Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T18:22:53.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Alexandre Dumas's Odyssey: Race, Slavery, Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2022

Edmund Birch
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Alexandre Dumas père left behind few explicit reflections on race and slavery in the modern world, but he was not silent on these subjects. Before the tireless deeds of the musketeers, or the vengeful fantasies of the Count of Monte-Cristo, there was Georges, an 1843 novel of race and slave rebellion set on the island of Mauritius. This essay explores questions of homecoming, homelessness, and recognition in the novel. It argues that the text incorporates a series of references to the Homeric Odyssey and that these come to illuminate the complexities of a problem faced by metropolitan French novelists of the nineteenth century: What manner of plot might grasp, or fail to grasp, the interlocking injustices of racism and slavery? After all, Georges does not conclude with homecoming and recognition, as the model of the Odyssey might imply, but with homelessness.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 137 , Issue 5 , October 2022 , pp. 809 - 823
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Allen, Richard Blair. Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Labourers in Colonial Mauritius. Cambridge UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Bell, Dorian. Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture. Northwestern UP, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernard, Claudie. “Georges, or the ‘Mixed-Blood’ Settles Scores.” The Black Musketeer: Re-evaluating Alexandre Dumas within the Francophone World, edited by Martone, Eric, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 127–59.Google Scholar
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri. Paul et Virginie. Edited by Mauzi, Robert, Flammarion, 1992.Google Scholar
Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.Google Scholar
Burrow, Colin. “Light through the Fog.” London Review of Books, 26 Apr. 2018, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n08/colin-burrow/light-through-the-fog.Google Scholar
Cave, Terence. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton UP, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Counter, Andrew J. “A Nation of Foreigners: Chateaubriand and Repatriation.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 46, spring-summer 2018, pp. 285–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daut, Marlene L. “Haiti and the Black Romantics: Enlightenment and Color Prejudice after the Haitian Revolution in Alexandre Dumas's Georges (1843).” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 56, spring 2017, pp. 73–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Desormeaux, Daniel. “L'amour nègre chez Alexandre Dumas.” Dumas amoureux: Formes et imaginaires de l’Éros dumasien, edited by Anselmini, Julie and Schopp, Claude, PU de Caen, 2020. Open Edition Books, books.openedition.org/puc/12372.Google Scholar
Dumas, Alexandre. Georges. Gallimard, 1974.Google Scholar
Dumas, Alexandre. “Ulysse de Ponsard.” Souvenirs dramatiques, vol. 2, Michel Lévy, 1881, pp. 355–436.Google Scholar
Dumas, Alexandre. Viva Garibaldi! Une Odyssée en 1860. Edited by Schopp, Claude, Fayard, 2002.Google Scholar
Dupuy, Alex. Rethinking the Haitian Revolution: Slavery, Independence, and the Struggle for Recognition. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.Google Scholar
Enz, Molly. “The Mulatto as Island and the Island as Mulatto in Alexandre Dumas's Georges.” The French Review, vol. 80, no. 2, 2006, pp. 383–94.Google Scholar
Forsdick, Charles, and Yee, Jennifer. “Towards a Postcolonial Nineteenth Century: Introduction.” French Studies, vol. 72, 2018, pp. 167–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-revolutionary France. Yale UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. Schwarz, With Bill. Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands. Allen Lane, 2017.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Léon-François. “Dumas et les noirs.” Dumas, Georges, pp. 7–23.Google Scholar
Homer, . The Odyssey. Translated by Wilson, Emily, W. W. Norton, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery. Vintage Books, 1990.Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Kingsley, Patrick. The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis. Guardian Faber Publishing, 2016.Google Scholar
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock, Aaker, 2016.Google Scholar
Martone, Eric. “Alexandre Dumas as a Francophone Writer.” Introduction. The Black Musketeer: Re-evaluating Alexandre Dumas within the Francophone World, edited by Martone, , Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 1–30.Google Scholar
Martone, Eric. Finding Monte-Cristo: Alexandre Dumas and the French Atlantic World. McFarland, 2018.Google Scholar
McConnell, Justine. Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939. Oxford UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milbert, Jacques-Gérard. Le voyage pittoresque à l’Île-de-France, au Cap de Bonne-Esperance et à l’Île de Ténériffe. Nepveu, 1812.Google Scholar
Miles, David H. “Portrait of the Marxist as a Young Hegelian: Lukács’ Theory of the Novel.” PMLA, vol. 94, no. 1, Jan. 1979, pp. 22–35.Google Scholar
Miller, Christopher. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Duke UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Mirecourt, Eugène de. Alexandre Dumas. Havard, 1856.Google Scholar
Mirecourt, Eugène de. Fabrique de romans: Maison Alexandre Dumas et compagnie. Les Marchands de Nouveautés, 1845.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Robin. Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France. U of Georgia P, 2020.Google Scholar
Mombert, Sarah. “Georges d'Alexandre Dumas: Esclavage et métissage romantiques.” Littérature et esclavage, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles, edited by Moussa, Sarga, Desjonquères, 2010, pp. 238–50.Google Scholar
Murnaghan, Sheila. Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey. 2nd ed., Lexington Books, 2011.Google Scholar
Neubauer, John. “Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel.” Poetics Today, vol. 17, no. 4, 1996, pp. 531–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peabody, Sue. Madeleine's Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies. Oxford UP, 2017.Google Scholar
Pigault-Lebrun, . Le blanc et le noir. Mayeur, 1795.Google Scholar
Prasad, Pratima. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination. Routledge, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Racault, Jean-Michel. “Mimétisme et métissage: Sur Georges d'Alexandre Dumas.” Métissages: Littérature-Histoire, edited by Marimoutou, Jean-Claude Carpanin and Racault, L'Harmattan, 1992, pp. 141–50.Google Scholar
Reiss, Tom. The Black Count: Napoleon's Rival, and the Real Count of Monte-Cristo—General Alexandre Dumas. Vintage Books, 2013.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.Google Scholar
Schopp, Claude. Alexandre Dumas. Fayard, 1997.Google Scholar
Séjour, Victor. “Le mulâtre,” suivi de “La tireuse de cartes.” L'Harmattan, 2014.Google Scholar
Sue, Eugène. Atar-Gull. Garnier, 1979.Google Scholar
Vaughan, Megan. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Duke UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Yee, Jennifer. The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel. Oxford UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar