Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution by Lesley Shannon Curtis Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Deborah Jenson, Supervisor ___________________________ Laurent Dubois ___________________________ Toril Moi ___________________________ David F. Bell, III ___________________________ Philip Stewart Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 i v ABSTRACT Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution by Lesley Shannon Curtis Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Deborah Jenson, Supervisor ___________________________ Laurent Dubois ___________________________ Toril Moi ___________________________ David F. Bell, III ___________________________ Philip Stewart An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 i v Copyright by Lesley Shannon Curtis 2011 Abstract ‚Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution‛ examines the works of French women authors writing from just before the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 to those writing at the time of the second and final abolition in 1848. These women, each in different and evolving ways, challenged notions of race and gender that excluded French women from political debate and participation and kept Africans and their descendants in subordinated social positions. However, even after Haitian independence, French authors continued to understand the colony as a social and political enterprise to be remodeled and ameliorated rather than abandoned. These authors’ rewritings of race and gender thus played a crucial role in a more general French engagement with the idea of the colony- as-utopia. In 1791, at the very beginning of the Haitian Revolution—which was also the beginning of France’s unexpected first postcolonial moment—colonial reform, abolitionism, and women’s political participation were all passionately debated issues among French revolutionaries. These debates faded in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. Slavery, though officially abolished in 1794, was reestablished in 1802. Divorce was again made illegal in 1816. Even in 1848, when all men were granted suffrage and slavery was definitively abolished in the French colonies, women were not iv given the right to vote. Yet, throughout the early nineteenth century, the notion of the colony-as-utopia continued to offer a space for French women authors to imagine gender equality and women’s empowerment through their attempts to alter racial hierarchy. My first chapter examines the development of abolitionism through theatre in the writings of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). At a time when performance was understood to have influential moral implications, de Gouges imagines a utopian colony to be possible through the power of performance to produce moral action. In my second chapter, I analyze how, during the slowly re-emerging abolitionist movements of the 1820s, Sophie Doin (1800-1846) and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) expose the individual emotional suffering of slaves in an effort to make the violence of enslavement visible. In the process of making this violence visible, Doin’s La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires (1825-6) and Desbordes-Valmore’s Sarah (1821), in contrast with Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823), mobilize respect for motherhood to bolster their abolitionist claims. My third chapter analyzes the colonial novels of Madame Charles Reybaud (1802-1870), a forgotten but once-popular novelist, who uses the idea of the colony to develop a feminist re-definition of marriage involving the emancipation of males from their own categories of enslavement. Influenced by the Saint-Simonian thought of the July Monarchy, Reybaud imagines a utopian colony v organized by a feminized French humanitarianism that attempts to separate French racial identity from that of the ‚Creole‛ colonizer. My final chapter compares this French desire to yoke utopia to colony with nineteenth-century Haitian attempts to reveal the opposite synergy: the inseparability of the institutions of slavery and colonialism. Haiti’s first novel, Stella (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818-1858), opposes racial hierarchy and defends Haitian independence in the face of harsh discrimination from an international community whose economies still depended on colonialism and slavery. In contrast with the previous texts studied in this dissertation, Stella imagines Haiti to have the potential to become a utopian postcolony, a nation freed from the constraints of colonialism in such a way as to serve as a model for a future in which racial hierarchy has no power. vi Dedication In memory and honor of my mom, Judith Ann (1944-2000). vii Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................... x Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Abolitionism and Colonialism in French Literature.......................................................... 8 Gender and Abolitionism .................................................................................................... 16 1: The Dramatic Abolitionism of Olympe de Gouges ............................................................ 40 The Power of Words and the Importance of Family ....................................................... 42 The Play, its Performance, and its Politics ........................................................................ 46 The Quest for Performance ................................................................................................. 57 Morality through Spectacle: Portraying and Observing Racial Difference .................. 65 De Gouges among Playwrights and Abolitionists........................................................... 76 Saint-Domingue Reacts ........................................................................................................ 84 2: Reconditioning Violence in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s Sarah and Sophie Doin’s La Famille noire, Le Négrier, Blanche et noir, and Noire et blanc ................................................ 87 Slavery in Sarah ..................................................................................................................... 91 Opposing Violence through Christianity in La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires ..................................................................................................................... 97 Sexuality, Maternity, and Violence in La Famille noire, Sarah, and Ourika .................. 107 3: Conceptualizing Race and Romance in the Colonial Novels of Fanny Reybaud ........ 123 Removing the Political ....................................................................................................... 126 viii Reybaud’s Feminized Colony ........................................................................................... 136 Romancing the Slave .......................................................................................................... 147 Missing Saint-Domingue, Forgetting Haiti: Madame de Rieux ...................................... 155 Whiteness Revisited ........................................................................................................... 161 4: Remembering Revolution and Writing Independence in Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella ... 167 Defining Haiti’s Past .......................................................................................................... 172 Defending Haiti’s Future ................................................................................................... 180 Bergeaud, Reybaud, Race and Nation ............................................................................. 190 Conclusion: The Transforming Power of the Colony-as-Utopia ........................................ 193 References .................................................................................................................................. 204 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 220 ix List of Abbreviations AN<<<..Archives nationales, Paris ABR<<<Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, Aix and Marseille AFF<<<.Archives départementales de la Martinique, Fort-de-France BCF<<<.Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie française, Paris BNF<<<...Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris x Acknowledgements I did not complete this project alone and have many people to thank. David Bell and Philip Stewart readily shared their encyclopedic knowledge with me about the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. Valentin Mudimbe, with