Creole Women and Counterdecadence in Lafcadio Hearn’s Antillean Writing

Abstract

Critics often cast the Creole woman of color in Lafcadio Hearn’s circum-Caribbean writings as a figure of cultural moribundity—an emblem of a Creole world fading under the pressures of modernization. However, Hearn also presents Creole women as vivacious counterdecadent agents, disruptors of the political decline experienced by Martinique’s white Creoles after citizenship was restored to the colony’s men of African descent. Through historical contextualization of Hearn’s periodical writing and his correspondence with journalist Elizabeth Bisland, this paper explains why he employs the strategies of Decadent conservatism to imagine a moment in which formerly enslaved Creole women prevent an iconoclastic Republican attack on a sculpture of the Empress Joséphine. Erected in a reactionary period after slavery’s abolition, this monument originally commemorated the reinstatement of plantocratic dominance over the Black population, but by the time Hearn saw the statue, it had become an ironic reminder of weakened white authority. The imagined actions of Hearn’s Creole women resignify the monument, making its survival attest to the limited victory of Republican egalitarianism and the survival of pre-modern traditions of racial deference.

1. Introduction

From 1877 to 1889, the writer Lafcadio Hearn lived in the Francophone circum-Caribbean—the first decade in New Orleans and the last two years in the colony of Martinique. During this time, he produced texts concerning the contact of French and African peoples in the plantation and post-plantation societies of the Americas. Through his folklore, travel writing, ethnographic sketches and ethnographic fiction, Hearn bore witness to “a clash between the savagely beautiful pre-modern and encroaching modernity—with, crucially, the former taking on decidedly feminized and moribund traits” (Wiedorn 2014, pp. 375–76). This conflict invariably moved Hearn to elegy, especially over his favorite character types: “alluring but near-extinct creole women,” usually biracial (Wiedorn 2014, p. 378). For example, in his essay, “The Creole Patois,” Hearn (1885) mournfully anticipates the fate of that eponymous language. The “great social change will eventually render it extinct,” he laments, referring to the Americanization of New Orleans (p. 27). Passing from Louisiana Creole to Creole bodies, Hearn foregrounds the intimacy that generates creolized culture. As the product of “linguistic miscegenation,” Creole reminds Hearn of “a celebrated and vanished type” Hearn (1885, p. 27). He eulogizes these placées, mixed-race women of African descent who entered an extralegal concubinage with white men:

Uncommonly tall were those famous beauties—citrine-hued, elegant of stature as palmettos, lithe as serpents; never again will such types re-appear upon American soil. Daughters of luxury, artificial human growths, never organized to enter the iron struggle for life unassisted and unprotected, they vanished forever with the social system which made them a place apart as for splendid plants reared within a conservatory. With the fall of American feudalism, the dainty glass house was dashed to pieces; the species it contained have perished utterly; and whatever morality may have gained, one cannot help thinking that art has lost something by their extinction.

(Hearn 1885, p. 27)

For Hearn, the hierarchical and exclusionary qualities of racism, colorism and sexism in a slavocracy functioned as a social enclosure that produced peculiar, artificial conditions for the placées’ development. Dependent on the patronage of their lovers, shielded from the coarsening effects of fighting for economic survival, these women cultivated an exceptional feminine grace, a rare physical allure. Yet the decline of the planter class after emancipation destroyed the gendered separatism and material base that enabled these Creole beauties to thrive luxuriously like hothouse orchids. They become victims of a modernity that follows “American feudalism” Hearn (1885, p. 27).

Everywhere Hearn looks, he sees beautiful creolized languages, social forms, cultural practices and racial types, yet they vanish under increasing democratization, industrialization and in the wake of the abolition of slavery. Considering the preceding elegy for the extinct octoroons, Robert Azzarello (2019) notes that they provide “an occasion for the decadent preservationist to get to work” (p. 89). Similarly, Wiedorn (2014) describes “the methodology that was to typify [Hearn’s] work: that is, preserving and embellishing these vanishing cultures with his explicative pen while paying particular attention to the structures of ebbing power and increasing violence within them” (p. 374). Indeed, Hearn’s informants about endangered culture were frequently Creole women “whom he saw as embodying…exotic, moribund places”; they drew his “attentions, both literary and amorous” (Wiedorn 2014, p. 374). Hearn’s salvatory impulse is best captured in his remarks on recording the orature of Louisiana’s Creoles: “But there is yet time…to rescue some of its dying legends and curious lyrics, to collect and preserve them, like pressed blossoms, between the leaves of enduring books” Hearn (1885, p. 27). Addressing the globalization of literatures of decadence, Regenia Gagnier (2021) has argued that “styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence proliferate at moments when traditional cultures meet the forces of modernization and social relations undergo processes of deformation” (pp. 166–67). Accordingly, Hearn is a chronicler of modernity as it impacts the post-plantation societies of Martinique and Louisiana; literary Decadence is the tool with which he records cultural change as a form of decline.

Although Hearn does seek to preserve a dying and feminized Creole culture as Azzarello and Wiedorn argue, this characterization risks caricaturing him as a necrophiliac who lacks a creative response to decadence. That image is a legacy of the early reception of Hearn as a Decadent writer, shaped by the idea that he was a bricoleur, translator or stylist who lacked innovative power. As one critic sneered: “The sole quality, the only originality, he brought to the fact, or to the echo, was colour—a peculiar derivation of a maimed sense. He created or invented nothing; his stories were always told him by others” (Gould 1908, p. 6). Yet Hearn does create fictions, masquerading as anecdotes or history, that do not focus on racialized female registers of decadence in extremis. In these cases, the cultural decadence of the present incentivizes Hearn to use literary Decadence to interrupt historical moments of crisis that create a trajectory of decline. He retells the past, inventing counternarratives in which Creole women are not symptomatic victims of a pernicious modernization, but heroines who energetically resist the violent imposition of progressive ideals. Purporting to recover the activism of these conservatives, Hearn alters his antimodernist readers’ understanding of the degraded era they occupy, demonstrating that their political and cultural milieu is not as fallen as appearance suggests. As we will see, this revision and deployment of the past are strategies of “Decadent conservatism” (Murray 2023, p. 2).

