Mixed Race Studies

The Black Musketeer: Reevaluating Alexandre Dumas within the Francophone World

Cambridge Scholars Press
August 2011
260 pages
8.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
ISBN 13: 978-1-4438-2997-7
ISBN: 1-4438-2997-8

Edited by:

Eric Martone, Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies Education
Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York

Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man in the Iron Mask, is the most famous French writer of the nineteenth century. In 2002, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon, a mausoleum reserved for the greatest French citizens, amidst much national hype during his bicentennial. Contemporary France, struggling with the legacies of colonialism and growing diversity, has transformed Dumas, grandson of a slave from St. Domingue (now Haiti), into a symbol of the colonies and the larger francophone world in an attempt to integrate its immigrants and migrants from its former Caribbean, African, and Asian colonies to improve race relations and to promote French globality. Such a reconception of Dumas has made him a major figure in debates on French identity and colonial history.

Ten tears after Dumas’s interment in the Panthéon, the time is ripe to re-evaluate Dumas within this context of being a representative of la Francophonie. The French re-evaluation of Dumas, therefore, invites a reassessment of his life, works, legacy, and previous scholarship. This interdisciplinary collection is the first major work to take up this task. It is unique for being the first scholarly work to bring Dumas into the center of debates about French identity and France’s relations with its former colonies. For the purposes of this collection, to analyze Dumas in a “francophone” context means to explore Dumas as a symbol of a “French” culture shaped by, and inclusive of, its (former) colonies and current overseas departments. The seven entries in this collection, which focus on providing new ways of interpreting The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Georges, are categorized into two broad groups. The first group focuses on Dumas’s relationship with the francophone colonial world during his lifetime, which was characterized by the slave trade, and provides a postcolonial re-examination of his work, which was impacted profoundly by his status as an individual of black colonial descent in metropolitan France. The second part of this collection, which is centered broadly around Dumas’s francophone legacy, examines the way he has been remembered in the larger French-speaking (postcolonial) world, which includes metropolitan France, in the past century to explore questions about French identity in an emerging global age.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Alexandre Dumas as a Francophone Writer—Eric Martone
• Part One: Life and Works
  • The Paternal Mystery of Alexandre Dumas—Simone Dubrovic
  • “White Negroes, Nothing More”: The Ambiguous Role of the “Mulatto” in Alexandre Dumas’s Georges—Molly Krueger Enz
  • Monte Cristo Brings the Empire Home: Alexandre Dumas and the Promise of Postcolonial Philology—Indra N. Mukhopadhyay
  • Georges, or the “Mixed-Blood” Settles Scores—Claudie Bernard
• Part Two: Legacy
  • From the Literary Myth to the Lieu de Mémoire: Alexandre Dumas–and French National Identity(ies)—Roxane Petit-Rasselle
  • “Dent pour dent”: Injustice, Revenge, and Storytelling in The Count of Monte Cristo and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress—Barbara T. Cooper
  • “A French Precursor of Obama”: The Commemoration of General Alexandre Dumas and French Reconciliation with the Past—Eric Martone
• Contributors

Who Belongs to Whom?: Codes, Property, and Ownership in Madame Charles Reybaud’s “Les Épaves”

Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2011)
pages 229-239
E-ISSN: 1536-0172 Print ISSN: 0146-7891

Molly Krueger Enz, Assistant Professor of French
South Dakota State University

French Romantic writer Madame Charles Reybaud explores the coupling of gender and race by depicting the legal restrictions imposed upon married women and slaves in her novella “Les Épaves” (1838). Both groups have a lack of power and are treated as inferior in a colonial, patriarchal society. This article examines the parallels between Madame Éléonore de la Rebelière, the Creole wife of a Belgian plantation owner, and Donatien, a former slave. They are both subordinated by Monsieur de la Rebelière: Donatien because of being a mixed-race épave and Éléonore because of her status as a married, Creole woman.

Read or purchace the article here.

(In) between identities: Representations of the island and the mulatto in nineteenth-century French fiction

University of Wisconsin, Madison
2005
205 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3186126
ISBN: 9780542274718

Molly Krueger Enz, Assistant Professor of French
South Dakota State University

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (French)

This dissertation explores how five nineteenth-century authors depict the tension surrounding racial (in)equality in France’s island colonies through the creation of mulatto characters who are portrayed as “in-between” characters in exile. The thesis is divided into two sections, each based on a common a theme. The first part treats two novels containing mixed-race characters who criticize racial prejudice and the hypocrisy of metropolitan and colonial societies. In my first chapter, I examine how the protagonist of Dumas’s Georges devotes his life to ending racial discrimination against mulattoes on the Île de France and show that the figures of the island and mulatto are structured around similar tensions of isolation and self-sufficiency. My second chapter explores how mixed-race characters in Hugo’s Bug-Jargal refuse to be classified racially. I argue that race is changeable and reflects the unstable history of the island of Saint-Domingue. The second section of this study considers the themes of female heroism and oppression through the figures of the revolutionary, the “tragic mulatta,” and the épave. In the third chapter, I contend that the central mulatta character in Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture, the product of her black mother’s rape by a white colonist, is depicted as a revolutionary heroine who symbolizes the political power struggle between France and Saint-Domingue. My fourth chapter claims that the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, previously studied in relation to American literature, can be applied to Sand’s eponymous white heroine in Indiana. In my fifth chapter on Madame Charles Reybaud’s “Les Éépaves” and Madame de Rieux, I argue that white female characters usurp traditional white male roles when they enter relationships with men of color. Furthermore, I analyze the figure of the “épave,” neither free nor slave, which I feel best represents the “in-between” nature of the mulatto. This dissertation analyzes geographic, racial, and gendered “in-between” spaces in French Romantic literature on colonialism to further develop an understanding of how marginalized identities were formed in the first half of the nineteenth century and how these identities in turn shaped Romanticism.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction: Margins and Mixings
• I. Prejudice and Hypocrisy: Criticisms of Metropolitan and Colonial Societies
  • CHAPTER ONE: The Mulatto as Island and the Island as Mulatto in Alexandre Dumas’s Georges
  • CHAPTER TWO: Mirroring, Monstrosity, and Métissage: Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal
• II. Heroism and Oppression: The Revolutionary, the Tragic Mulatta, and the Épave
  • CHAPTER THREE: Female Revolutionary Heroism in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture
  • CHAPTER FOUR: Slavery and the Tragic Mulatto Stereotype in George Sand’s Indiana
  • CHAPTER FIVE: Who “Belongs” to Whom?: Sexual Politics in Two Works by Madame Charles Reybaud
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Works Consulted

Purchase the dissertation here.