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  • Le Nègre et la créole, ou Mémoires d’Eulalie D***
  • Doris Y. Kadish
de Paban, Gabrielle. Le Nègre et la créole, ou Mémoires d’Eulalie D***. Edited and Presented by Marshall C. Olds. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Pp. xl. + 229. ISBN 978-2-296-07037-0

In recent years antislavery works by women dating from the 1820s have become increasingly available, thanks in part to Roger Little’s series Autrement Mêmes published by [End Page 123] L’Harmattan. To the number of such works produced in that series, which includes texts by Charlotte Dard, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, and Sophie Doin, we can now add Marshall C. Olds’ meticulous edition of Gabrielle de Paban’s Le Nègre et la créole, ou Mémoires d’Eulalie D*** (1825). But, as Olds states concerning Paban’s authorship of the text, we cannot know “avec certitude l’identité que ce nom révèle” (x). Olds raises questions in the opening pages of his introduction concerning the work’s authorship: might Paban’s abolitionist brother-in-law have played a role in writing it? might the work be an authentic account, as certain elements such as descriptions of human sacrifice in Africa suggest? However, Olds convincingly argues for proceeding upon the assumption that a woman writer, Gabrielle de Paban, is the author of Le Nègre et la créole: that evidence includes the work’s sentimental style and evidence of its female readership.

As Olds explains and Paban makes explicit in the opening pages of the novel, Le Nègre et la créole reverses the circumstances recounted in Ourika, which was at the height of its popularity in 1825. The reversals are numerous: the young heroine Eulalie (referred to as Lily in the novel) is white not black; she is rescued from the black rioting masses in Saint-Domingue, not from white European slave traders as is Ourika; a black woman, Maky, rescues Eulalie and raises her in an African village in Benin, not in the privileged setting in France in which Ourika is raised by Mme de B, a white aristocrat; Eulalie is loved by, but rejects the love of, Maky’s son Zambo, whom she loves as a brother but not a husband, as opposed to the unrequited love for a white man that Ourika feels for Mme de B’s grandson Charles.

What are we to make of such reversals? Olds refrains from extensive interpretation of Paban’s use of the Ourika story, leaving to future critics, teachers, and students of literature the intriguing prospect of detailed comparisons between the two works: for example, concerning Paban’s use of a female frame narrator, in contrast with Duras’s male medical doctor, a more conventional figure of authority. Other interesting issues that might be worth exploring in later interpretations include Paban’s use of the voices of both white and black women to decry patriarchal practices, in contrast with Duras’s more muted approach to women’s condition in society; Paban’s engagé statements justifying the uprisings in Saint-Domingue (“j’ai peine à comprendre que ces malheureux noirs aient attendu si longtemps le jour de la vengeance” [13]), in contrast with Ourika’s white colonialist perspective in condemning those events; and the fact that Eulalie, a native-speaker of Creole, who only learned French as an adolescent, is the author of her story, in contrast with Ourika, a highly educated French-speaking narrator, who delivers her story orally.

Olds’ highly informative introduction provides readers with a comprehensive survey of the literary, historical, and cultural context of Paban’s novel. It also gives useful information about the work’s various settings: Saint-Domingue, Benin, Puerto Rico, and Martinique. For readers unfamiliar with the historical background of French writings on the subject of slavery, Olds discusses antislavery writings generally in relation to their intellectual and moral roots in the Enlightenment; and he identifies the most notable sources for Paban’s novel such as Raynal, Grégoire, Clarkson, and Mungo Park. One name that Olds might have added to that list is Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, especially since the description...

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