Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and The Reform of Colonial Slavery (review)

The main argument of this interesting study is that there is a major but hitherto unexplored connection in novels written both before and after the abolition of slavery, between the two apparently unrelated themes of slavery in the colonies and domestic reform at home. The latter involves a repositioning of the woman as the respected, indeed idealized, manager of a well-run household and a happy family, dispensing a moral education to her children and exerting a similarly beneficial moral influence on her husband; the emancipation of women in the home and the 'home' nation thus resonates with the campaign for the emancipation of slaves in the colonies, and Berman analyses 'the critical juncture occupied by the antislavery movement in the history of the modern (bourgeois) family' (p. 7). She focuses particularly on the figure of the Creole woman as the key point of intersection between the two discourses; in her racial indeterminacy—both black and white people born in the colonies were, at different times and places, designated as Creole —and in the heterogeneity of her stereotypes, from lascivious seducer of white men to devoted servant and wet-nurse, the Creole woman uncannily condenses all the diverse overlaps between domestic familiarity and colonial otherness. The question of nationalism is also prominent throughout, particularly but not solely in relation to the French Revolution and the American Civil War. Berman discusses a mixture of French and English-language novels: Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, Sand's Indiana, Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Brontë's Jane Eyre, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl, and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Taken together, they demonstrate her claim that this fiction can be adequately understood only in a transnational context, and her analysis also brings out a complex network of intertextual relations—not only the well-known ones between, for instance, Brontë and Rhys, but also the numerous ways in which Saint-Pierre's Creole virgin is reworked and subverted in subsequent novels in both French and English. Berman's readings, contextualized with a wealth of detailed historical information and references to a wide range of other kinds of writing, are subtle and complex: so much so, in fact, that the main lines of her argument occasionally get submerged in the detail of intricate textual interpretations. Overall, however, she produces illuminating original readings of some very well-known novels, and her central thesis of the 'convergence of discourses of colonial and domestic reform' is wholly convincing. There is also a very full and useful bibiography.