Madness and the Mulâtre-Aristocrate: Haiti, Decolonization, and Women in Marie Chauvet’s Amour

Published in 1968, eleven years into the Duvalier dynasty, Amour, the first of Marie Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, colère et folie [Love, Anger, and Madness], presents a searing critique of despotism, racialized social hierarchies, and women’s subordination in Haiti. The main character Claire Clamont’s narrative—vacillating between clarity and incoherence, sanity and madness—provides a scathing perspective on the political, economic, and social machinations that restrict and silence women’s active participation in politics and public life in 1939, four years after the twenty-year United States occupation in Haiti ended. Through a series of private journal entries, Claire traces the trajectory of her life; she begins as the daughter of a rich coffee planter with hopes of marrying well and living in relative luxury and ends as the embittered, unmarried eldest sister who runs the family’s household. At the age of thirty-nine, with her aspirations for marriage and motherhood over, she lives vicariously through her younger sisters, Félicia and Annette. Exacerbating her bitterness, Claire finds her wealth and privileges eroded by the expenses associated with her father’s vain political aspirations as well as by the abrupt reversal of the political and social orders, intensified by the presence of the United States military and corporations. Unable to cope with the conflicts facing a mulâtre-aristocrate woman of her social, political, and economic class, she retreats into a fantasy world—filled with rage, anger, and lust—where she passionately plays out her desires and imagines alternatives to her social and class frustrations.¹

Chauvet was a dramatist, novelist, and occasional actress. Her controversial book was immediately banned upon publication and caused her to flee the country out of fear of violent retaliation from the Duvalier regime. This was not just due to the novel’s critique of the government, but also because of her questioning and condemnation of the patriarchal and elitist structures in Haiti. Earlier critical readings of Amour have pointed out the important feminist interventions that Chauvet has made in Haitian literature.² Three, in particular, have focused on the political implications of a woman of Chauvet’s class writing as an act of resistance. Renée Larrier argues that Claire’s act of writing releases a stifled voice breaking free to find her own female subjectivity apart from the gender and class limitations placed upon her. Similarly, Françoise Lionnet argues that the potential empowerment gained in the transgression of writing can be a means of emancipating the writing subject from the forces that constrain her. Looking at the larger political field of Haitian literature and politics, Martin Munro insists that Chauvet’s writing is an act manifesting the recurring theme of revenge that shapes the larger experience of the Haitian people. Two others have examined the role terror plays in the shaping of both the novel and the Haitian people: Ronnie Scharfman argues that the ongoing terror produced by politically motivated physical violence in Haiti is evident in Chauvet’s writing and thus registers as an act of resistance to that violence, and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw argues that Chauvet’s unrelenting and vivid portrayal of violence exposes the terror of the Duvalier regime. In another vein, Joan Dayan has argued that Chauvet’s recuperation of Haiti’s voudun religion and women’s sexuality promises a subversive solution to the limited economic and social conditions of the nation.³ Few, however, have focused on Chauvet’s use of madness as her primary strategy for navigating the political, class, and social conditions and as an alternative future vision for women’s role in Haiti.

In what follows, I will first briefly sketch out the turbulent history of Haiti, specifically focusing on the periods in which the novel is set and was written, 1930s and 1960s, respectively, in order to illustrate that Chauvet’s trope of madness corresponds to the chaos of presidential successions and their contradictory demands, which produced a culture of fear, submission, and alienation for the peoples of Haiti. Expanding upon Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the...