Jules Levilloux's Les créoles, ou la vie aux Antilles.1835) was published in the wake of the July 1830 Revolution, and was followed five months later by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe's Outre-mer. These novels’ imagery of disastrous love and dysfunctional families reiterates France's opinion that more than ever the plantation system and slavery were a thorn in its side that threatened its construction of a pure national identity. Les créoles.nd Outre-mer.an be read as failed national romances in which depictions of love, sexuality, gender, and racial mixing point to the dangerous liaisons endemic to the Creole plantation system, colonial order, and the construction of nationalism. In particular, political allegories of womanhood appear not only as ‘contact zones’ but as experimental zones: spaces for transforming and redefining institutions, practices, imaginaries, and power dynamics concerning colonialism, slavery, and nationalism. However, the prevalent imagery of inadequate mothers and daughters signals that fictional Creole women are no longer constructed as the guardians and defenders of their culture. The transformation of motifs illustrates an evolution in national consciousness: the development of the idea of a threat from within in the form of white women who menace the white patriarchy.

As experimental spaces, Levilloux's and Maynard's symbolic representations of women expose an ambivalent desire for national unity during a period of social and political crisis. While European nationalist discourse relies on the purity of the white mother for its legitimacy, both Levilloux and Maynard question the survival of maternal and feminine virtue among colonists. If Levilloux and Maynard do not embrace Traversay's sentimentality, they do, like him, deplore the disappearance of the virtuous mother. In so doing, they look with nostalgia upon the virtuous woman presented in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's ‘Discours sur cette question: Comment l'éducation des femmes pourrait contribuer à rendre les hommes meilleurs’ (1777). In his essay, it is only the virtuous wife who can make a man good, and it is only the virtuous mother who can teach virtue to her children.