Analyzing Hearn’s periodical writing on Martinique and his correspondence with his friend Elizabeth Bisland, this essay examines how Hearn positions Bisland to understand not merely the causes and effects of decadence in the French Antilles, but also how Creole women might be powerful agents for averting the effects of decadence. In his recent overview of scholarship on Hearn, Riddell (2025) has noted that critics have been using Hearn’s Antillean texts to reconceptualize “discourses of decadence within the historical and geographical pressures of nineteenth-century colonization” (p. xi). This article should be regarded as part of these efforts to globalize and decolonize the study of Decadence.

Building on the foundational work of scholars such as Robert Stilling and Jacqueline Couti, there is a growing critical consensus that in the Caribbean, Decadence arises as an aesthetic response to the feeling of dispossession and the attrition of privilege the planter class experienced after the abolition of slavery (Riddell 2025, p. xi). For example, my analysis of Hearn’s revisions to his Antillean travel writing demonstrates how they are an index to “post-emancipation power struggles between Martinique’s white [C]reoles and its [B]lack and mixed-race population” (Bailey 2023, p. 5). As Hearn rewrites his descriptions of landscape, he draws on Decadent rhetoric to increasingly blame Martinique’s degraded treescapes on the “barbarism of negro-radical rule” (Bailey 2023, p. 8). In Hearn’s view, this debased regime resulted from enfranchising and electing Black and mixed-race men. His malignment of these men’s republican egalitarianism enables him to assuage white Creoles’ fears of racial replacement by “rhetorically abject[ing] Martinicans of colour from their reinstated place as citizens,” (Bailey 2023, p. 5).

As Riddell aptly concludes, by “emphasizing Hearn’s racializing and eugenic thinking alongside his interest in hybridity, scholars have shown how these concepts were not just compatible with, but foundational to decadent writing when viewed through a transnational lens” Riddell (2025, p. xi). This essaycontinues my historicization of Hearn’s writing to demonstrate how it empathizes with white Creoles, employing Decadence to disavow the admission of non-white people to the category of citizen. However, while previously I focused on the negrophobic representation of Black and mixed-race men as vectors of decadence who cannot be assimilated into civil society, this article focuses on how nonwhite Creole women are valorized as conservative guardians of plantocratic social order.

2. Becoming “Mamzelle Zefine”

Hearn’s earliest public attempts to employ the concept of decadence to explain the political environment of Martinique appear in his travelogue “A Midsummer Trip to the West Indies,” which was released serially in Harper’s magazine in 1888. One of the most remarkable narratives of the text is an anecdote about how regime change in metropolitan France manifested in Martinique. The account focuses on a reverie evoked by the statue of Joséphine, the Martinican-born Empress of the French, wife of Napoleon.

Critics have not remarked that the earliest extant telling of this anecdote is a July 1887 letter to the journalist Elizabeth Bisland. She includes the letter in her collection The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906). Reading the letter alongside Hearn’s published essays allows us to see the development of how he understands and communicates about colonial decadence in the Caribbean, but also to consider how his articulation of the issue gathers additional significance in being addressed to a specific reader. If Bisland was the only person in the world who had read this anecdote, what might it have meant? Why was Bisland Hearn’s primary addressee? One answer is that he may have been interested in how his friend’s race, gender and habitus as a member of a Louisianan family of former planters could produce pleasure, dread, insight and above all, empathy when she read his oblique meditation on the threat posed to white privilege after emancipation.

Examining the period between the Haitian Revolution and the end of Reconstruction, Matthew Pratt Gutterl posits a pan-American class of white creole slaveholders and former slaveholders who feared that their prosperity and security would be destroyed abruptly by the freedom, citizenship and retribution of enslaved people of African descent. Members of this plantocratic class populated a region that stretched from the coastal states of the U.S. South through the Lucayan Archipelago and Antilles to Brazil. They looked to one another’s experiences to understand and counter the privation a regional wave of emancipations portended. As Gutterl writes, “Southern masters turned their eyes further southward, to Jamaica and Haiti, where slavery had already been abolished with what looked to the Southerners to be disastrous consequences. They turned their attention as well to the few places where plantation slavery survived on a large scale, such as Brazil and Cuba” (Guterl 2008, p. 5).

Bisland’s life was directly shaped by the Civil War and the aftereffects of abolition. Her father had eschewed his medical training to pursue the genteel life of planter, acquiring and profitably developing a sugar-plantation. Bisland was born there just months before the Civil War broke out. As battle-lines advanced towards their homestead, the Bislands fled. After the war, they returned to a labour force disrupted by emancipation, a house vandalized by occupying troops, and economic ruin. Bisland grew up on the impoverished estate. As Susan Millar Williams notes, Bisland’s autobiographical novel A Candle of Understanding (1903) explores her parents’ wistfulness for antebellum life (Millar Williams 1986, p. 681).

Knowing Bisland’s background, we might place her in the extended network of the class Gutterl describes: people looking to the Caribbean for insight into the present and future of the American South after the end of slavery and after the defeat of the Confederacy. Hearn interpellates her in this way; from the first lines of his letter, he works to forge a transhistorical and transnational identification between his Southern friend and the Antillean-born French Empress:

Dear Miss Bisland, —Imagine yourself turned into marble, all white…standing forever on a marble pedestal, under an enormous azure day, —encircled by a ring of tall palms, graceful as Creole women, —and gazing always, always, over the summer sea, toward emerald Trois Islets.

