Tituba and Hester in the Intertextual Jail Cell: New World Feminisms in Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, sorcière ... Noire de Salem

Carolyn Duffey100Women In French Studies Tituba and Hester in the Intertextual Jail Cell: New World Feminisms in Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, sorcière ... Noire de Salem Perhaps finding a way into the intertextual, intenacial, and intercultural jail cell in Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé's 1986 novel, Moi, Tituba, sor ci ère ... Noire de Salem, might begin via some recent events in Beijing. That is to say, the representation of a number of incidents at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September, 1995 seems most relevant to Ulis odd fictional jail cell. The media coverage of that conference in Üie San Francisco Bay Area, for example, included much gleeful commentary about the so-called Chinese view of Western feminists as lesbians or prostitutes, culminating in the story that Chinese officials, fearing mass demonstrations of naked lesbians at the N.G.O. forum in Huairou, issued blankets to Chinese security police. From another angle, a further account centered on a gathering ofWestern women who were said to chant, "Liberté, Egalité, Homosexualité" before a tent of disapproving Arab and North African Muslim women's groups,just after a LIgandan speaker had declared that Üie "structural adjustment" policies of the World Bank were the biggest threat to women's equality and to their and their children's freedom in the developing world.1 Perhaps these stories as presented in the Western press reflect in part the primarily masculine media's desire to emphasize a glaring split between women of the first and third worlds, as well as to denigrate feminism in Üie process. Noneüieless, they also point, albeit somewhat reductively , to the way misrepresentations or ignorance of Üie historical and social context for die varying cultural constructs of women's freedom, equality, sexuality , or family life do separate women in Ulis postcolonial or neocoloiiial world. The reception of postcolonial literature by women has unquestionably repeated some of these same misconceptions, in part because these texts have often been published by necessity in the capitals of previous colonial powers. (And because of die problems with this word "postcolonial" - post is clearly not post in the French-speaking Caribbean with die Département d'Outre Mer (DOM) status of Martinique and Guadeloupe - I like Üie tenu "postcontact," coined by Françoise Lionnet, which refers to writings created to contest and resist the colonial moment and its continuing ideology before and after independence [4].) In response to this reception of such "postcontact" literature, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, for one, has called for an end to Western feminist scholarship which creates a composite "Third World Woman" victimized by a universalized "patriarchal oppression," particularly because she is juxtaposed to "educated, modem" Western women "having control over their own bodies and sexualities" (260-61). Somewhat more acerbically, Sara Suleri derides another ramification of creating the "postcolonial woman" wliich she says "almost inevitably leads to die simplicities that underlie undiinking celebrations of Carolyn Duffey101Women In French Studies oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for the 'good'" (273). These "simplicities" furthennore often involve, as Gayatri Spivak has repeatedly pointed out, a patronizingly literal reading of third world women's texts. She critiques Julia Kristeva for this type of uninfonned reading in Des Chinoises ("French Feminism"131-141), and she cites Üie critical response to her own so-called "elite" readings of Mahasweta Devi's "Breast Giver" as further evidence of the same attitude ("A Literary" 241-268). What is so intriguing about Maryse Condé's account in her novel of a fantastical jail cell meeting (151-162) between Tituba, the historically muted black slave from Barbados, and die much discussed tragic heroine of Nathaniel Hawüiorne's Scarlet Letter, Hester Pryrtne, is Üiat Coudé is reversing who is reading whom. She is in effect artfully staging the politics of this complicated encounter between first and diird world feminisms as the accused witch and Üie alleged adulterous wife meet in seventeenth-century Salem. In her afterword to die English translation of Moi, Tituba, Ann Annstrong Scarboro comments that Condé in this interchange "parodies modem feminist discourse"(193) (perhaps assuming Western is understood?), and Angela Davis in her introduction to die same edition refers...