Bearing the Burden of Loss: Melancholic Agency in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, FMC

Abstract

Although a number of scholars have focused on titular protagonist in analyzing arbitrary constructions of race and performances of racial identities (1) in Charles W. Chesnutt's Paul Marchand, FMC, few have fully explored ways in which author deploys novel to personify history and create entities that represent those people who seem lost to official record but demand attention nevertheless (Tettenborn 114). Indeed, Chesnutt embeds in main plotline of Paul Marchand, FMC an account of subject formation of Zabet Philosophe, (2) an enslaved black Saint-Dominguan woman who, at behest of her owner, flees Haiti with her master's children during 1793 revolution and later influences destiny of wealthy Beaurepas family of New Orleans. As I argue, Zabet Philosophes biographical narrative is developed as a response to white Saint-Dominguan refugees' historical erasure of black Haitians' subjectivity in their descriptions of war and their transnational emigration to United States. Through Zabet's story, Chesnutt, consequently, endows cake woman with authority to reveal black refugee's experiences of complex realities of enslavement, dispersion, and diasporic survival. In so doing, he further unmasks Zabet as an embodiment of what I term a black melancholic subject, a raced individual who not only willfully manifests infinite sorrow that stems from enduring a long history of personal losses but also transforms this grief into an enabling force of resistance against racial and post-imperial objectification. (3) Ultimately, my concentration on Zabet's narrative is to make evident her identity as more than an old trusty family slave (Wilson xix) but as a Haitian revolutionary whose subjectivity emerges both as effect of a prior power--French imperialism--as well as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency (Butler 15)--melancholic agency. One may speculate that Chesnutt's decision to reference Haitian Revolution and compose a narrative of melancholic subjectivity of a black Saint-Dominguan refugee was informed by his intense interest in political state of Haiti during time he was writing novel. (4) At time of novel's authorship, Chesnutt was following newspaper accounts, especially those that appeared in Nation, of American occupation of Saint-Domingue. (5) In 1915, United States intervened in debt-ridden and politically unstable Haiti's affairs ... for proclaimed end of stabilizing country ... and preventing rival nations from bringing it under their (Crisler, Leitz, and McElrath 244). On March 18, 1922, Chesnutt relates to Ernest Angeli that he had signed a brief in support of withdrawing U.S. marines from occupying Haiti in 1915 (Crisler, Leitz, and McElrath 150). He would later encourage others, such as Harry C. Smith, editor of Cleveland Gazette, to support a resolution to remove American troops. Chesnutt writes, The United States ought to be able to help Haitians out of rut without entirely depriving them of their hard-earned and long-maintained independence (Crisler, Leitz, and McElrath 159). Through this statement, Chesnutt connects modern with colonial domination of Haiti. In particular, twentieth-century occupation harkens back to history of Haitian subjugation by French. And like French, Americans would also experience Haitian rebel resistance against its presence on island nation in 1918. America's agenda to control Saint-Domingue thus provides rich fodder for Chesnutt in constructing novel through which he tacitly articulates his contemporaneous grievance concerning continued oppression involved in Western rivalries that are endemic to nation-building. Moreover, Paul Marchand, FMC provides readers with occasions for historical remembrance of black insurgents and especially refugee subjects who were engendered by Haitian Revolution. …