Romance to Novel: A Secret History
TL;DR: Leonora Sansay's Secret History as discussed by the authors is a series of letters written by a Philadel-phia-born woman and presented as "A Series of Letters" based on those she wrote to the "Late Vice-President, Colonel Burr," which announces its aim to provide intimate secrets for the benefit of public history.
Abstract: Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) is pref- aced by a timid confession. She writes: "I am fearful of having been led into an error by my friends, when taught by them to believe that I could write something which would interest and please; and it was chiefly with a view to ascertain what confidence I might place in their kind assurances on the subject, that I collected and consented, though reluctantly, to the publication of these letters. Should a less partial public give them a favourable reception, and allow them to possess some merit, it would encour- age me to endeavour to obtain their further approbation by a little work already planned and in some forwardness" (60). Sansay immediately discloses a productive tension at the core of her text's narrative structure. A private tale written by a Philadel- phia-born woman and presented as "A Series of Letters" based on those she wrote to the "Late Vice-President, Colonel Burr," Leonora Sansay's Secret History announces its aim to provide intimate secrets for the benefit of public history. This conceit, among others, locates the text within the British literary genealogy of the secret history, a genre primarily encountered in England during the long eighteenth-century; early practitioners included Daniel Defoe, John Oldmixon, Henry Brooks, Aphra Behn, De- lariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood. 1 Sansay's Secret History is generically jarring in part because of these similarities to such literary predecessors, but also because of its physical distance from a metropolitan center, and its temporal distance from the genre's nearly comprehensive decline over half a century earlier. One cannot help but be struck by how far out—and away—the secret history has traveled. 2
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01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: The authors argue that writers in preand post-revolutionary Haiti and the United States conceived of liberty and resistance to sovereign power through figures that complicate the relationship between the physical body and the psyche, including sleepwalkers, spirits, and zombies.
Abstract: of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor Tim Watson. No. of pages in text. (278) In the following work, I argue that writers in preand post-revolutionary Haiti and the United States conceived of liberty and resistance to sovereign power through figures that complicate the relationship between the physical body and the psyche, including sleepwalkers, spirits, and zombies. These figures, which were immensely popular in both post-colonial settings, interrogate scientific understandings of the body as intimately tied to a psyche and call into question conflicting religious understandings of the body‘s relationship to the spirit. In doing so, these disembodied figures complicate popular assumptions about political agency in their respective new nations. As a comparative analysis of lesser-known texts by Haitian authors and more canonical U.S. works, including Leonora Sansay‘s Secret History, or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), Charles Brockden Brown‘s Edgar Huntly,or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). My work uncovers a clear, multidirectional influence between the locales that can be traced by following the development of such figures from the end of the eighteenth century through the U.S. antebellum period. I frame my discussion with an extended introduction contextualizing the relationship between the revolutions and subsequent literatures and a conclusion that addresses larger concerns about the importance of including Haitian literature of the period as part of the vast corpus of hemispheric literature that emerged between the onset of the Haitian Revolution (roughly 1791) and the mid-nineteenth century. In my first chapter, I consider firsthand accounts of the Haitian revolution and early nineteenth-century Haitian histories, both of which attach particular set of meanings to the tortured body in the context of the revolution. I argue specifically that Haitian writers coded some acts of revolutionary violence as reactions to European violence enacted against black bodies, while other acts were coded as presenting an African understanding of a very different relationship between the body and the mind. After establishing the tortured body as a symbol of multiple levels of oppression and repression in revolutionary writings, I move on to assert the emergence of two important conceptions of the relationship between the body and the political subject in the writings of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, both of which were later taken up in early nineteenth-century Haitian literary works and oral cultures. First, I argue that Toussaint Louverture‘s writings use metaphors of family and disease to formulate relationships between his own body, the French government, and the bodies other revolutionaries. Next, I consider Jean-Jacques Dessalines‘ presentation of the bodies and spirits of the dead as disembodied figures who continued to resist the encroachment of colonial power. My project then traces these dual understandings in the earliest available Haitian creative work, Ignace Nau’s “Isalina” (1836), arguing that Haiti‘s nineteenth-century national literature utilized and reformulated both understandings established by these revolutionary leaders. The third chapter of my dissertation turns to creative texts about the Haitian revolution, including the anonymously authored Mon Odyssee (circa 1799) and Secret History, which propose novel means of separating the resistant subject from the tortured body. The author of Mon Odyssee uses cross-dressing as a means of escaping violence, and more importantly understands this means of changing his own body as subverting not only gender normativity but also his own subjection to sovereign power. Similarly, Leonora Sansay suggests that authorship serves as a multi-layered means of disembodiment through which the protagonist escapes domestic violence, and resists both the domination of her husband and the political violence of revolutionary Saint Domingue. My fourth and final chapter considers the appearance of the sleepwalker in late eighteenth-century and antebellum U.S. novels, including Edgar Huntly and Dred, both of which position their sleepwalking protagonists as able to resist the encroachment of political power over territories through the formulation of disembodiment presented in somnambulism. I ultimately argue that the disembodied figure so firmly rooted in resisting colonial power in Saint Domingue evolves throughout Haitian and U.S. literatures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
14 citations
12 citations
06 Nov 2018
TL;DR: This article examined two novels about the Haitian Revolution, namely Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel Secret History (1808) and an extended rewriting of this novel entitled Zelica, the Creole (1820), which has been attributed to Sansay.
