Colonial Literature and Impossible Métissage

In the nineteenth-century novels set in New Caledonia, métissage, as the process and outcome of racial mixing, was most particularly associated with women characters, and largely characterized by sexual permissiveness and biological degeneration. The earliest written literature in New Caledonia was, for the most part, produced by Metropolitan French people passing through. Louise Michel, considered in Chapters 1 and 2, spent eight years in the country's penitentiary system, leaving New Caledonia after the general amnesty to rejoin her ailing mother in France. Jacques and Marie Nervat came to the colony a decade later, where they lived from 1898 to 1902. Like Louise Michel, Marie Nervat, under the pseudonym of Marie Causse, constitutes something of an exception with her volume of poems Lês Reves unis and a colonial novel, Célina Landrot. This love story and portrait of colonial social life, which she published in 1904 in collaboration with her husband, is largely constructed by stereotypes of women of the time, both romantic and realist ready-made clichés of the feminine. Célina Landrot tells the story of Victorine, a young peasant girl, condemned to twenty years’ imprisonment for the infanticide of a child born shamefully after her seduction by the middle-aged husband of her employer. This detail is a realistic one, as infanticide was one of the most commonly listed crimes for transported convict women. Victorine had jumped at the opportunity to commute her sentence by volunteering to leave her French prison for New Caledonia where, under the surveillance of the Order of St Joseph's Little Sisters of Cluny at Bourail, she becomes the wife of a liberated convict. This man, François Landrot, is an unruly young brawler from a peasant family in Lorraine who had inevitably finished up killing a man, and found himself deported. The couple's installation on a small land-grant at Pouembout, as part of the colony's attempts at the social regeneration of its convict population unable to return to France, provides the foreground to a portrait of the social distinctions and gender roles in rural colonial society.