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

Framed in the broadest possible terms, the premise of Carolyn Vellenga Berman's Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery is not a new one. A number of influential studies by Victorian critics ranging from Anne McClintock to Susan Meyer to Deirdre David have profitably illustrated the interconnectedness of domesticity and imperialism, hence disrupting the seeming separation between private and public concerns in nineteenth-century British fiction. What is innovative about Berman's study, however, is its focus on these imbricated discourses through a transatlantic figure who aptly delineates their points of intersection—the Creole woman.

As Berman asserts, the fictional Creole serves as "a test case for national belonging generally, as well as for the sex and/or gender norms that were thought to ensure the future of nations" (188). In a series of carefully researched readings, Creole Crossings historicizes the place of such Creole characters in novels from the antislavery era, reading them alongside the political debates that surfaced in such nonfiction sources as travel writing, journalism, government documents, and medical texts. Through these pairings, Berman demonstrates how discourses on the reform of colonial slavery in France, Britain, and Anglo-America were tightly linked to discourses surrounding the reform of domestic life, allowing for "promiscuous crossings of vocabulary, concepts, literary allusions, and literary texts across linguistic borders and political lines" (26). The novel was a perfect vehicle for facilitating such crossings because, as Berman asserts, both the campaigns to reform colonial slavery and to reform domestic life targeted the same audience: bourgeois women readers who represented "the moral 'heart' of expanding nation-states" (3). Drawing on Benedict Anderson's arguments in Imagined Communities (1983; New York: Verso, 1991) about the importance of print culture in facilitating the emergence of modern nationalism, Berman reveals how novelistic representations of the Creole helped to work out the terms of national belonging after emancipation.

Chapter 1 brilliantly lays the groundwork for this study by examining the linguistic and geographical history of the term "Creole." Although recent critical debates over the racial classification of Creoles in nineteenth-century literature have been animated, Berman cautions against the tendency to associate the term with race. She argues that "[t]o read 'Creole' as a signifier of whiteness or of blackness involves the anachronistic projection of a modern racial binary that was only half formed, paradoxical as this may seem, in the heyday of colonial slavery" (43). One of the strengths of this study, then, is the way it deconstructs this entrenched binary: by defining "Creole" as a colonial label that evokes its etymological sense, "brought up domestically" (7), Berman's usage encompasses a heterogeneous group comprised of "all kinds of individuals born and raised in the European slave colonies" (9).

In order to demonstrate the importance of these "domestic" origins—and by extension, the formative role of upbringing as opposed to race or blood—Berman examines Creole sexuality, female education, and child-rearing, persuasively showing how such domestic practices impinged on questions of national belonging and helped to shape political life and the future of the modern nation. As a touchstone for such analyses, Berman's second chapter examines Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788), and she argues convincingly in chapter 3 that later allusions to this text in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), George Sand's Indiana (1832), and Honoré de Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834) invoke not only the representation of its Creole characters, but also "a dense fabric of feminine ideals, concepts of the domestic, national imaginings, and didactic intentions" (90).

This fabric extends into later chapters as well, including one on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). Although no study of the Creole in nineteenth-century literature would be complete without an analysis of Brontë's famous rendering of this figure, I found that this chapter, while intriguing, was less eloquently written than others...