IMAGINING THE CREOLE CITY: WHITE CREOLE PRINT CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ORLEANS AN ABSTRACT SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2013 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rien T. Fertel ---
ABSTRACT!! This dissertation traces the development, growth, and eventual fall of a white Creole intellectual and literary community in New Orleans, beginning in the 1820s and continuing for a century thereafter. In histories and novels, poetry and prose, the stage and the press, white Creole New Orleanians those who traced their parentage back to the city s colonial era advocated both an intimate connection to France and a desire to be considered citizens of the United States of America. In print, they consciously fostered, mythologized, and promoted the idea that their very bifurcated nature made them inheritors of a singularly special place, possessors of an exceptional history, and keepers of utterly unique bloodlines. In effect, this closely-knit circle of Creole writers, like other Creole literary communities scattered across the Atlantic World, imbued the word Creole as a descriptive identity marker that symbolized social and cultural power.! In postcolonial Louisiana, the authors within this white Creole literary circle used the printed word to imagine themselves a unified community of readers and writers. Together, they produced newspapers, literary journals, and art and science-based salons and clubs. Theirs was a postcolonial exercise in articulating a common identity, a push and pull for and against their French and American halves to create a creolized Creole self.
! Looking to their American brothers and to their French motherland, they participated in idealistic, literary, and wider cultural movements witnessed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of the long-nineteenth century, these movements included romantic historicism, religious reformation, pan-linguistic nationalism, racial refashioning, a preoccupation with genealogy, and a social feminization.! Though few of these white Creole authors are still read today, their fashioning of a city and state literature continues to resonate in most all literary representations of New Orleans and Louisiana. By the turn of the twentieth century, and the end of their era of prominence, the white Creoles had popularized the idea of a New Orleans centered in the city s mythologized white, Gallic past. They had imagined the Creole City.
IMAGINING THE CREOLE CITY: WHITE CREOLE PRINT CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ORLEANS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2013 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY APPROVED: Lawrence N. Powell, Ph.D. t::mily Clark, Ph.D.
Copyright by Rien Thomas Fertel, 2013 All Rights Reserved
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS! In addition to overseeing research, offering ideas in conversation, challenging my scholarly interpretations, and carefully reading each and every page, each member of my dissertation committee made a key contribution to the formulation and completion of this monograph. Knowing my interest in the nineteenth-century shifts in the meaning of the word Creole, Dr. Lawrence N. Powell encouraged me to take a look at white Creole-centric manuscripts collections that belonged to the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection at Louisiana State University s Hill Memorial Library. After watching me conduct archival research and read seemingly every book on the subject over a two year span, Dr. Emily Clark told me to stop reading and start writing, some of the best advice I have ever received. And finally, Dr. Randy J. Sparks, my advisor and dissertation director, advised me to take as many non-dissertation writing and research assignments as I could handle. Writing outside and alongside the topic of white Creole literary culture made me a better academic writer.! Gratitude goes out to each and every individual who read various chapters and/or conversed with me on the subject of this dissertation. Dr. Jana K. Lipman was a superb doctoral examination committee member who pushed me to read deeply in the realms of fact and fiction. Dr. Thomas J. Adams read and offered ii
rich commentary on the prospectus. Russell Desmond, proprietor of Arcadian Books in New Orleans, is a saint; he translated documents at moment s notice, read several chapters, and has helped me hunt down down rare Louisiana books, aiding in research and adding to my collection since 2007. My Tulane History Department colleagues Liz Skilton and Walter Stern read various iterations of chapters and offered helpful commentary. Dr. Oz Frankel and Dr. Julia Ott, members of the Historical Studies faculty at The New School for Social Research in New York, inspired me to take up a scholarly career in the study of history. Among the conferences at which I ve presented this work, the participants from the Toulouse Interculturalité: La Louisiane au carrefour des cultures conference (January 2012) were especially helpful particularly Dr. Nathalie Dessens, Dr. Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, and Emilie Urbain in thinking about Chapter Two. Pableaux Johnson has fed my stomach most every week over the past three years, while Andre Stern has fed the mind and Charlie Gallagher the body. Kira Henehan and Brett Martin graciously provided me with a place to live during the crucial last few months of writing and defense. Susie Penman is one of the best readers and editors around, and though she came late to this manuscript, her input fills its pages. The mentorship and dinner companionship of my uncle, Randy Fertel, has been rewarding in ways that stretch way beyond the research and writing of this dissertation. iii