Abstract: This article examines two novels about the Haitian Revolution, namely Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel Secret History, or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and an extended rewriting of this novel entitled Zelica, the Creole (1820), which has been attributed to Sansay. While Secret History narrates the events in Haiti through the lens of the American coquette Clara and her prudish sister Mary, Zelica transforms that sororal relationship into a crossracial friendship between Clara and the mixed-race character Zelica. In Secret History, Clara escapes both Saint Domingue and her abusive husband. In Zelica, she is killed by Zelica’s father, a philanthropist who believes in emancipation through amalgamation. The aim of the article is not to provide definitive answers to the question of Zelica’s authorship but to examine the motivational claims underlying the rewriting. It argues that the foregrounding of a mixed-race character reflects the increasing fixation on race-mixing in nineteenth century culture. The death of Clara at the hands of the philanthropist De La Riviere is read as an implicit creole critique of gradual abolitionism.
10 citations
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Book•
01 Aug 1996
TL;DR: The first edition of this compendium of place names appeared to wide acclaim in 1968 and has remained an essential reference for anyone with a serious interest in the Tar Heel State, from historians to journalists, from creative writers to urban planners, from backpackers to armchair travelers as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This American classic is the only full-length book written and published by Thomas Jefferson during his lifetime. Written in 1781, Notes on the State of Virginia was begun by Jefferson as a commentary on the resources and institutions of his home state, but the work's lasting value lies in its delineation of Jefferson's major philosophical, political, scientific, and ethical beliefs. Along with his accounts of such factual matters as North American flora and fauna, Jefferson expounds his views on slavery, education, religious freedom, representative government, and the separation of church and state. The book is the best single statement of Jefferson's principles and the best reflection of his wide-ranging tastes and talents. This edition, meticulously edited by William Peden, was originally published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1955. |The first edition of this compendium of place names in North Carolina appeared to wide acclaim in 1968 and has remained an essential reference for anyone with a serious interest in the Tar Heel State, from historians to journalists, from creative writers to urban planners, from backpackers to armchair travelers. This revised and expanded edition adds approximately 1,200 new entries, bringing to nearly 21,000 the number of North Carolina cities, towns, crossroads, waterways, mountains, and other places identified here.
1,141 citations
1,134 citations
TL;DR: The property the owners parliament and property the San Domingo masses begin and the Paris masses complete the rise of Toussaint the Mulattoes try and fail the white slave-owners again the expulsion of the British TousSaint seizes the power the black consul the bourgeoisie prepares to restore slavery as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The property the owners parliament and property the San Domingo masses begin and the Paris masses complete the rise of Toussaint the Mulattoes try and fail the white slave-owners again the expulsion of the British Toussaint seizes the power the black consul the bourgeoisie prepares to restore slavery the War of Independence.
1,100 citations
DOI•
26 Apr 2022
TL;DR: The first edition of this compendium of place names appeared to wide acclaim in 1968 and has remained an essential reference for anyone with a serious interest in the Tar Heel State, from historians to journalists, from creative writers to urban planners, from backpackers to armchair travelers as discussed by the authors .
Abstract: This American classic is the only full-length book written and published by Thomas Jefferson during his lifetime. Written in 1781, Notes on the State of Virginia was begun by Jefferson as a commentary on the resources and institutions of his home state, but the work's lasting value lies in its delineation of Jefferson's major philosophical, political, scientific, and ethical beliefs. Along with his accounts of such factual matters as North American flora and fauna, Jefferson expounds his views on slavery, education, religious freedom, representative government, and the separation of church and state. The book is the best single statement of Jefferson's principles and the best reflection of his wide-ranging tastes and talents. This edition, meticulously edited by William Peden, was originally published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1955. |The first edition of this compendium of place names in North Carolina appeared to wide acclaim in 1968 and has remained an essential reference for anyone with a serious interest in the Tar Heel State, from historians to journalists, from creative writers to urban planners, from backpackers to armchair travelers. This revised and expanded edition adds approximately 1,200 new entries, bringing to nearly 21,000 the number of North Carolina cities, towns, crossroads, waterways, mountains, and other places identified here.
1,068 citations
12 Nov 2004
TL;DR: Futures past Romanticism and anti-colonational revolution Conscripts of modernity Toussaint's tragic dilemma The tragedy of colonial enlightenment as discussed by the authors, and their tragic dilemma
Abstract: Futures past Romanticism and anti-colonial revolution Conscripts of modernity Toussaint's tragic dilemma The tragedy of colonial enlightenment
956 citations