Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Chapter One “Monstrous Hybridity” in Colonial and Revolutionary Writing from Saint-Domingue
- Chapter Two Baron de Vastey, Colonial Discourse, and the Global “Scientific” Sphere
- Chapter Three Victor Hugo and the Rhetorical Possibilities of “Monstrous Hybridity” in Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary Fiction
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Three - Victor Hugo and the Rhetorical Possibilities of “Monstrous Hybridity” in Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary Fiction
from Part One - From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Chapter One “Monstrous Hybridity” in Colonial and Revolutionary Writing from Saint-Domingue
- Chapter Two Baron de Vastey, Colonial Discourse, and the Global “Scientific” Sphere
- Chapter Three Victor Hugo and the Rhetorical Possibilities of “Monstrous Hybridity” in Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary Fiction
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Ces hommes de couleur qui se multiplient avec une rapidité effrayante pourront être un jour bien funeste au repos de la colonie.’
—J. de Loyac, Aventures de la famille Dolone (1827)‘…the first moment we come ashore on St. Domingo, our souls shall swell like a sponge in the liquid element; —our bodies shall burst from their fetters, glorious as a curculio from its shell; —our minds shall soar like the car of the aeronaut when its ligaments are cut; in a word, O my brethren, we shall be free!—Our fetters discandied, and our chains dissolved, we shall stand liberated,—redeemed,— emancipated,—and enthralled by the irresistible genius of Universal Emancipation!!!’
—Uriah D'Arcy, The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo (1819)Up to this point in our exploration of the transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution, we have focused our attention primarily on texts designed by their authors to be scientific, historical, or biographical. However, the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries also saw what can only be described as a deluge of representations of the Haitian Revolution that were meant to be fictional. Before 1865, more than 100 novels and plays of the Revolution had been published or staged in the Atlantic World, written by the well known and the obscure alike. In these fictions, the trope of “monstrous hybridity” continued to loom large, as people of “mixed race” were more often than not portrayed as either desiring of vengeance against the “whites” to whom they were related by birth or by whom they had been enslaved, and as hateful of other people of color and, especially, “negroes,” who supposedly reminded them of their degradation.
The French novelist J.-B.C. Berthier published an inflammatory romance of the Haitian Revolution in 1801 entitled Félix et Léonore; ou les colons malheureux, in which “racial mixing” was described as not only completely unnatural—‘there has never been an error more fatal in its consequences than that which has assimilated two species [celle qui a assimilé deux espèces] that are distinguished by the most essential of differences’ (2:77)—but as the impetus for revolutionary parricide. Berthier consequently characterizes the free people of color in Saint-Domingue as both the unnatural children of their ostensibly “white” colonist-fathers and as the principle perpetrators of the violence of the Revolution: ‘the men of color plunged their daggers into [their father's] breasts.
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 152 - 196Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015