! This work is dedicated to my family, especially my grandmother, Ruth Fertel, who all encouraged my reading of the higher and lower branches of literature. iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS... ii INTRODUCTION... 1! Que né créole, je veux vivre et mourir créole. Creating the!! White Louisiana Creole CHAPTER ONE... 22! Procuring the higher branches of literature. Charles Gayarré!! and the Cultivation of a Louisiana Creole Print Terroir CHAPTER TWO... 59! Cette terre catholique. Catholic Priest and Poet Adrien Rouquette!! Bridges the Atlantic Ocean CHAPTER THREE... 91! Conservons la langue immortel. Alfred Mercier, the Athénée!! Louisianais, and the Fight to Preserve the French Language CHAPTER FOUR... 130! Today we see walking together the representatives of two important!! races. George Washington, Blood Matters, and the Creole!! Backlash CHAPTER FIVE... 173! His place among us... belongs to the future. Grace King s Lost!! Creole Cause and the Feminization of New Orleans s Creole!! Culture CONCLUSION... 214! New Orleans is a world. Creating the Creole City in the Twentieth!! Century BIBLIOGRAPHY... 222 v
1 Introduction Que né créole, je veux vivre et mourir créole. Creating the White Louisiana Creole! In the autumn of 1827, two New Orleanians waged a war of the printed word. Though both men were cultivated, politically powerful French Louisianians, Bernard de Marigny and Étienne Mazureau exercised their American rights to free speech and suffrage by supporting opposing presidential candidates. Born in 1785, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville s lifestyle mirrored his aristocratic French name. In 1822, as President of the State Senate, in a move he called one of the happiest days of my life, Marigny overturned a Louisiana Supreme Court decision to make null and void any minutes of meetings not written in English. He was thusly deemed the Defender of the French language. 1 Francophone paladin aside, he was also an infamous libertine and an even more notorious gambler. Within six years of inheriting his father s immense plantation landholdings, one block downriver from the city, Marigny s dice habit forced him to subdivide the property. He would become and forever remain an Andrew Jackson supporter in 1824, primarily because Old Hickory s 1 Bernard Marigny, To His Fellow Citizens (New Orleans: s.n., 1853), 3 (italics in original).
2 presidential opponent, John Quincy Adams, had been adverse to the Louisiana Purchase two decades prior. 2! Étienne Mazureau, conversely, was an adamant Adams man. A three-term State Attorney General, and Louisiana Secretary of State, in 1827 he ranked as one of the city s most accomplished, and fiery, lawyers and orators. Mazureau possesses a most extensive and profound knowledge of the civil law,... but on certain occasions his eloquence becomes tempestuous, one historian of the period noted. He is a perfect specimen of the Southern type. 3 When selecting juries, Mazureau often challenged every single potential Anglo-American juror, hoping to place as many French-speaking citizens on the panel as the judge would allow. 4 In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville visited the home of the learned Louisiana advocate, whom he called the eagle of the New Orleans bar, to consult on a series of local issues. 5 They say that in New Orleans is to be found a mixture of all the nations? Tocqueville queried. That s true; you see here a mingling of all races.... New Orleans is a patch-work of people, answered the eagle. Tocqueville inquired further, But in the midst of this confusion what race 2 For biographical information on Marigny, the following were consulted: Marigny, To His Fellow Citizens; Edward Larocque Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane au 19ème siècle; essais biographiques et bibliographiques (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1932), 299-327; Edward Larocque Tinker, The Palingenesis of Craps (New York: The Press of the Wooly Whale, 1933). 3 Charles Gayarré, The New Orleans Bench and Bar in 1823, Harper s New Monthly Magazine 77:462 (November 1888), 890. 4 Ibid., 891. On Mazureau, see also Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane, 344-350. 5 George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (1938; reprint ed., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 625.
3 dominates and gives direction to all the rest? Mazureau answered: The French race, up to now. It s they who set the tone and shape the mœurs [the mores]. 6! Marigny and Mazureau s opinions on French Louisiana identity deviated as fiercely as their presidential politics. In a series of late 1827 newspaper editorials and pamphlets, the pair of Francophile New Orleanians attacked the other s candidate, while questioning each other s allegiance to the state and nation. Additionally, both men published under a pseudonym, each befitting their place of birth. Mazureau labeled himself the Citoyen Naturalisé, because, though born in France in 1777, he proudly considered himself, for at least the past two decades, a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.! Marigny, on the other hand, adopted the sobriquet Un Créole. No less proud of his American citizen than his adversary, he could make one claim that Mazureau could not. Bernard de Marigny s birthplace was colonial Louisiana. Born the son of two French-ethnic, New Orleans-born parents in 1785, Marigny, before even reaching his eighteenth birthday, lived under the flags of the Spanish, French, and nascent U.S. empires. He made sure Mazureau and any readers knew the difference this birth made. In the last lines of his final riposte, Marigny signed off with, I will say that Creole born, I live and die Creole. 7 Mazureau might be a French Louisianian and a French American, but he would never, like Marigny, be a Creole Louisianian nor a Creole American. In 6 Ibid., 627-628. 7 This phrase appears in its original language the title to this introductory chapter. Un Créole [Bernard de Marigny], Aux Electeurs de l Etat de la Louisiane: Réponse du Créole au dernier pamphlet du Citoyen Naturalisé (New Orleans: s.n., 1827), 22 (translation mine).
