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Abstract
This dissertation challenges the assumption that the literary traditions of domestic fiction developed in strict isolation from debates over colonial slavery in the age of abolition (1770–1870). In my view, contemporary slavery—in images, metaphors and lived experiences—shaped both the forms of freedom imagined by domestic fiction and the kinds of family household it came to contain. In order to understand just how colonial slavery served as a “deeper wrong” in narratives of sexual and national emancipation, I examine the representation of the Creole woman in novels by Charlotte Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, George Sand, Honoré de Balzac, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. When the former slave Harriet Jacobs borrowed the conventions of women's fiction in order to tell her own story of subjection and escape, as I argue, she drew upon a transatlantic tradition already informed by colonial slavery. A Creole woman taints the domestic landscape of novels like Indiana and Jane Eyre with reminders of slavery, exposing the effects of women's subordination by comparing European women to colonial slaves. Just as importantly, the Creole woman places European mores and colonial practices into sharp relief, revising the moral criteria for membership in a modern free nation. In so doing, this peculiar figure served as a volatile and crucial test-case for both sexual norms and national belonging in domestic novels of the major slave-owning and slave-trading powers, Great Britain, France and the United States.
