Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves brings to life the unique contribution by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. The book enriches ...our understanding of French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. In addition to these now canonical French authors, it calls attention to the lives and works of two lesser-known but important figures—Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the empathy that daughters show toward blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. The works by these French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth and twenty-first century Francophone texts. These women’s contributions allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women’s writing in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism. It undercuts neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies and between nineteenth and twentieth-century Francophone writing.
Including essays on the impact of colonial slavery on France, the United States, and the French West Indies, this collection focuses on the events, causes, and effects of violent slave rebellions ...that occurred in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.
Sophie Doin's proclaimed goal was to extend the reach of the elitist French abolitionist movement to the common people, an objective that had met with greater success in England than in France. Her ...writing provided authority to Haiti as a nation.
This essay considers Femmes des Antilles, traces et voix: cent cinquante ans après l'abolition de l'esclavage by two Guadeloupean writers, Gisèle Pineau and Marie Abraham. It argues that this work ...needs to be placed in the context of the writings of other Guadeloupean women who have addressed the subject of slavery such as Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Bébel-Gisler. The works of those other women provide intertextual models both for the authors and for readers familiar with Caribbean women's literature, shedding light on the Caribbean feminist recounting of the history and legacy of slavery that Pineau and Abraham have undertaken.
This article treats Sarah as an antislavery work based on its historical context, its association with sentimental writing, its narrative and onomastic structures, and its critique of the ...patriarchical and paternalistic underpinnings of slavery. Similarities with "La Jambe de Damis" and changes made in the second edition are also considered.
The name of Charlotte Dard, née Picard, would have remained buried in obscurity were it not for the notorious shipwreck of theMedusain 1816. That event set off one of the great scandals of the ...Restoration and provided the impetus for the renewal of French efforts to enforce the abolition of the slave trade.La Chaumière africaine, Dard’s account of the shipwreck and her life in Africa from 1816 to 1820, published in 1824, provides the basis of this chapter’s analysis of fathers, daughters, and slaves. It tells two different stories. The story of an early colonizer, Charles picard,
This chapter looks at Germaine de Staël’s complex construction of fathers in relation to slavery and abolition. Central to that construction is Staël’s own father, Jacques Necker, who appears in ...person or in various guises in his daughter’s fictional, biographical, historical, and other writings. The paintingMme de Staël à côté du buste de son père Jacques Neckerattributed to Firmin Massot (Figure 2), which Staël commissioned shortly after Necker’s death, captures the strong bond between father and daughter. Both gaze to their left in the sentimental, benevolent spirit of those devoted to the cause of freedom and the end
Claire de Duras’s haunting portrayal of the young African woman Ourika grew out of experiences with dramatic revolutionary and postrevolutionary events linked to slavery. Her father, Admiral ...Armand-Guy-Simon de Coëtnempren, comte de Kersaint, was a liberal Breton aristocrat. He played an active role in the legislative arena at a time when colonial issues were pressing objects of discussion, publishingMoyens proposés à l’Assemblée nationale pour rétablir la paix et l’ordre dans les coloniesfollowed bySuite des Moyens.The two works were written in 1791, before the slave insurrections in Saint-domingue occurred, and published in 1792.¹ As a distinguished naval