4 nineteenth-century New Orleans, that word Creole operated as a birthright, a symbol of exceptionality, and an identity marker. There was power embedded in the word Creole.! Certainly unbeknownst to him at the time, Bernard de Marigny was at the forefront of a white Creole literary and intellectual culture that thrived during the long-nineteenth century. 8 Supported by a democratic right to expression, the eruption of the modern print culture, and a burgeoning Francophone readership, an elite circle of cultured Creole French-Americans produced a Creole New Orleans literature. This Creole body of letters lasted roughly one hundred years, from the 1820s through the 1920s. During this era, they used Creole as a marker of status and power.! The first French-language publications appeared in Louisiana during the Spanish-colonial era of Marigny s birth. In the late 1770s, French-born poet Julian Poydras penned a trio of odes honoring Spanish Louisiana Governor and military hero Bernardo de Gálvez. By the time Marigny had sold off his landholdings piecemeal to create what would become the Faubourg named in his honor, the stage drama La Fête du Petit-Blé; ou L Héroisme de Poucha-houmma, written by the Frenchman Paul Louis Le Blanc de Villeneufve, was being performed in New Orleans. In the same late 1827 season that Marigny and Mazureau battled in print, the Saint-Domingue refugee François Delaup began publishing the city s first serious semi-weekly newspaper. Taking advantage of the nearly 20,000 Saint Domingue exiles who relocated to New Orleans (along 8 Throughout this monograph, the word Creole will be used to refer to Louisiana s white Creole population.
5 with a not unsubstantial, contemporary French immigration), L Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (The Bee), provided a Francophone forum for real journalism, political editorials, and art and literary criticism. 9! In the following two decades, the Creole intellectual circle would become fully formed. By the time Marigny published his brief memoirs in 1853 in both French and English readers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean devoured the works of Creole authors like Charles Gayarré and Adrien Rouquette. In the year of Marigny s death, 1868, the Creole literary circle found itself falling apart. During and following the Civil War, the occupational government and Republican State Congress fought to enact a series of Constitutional acts that would curb the use of the French language, first in all governmental proceedings, and finally in every public school. Near the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, a new generation of Creole writers sprung up to continue the work of the Frenchlanguage defender. They started Francophile clubs, journals that promoted a purely Franco-Louisiana platform, and celebrated official Creole Days.! But it was too little, too late. By the turn of the twentieth century, the French language had largely disappeared as a working language in New Orleans. French was forbidden as a language of instruction in public schools, laws were no longer published bilingually, and French presses and periodicals evaporated. The first generation of Creole writers passed away, replaced by a second wave of authors who carried the torch of Creole letters, many of whom could not claim a Creole birthright. This second generation of non-creole Creole 9 Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 19.
