Women of the House: Race-Mixing, Mistresses, and Servants in Plantation Literature of the Americas, 1839-2009 A Thesis by Kathleen Sparks submitted to University College London Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry as partial requirement for the completion of a PhD in Comparative Literature Professor Stephen M. Hart (Spanish) – Supervisor Doctor Linda Freedman (English) – Advisor Doctor Tyler Fisher (Spanish) – Tertiary 1 Declaration I, Kathleen Sparks, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. ________________________________________ 2 Acknowledgements Many people supported the completion of this project. I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Stephen Hart, for his invaluable advice, encouragement, and keen critical eye. My gratitude also goes to my advisor, Doctor Linda Freedman, and to Doctor Tyler Fisher for their many constructive and helpful comments and suggestions. Thank you to my husband for his endless, endless support and to our daughter for her endless smiles. A million thanks to my parents, who raised me to never stop moving forward. Finally, I am grateful to the Universe for granting me the gifts, tools, and time to undertake this journey. 3 Abstract This study traces literary representations of race-mixing in the Americas as informed by the paradigms of the true Plantation, the nostalgic Plantation, and the post-Plantation, especially through the figure of the black and mixed-race female domestic servant and the potential for darkening she continues to embody. A comparison of US texts with their contemporary counterparts in Latin America focuses on differing ideologies of race-mixing that resulted in divergent representations of black and mixed-race women by Plantation writers, especially in regard to their sexuality. The works analyzed here include: the nineteenth- century abolitionist novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés, and Bernardo Guimarães’s A Escrava Isaura; the interwar works Las memorias de Mamá Blanca by Teresa de la Parra and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind; and turn-of-the-century novels Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Mario Vargas Llosa’s Elogio de la madrastra and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. The representations of black and mixed-race female servants reveal an erasure of race-mixing in US literature that results in the figure’s relegation to a sexless mammy type. Alternatively, Latin America’s relative embrace of mixing results in a different fate for the servant; though granted greater agency and complexity in the literature, she is ascribed an aggressive or hyperactive sexuality that exposes more nuanced regional anxieties about race-mixing and the female body. This study argues that these differences originate in a foundational religious belief in the US’s unique spiritual project, which has worked to exclude the female subaltern from the national identity. Ultimately, this taboo mindset 4 surrounding race-mixing manifests in US post-Plantation literature in an eradication of normative black sexuality unparalleled in contemporary Latin American texts, and condemns its female servant characters to a dehumanizing fate: unwanted, ignored, silenced, unpersoned. 5 Table of contents Declaration ............................................................................................................ 2 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................... 3 Abstract ................................................................................................................. 4 Table of contents .................................................................................................. 6 INTRODUCTION: Race-Mixing, the Female Servant, and Religion in the Plantation Home ................................................................................................... 7 PART 1: In the Plantation – Sentimental Abolitionism, 1839-1882 ............. 37 CHAPTER 1: Uncle Tom’s Cabin ....................................................................... 43 CHAPTER 2: Mestizaje and Incest in Cuba ....................................................... 68 CHAPTER 3: Mestiço Brazil ............................................................................. 101 PART 2: Plantation Nostalgia – Mixing and Memory, 1929-1936 .............. 125 CHAPTER 4: Remembering Piedra Azul: Las memorias de Mamá Blanca.... 133 CHAPTER 5: Going Back to Tara in Gone with the Wind ............................... 167 PART 3: Post-Plantations, or, How to Be Friends with Your Maid, 1988-2009 ........................................................................................................................... 206 CHAPTER 6: Mixing at the Border and in the Bedroom – Como agua para chocolate and Vargas Llosa’s Erotic Novels .................................................... 213 CHAPTER 7: The (Helpful) Help ...................................................................... 244 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 263 Works Cited....................................................................................................... 268 6 INTRODUCTION: Race-Mixing, the Female Servant, and Religion in the Plantation Home The literary works examined in this study span 170 years, from the decades leading up to the end of slavery in the Americas to the first decade of the twenty-first century. These works are products of the Plantation, a paradigm from colonial times that continues to govern societies of the Americas.1 As argued in the pages that follow, the Plantation is both a physical place and an ideology that sets the socio-political, economic, religious, and racial norms and practices of the nations that lie within its parameters. As such, the Plantation, its history and its living legacy, emerges in literature of the Americas as both a setting and a state of mind. The Plantation writers2 in this study in fact bear witness to three iterations of the Plantation, which determine this study’s three-part structure. The first iteration of the Plantation is the true Plantation: literature from this period comes from within the Plantation, from a time and place where its living practices structured daily life. The Plantation’s defining institution, slavery, was under attack, and the true Plantation literature in this study formed part of the textual assault but still reflected contemporary Plantation paradigms and discourse. Plantation works included in this study are Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882), and Bernardo Guimarães’s A Escrava Isaura (1875). 1 This study defines a plantation as a large farm or agricultural estate in the Americas, dating from the colonial period until the late nineteenth century, which produced cash crops through the exploitation of slave labor. The Plantation is a pan-American paradigm of shared customs, practices, and hierarchies, comprised by a network of plantations. 2 ‘Plantation writers’, in this study, references white writers whose work is set within the Plantation and who, as members of Plantation culture and part of the Plantation’s legacy, produce work that also reaffirms the Plantation’s hierarchies and hegemony. 7 The second iteration is the nostalgic Plantation; its depictions rely upon nostalgic yearning for a lost way of life. Its writers long not for a return to chattel slavery, but for a return to the clear hierarchies (regionally and nationally distinct thought they were) that existed within the true Plantation. This nostalgia expresses disillusionment with the present and looks backwards in search of solutions for an unsatisfactory present and future, and its literature praises the Plantation even as it seeks a path out of it. Las memorias de Mamá Blanca by Teresa de la Parra (1929) and Gone with the Wind (1936) enable a comparative reading of Plantation nostalgia. The third iteration is the ‘post-Plantation’. The term ‘post-Plantation’ is preferable to ambiguous and heavily laden terms such as ‘postcolonial’,3 and achieves two ends: one, it coincides with these terms in its concept of ‘post’ as something contemporary and culturally relevant (a late twentieth-century perspective that considers issues of class, gender, and race, for example); and two, it highlights the continued influence and legacy of the Plantation itself, which is purportedly shed in the ‘post-Plantation’, but which is in fact inescapable for Plantation writers. Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989), Mario Vargas Llosa’s Elogio de la madrastra (1988) and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997), and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) each offer a potential rebuttal to the Plantation. Yet the traces of slavery’s collective trauma haunt these works and serve to ultimately reproduce the Plantation. In support of these claims, this study traces literary representations of 3 For work on postcolonial theory’s application to globalization in Latin American contexts, see Coronil, ‘Latin American Postcolonial Studies’; for its application to literature, see Lie, ‘Postcolonialism and Latin American Literatures’ and Ortega and Natali, ‘Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Writing’. For