Tropics of Haiti Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Chapter Four Moreau de Saint-Méry's Daughter and the Anti-Slavery Muse of La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803)
- Chapter Five ‘Born to Command’: Leonora Sansay and the Paradoxes of Female Benevolence as Resistance in Zelica; the Creole
- Chapter Six ‘Theresa’ to the Rescue! African American Women's Resistance and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Four - Moreau de Saint-Méry's Daughter and the Anti-Slavery Muse of La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803)
from Part Two - Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Chapter Four Moreau de Saint-Méry's Daughter and the Anti-Slavery Muse of La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803)
- Chapter Five ‘Born to Command’: Leonora Sansay and the Paradoxes of Female Benevolence as Resistance in Zelica; the Creole
- Chapter Six ‘Theresa’ to the Rescue! African American Women's Resistance and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘I remember four women of my boyhood: my mother, cousin Inez, Emma, and Ide Fuller. They represented the problem of the widow, the wife, the maiden, and the outcast. They were, in color, brown and light-brown, yellow with brown freckles, and white. They existed not for themselves, but for men; they were named after the men to whom they were related and not after the fashion of their own souls.’
—W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Damnation of Women’ (1920)‘Je ne conseille point aux dames de lire l'Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue: ici toute curiosité, même naturelle, doit cesser; leur âme serait trop péniblement affectée; il y aurait trop de danger pour elles à seulement parcourir cette longue série de crimes de lèse-humanité.’
—Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Cressé, Préface, L'Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue (1824)‘Est-il rien de plus accablant pour des pères, que la honte de donner l’être à des enfants incapables de remplir aucunes fonctions civiles, & condamnés à partager l'humiliation des esclaves.’
—Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie de Saint-Domingue (2:79)Scholars of Saint-Domingue have known for some time now that before he was married Moreau de Saint-Méry had a mistress, a free woman of color named Marie Louise La Plaine, with whom he lived for five years in Saint-Domingue. Some scholars have even speculated that La Plaine's child, Jeanne-Louise, ‘called Aménaïde,’ according to her baptismal record, might have been Moreau de Saint-Méry's daughter since he bequeathed three slaves to her in the 1778 act of dissolution from her mother which he filed with the courts in order to prepare for his marriage to a white Creole woman (Camus, 1960; Rogers, 2006, 87). The fact that Moreau de Saint-Méry later became Aménaïde's ‘legal guardian’ has only added to the suspicion that the ‘young quadroon, raised in France’ was his child (Rogers, 2006, 87). The historian Michel Camus writes, ‘this generosity on the part of Moreau de Saint-Méry in favor of a quadroon … permits us to believe that Jeanne-Louise was his child.’ The baptismal record ‘reinforces this impression,’ Camus writes, since Aménaïde's godfather was a powerful and well-known lawyer in Cap-Français (where Moreau de Saint-Méry worked and lived), while her godmother was the wife of a former attorney general of the king (Camus, 1960).
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 220 - 252Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015