6 writers, in effect, cemented the idea of a Creole city, a New Orleans built by Creoles, dominated by Creole history, culture, and thought. 10 Each sphere of life, the cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, produced its own tribe of storytellers. 11 And for New Orleans and Louisiana, this storytelling tribe was the Creole circle of writers. 12! This dissertation will document the rise, crest, and fall of a white Creole print culture in New Orleans. Bernard de Marigny was among the first of hundreds of Creole Louisianians mostly men who composed countless histories, novels, poetic verses, plays, operas, and songs. Along with the numerous newspapers, journals, cultural organizations, and benevolent societies, this print culture enabled New Orleans s white Creole population to imagine itself a unified community of readers. Together, these Creole intellectuals attended the same salons and clubs. They called each other friend, traveled abroad together, and often posted each other written letters. They positively 10 Contrary to other scholars, I trace the foundations of the creation, or mythologizing, of New Orleans to an earlier era, and give credit to another group of ideological pioneers. For contrasting views, see S. Frederick Starr, ed., Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2001); J. Mark Souther, New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006). 11 Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 85. 12 This dissertation was informed by, and endeavors to take a place among, other monographs covering nineteenth-century print communities in the United States, including Philip D. Beidler, First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999); Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Michael O Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
7 reviewed each other s books and prepared each other s obituaries. Contemporary readers of Louisiana literature rarely dip into the Creole canon today; only a handful of the authors and books even remain in print. But their ideologies, arguably, have filtered throughout most all subsequent literary representations of Louisiana and New Orleans, fiction and non-fiction alike.! As this circle of white Creole intellectuals created their Creole personas in print, they rewrote how we think of the geographical space that is Louisiana, but especially urban New Orleans, in three ways. First, the Creoles promoted the idea that their city and state were exceptional. From the state s soil and river, to the city s history and their history, most everything was singularly special about New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Creoles. Second, the Creoles claimed not only an intimate connection to their motherland, France, but, relying on memories of the past, maintained that they were the true inheritors of Francophone blood, language, and culture. Third, they petitioned for the right to be citizens of the United States, while at the same time advocating the idea that they were uncommon Americans. For the white Creoles, bi-culturalism begat a wholly mythologized exceptionalism.! Occasioned by postcolonial thought, the spread and popularization of new print media forms, and an influx of Francophones from Saint Domingue and France, this Louisiana Creole print culture had a nationalizing effect. Creoles, through writing and reading, created a bifurcated identity: French and/or Spanishblooded Louisiana Creoles and American citizens of the United States. They endeavored to build a vital French-reading and speaking print community at
8 home, yet still wished to be incorporated into the nation. In many aspects, their lives bridged two worlds. Many were educated in France, especially Paris, and in the northern United States. Cultured and bilingual, they spoke and wrote in French and English (and occasionally Spanish, Italian, and German). They worshipped at the altar of both Napoleon Bonaparte, who authorized the selling of their city to the United States in 1803, and President Andrew Jackson, who masterminded the city s salvation during the Battle of New Orleans a dozen years later. This dissertation will argue that as the Creoles created Creole and American identities simultaneously, they became more cultural and socially creolized. 13! This print-based community mirrored other postcolonial, creolized peoples in its causes and effects. Marigny s adoption of the sobriquet Un Créole exhibited the first stirrings of a bifurcated Old World/New World sensibility, an identity shift historians working in colonial Latin America today have termed a Creole 13 Nick Spitzer defines cultural creolization as the formation and development of new traditions, aesthetics, and group identities out of combinations of formerly separate peoples and cultures, but not without an embedded and intrinsic tension between traditional and transformed between the old and new. Nicolas R. Spitzer, Monde Créole: The Cultural World of French Louisiana Creoles and the Creolization of World Cultures, The Journal of American Folklore 116:459 (Winter 2003), 58-59. On creolization, also see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context, in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Keith Axel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 189-210; Charles Stewart, Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, in Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Stewart (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007): 1-25; Berndt Ostendorf, Creole Cultures and the Process of Creolization: With Special Attention to Louisiana, in Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, ed. John Lowe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008): 103-135.
9 consciousness. 14 Combating Old World pretensions that saw individuals born across the ocean as lesser than themselves, elite Creoles, both white and black, throughout the Americas eventually declared their locales to be the center of human civilization and the highest peak of New World religiosity. 15 Patriotic Creole nationalist movements sprang up throughout the postcolonial Atlantic 14 D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 343-361; Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas, in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, eds. Bauer and Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25-32. 15 Bauer and Mazzotti, 26.
10 World, and New Orleans was no exception. 16 As with Marigny, postcolonial Creoles across the Americas appropriated the identity-signifier Creole, a word that before had implied a Eurocentric disdain. 17 Lettered creoles... responded time and again to [their] marginalization, the literary scholars Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti aptly suggest, producing numerous pages of their own dedicated to exalting the character and appearance of the distinguished descendants of the conquerors. That is, Creoles performed themselves new 16 On Creole patriots, nationalism, and consciousness, see Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Carole Shammas, English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia, in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979): 274-296; D. A. Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 20, 85, 93; Brading, The First America; Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); José Antonio Mazzotti, ed., Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad "colonial" en las letras hispanoamericanas (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epstemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), especially 204-265; Juan R. González Mendoza, Puerto Rico s Creole Patriots and the Slave Trade after the Haitian Revolution, in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001): 58-71; Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (New York: Routledge, 2002); David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Creole Colonial Spanish America in Stewart: 26-45; Joyce Chaplin, Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance, in Stewart: 46-65; Stephan Palmié, The C-Word Again: From Colonial to Postcolonial Semantics, in Stewart: 67-83; Miguel Vale de Almeida, From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde, in Stewart: 108-132; Bauer and Mazzotti, eds., all essays, but especially Carlos Jáuregui, Cannibalism, the Eucharist, and Criollo Subjects : 61-100 and Jeffrey H. Richards, Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks: Creolism in the Literary Chesapeake, 1680-1750 : 135-161; Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 17 Bauer and Mazzotti, 27. Carlos Jáuregui calls this the compensatory appropriation-translation of colonial tropes in Jáuregui, 100. Also, see Richards, Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks.
