of the slave trade, the tenuous Congress of Vienna’s 1815 condemnation of the slave trade, and the 1821 formation of the pro-abolition group Société de la Morale chrétienne. The novel’s one-word title, the name of its main character, equally reflects a literary trend of its time, but in Bergeaud’s novel, Stella names more than just one individual: she is the earthly incarnation of divinely inspired Liberty, the “Star of Nations.”
50 In The French Atlantic Triangle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), Christopher Miller identifies France’s approach as a “calculated plan for forgetting” Haiti (246).
51 In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Dayan points to Ardouin as exemplary of an elite Haitian population who wished to “progress away from the dark continent” (16). This criticism of “francophilia” became a common way of reading French influence on Haitian literature, especially after Jean Price-Mars’s theory of “bovarysme,” which was developed during the American occupation of the early twentieth century. While Price-Mars meant to encourage his compatriots to embrace African culture, the concept of bovarysme has often been used to denigrate Haitian artists as derivative or lacking in innovation.
52 Hoffmann, Essays: 121. In current-day Haiti, the Ficus carica is called a “French fig” to distinguish it from a Haitian fig, which is a type of banana.
53 Émile Nau, “Littérature”: 4.
54 According to Hoffmann, Jules Michelet, the great French historian of the day, knew and corresponded with both Madiou and Ardouin (Haïti: lettres et l’être, 1992): 234. In the early twentieth century, some Haitian readers tired of reading Bergeaud’s style of “great men” history and, as with the examples of Frédéric Marcelin, Jacques Roumain, and Jacques-Stéphan Alexis, began to focus their literature on the lives of middle-class, peasant, and working-class Haitians. See Marcelin, Autour de deux romans (Paris: Kugelman, 1903): 27.
55 Pradel Pompilus explains the confusion surrounding the text’s generic uniqueness when he writes: “We are forced to count Stella as a novel because of the author’s considerable use of fiction, but in the end, it is really just a story of our battles for independence livened up by ingenious inventions of imagination” (Manuel illustré d’histoire de la littérature haïtienne, Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1961): 201. Our translation.
56 See Duraciné Vaval, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne: ou, “L’âme noire” (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Aug A. Héraux, 1933): 137. Nau’s periodical L’Union was filled with these types of history-stories.
57 See Jean Casimir, “Prologue: From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: To Live Again or to Live at Last!” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009): xvii.
58 Pompée-Valentin, baron de Vastey, for example, insisted on solidarity between Haitians of different hues. He remarked on the fact that he was of an extremely fair complexion and politically sided with Henri Christophe, a man of dark complexion in his Le Système colonial dévoilé (Cap-Henry: Chez P. Roux, 1814).
59 Vastey, An Essay on the Causes of Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti, Being a Sequel to the Political Remarks Upon Certain French Publications and Journals Concerning Hayti By the Baron de Vastey, trans. W.H. M.B. (Exeter: Printed at the Western Luminary Office, 1823).
60 On this subject, see Marlene L. Daut, “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian Literature: Baron de Vastey and the U.S. Audience of Haitian Political Writing,” Comparative Literature 64, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 49-72. Christiane Ndiaye has long lamented what she terms the “impasse of literary criticism in the nineteenth century.” See Christiane Ndiaye, “Quelques impasses du discours de la critique littéraire du XIXe siècle,” in Relire l’histoire littéraire et le littéraire haïtiens (Port-au-Prince: Les Presses Nationales d’Haïti, 2007): 261–275.
61 Jean Price-Mars, in reaction to the American occupation of Haiti, sought to encourage a return to African heritage and a move away from French culture. His work presages that of other negritude authors like Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Antoine Dalmas. For more information on the influence of bovarysme on Haitian literature, see J. Michael Dash, “True Dechoukaj: Uprooting Bovarysme in Post-Duvalier Haiti,” in Politics and Power in Haiti, ed. Kate Quinn and Paul Sutton (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013): 27–42.
Recommended Reading
Dash, J. Michael. Literature and Ideology in Haiti 1915–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1981).
Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: A Literary History of Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New Word: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
———. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012).
Fisher, Sybille. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Garraway, Doris. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Geggus, David Patrick, and Norman Fiering, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Ghachem, Malick Walid. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Hoffmann, Léon-François. “The First Haitian Novel: Émeric Bergeaud’s ‘Stella,’” in Essays on Haitian Literature (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984): 111–122.
Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).
Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti, revised ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
Popkin, Jeremy. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Prasad, Pratima. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Sepinwall,
