emilie Urbain—in thinking about Chapter Two. Pableaux Johnson has fed my stomach most every week over the past three years, while Andre Stern has fed the mind and Charlie Gallagher the body. Kira Henehan and Brett Martin graciously provided me with a place to live during the crucial last few months of writing and defense. Susie Penman is one of the best readers and editors around, and though she came late to this manuscript, her input fills its pages. The mentorship and dinner companionship of my uncle, Randy Fertel, has been rewarding in ways that stretch way beyond the research and writing of this dissertation. iii ! This work is dedicated to my family, especially my grandmother, Ruth Fertel, who all encouraged my reading of the higher and lower branches of literature. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................... ii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 1 ! “Que né créole, je veux vivre et mourir créole.” — Creating the !!White Louisiana Creole CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................ 22 ! “Procuring the higher branches of literature.” — Charles Gayarré !!and the Cultivation of a Louisiana Creole Print Terroir CHAPTER TWO ............................................................................................... 59 ! “Cette terre catholique.” — Catholic Priest and Poet Adrien Rouquette !!Bridges the Atlantic Ocean CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................... 91 ! “Conservons la langue immortel.” — Alfred Mercier, the Athénée !!Louisianais, and the Fight to Preserve the French Language CHAPTER FOUR ............................................................................................. 130 ! “Today we see walking together the representatives of two important !!races.” — George Washington, Blood Matters, and the Creole !!Backlash CHAPTER FIVE ............................................................................................... 173 ! “His place among us . belongs to the future.” — Grace King’s Lost !!Creole Cause and the Feminization of New Orleans’s Creole !!Culture CONCLUSION ................................................................................................. 214 ! “New Orleans is a world.” — Creating the Creole City in the Twentieth !!Century BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................. 222 v 1 Introduction “Que né créole, je veux vivre et mourir créole.” — Creating the White Louisiana Creole ! In the autumn of 1827, two New Orleanians waged a war of the printed word. Though both men were cultivated, politically powerful French Louisianians, Bernard de Marigny and Étienne Mazureau exercised their American rights to free speech and suffrage by supporting opposing presidential candidates. Born in 1785, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville’s lifestyle mirrored his aristocratic French name. In 1822, as President of the State Senate, in a move he called “one of the happiest days of my life,” Marigny overturned a Louisiana Supreme Court decision to make “null and void” any minutes of meetings not written in English. He was thusly deemed “the Defender of the French language.”1 Francophone paladin aside, he was also an infamous libertine and an even more notorious gambler. Within six years of inheriting his father’s immense plantation landholdings, one block downriver from the city, Marigny’s dice habit forced him to subdivide the property. He would become—and forever remain—an Andrew Jackson supporter in 1824, primarily because Old Hickory’s 1 Bernard Marigny, To His Fellow Citizens (New Orleans: s.n., 1853), 3 (italics in original). 2 presidential opponent, John Quincy Adams, had been adverse to the Louisiana Purchase two decades prior.2 ! Étienne Mazureau, conversely, was an adamant Adams man. A three-term State Attorney General, and Louisiana Secretary of State, in 1827 he ranked as one of the city’s most accomplished, and fiery, lawyers and orators. Mazureau “possesses a most extensive and profound