11 identities. 18 Bauer and Mazzotti continue, these creole intellectuals carried out the immense task of creating a discursive corpus to articulate their own conception of a communal Creole identity. 19 Creole literatures became the watchword of nationalistic movements. 20! Prior to the chronological scope of this dissertation's narrative, New Orleans and Louisiana was a site of overlapping, contesting empires. Up until and through the first decades following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, few New Orleans residents identified themselves as French or Spanish, or Americans. Rather, "people identified themselves with varied communities ethnic, racial, national, imperial in ways that upset the notion of identity itself." 21 This term Creole resonated with each of these community classifications, and carried over into the mid to late, postcolonial, nineteenth century. Eventually, for the white 18 Bauer and Mazzotti, 27. On Creole performativity, see Roger D. Abrahams, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Susan Castillo, Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786: Performing America (London: Routledge, 2006), especially 187-237; Andrew J. Jolivétte, Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 59-70; Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Cruel Criollos in Guaman Poma de Ayala s First New Chronicle and Good Government, in Bauer and Mazzotti: 118-134. 19 Bauer and Mazzotti, 27. On Creole discourses, also see Brading, The First America; Ralph Bauer, Creole Identities in Colonial Space: The Narratives of Mary White Rowlandson and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, American Literature 69:4 (December 1997): 665-695; Mazzotti; Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World; Lambert; Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Cañizares-Esguerra, Creole Colonial Spanish America. 20 Carolyn Allen, Creole: The Problem of Definition, in Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, eds. Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002), 52. 21 Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, Introduction, in Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase, eds. Kastor and Weil (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 8.
12 Creole community, Creole became synonymous with a Gallic-American, white, largely masculine nationalism.! But New Orleans, Louisiana, like other postcolonial Creole sights across the Atlantic World, contained not one, but two Creole literary corpora: that of the white Creole community and the literature of the black Creoles (also known as the Afro-Creoles or Creoles of color). Like the white Creole population under examination here, these French-speaking peoples of African descent, spurred by their own awakening of Creole consciousness, crafted a body of literature to fashion and perform a Creole identity. Though these two Creole literary communities have most often diverged to the point of not recognizing the other, this pair of racialized groups did in fact, for a brief period in the late 1860s, unite forces under a common cause. 22 But while the white Creoles have generally been ignored by academics in the past half-century, the coterie of Afro-Creole 22 See chapter three below.
13 writers have received a bounty of scholarly attention in the past several decades, and will thus remain largely outside the scope of this study. 23! Serious efforts to catalogue and analyze the literature of white Francophone Louisiana began just as the individual members of the Creole intellectual circle were dying off and the local use of the French language largely ceased to exist. In 1894, white Creole New Orleanian Alcée Fortier, the chair of Romance Languages Department at Tulane University, compiled the first compendium of Louisiana letters. 24 His son, Edward Fortier, continued in the scholarly footsteps of his father, becoming a French professor at Columbia University and publishing several bibliographical studies of Creole literature. 25 Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, numerous theses and 23 For the literary lives of New Orleans s Creoles of color, see Charles Barthelemy Roussève, The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His Literature (New Orleans: Xavier University Press, 1937); Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits, trans. and ed., Sister Dorothea Olga McCants (1911; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 10-60, passim.; Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 89-136, passim.; Michel Fabre, The New Orleans Press and French-Language Literature by Creoles of Color, in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998): 29-49; Caroline Senter, Creole Poets on the Verge of a Nation, in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana s Free People of Color, ed. Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001): 276-294; James L. Cowan, La marseillaise noire et autres poèmes français des Créoles de couleur de la Nouvelle-Orléans, 1862-1869 (Lyon: Éditions du Cosmogone, 2001); Jean-Charles Houzeau, My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era, ed. David C. Rankin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 126-129, 210-260, passim. 24 Alcée Fortier, Louisiana Studies: Literature, Customs and Dialects, History and Education (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1894). 25 Edward Joseph Fortier, Study of the French Literature of Louisiana (MA thesis, Tulane University, 1904); Edward Fortier, Les Lettres françaises en Louisiane (Québec: Québec: Imprimerie L Action sociale limitée, 1915); Edward J. Fortier, Non-English Writings I: French, in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Later National Literature, Part III,, eds. William Peterfield Trent et. al. (New York: G. P. Putnam s Sons, 1921): 590-598.