That is Josephine! I think she looks just like you, “Mamzelle Josephine,”—or Zefine, if you like.

(Hearn 1906, p. 417)

As we will see, this empathetic bond traces the same circuit of shared racial consciousness and attentiveness that Gutterl describes, suggesting that Hearn is reiterating at the fin-de-siècle the same concerns that preoccupied the master class earlier in the century. In French Antillean discourse from the nineteenth century to the present, to invoke the Empress Joséphine is always to engage a debate over the legitimacy of Martinican white Creoles’ claims to racial, political, social and moral authority over the non-white inhabitants of Martinique. By foregrounding the historical contexts and racial subtexts involved in Hearn’s commemoration of Joséphine, we can understand how motivated it is by concerns over the decline of white civilization and power. Furthermore, we might inquire, how is the work of articulating these concerns furthered through the specific identification of Bisland with “Mamzelle Josephine” as one woman with another?

After inviting Bisland to imagine herself as “Zefine,” Hearn relates how Joséphine’s monument was endangered “after the fall of the Second Empire, —after France felt the iron heel of Germany upon her throat” (Hearn 1906, p. 417). Filled with antipathy towards Emperor Napoleon III for his role in bringing about the ruinous Franco-Prussian war, metropolitan and colonial supporters of France’s Third Republic were filled with anti-Bonapartist fervor. As Hearn writes, “the Martinique politicians resolved to do that which had already been done in France, —to obliterate the memories of the Empire” (Hearn 1906, p. 418). This obliviation included Napoleon III’s grandmother, whose statue Republican factions prepared to pull down and destroy. Yet, their iconoclasm was forestalled by “a crowd of women, —mostly women who had been slaves, —quadroons, mulattoesses; the house-servants, the bonnes, the nurses and housekeepers of the old days” (Hearn 1906, p. 418).

Hearn paints a scene of confrontation at sunrise: Republican officials and their workmen arrive while “Mamzelle Zefine was still gazing toward Trois Islets; she was white as ever…she seemed totally indifferent to what was about to happen, —she was dreaming her eternal plaintive dream” (Hearn 1906, p. 418). However, all around the statue surges “a living sea, —a tide of angry yellow faces, above which flashed the lightning of cane-knives, axes, couteaux de boucher” (Hearn 1906, p. 418). Taunting the Republicans as cowards, cockroaches and sissies, these enraged mixed-race women dare their adversaries to harm the statue: “Ah! li vieu!—lâches! cafa’ds! pott’ons! Vos pas cabab toucher li! Touché li—yon tête fois! —Osé toucher li. Capons Républicains! Osé toucher li!” (Hearn 1906, pp. 418–19). Seeing in the sculpture “some young mistress, some petted child, some memory of the old colonial days” the women are inspired to action by “all the love of the slave for the master, all the strange passionate senseless love of the servant for the Creole family” (Hearn 1906, p. 419). Frightened by the violent resistance of the Creole women, the officials pledge that the statue will remain unharmed; they garland it with flowers and pile blooms at its feet in homage. Hearn ends his letter by evoking the enduring presence of the statue: “And she is still here,—always in the circle of the palms, always looking to Trois Islets, always beautiful and sweet as a young Creole maiden,—dreamy, gracious, loving,—with a smile that is like some faint, sweet memory of other days” (Hearn 1906, p. 419).

We might well wonder what the meaning of this story is. Why in 1887 is Hearn invested in a story about Martinican political turmoil around the time the Second French Empire collapsed? We might dispel immediately that the primary motivation is to tell Bisland accurate history. While the proclamation of the Third Republic in Martinique coincided with the Southern Insurrection of 1870, an insurgency that prominently involved women insurrectionists, there exists no corroboration for Hearn’s account of averted attempts at iconoclasm. Rather, the purpose of this narrative is to entertain, but also to explain through the manipulation of pathos.

Hearn had an abiding interest in representing decadent societies and explaining their origins. As Regenia Gagnier (2015) argues, Decadence is a critique that characterizes societal change as the “decline of economic, social, religious, political, ethnic, regional, and gendered traditions under the forces of modernization that disrupted numerous relations of part to whole” (p. 14). For white Creole elites who lived in the nineteenth-century plantation societies of the Caribbean, economic liberalization, industrialization, emancipation and the enfranchisement of people of African descent were developments that deranged long-cherished traditions of agrarianism, gentility and white supremacy. While for some these changes might constitute progress, for the plantocracy, they were decadence.

Hearn invites Bisland to comprehend the negative effects of colonial decadence by imagining herself as a near-victim of those effects. Yet in exposing the state of decadence, Hearn then has the stimulus to imagine how its effects might be mitigated or forestalled. In portraying the means through which the act of victimization is averted, he suggests that Creole women of color are an untapped resource in resisting the unwelcome disruptions of modernization.

The fall of the Second Empire and the unmentioned year of its occurrence 1870, is Hearn’s shorthand for the moment when Martinique’s decadence seemed to become irreversible. We can understand the logic informing this shorthand by adopting the point of view of Martinique’s white Creoles and considering the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789–1799) in the Antilles.

3. Creole Decadence

In the century after the Revolution, France and its Caribbean colonies were convulsed by a “chaotic succession of… constitutional monarchies, weak republics, and tumultuous empires” (Couti 2016, p. 22). Noting that the white Creoles of Martinique’s planter class, the békés, identified most with France’s aristocratic pre-revolutionary culture, historians have differed about which of these metropolitan regime changes had the most devastating significance for white Creole elites. For example, Couti argues that the failure of the Bourbon Restoration in 1830 was felt most traumatically because it signaled the impossibility of returning to the ancien regime (Couti 2016, p. 16). Others deem the advent of the Second Republic (1848–1852) most consequential since its egalitarian idealism led to the definitive abolition of slavery in the French colonies, thereby causing catastrophe for the socio-economic and ideological foundation of the plantocracy. For Hearn, however, the decadence, and hence despair, of white Creole civilization is most precipitated by the collapse of the Second Empire (1852–1870).

