Sarah: The Original French Text, and: Sarah: An English Translation (review)

Renewed interest in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's prose has led to recent modern editions of her short stories, notably by Marc Betrand (Huit femmes, Droz, 1999) and Aimée Boutin (Les Veillées des Antilles, L'Harmattan, 2006). Desbordes-Valmore's writings on the Antilles, and in particular, Sarah, have drawn attention to her contributions to French Romantic writings on slavery and the colonial experience. Previously language stood as the primary barrier to potentially widespread adoption of Sarah in a variety of Anglophone university courses exploring areas ranging from race to gender to Atlantic studies, to colonialism, to emancipation, to history, to literature. This has now changed. Deborah Jenson and Doris Y. Kadish's edition of Sarah in French and English translation in the MLATexts & Translations series opens access to what stands arguably as Desbordes-Valmore's most provocative work.

From a material perspective, the two volumes offer excellence at an affordable price rendering Sarah an attractive selection for undergraduate and graduate courses across the disciplines in French or in English. Relatively understudied, this text offers a fascinating example of a French female author's portrayal of a love triangle in the tropics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The critical apparatus (introduction, editors' and translators' notes, bibliographies) highlights and informs readers of complexities easily overlooked at first in this deceptively simple novella. Jenson and Kadish elucidate the ways in which Sarah rises above its form as a standard melodrama in a colonial setting. They argue persuasively that Desbordes-Valmore transformed a seemingly simple-minded tale of the innocent love between an orphaned girl and the son of her short-sighted benefactor that was threatened by a nefarious and jealous suitor. Under her pen, these stock characters and plot twists gained depth, serving as the basis for a fascinating meditation on narrative authority, personal autonomy, liberty, and color prejudice.

Jenson and Kadish heighten the reader's appreciation for the unique status of Des-bordes-Valmore and her novella by signaling elements linking the text to the author's personal experiences as a female artist on the socio-economic margins in France and as a teen on an ill-fated voyage to the Caribbean marked by slave revolts, the yellow fever epidemic that claimed the life of Desbordes-Valmore's mother, and a painful journey home. In addition, they situate Sarah within the literary genres sentimental novels and melodrama; contemporary cultural debates over the abolition of slavery; and the history of post-Revolutionary, post-Napoleonic, Restoration France. In their discussion of the rhetorical implications of Desbordes-Valmore's deliberate layering of narrative frames, which invests women (the narrator and Eugénie) and an African (Arsène) with unusual authority, they underscore the continued relevance of the issues raised in Sarah.

The quality of the introduction, edition, and translation leave little to regret, although we note that the emphasis in the introduction on the specificities of Desbordes-Valmore's novella and its status as a piece of women's writing tends to obscure the fact that Sarah occupies a central place in a different corpus of fictional texts by women and men from the 1820s that attests to a contemporary preoccupation with race and the bounds of desire. Characterizing Sarah as a precursor to Romantic texts like Ourika, Bug-Jargal, Indiana, and Toussaint Louverture (xxiv) tends to gloss over the text's centrality in a more tightly-knit though less prestigious body of Restoration fiction that includes Balzac's Le Nègre, de Duras' Ourika, the myriad of Ourika poems and plays, Hugo's Bug-Jargal, de Rémusat's L'Habitation de Saint-Domingue, Lacour's Pyracmond, ou Les Créoles, and de Paban's Le...