14 dissertations biographically examined individual members of the white Creole literary circle. One standout from this period remains Ruby Van Allen Caulfeild s bibliographical French Literature of Louisiana (1929), which added many French Creole authors overlooked by the Fortiers. Caulfield included some biographical information, without much historicization or analysis. 26 Edward Larocque Tinker s masterly, yet problematic, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane au 19ème siècle (1932) contains the most bibliographically and biographically complete information on Creole and French writers up until the present day. 27! But by the 1960s, the white Creole intellectuals and their literary corpus had faded into obscurity. A liberalized academy moved on to studying the lives and letters of the black Creole literati. For several decades following the 1960s, those few historians who studied the white Creoles of New Orleans focused on that group s postbellum, conservative attack on the city s creoles of color, to the detriment of any discussion of their cultural or literary legacy. While, this dissertation readily acknowledges the white Creoles intense reactionary racism during this period, it also rejects the claims of these earlier historians as blatantly false characterizations, vestiges of the 1960s-era liberal turn in historiographical modes of thought. For instance, in 1981, Liliane Crété claimed that antebellum 26 Ruby Van Allen Caulfeild, The French Literature of Louisiana (1929; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998). 27 Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane. Tinker s work contains some bibliographical omissions, more biographical errors, and a wholly biased view in favor of the white Creoles, to the detriment of the Creoles of color, see Auguste Viatte, Complement à la bibliographie louisianaise d Edward Larocque Tinker, Revue de Louisiane 3:2 (Winter 1974): 12-57.
15 Creoles did not own books because they could not read. 28 Similarly, in an influential essay entitled Creoles and Americans (1992), Joseph G. Tregle, Jr. used a handful of condescending traveller accounts to demonstrate the Creoles complete benightedness, while claiming that they were pitifully ill-equipped for incorporation into the United States. 29 But as John Milfred Goudeau s study of early-louisiana libraries shows, Creoles did, in fact, publish, collect, and consume plenty of reading material. Several mid-nineteenth century Creole New Orleanians owned thousands of volumes, while many others checked out livres from the private Bibliothèque de Société de la Nouvelle-Orléans located on Royal Street. 30 28 Liliane Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 1815-1830, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 66-67. 29 For example, Tregle quotes Frenchman Berquin-Duvallon, who wrote in his travel journal, A Creole told me with great naiveté one day, that a never failing method to make him fall asleep, was to open a book before him. Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., Creoles and Americans, in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, eds., Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 141-143 (both quotations appear on 142). Himself a white Creole New Orleanian, Tregle wrote several articles along a similar vein, see Tregle, Early New Orleans Society: A Reappraisal, The Journal of Southern History 18:1 (February 1952): 20-36; On that Word Creole Again: A Note, Louisiana History 23:2 (Spring 1982): 193-198; Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Cultures and Personalities (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 27-30. 30 Also known as the New Orleans Library Society, the Bibliothèque functioned as a membersonly lending lyceum. Organized in 1805-06, it operated as a joint effort between Creoles and Anglo-Americans. The Bibliothèque moved to St. Peter Street in March 1808, and by 1824 incorporated 7,200 volumes in French and English. Goudeau concluded that though Americans contributed more to library development in the city, Creoles often cooperated with them. John Milfred Goudeau, Early Libraries in Louisiana: A Study of the Creole Influence, (PhD diss., Western Reserve University, 1965), 149-159 for an analysis of the Bibliothèque de Société, 188 and especially 220 for his conclusions. For further discussions on Creole consumption of literature, see Roger Philip McCutcheon, Libraries in New Orleans, 1771-1833, The Louisiana Historical Quarterly (LHQ) 20:1 (January 1937): 152-158; McCutcheon, Books and Booksellers in New Orleans, 1730-1830, LHQ 20:3 (July 1937): 606-618; Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 32-33, passim.