As Robert Stilling has discussed, the period following emancipation in the British and French Caribbean colonies was marked by emigration of white Creole planters from the region. The loss of enslaved labour and collapsing sugar prices due to factors including sugar beet competition and tariff removal made sugarcane plantations less profitable. Furthermore, concerns about genocidal reprisal and political domination by nonwhite majorities also made white Creoles uneasy about remaining in the Caribbean. Those that did remain adopted a siege mentality concerning the Black and mixed-race populations of the islands. Stilling (2015) argues that the ruined architecture became the visual signifier of the plantocracy’s decadence: “A landscape once depicted by nineteenth-century naturalists as a new tropical Eden became littered with the ruins of abandoned plantation houses, sugar mills and colonial forts” (p. 451). As Hearn (1888b) wrote about his cruise through the Caribbean, he drew on adjectives of structural ruin and abandonment to indicate his understanding of the decline of the entire region: “desolate,” “crumbling” “half-abandoned” and “full decadence” (p. 631).

While decadence was the condition of the whole Caribbean, Hearn focuses on how the emancipation of 1848 had circumscribed the prerogatives of the békés. He sympathetically expresses this several times in his Caribbean writings, but perhaps most succinctly and powerfully in an essay secured by Bisland for Cosmopolitan: “universal suffrage followed the donation of freedom, and the situation of the small white population became more and more difficult with each passing season. Hundreds of Creoles abandoned the country forever; for those who remained there was no hope but in cheerful acceptance of the new condition: all who could not bend to them were broken by them or forced to emigrate” (Hearn 1890, p. 170). Hearn exaggerates the békés’ disempowerment, but certainly the declared equality of the formerly enslaved was experienced as victimization by white Creoles. Biding their time until the Second Republic might collapse, they undermined the newly won rights of Martinique’s nonwhite population through increased policing and restrictions on mobility that would curtail their access to institutions of justice and render them reliant on the plantations to earn a living. Under Napoleon III’s regime, these reactionary efforts expanded to maximal effectiveness and were supported by the metropole; universal male suffrage was abolished, bolstering the authority of the békés in Martinique’s local government.

For the békés, the Second Empire ushered in a period of post-emancipation confidence. Indeed, one of the symbols of their relief was Gabriel Vital Dubray’s monument to Joséphine, the statue about which Hearn writes to Bisland. As Laurence Brown (2006) explains, when the monument’s first stone was laid in Fort-de-France in 1856, municipal officials presented the memorial explicitly as a sign that the social crisis triggered by emancipation had been overcome (p. 40). Referring to the “l’ouragan révolutionnaire de 1848” [revolutionary hurricane of 1848]—Fort-de-France’s mayor remarks “Ce ne fut qu’en 1852, quand le calme eut succédé à l’orage, que la tranquillité fut rétablie, sous le gouvernement réparateur de S. M. Napoléon III, … que l’œuvre reçut véritablement un commencement d’exécution” [it was only in 1852, when calm followed the storm, when tranquility was restored under the reparative government of H. M. Napoleon III that preparatory work for the monument could be commenced] (2006, p. 40). Brown (2006) astutely points out that the meteorological metaphor here allowed emancipation’s effects to be figured “as a tropical storm–intense, destructive, but also of limited duration” (p. 40). On the other hand, the monument suggested the durability of the plantocracy; it symbolized the “restoration of order, the revival of the colonial economy, and the celebration of the Second Empire” (Brown 2006, p. 46).

As Maeve McCusker (2021) has pointed out, the dismissal of 1848’s abolition “as a passing tempest, a temporary interruption in the ongoing narrative of white dominance [was] an act of profound denial” (p. 4). The succession of the Second Empire by the Third Republic (1870–1940) once more reversed the fortunes of white Creoles, restoring voting rights to Black and mixed-race Martinican men. It is during this era that Hearn visits Martinique, and the pessimism of the békés informs his reporting on the colony. He laments:

with the fall of Napoleon III, the war of caste hate reopened and the whites a second time found themselves crushed; crushed so hopelessly as to voluntarily abandon all part in politics. As a rule, the white creole of the city, the creole of the new generation, has no thought above commercialism and no object in life beyond the will to live. He lives according to the fashion of his fathers, inheriting their faults but not their fiery energy and pride; he usually complains of the domination of the colored race, but nevertheless has colored children.

(Hearn 1890, p. 170)

This is a portrait of Creole decadence. Defeated in the political realm by the Black and mixed-race man, the white Creole withdraws from public service and civic duty. He cares only about bourgeois profitmaking and the erotic pleasure he can find with Black and mixed-race women, even if the colored children he has with them further minoritizes his ethnoclass. He becomes a lesser son to formidable forefathers, listless where they were driven, inheriting negative traits, not positive qualities. Hearn suggests that the second loss of privilege the white Creoles suffer is all the more terrible because it came after a brief season of restored optimism: now as an ethnoclass, the békés are setback “hopelessly.” He continues: “No change of government, no change of masters for the island, no possible change in colonial policy, can now ever effect the re-establishment of any social distinctions solely based on blood origin: the day of such distinctions has passed for all the West-Indian colonies” (Hearn 1890, p. 172).

While the official discourse around the installation of Joséphine’s monument indicates the sculpture’s status as a reactionary signifier, to fully understand the artwork’s import we must consider the values associated with Joséphine specifically and we must question why Hearn insists that Bisland identify with the statue. Susan Millar Williams (1986) interprets Hearn’s romantic idealization of Bisland in his evocation of female flesh petrified and elevated as art (p. 696). Yet beyond hinting at his infatuation with his friend, Hearn’s placement of Bisland on a pedestal and his insistence on her resemblance to Joséphine should be seen as his invitation to her to identify with and adopt the symbolic positioning of the Empress.

