Two Contending Mothers: Discrepant Allegories in Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella

In the following essay, I will discuss the failure of allegory and the lack of a national foundational myth in what is considered to be the first Haitian novel, Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella. As a nineteenth-century text, Stella raises questions of genre related to the genealogy between the creole story and the novel, as well as questions regarding the transition between the oral and the written. As a representation of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, it portrays a conflicted approach to the legacy of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. The articulation of the Haitian Revolution and the French is embodied in the characters of Stella, a white French lady exiled in Saint-Domingue, and Marie L’Africaine, a slave and the mother of the Haitian fictional heroes Romulus and Remus. Nevertheless, rather than becoming allegories of national cohesion, they produce a series of non-encounters that ultimately point to an emergent literary and historical sensibility that is distinctly Caribbean.