16! However, other recent researchers have heeded Francophone scholar Auguste Viatte s position, from Histoire littéraire de l Amérique française (1954), that colonial and postcolonial French language prose and poetry written in the Americas should be recognized and studied as both Continental French and Franco-American literature. 31 These historians and literary scholars, who, for the most part, are based in France and Canada, have resurveyed, anthologized, and reexamined Louisiana s white Creole literary culture as products of both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. 32 This dissertation takes its place among these contemporary studies, but further historicizes Louisiana s white Creole literature as a product of transnational and multi-cultural, and nationalizing and Americanizing processes.! The Creoles literary circle came late in the American republic s Age of Print, a flourishing of print media in the early nineteenth century. Chapter One traces the life and literary output of Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarré, the first great Creole man of letters and the founding father of Louisiana literature. Gayarré believed that his homeland literally exuded exceptionality, that Louisiana s place, past, and people were singularly special. In the 1830s and early 1840s, Gayarré published several volumes of French-language chronicles of Louisiana history 31 Auguste Viatte, Histoire littéraire de l Amérique française: des origines à 1950 (Laval, Quebec: Presses Universitaires, 1954), 1-3. 32 Most of these Gérard Labarre St. Martin and Jacqueline K. Voorhies, Ecrits Louisianais du dixneuvième siècle: nouvelles, contes et fables (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Mathe Allain and Barry Ancelet, Littérature française de la Louisiane: anthologie (Bedford, NH: National Materials Development Center for French, 1981); Réginald Hamel, La Louisiane créole: littéraire, politique et sociale, 1762-1900 (Ottawa: Les Editions Lemeac, 1984); Patrick Griolet, Cadjins et créoles en Louisiane: histoire et survivance d un francophonie (Paris: Payot, 1986); Frans Amelinckx, La littérature louisianaise au XIXe siècle: perspective critique, Présence Francophone 43 (1993): 10-24; Norman R. Shapiro, trans., and M. Lynn Weiss, intro., Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Germain Bienvenu, The Beginnings of Louisiana Literature: The French Domination of 1682-1763, in Lowe: 25-48.
17 that contained real research and objective insight. But beginning with his Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848) and continuing well into the 1890s, Gayarré published English-language popular histories that romanticized and embellished episodes in the city and state s past. These later histories, rather than the earlier ones, precipitated the white Creole print culture, making Gayarré the primary architect of the New Orleans mythos.! New Orleans s white Creole population, like Gayarré, regularly sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to France for schooling, social and cultural education, or just to visit the motherland. Perhaps no member of the Creole intelligentsia crisscrossed the Atlantic more repeatedly than Adrien Rouquette, the subject of Chapter Two. In a life defined by movement and exile, art and religion, Rouquette was a member of, what I term, the cosmopolitan Creole elite, New Orleanians who sought to define their dualistic postcolonial selves through two metropoles: New Orleans and Paris. A popular poet of his day, Rouquette used the Catholic Church as his spiritual compass to guide his restless spirit, a place to tame his frequent feelings of in-betweenness, and simply as a home. Rouquette became the first Louisiana-born Catholic minister and the Church s first Creole priest, living a bifurcated life in more ways than one.! Many Creoles took to writing and publishing in French to wrestle with their liminal American and Latinate identities. Chapter Three narrates the history of several Civil War and Reconstruction-era print journals, newspapers, and, especially, one literary-scientific social organization. The founders of the La Renaissance Louisianaise (1861), Le Carillon (1869), and the Athénée
18 Louisianais (1876) sought to revive a floundering Francophone New Orleans community by fighting to defend and preserve the French language. Headed by the medical doctor and amateur linguist Alfred Mercier, the Athénée Louisianais sought to overturn recent developments that banished French from public school and state government. During the Civil War, the Creole-Francophone defenders worked alongside members of a transnational pan-latin movement that sought to combat the creeping influence of Great Britain and the English language. Afterwards, they brought the linguistic struggle to New Orleans.! In the 1880s, the Creole literary circle was likewise outdone by an Anglo, English-speaking and writing author. Chapter Four outlines the often told story of George Washington Cable and the Creole backlash his New Orleans-set short stories and novels engendered. This chapter will take the Creoles attacks on the author and his works as its focal point. Gayarré, Rouquette, and many other Creoles charged that Cable, one of the most nationally popular authors of his day, had disrespected their Creole culture and, even worse, inferred that they were not of pure white blood. The Creoles vicious barrage occurred in newspaper columns, published pamphlets, and speeches. This literary battle over blood, race, and identity occurred at a time when white Southerners were reconciling nationally with their northern brothers and sisters, while strengthening bonds steeped in the language and theory of white power. During this period, the Creoles, like other ethnic American communities, became white by redefining the word Creole to indicate a purely white, Latinate Louisianian.
