Environment and Identity in the Nineteenth-Century French Caribbean Novel: Traversay’s Les amours de Zémédare et Carina and Bergeaud’s Stella

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article compares Traversay’s Les amours de Zémédare et Carina (1806) and Bergeaud’s Stella (1859), which portray Caribbean landscapes altered by plantation economy. Examining these understudied novels through the lens of ecofeminism and eco-postcolonialism allows us to understand how Francophone colonial authors perceived the history of the land to be inseparable from socio-political history on both a regional and an international level, and also how the authors portray new Caribbean identities as dependent on landscape and the role of women.