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1 / “Stamped and Molded by Pleasure”: The Transnational Mulatta in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue All her kindred, and most commonly her very paramours, are fastened upon her keeper like so many leeches; while she, the chief leech, conspires to bleed him usque ad deliquium. —edward long, the history of jamaica (1774) So therefore it’s really to the state of courtesan that the mulattas are almost generally condemned. . . . This illegitimate commerce that offends religious manners and morals is, however, regarded as a necessary evil in the colonies, where white women are in small number. —médéric-louis-élie moreau de saint-méry, description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et historique de la partie française de l’isle saint-domingue (1797) To begin at the very source of my misfortunes, they proceeded from the beauty of my mother. —leonara sansay, zelica, the creole (1820) In February 1789, three years before the Saint-Domingue Revolution began, Baron de Wimpffen made the following appeal in his travel narrative : “Let us introduce good morals into Saint Domingo. Let the planters , instead of attaching themselves to those black, yellow, livid complexioned mistresses, who brutify, and deceive them; marry women of their own colour; and we shall soon see the country assume, in the eyes of the observer, a very different aspect.”1 Wimpffen, who later settled on a coffee plantation near Jacmel, cites the prevalent custom of concubinage between white colonists and free women of color as the source of the colony’s corruption. However, by May of that same year, his impression of “those black, yellow, livid” mistresses seems to have changed. Offering his readers an insider’s view of a “coloured ball,” Wimpffen writes: “These female mulattoes, who dance so exquisitely, and who have been painted to you in such seducing colours, are the most fervent priestesses 18 / “stamped and molded by pleasure” of the American Venus. . . . They join to the inflammability of nitre, a petulance of desire, which, in despite of every consideration, incessantly urges them to pursue, seize, and devour pleasure, as the flame devours its aliment.” Although “on every other occasion, these furious Bacchantes . . . scarcely seem to have strength enough to drag along their limbs, or articulate their words,” they do possess “some skill in the management of a family, sufficient honesty to attach themselves invariably to one man, and great goodness of heart. More than one European, abandoned by his selfish brethren, has found in them all the solicitude of the most tender, the most constant, the most generous humanity, without being indebted for it to any other sentiment than benevolence.”2 So who was the mixed-race West Indian woman such travelers as Wimpffen, Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Edward Long, Lady Maria Nugent, and Janet Schaw encountered in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica: an American Venus, a fille de joye (prostitute), a ménagère (housekeeper), or perhaps a complex combination of all three? This chapter examines how contradictory images of white and mixed-race Creoles in French, British, and American travel narratives created the Transnational Mulatta , an imperial figure who preceded the imperiled Tragic Mulatta in the eighteenth-century transatlantic imaginary. The origins of the mixed-race West Indian woman as a literary type cannot be traced back to one particular nation. She was a transnational figure created by British, French, and American authors whose travel narratives and novels circulated transatlantically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the mixed-race West Indian woman has been examined in scholarship of the British and French West Indies, few scholars have read British, French, and American representations of this figure against each other.3 By reading the mixed-race West Indian woman as a Transnational Mulatta, we will see that travel narratives that preceded the Saint-Domingue Revolution were populated with contradictory stereotypes that represented this figure as a deceptive adventuress, a monogamous devourer of pleasure, and a skillful housekeeper . But in British and American fiction published after the revolution , such as The Woman of Color (1808) and Leonara Sansay’s Zelica (1820), the mixed-race West Indian woman is transformed from an imperial adventuress into an imperiled heiress. In this chapter, I argue that the transatlantic circulation of stories about the horrors of the SaintDomingue Revolution transformed the way that British and American authors represented the mixed-race West Indian woman. In both travel accounts and legislation published before and during the revolution, the [3.133.109.211] Project...

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