For Martinique’s békés, commemorating bonds of moral obligation between their daughter-colony and its motherland became especially important in the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Jacqueline Couti (2016) argues that France’s loss of Saint-Domingue to its formerly enslaved population traumatized white Creoles in France’s remaining Caribbean territories, quelling their incipient anticolonial nationalism (p. 3). Perceiving that France’s enduring economic, political and military commitment to its colonists was vital for their continued subjection of the enslaved and free people of color, Martinique’s white Creoles petitioned for France’s solicitude by insisting upon their French identity and fealty to France (Couti 2016, p. 3). In the histories written by nineteenth-century Martinican Creole historians such as Sidney Daney and Etienne Rufz de Lavison, Joséphine embodied colonial loyalty. As Richard D. E. Burton (1993) notes, she was “the apotheosis of ‘creole’ (that is, white creole) grace and beauty, the ultrafeminine incarnation of all that was most ‘French’ about the French West Indies” (p. 76). In wedlock to Napoleon, she symbolized “the loving submission of the French West Indies to the phallic designs of patriarchal France, always providing, of course, that the patriarch promised to uphold the interests of her race and class” (Burton 1993, p. 76). Beyond serving as a gendered sign of loyalty, Joséphine was also a reminder of the contributions her island and ethno-class made to France’s glory. As abolitionism and Republican sentiment became more popular, Creoles were apt to be vilified and marginalized as embarrassing representatives of a pre-modern hierarchical order, like the degenerate aristocrats of the ancien regime. Yet Daney praises Joséphine as “cette Créole qui unit son sort à celui du plus grand héros que les siècles aient produit, et qui eut le mérite d’avoir encouragé sa gloire naissant” [that Creole who joined her lot with that of the greatest hero that the ages have produced, and who had the virtue of having fostered his burgeoning glory] (Daney 1846, p. xiv). As Couti (2016) notes, Daney’s “patriarchal discussion transforms women into realms of memory, reifying a particular vision of the past that insists on the strong connection between France and the French Antilles” (p. 117). Joséphine exemplifies how “women become monuments erected to the glory of their group and so help to establish the importance of Creole culture in world history” (Couti 2016, p. 117).

Hearn was certainly aware of the associations above but downplays the matrimonial aspects that underpin Joséphine’s ideological signification. Born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, and known in her girlhood simply as Rose, Joséphine became famous as Napoleon’s imperial consort under the pet name he bestowed upon her. However, when Hearn re-nominates her with the honorific “Mamzelle” and the diminutive “Zefine,” both of which evoke not French but an informal Creole, he suggests we look back to Rose’s roots; Joséphine’s value is not as the mature metropolitan wife she became, but as the Martinican maiden she once was. Framed by the racial contexts of post-emancipation Martinique, this retrospection can be understood as a political orientation, one materialized by the tropism of Joséphine’s monument not to France, but “toward emerald Trois Islets,” a bearing Hearn encourages Bisland to adopt. Josephine’s gaze towards Trois Islets, her birthplace, conveys her adult nostalgia for her childhood and thus her affective ties to her natal land, but because Trois Islets is also famously the site of her family’s plantation, this retrospection also commemorates and justifies the plantocratic social order before emancipation.

Considering the preceding historical context, we can see that Hearn is asking Bisland to imagine herself as an avatar of white supremacy at an apocalyptic moment when the values, institutions and culture that uphold racial hierarchy are violently threatened. We should not overlook the importance of gender to indicate the significance of that threat. As Mamzelle Zefine, Joséphine becomes “a young Creole maiden” not the twice-married, often unfaithful mother who nevertheless failed to bear the Emperor an heir. With this representation, Hearn is drawing on one of the earliest nineteenth century Creole literary discourses, that in which a young, unmarried and virginal white Creole woman “serves as a reference model for ideas of purity, virtue, victimhood and beauty” (Couti 2016, p. 14). As a potential victim of rape or physical aggression, the Creole maiden played an important symbolic role in articulating békés’ feelings of being persecuted by metropolitan Republicans or local people of color. For Bisland to imagine herself as “Mamzelle Josephine” is to experience herself as “a creolized site of conflict and conquest…a feminine contact zone” where she too could face decline and extinction depending on what culture comes to prevail (Couti 2016, p. 15).

By 1887, when Hearn visited Martinique, the attrition of traditional white authority that came along with the fall of the Second Empire and the rise of the Third Republic could not be reversed by ordinary political processes. Yet, in pinpointing the moment when that decadence settled in and by revisiting it creatively in narrative, Hearn makes it possible to salvage some resources for optimism from the inflection point he describes. While it might have been too late for Martinique’s white Creoles to free themselves from the decline that had taken hold, it did not mean their fate was without value to other Pan-American members of the formerly slave-holding classes who were adjusting to life in the wake of abolition. Bisland can stand for the members of that class.

As is clear from the denouement of Hearn’s narrative and the survival of the unscathed monument Hearn witnesses during his visit of Fort-de-France, the moment of crisis is averted. The survival raises the question of how we are to understand the heroic actions of the crowd of mixed-race women who avert the impending iconoclasm. What motivates them to act? What empowers them to be successful? What significance does their success have?

