Capitalism, Domestic Violence, and the “Botany of Desire” in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo

Abstract

Chapter 3 adopts an ecofeminist approach to the sugar revolution vis-à-vis Leonora Sansay’s Gothic novel, Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808). That Sansay chooses to not make Haitian independence her primary object of study, but, instead, focuses upon the horrifyingly misogynistic, amorous intrigues of Europeans, invites readers to reconsider the brutal nature of capitalism in the Caribbean. That is, this chapter explores how Sansay’s novel establishes a troubling connection between the brutality of capitalism and evolutionary biology vis-à-vis women’s struggle for survival in a plantation economy designed to satisfy particular masculine, patriarchal desires. Accordingly, this chapter takes into account the botany and zoology of this tragically confused circuitry of sexual desire and global commerce, as it were, exploring the various ways in which particular animals and plants intervene in Sansay’s Gothic narrative to situate cycles of capitalist exploitation (boom and bust) in the web of life (birth and death). Drawing upon Vandana Shiva’s work in biopiracy, it reads Sansay’s novel as foregrounding connections between bioengineering and misogyny in the agribusiness of sugar cane.