Cover not available
Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 35–50

Chapter 2
Race and affect in Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie, ou L’esclavage aux Etats‑Unis

Gustave de Beaumont’s novel Marie, ou l’esclavage (1835), a companion piece to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America (1835, 1840) (Beaumont accompanied Tocqueville on his travels through the United States) belongs to a small group of early nineteenth-century francophone fictions in which the question of slavery is deflected onto the examination of race. Romantic psychology and epistemology shape Beaumont’s exploration of race as a site of emotional intensity that has no fixed referent. This treatment of race as an emotional forcefield rather than as the cause of an emotional effect, anticipates the work of theorists of affect and social emotionality such as Sara Ahmed. While Beaumont strives to demystify race, thereby exposing the absurdity of racial prejudice, by centering whiteness as an aesthetic value and metaphor for purity, the novel in the end illustrates its tenacious hold.
Keywords: Gustave de Beaumont, Alexis de Tocqueville, history of race, Romanticism, affect theory, stigma, shame
Article outline
  • Comparative histories and literatures of race and slavery
  • Race, emotion and affect
  • Literature, history and the emotions
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (48)
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Beaumont, Gustave de. 1835. Marie ou de l’esclavage aux États-Unis: tableau de mœurs américaines. Paris: Charles Gosselin.Google Scholar
. 1958. Marie, or Slavery in the United States. Translated by Barbara Chapman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Boddice, Rob. 2018. The History of Emotions. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Boucicault, Dion. 1859. Octoroon.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling A. 1937. The Negro in American Fiction. Washington, D.C.: The Associates in Negro Folk Education.Google Scholar
Brown, William Wells. 1853. Clotel. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Carey, Brycchan. 2005. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chapman, Barbara, trans. 1958. Marie or Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Charara, Youmna. 2005. Fictions coloniales du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan.Google Scholar
Chateaubriand, François-René. 1802. Le génie du christianisme. Paris: Migneret.Google Scholar
Child, Lydia Maria. 1842. The Quadroons. Reedy, WV: Liberty Bell Publications.Google Scholar
Creech, James. 1994. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: the Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Curran, Andrew S. 2011. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée.Google Scholar
Didier, Béatrice. 1983. Stendhal autobiographe. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dobie, Madeleine. 2010. Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Dumas, Alexandre. 1847. George. Paris: Michel Lévy.Google Scholar
Duras, Claire de. 1824. Ourika. Paris: Ladvocat.Google Scholar
Festa, Lynn. “Slavery, Sentimentality and the Abolition of Affect,” in press.
. 2006. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gans, Eric. “René and the Romantic Model of Self-Centralization.” Studies in Romanticism 22, no. 3 (1983): 421–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffmann, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: J. Aronson.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Jann. “Toward an Empirical History of Moral Thinking: The Case of Racial Theory in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France.” American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (2015): 1–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heuer, Jennifer. “The One Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France.” Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (2009): 515–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Léon-François. 1973. Le nègre romantique: personnage littéraire et obsession collective. Paris: Payot.Google Scholar
Houssaye, Sidonie de la. 1894–97. Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans.Google Scholar
Hume, David. 1739. Treatise of Human Nature. London.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. Le totémisme aujourd’hui. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Mall, Laurence. 2012. “De l’émotion chez Rousseau / Rousseau and Emotions.” L’Esprit créateur 52: 4.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. 1978. “On the Jewish Question.” The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker. New York: Norton: 26–46.Google Scholar
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Christopher L. 2007. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Peabody, Sue. 1996. There are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Philips, Christopher. 1997. Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Reddy, William. 1997. “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions.” Current Anthropology 38 (327–51). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Alan. 2001. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sala-Molins, Louis. 1992. Les misères des lumières: sous la raison, l’outrage. Paris: Robert Laffont.Google Scholar
Schoelcher, Victor. 1833. De l’esclavage des Noirs et de la législation colonial. Paris: Paulin.Google Scholar
Séjour, Victor. “Le mulâtre.” Revue des colonies, 1837.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1759. Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: George Bell & Sons. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sollors, Werner. 1997. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tawil, Ezra. 2006. The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tocqueville, Aléxis de. 1835, 1840. De la démocratie en Amérique. 2 vols. Paris: Charles Gosselin.Google Scholar
Wanquet, Claude. 1998. La France et la première abolition de l’esclavage, 1794–1802. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Webb, Frank. 1857. The Garies and their Friends. London: George Routledge.Google Scholar
White, Charles I., trans. 1856. The Genius of Christianity. Baltimore: John Murphy & Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.Google Scholar