19! By the end of the 1890s, the core founding members of this white Creole myth were marginalized or dead. Chapter Five appraises the life of Grace King, literary heir to the Creole cause. King, an Anglo-Protestant New Orleanian, headed a second wave of non-creoles dedicated to further pursue the defense of the Creoles language, literature, and history. She became the Creoles champion par excellence through the writing of short stories, novels, short and long form histories and biographies, memoirs, and literary and social criticism, that, for the most part, glorified the city and state s founding families. In her landmark work Creole Families of New Orleans (1921), King detailed the family trees of the most august Creole lineages, while whitewashing their bloodlines. She too operated not only inside the whiteness paradigm, but also within a cross-national movement that regendered and feminized history and genealogy. King cemented the myth of white Creole racial purity, while solidifying the redefinition of New Orleans as a Creole city.! Throughout this monograph, the word Creole will be used to refer to Louisiana s white Creole population. The slippery nature of this term continues to produce confusions, controversies, and conflicts throughout New Orleans, Louisiana, and the wider postcolonial world. Its meaning differs according to location, as it does with historical period and from one [scholarly] discipline to another, according to the best recent analysis of the word and its transnational
20 etymological history. 33 Scholars have posited that creole derives from Portuguese Brazil, the Caribbean, Spanish America, or simply the Latin root meaning to create (creare). But in her essay Creole: The Problem of Definition, Carolyn Allen writes that the word s obscure origins perhaps matter not; instead we should focus on the fact that each and every transnational usage of the word expresses the result of the Atlantic crossing and colonisation, resulting in the cross-pollination of New and Old World peoples. Furthermore, creole, especially when used to describe individuals and communities, always emphasizes cultural nationality, racial indeterminacy and implicit social class. 34! The white Creoles of New Orleans and Louisiana were no different. They were a intermediary people, simultaneously American and French, who culturally, racially, and socially defined themselves against Anglo-Americans and Creoles of color. The white Creole print culture circle additionally sought to redefine and broaden the word from its original use as an identity descriptor. Throughout the nineteenth century, this Creole community endeavored to define Creole in the abstract. Creole became an idea to shape Louisiana s past, a conception indicating social and cultural exceptionality in the present, and a birthright conferring dominion over New Orleans s future. These white Creoles wrote 33 Allen, 48. Perhaps creole should be added to the list of what Leftist critic called keywords, that is terms in which we find a history and complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence, specialization, extension, overlap, transfer; or changes which are masked by a nominal continuity so that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed, meanings and implications of meaning. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; reprint ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 17. 34 Allen, 48-50. For more on creole, the word, see Thomas M. Stephens, Creole, Créole, Criollo, Crioulo: The Shadings of a Term, The SOCOL Review 7:3 (Fall 1983): 28-39.
21 themselves to shape Creole identities, while rewriting New Orleans to fashion the Creole City.
22 Chapter One Procuring the higher branches of literature. Charles Gayarré and the Cultivation of a Louisiana Creole Print Terroir!! The history of Louisiana is eminently poetical. 1 As these words reverberated across the brick walls of the Methodist Church, the members in the audience that early-spring evening in 1847 undoubtedly nodded in agreement and satisfaction. Here in New Orleans, history, at times, must have seemed quite poetic. Anyone over the age of forty-five would remember living under the flag of three empires, a seemingly impossible battlefield victory just outside the city s perimeter, breathtaking population growth, a municipality split in three due to political-ethnic squabbles, and the decennial ebb and flow of yellow fever wasting the city s populace. Life in antebellum Louisiana might have certainly contained a romantic poeticism for many of its most privileged citizens, while the extraordinariness of late-jacksonian era New Orleans was unquestionable. Though Charles Gayarré s speech that evening involved a histrionic retelling of history, his portrayal of his city and state rang true.! New Orleans, so the myth goes, is a place that infamously works despite itself, but the city of the 1840s could especially be described as a study in contradiction and cooperation. This was harmonious chaos. That evening s elocutionist could claim impeccable credentials as the crème de la crème of 1 Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume I (1854; reprint ed. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974), 11.
23 Creole society; his maternal and paternal grandfathers were respectively among the French and Spanish founding fathers of colonial Louisiana. Gayarré s life was a study in contrasts: always flaunting his Latinate roots, at different times he identified as a Creole, a Southerner, and an American. And though an elegant, if not bathetic, composer of French prose, this night, he lectured in English. The New Methodist Church, perched on the uptown-river corner of Poydras and Carondelet, sat in the center of the American sector, just one block behind Lafayette Square, the Americans public park and political and commercial capital. 2 Largely because of European immigration, the city s population had more than doubled in the past decade. In 1836, the competing Creole and American factions that struggled to control the city, acquiesced to the seemingly uncontrollable pattern[s] of segregation, due to the population explosion, and split the city into three self-governing municipalities. 3 The trio comprised the French quarter, the American sector, and the downriver neighborhoods basically the Faubourg Marigny that harbored many of the tens of thousands of Germans and Irish that poured into antebellum New Orleans, along with many white and Afro-Creoles. 2 Mary Christovich, ed., New Orleans Architecture: The American Sector (Faubourg St. Mary): Howard Avenue to Iberville Street, Mississippi River to Claiborne Avenue (New Orleans: Pelican, 1972), 27-28. 3 Urban historian Mary Ryan describes New Orleans to be the most obvious, distinct, and actually de jure city, in a period of urban American social segmentation. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 35.