4. Creole Counter-Decadence and the Work of Decadent Conservatism

To appreciate the counterdecadent work that Hearn’s intervention in 1870 is doing, we must consider the significance of the statue of Joséphine in 1887, when Hearn first sees it. As I have discussed, when the monument’s first stone was laid in 1856 and when it was inaugurated in 1859, these commemorative acts hailed Joséphine as an “icon of local progress” who demonstrated how the crisis of emancipation had been resolved and béké authority restored (Brown 2006, p. 49). To effect this resolution, the memorial apotheosized Joséphine as a symbol of white Creoles’ centrality to French imperial glory and associated slavery with a “benevolent paternalism and black deference” (Brown 2006, p. 49). Yet by 1887, these commemorations of white Creole triumph seemed no longer credible, ironized by the expanded enfranchisement under the Third Republic and the increasing political activity of Martinique’s non-white men, especially those of mixed-race. Rather than project béké confidence, the monument might be seen to evoke all that had been lost to white Creoles since the collapse of the First and Second Empires. We might cast this dispossession as the irreversible decline of a tradition of racialized hierarchy in the name of modernization. The 1870 proclamation of the Third Republic marks the point when white Creoles had to accept their political environment was changed unalterably; they would never hold the same political dominance they had traditionally enjoyed.

Sympathizing with white Creoles over the waning of their authority, Hearn writes as if to assuage the confusion they experienced due to the abolition of their traditional prerogatives. His literary methods are adopted from the repertoire of Decadent conservatism. Decadent conservatives looked to institutions, worldviews and lives of the past “as a ballast against the disorientation of the modern” (Murray 2023, p. 2). Buffeted and disgusted by the sociocultural manifestations of modernity in the late nineteenth century, these figures valued the past as a “repository of experience, an archive of affect, a vault of values, [and] a storehouse of sanity” which they could employ to diagnose the present’s shortcomings, resist and assail progressive programs, strategize to live better in a decadent duration and envision futures that would surpass the fallen state of contemporary existence (Murray 2023, p. 22).

Decadent conservatives often experienced practices of modernization as a traumatic break in tradition, a feeling that all too suddenly shared practices, feelings, and values can no longer link living generations with those of the past or the future. The reparative work of Decadent conservatism was to bridge this rupture, assuring modernity’s discontents that the values of the past do not lie dead and unreachable beyond a chasm that separates modernity and premodernity. Rather, these virtues are immanent in the present, transmitted through time and culture as if borne by a river that sometimes disappears underground, but which may be brought to view.

In Hearn’s writing, the Decadent conservative strategy of temporal bridging is applied by positioning people of color, especially mixed-race women, as convoys of pre-modern value—values that are not subject to political contingency. Although to the békés, emancipated persons of African descent might ordinarily have seemed both symptoms and agents of a virulent modernity, Hearn casts Black and mixed-raced people as defenders of the traditions and regimes that most blatantly disenfranchised them. Given a chance to support the new order when the old order has been proclaimed dead, these defenders’ protective attentions to Joséphine’s monument refashion it not as a reminder of lost racial prestige, but as a sentimental testimony to the enduring rightness of plantocratic hierarchy. Accepting Hearn’s fictions as true, Elizabeth Bisland—and by extension, all later readers Hearn encourages to sympathize with the békés, could at least be comforted that the very survival of the statue attested to a rejection of Republicanism and the egalitarian progress it had forced on Martinique. Moreover, this repudiation was all the more powerful because it was made by the intended beneficiaries of the universalizing of rights.

The affective continuity Hearn seeks to demonstrate before and after the rise of the Third Republic is informed by the emotional investments of the plantation romance. To legitimize the virtue of the plantocratic order, even as the planter class loses power, Hearn must have the subordinates of that order demonstrate their love for that class, their loyalty to racial inequality, their willingness to mobilize against all who would attack the hierarchizing traditions and symbols of plantation society. In the scenario Hearn evokes, this mobilization requires countering an invasive and iconoclastic Republican fury with a righteous outrage that is fueled by a devotion to the master class.

As Linda M. Shires (1992) has demonstrated, from the late eighteenth century, in French and British conservative discourse about the French Revolution, the dangers of republican activism, especially that of women, are expressed by denigrating revolutionary collectives as “unnatural, whether depicted as maenad, bacchant, or fury” (p. 240). Throughout the nineteenth century, Victorian writers seized this antifeminist, antirevolutionary imagery to criticize popular challenges to hegemonic order; the revolutionary mob was linked with femininity, irrationality, madness, sublimity and emotional excess. These associations were drawn from classical discourse. As Yopie Prins (1999) writes, “maenadism in Greek myth was associated with more threatening forces of nature, beyond masculine control: [maenads were] a community of women with the power to create and destroy, dedicated not only to song and dance…but to darker acts of destruction like sparagmos and omophagia, rending apart a sacrificial animal and eating raw flesh” (p. 49).

Shires goes on to argue that gradually the signifier of the non-normative woman as maenad or fury “loses its connection with the particular historical and geographical events of the Revolution and, having attained the status of myth and symbol, becomes available for application to cultural situations which may bear only a slight resemblance to the original events” (1992, p. 240). Hearn is one of those who seizes the signifier of the maenad as it comes loose—his anti-iconoclastic anecdote is inflected by the conservative critique of fury discussed above but he inverts and transvalues the ideological associations customarily applied to antimonarchical female activists. His narrative begins by evoking the “Republican rage,” against symbols of the Second Empire; “like a magnetic current,” this “huge reaction” travels transatlantically from France to Martinique where it “[makes] itself felt” (Hearn 1906, p. 418). The rage orients colonial actors towards the events in the metropole, inspiring them to imitate the iconoclasm occurring there. But in violation of the conventions Shires discusses, this fury does not express itself through female or feminized bodies. Rather, its vessels are male: “Martinique politicians,” “Republican officials” and their workmen (Hearn 1906, p. 418). These men’s anti-imperial anger is repeatedly linked to symbolic violence against women. First, the fall of the Empire that they celebrate is signified by the decadent image of a prone woman—the Prussian victory over Napoleon III’s forces is described as France suffering the “iron heel of Germany on her throat” (Hearn 1906, p. 417). This image of the menaced female throat reoccurs when the colonial Republicans place a rope around the neck of the statue of Joséphine to pull it down.

