Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery by Carolyn Vellenga Berman

Abstract

MLR, I02.4, 2007 1127 hegemony may be under threat.There aremoments when Mignolo's prose becomes a trifleconvoluted, and thenon-academic readermay struggle occasionally to followhis arguments. None the less, in the current context ofUS politics, to advocate a diverse, multilingual world inwhich differentworld-views and cultures can coexist side by side inmutual respect, differentbut coeval, may be more than a little idealistic, but it is remarkably courageous aswell. KING'S COLLEGE LONDON SUSAN CASTILLO Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and theReform ofColonial Slavery. By CAROLYN VELLENGA BERMAN. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2oo6. xi+240 pp. $39.95; ?2I.50. ISBN 978-0-80I4-4384--8. Inmany ways, the term 'Creole' is the sitewhere theunstable dark side of themaster narratives we have inherited from the earlymodern period and theEnlightenment colonialism, race, slavery,nationhood, thepublic and private spheres-is most starkly cast into relief.This radical instability calls intoquestion many of the seemingly fixed categories which, even today,govern our world. In Creole Crossings Carolyn Vellenga Berman has chosen to trace the convergence of discourses related to colonial and domestic reform in the fiction and politics of the anti-slavery movement. In doing so, she has provided a fascinating analysis of theways inwhich many eighteenth and nineteenth-century domestic fictional narratives,with their foregrounding of is sues linked to race, slavery, and abolition, are destabilized by the figureof theCreole woman. Berman begins by offering an overview of the etymology of the term 'Creole' and theways inwhich ithas evolved in French and inBritish and American English, illustrating its slipperiness and radical ambiguity. This is followed by a brief study of characterizations of Creoles in several novels, such as Helena Wells's Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian (i 8oo), Gustave de Beaumont's Marie, ou l'esclavage aux Etats- Unis (i 83 5), Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans (i 842), and Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres deParis (1843). This is followed by a chapter on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie,which according toBerman not only situatesmiddle-class domesti city in a colonial landscape, but also probes the linksbetween issues linked toCreole identity (coloniality, slavery, and education) and conceptions of nationhood. After this,Berman goes on to look at Creole characters and the roles they play innovels written and published during the early years of European abolitionist movements, which, however, concern themselves with women's rights rather thanwith slavery. The following two chapters illustrate, as Berman states, 'how the Creole figure served to emphasize this nexus between family practices and the (racial) qualifica tions fornational belonging in the laterperiod of slavery reform' (p. 24). She analyses Charlotte Bronte's linkage inyane Eyre of thediscourses onmadness and on theCre ole, inwhich theCreole figureofBertha becomes a synecdoche related to colonial and domestic reform, and situates her reading within the context of existing debates on emancipation, parliamentary reform, the status of governesses, penal systemswithin the colonies, and the treatment given to thementally ill.Chapter 5 is probably the strongest in the book, with its study of representations of domestic space (domestic inboth the familial and the national sense) in anti-slavery writing by theAmerican authors Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs. As Berman points out, Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin contests the institution of slavery by representing French colonial notions of the family that call into question rigidAnglo-American racial categories, as in the figureof the quadroon Cassy, who escapes from slavery inLouisiana. None the less, she observes, Stowe by championing maternal over paternal custody of chil dren ultimately repudiates the French model inorder to reinscribeAnglo-American I I28 Reviews familial norms. Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, is seen by Berman as reclaiming theCreole inheritance rejected by Stowe when she envisions 'an alternative Ameri can nation modelled on the family consisting of her fatherlessmulatto children and herself' (pp. 24-25). In thisperspective, theCreole linkage between female education and social reproduction is later transmuted into (and contained within) the issue of redefining family,race, and nation in theperiod of emancipation. The book concludes with an examination ofCreole politics in JeanRhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (I966). In Creole Crossings Berman has addressed not one but several extraordinarily com plex issues...