Typhaine Leservot
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846317538
- eISBN:
- 9781846317200
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317200.003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter analyses Auguste Lussan's play, La Famille créole [The Creole Family] (1837), which shows the changing understanding of the Creole identity in Louisiana by the 1830s. The play is set in ...
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This chapter analyses Auguste Lussan's play, La Famille créole [The Creole Family] (1837), which shows the changing understanding of the Creole identity in Louisiana by the 1830s. The play is set in 1794 and tells the story of a family of planter refugees, the Clairvilles, who left Saint-Domingue and arrived in New Orleans before moving to France. While in Paris, the father and the daughter are wrongfully accused of treason and are nearly guillotined. They then returned to Louisiana, which became their only place of salvation. The play presents the Clairville family not as past slaveholders in the Caribbean but as innocents who are neither revolutionaries nor royalists. Without any inconvenient cultural allegiances to Saint-Domingue and France, they are rendered more compelling as new American citizens.Less
This chapter analyses Auguste Lussan's play, La Famille créole [The Creole Family] (1837), which shows the changing understanding of the Creole identity in Louisiana by the 1830s. The play is set in 1794 and tells the story of a family of planter refugees, the Clairvilles, who left Saint-Domingue and arrived in New Orleans before moving to France. While in Paris, the father and the daughter are wrongfully accused of treason and are nearly guillotined. They then returned to Louisiana, which became their only place of salvation. The play presents the Clairville family not as past slaveholders in the Caribbean but as innocents who are neither revolutionaries nor royalists. Without any inconvenient cultural allegiances to Saint-Domingue and France, they are rendered more compelling as new American citizens.