Decadence spreads from mothercountry to colony through a model of gendered diffusionism. Yet if the decadent dangerousness of Republican zealotry and iconoclasm is figured as a symbolic threat to the memory of ”Mamzelle Zefine”, a white Creole, Hearn imagines an effective counter-response will come from a wrath that dwarfs and neutralizes this masculine zeal, the rage of Creoles of color, a Bonapartist “crowd of women,—mostly women who had been slaves,—quadroons, mulattoesses; the house-servants, the bonnes, the nurses and housekeepers of the old days” (Hearn 1906, p. 418).

We might well ask why these counterdecadent agents must be mixed-race Creole women. It is true that colorism often meant lighter-skinned enslaved people were chosen for domestic work, but Hearn’s insistence on the yellowness of the crowd is less a detail supporting verisimilitude than it is a reminder about what he values most in the systems of racial hierarchy that the women defend with their anti-iconoclastic stance. As we have seen from Hearn’s remarks on Louisiana Creole, he is fascinated by the culture and beings that arise from the contact of Africans and Europeans in the plantation societies of the New World. He is quick to describe the formation of Creole speech as “linguistic miscegenation,” quick to compare the patois itself to a “beautiful octoroon” (Hearn 1885, p. 27). Furthermore, of all New World societies, Hearn praises Martinique as the place where miscegenation achieves its most rarefied results. Surpassing New Orleans, Martinique’s capital has “a population of half-breeds, —the finest mixed race of the Antilles” (Hearn 1888a, p. 224). Yet Hearn seems to believe that without coercion and racial subordination, the pressures that generate and maintain Creole cultures would vanish; without them, the parent cultures cannot remain in productive contact. Recall the extinction of the “amber-tinted beauties” whom Hearn says could not survive “the fall of American feudalism” (Hearn 1885, p. 27). In having his collective of quadroons and mulatoesses stand against the Republicans, Hearn foregrounds not only the refined hybrid cultures most at risk if their racial egalitarianism should succeed, but also the hybrid quality that might have a singular prophylactic virtue against the agents of decadence. As Jennifer Yee reminds us “In France, fin-de-siecle fears of mixing and homogenization drew on Gobineau’s earlier theorization of métissage as the engine of universal decline that will lead to the eventual demise of humanity. Anxieties about degeneration resulting from racial hybridity saw it as a deviation from an assumed norm” (Yee 2022, p. 11). But as Robert J. C. Young demonstrates, especially in colonial contexts, there were those, such as Trollope, who went “so far as to advocate the advantages of racial amalgamation” (Robert J. C. Young 1995, p. 142). These thinkers, Hearn among them, saw hybrid types as combining the best traits of both their parent races, and emerging with adaptive capabilities superior to either. In some circumstances at least, creolized cultures and beings need not be mere passive registers through which social decline can be detected or vectors of degeneration. Instead, they could be agents uniquely equipped to bring about social stabilization, development or regeneration. In Hearn’s work, such agents are invariably feminized. Couti points out “the peculiarity of Hearn’s gendered and sexualized promotion of métissage” noting that while he praises the fille-de-couleur, he stereotypes the “homme-de-couleur as wicked and dangerous” (Couti 2016, pp. 145–46). When creolization and miscegenation occur positively in Hearn’s oeuvre, they are always linked to feminine nouns and adjectives.

Shires describes the operation of two concepts that operated to exclude women from exercising political power in the bourgeois public sphere: “the Rousseauistic ideal of republican motherhood and the cultural division of separate spheres aim to keep woman firmly in her domestic place” (p. 148). This is only the most basic account of the restrictions on women’s political agency. The struggle of nonwhite Martinican men to gain, retain or regain voting rights in the nineteenth century underscores race and colonial status as further exclusionary factors at play when we consider the political potential of the women Hearn portrays. Hearn describes their ties to the domestic sphere immediately; they were formerly enslaved workers who had been entrusted with the perpetuation of the Creole family and its home. Conceived solely in terms of their housekeeping and caregiving, they should have only a limited authority within a feminized, private domain.

Yet the effect of this restriction also seems to mean that these women have enormous amounts of political power in reserve, and once they leave the boundaries of the household, they can achieve significant effects in unusual ways precisely because they do not exercise power in the conventional ways expected in the masculinized bourgeois public sphere. The violent potential of this feminine mobility becomes evident when the integrity of Mamzelle Zefine and the white Creole maidenhood she represents are threatened. Defending the statue, the formerly enslaved domestic workers assemble in the public square, where their agency is displayed with shocking effectiveness.

The women’s efficacy partially results from their ability to manifest a political will so powerful and wild it can only be described by reference to nature. This rhetoric has a longstanding association with female figures of emotional excess. For example, looking to ancient Greece, Prins describes the maenad as transgressing the domestic boundary “into a domain culturally coded as ‘natural’ and ‘savage,’ a place outside the polis for the performance of sacrificial rites and ecstatic orgies that would seem to subvert the social order but also sustained it” (Prins 1999, p. 49). Hearn calls his quadroons and mulatoesses “a living sea,—a tide of angry yellow faces, above which flashed the lightning of cane-knives, axes, couteaux de boucher” (Hearn 1906, p. 418). Outside the home, as an undifferentiated, armed and surging collective in the town square, they embody the sublime power of the tempest over the ocean. Uncontrollable in the way the raging ocean is beyond mortal restraint, they threaten to bring chaos and unpredictability with their actions, and yet the disordered violence they threaten is in service of restoring the social order the radicals have disturbed.

It is important that the signifiers of women’s wrath are strongly associated with the specificity of Caribbean environments. Hearn presents Republican egalitarianism as a disruptive imposition of metropolitan, modernizing goals in the colonies. When Martinican Republicans uncritically adopt their European counterparts’ abstract, rage-inspired and iconoclastic commitment to racial equality throughout all French territories, they overlook how the traditions and nature of Martinique make it an inappropriate site for their radical social reforms. It is notable then, that as Hearn portrays his Creole women resisting ideological intrusion, the language with which he describes their defensive ire gains its impressionistic power by evoking things that signify the Antilles’ difference from France: the miscegenated population, Creole speech, the cane-fields, the sea, the hurricane.

In my preceding comments on the maenad, I have suggested that the association of nature’s sublimity with unrestrained anger explains a transgressive performance of gender Hearn wishes to appropriate. Yet as Valerie Loichot points out, for Hearn, environmental influences powerfully define race as well (Loichot 2011, p. 62). This makes sense when we recall the term “Creole” began as a place-dependent term, referring to people that were born in the New World to parents from the Old World. For Hearn, Martinique’s unique rainfall, climate, geology and other ecological aspects affected the Europeans and Africans who came to the island as well as their Creole offspring. As Loichot explains, these factors led to “a complete reshaping of the Creole being, not limited to a superficial change in skin color, but fully altering…physical, mental and moral characteristics” (Loichot 2011 p. 64). Consequently, the Creole “exists only in symbiosis with its natural element” (Loichot 2011, p. 64). Because of this symbiosis, as racialized women, Hearn’s protestors are presented as guardians of place—genii locorum, we might say. Their intersectional experience of race and gender enables them to advocate effectively for Antillean particularity because their femininity and racial hybridity are expressive of Martinique’s distinctive environmental influences. Furthermore, because of their close associations with nature, their angry defense of a symbol of social forms—plantocracy, imperialism—becomes cloaked in the characterization of a range of natural, and hence seemingly unquestionable, phenomena. To harbor Bonapartist sentiment is as natural as the lightning over the sea.

Shires argues that “figure of female fury never exists alone but gathers meaning as part of a cultural configuration including the mother as its other half and including feminized males” (p. 240). In Hearn’s account, we see this dyad of the feminized man and the raging woman, but it is not so much that this man becomes feminized by taking on feminine qualities, rather he loses masculine virtues, enduring symbolic castration. In their accusatory Creole, Hearn’s furies decry their cowardly adversaries—laches, pott’ons—and compare them to castrated roosters “Capons Republicans” (Hearn 1906, pp. 418–19). Their taunts show them capable of emasculating their enemies with sharp words as well as the cane knives and butcher knives they wield. But we see the most chilling threat of emasculation comes through the evocation of ritual dismemberment. Hearn writes “The man who should have dared to lay an evil finger upon Josephine that day would have been torn limb from limb in the public square” (Hearn 1906, p. 419). The reference here is to sparagmos, the ecstatic sacrifice of a creature by tearing it apart. Classical myth tells that in their Dionysian mania, maenads gained enough supernatural strength to dismember bulls and men with their bare hands. Commenting on one of the most famous mythic representations of sparagmos, the murder of Orpheus by the maenads, Catherine Maxwell comments that it is “heavily suggestive of a castration scene”; Orpheus is destroyed and “overwhelmed by the violent reassertion of female power” (Maxwell 2001, p. 22).

Yet, though I have been focusing here on the characteristics and capabilities of female rage as a tool to counter the masculine agents of modernity, we must remember that this is ultimately not the emotion Hearn is invested in. The basis for all this rage is love. Explaining the effect of Joséphine’s monument on the crowd, Hearn writes:

She must have seemed to that yellow population to live;—for each one she represented some young mistress, some petted child, some memory of the old colonial days. And all the love of the slave for the master—all the strange passionate senseless affection of the servant for the Creole family—was stirred to storm by the mere idea of the proposed desecration.

(Hearn 1906, p. 419)

Hearn appropriates revolutionary feminine rage to produce antimodern political effects, but he is sure to root that anger in extremely conservative forms of devotion: the masochistic love of the slave for the master, the self-abasing love of the (surrogate) mother for the child, and the submissive love of the servant for the family she serves. Some twenty years after emancipation, after the beginning of a new Republican era, Hearn insists there are powerful if incomprehensible reserves of nostalgia for the social order before emancipation and that these reserves can be used to challenge and transform contemporary life and politics.

Overwhelmed by the show of female rage, the Republican iconoclasts are frightened and foiled. Pledging not to harm the statue, the men are converted to its admirers. They twine crimson flowers about her “beautiful white throat” and pile them at her “white feet” (Hearn 1906, p. 419). Then the narrative leaps into the present: “And she is still here,—always in the circle of the palms, always looking to Trois Islets, always beautiful and sweet as a young Creole maiden—dreamy, gracious, loving—with a smile that is like some faint, sweet memory of other days” (Hearn 1906, p. 419).

The conclusion of the anecdote works hard to suggest a symbolic triumph of plantocratic values. True, the abolition of slavery and the restoration of full citizenship rights to men of color meant that békés could never enjoy the political dominance over Martinique’s non-white populations that they once held. But even though the Third Republic had ushered in an era of progress in race relations that white Creoles experienced as decadence, Hearn manages to suggest reasons for optimism amidst the diminished conditions they endured. Using the reality of Creole decadence as the creative inspiration for his counterfactual historical account, he revises the historical contexts that provide significance to the monument of Joséphine, the Creole-born Empress of France. Whereas the monument once seemed an ironic reminder of how white Creoles failed in their reactionary efforts to restrict the civil rights of Black and mixed-race Martinicans, Hearn’s anecdote makes the monument commemorate a moment when those non-white Martinicans embraced the reactionary iconology of the regime that disenfranchised them. Mixed-race Creole women become anti-modern agents in Hearn’s fantasy, vessels through which the racial traditions of the plantocracy survive into the present.