The Ethics of Social Life in Sidonie de la Houssaye’s Louisiana Tales

Abstract

Creole writer Sidonie de la Houssaye (1820–1894) registered the threat of anglophone dominance after the Civil War on behalf of a host of characters drawn from the geographies and ideologies in and around her home in Louisiana. Her little-known literary tales depict the period as a cultural and linguistic border zone. In addition to the texture of Louisiana French and Creole heritage, the tales depict the vexed social dynamics of prejudice and fragility. In the context of this special issue on good and evil, the poorly known children’s tales offer insight into these pernicious tensions that persisted under the surface of moral victory after the Civil War. La Houssaye’s lessons for children take up the moral panic of a Louisiana reckoning with its legacies of racial violence and cultural erasure. This article argues that morality in these tales takes shape in interpersonal practices that can be learned to heal social ills. What I have called La Houssaye’s “ethics of social life” relies on education rather than condemnation to redefine human bonds. If a broader lesson emerges from the stories taken together, it suggests that structural change is slow to heal cultural wounds. We must ourselves be the agents of a healthier community.

Louisiana was a cultural and linguistic border zone after the American Civil War when anglophone nationalism threatened the state’s Creole identity. No longer politically French after 1803, Louisiana saw its French-speaking community muted in the decades after the Union victory. While the Emancipation Proclamation abolished racial subjugation, English hegemony made white and black Creole communities linguistic outlaws in the United States. Against this threat of erasure, white Creole writer Sidonie de la Houssaye (1820–1894) took up the pen as a form of resistance. Her prolific output, 1870s–1890s, included tales, novellas, and novels, much of which remained unpublished in her lifetime. In addition to the texture of Louisiana French and Creole heritage, the tales depict the vexed social dynamics of prejudice and fragility. In the context of this special issue on good and evil, the poorly known tales written for her grandchildren offer insight into the pernicious tensions that persisted under the surface of moral victory after the Civil War. La Houssaye’s lessons for children take up the moral panic of a Louisiana reckoning with its legacies of racial violence and cultural erasure.

This article argues that the moral lessons in these tales are complex and take shape in interpersonal practices that must be learned to heal social ills. Drawing on material culture studies, decolonizing approaches to the fairy tale, and the ambiguity of the moralités in the classical French tales that influenced her, I argue that La Houssaye’s lessons for children take up the moral panic of a Louisiana reckoning with legacies of oppression and erasure. A sample tales illustrates that what I have called La Houssaye’s “ethics of social life” relies on education rather than condemnation to redefine social bonds.

1. Interpretative Contexts

Until the first decade of the twenty-first century, the tales La Houssaye wrote and dedicated to her grandchildren in the 1880s remained in manuscript form among her collected works in the libraries of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. La Houssaye’s first critical biographer, John Joseph Perret, was a mid-twentieth-century descendant whose treatment of the tales sealed their fate in obscurity for another half-century. Interpreting them through the prism of a persona drawn from private letters, he identified a “snobbish attitude which occasionally came to the surface”, particularly around the “genteel poor” (Perret 1966, p. 46), that rendered her stories about “racial tolerance” morally suspect (Perret 1966, p. 362). In 2007, Jonathan Vidrine, then a student in French Studies at LSU, published 11 of the manuscripts. His critical introduction to Contes d’une grand-mère louisianaise (Tales of a Louisiana Grandmother) does La Houssaye the service of textual interpretation but follows Perret to conclude that the tales are “profoundly moralizing” (Vidrine 2007, p. 23). Along with her “nineteenth-century” habit of direct address, he cites the narrator’s occasional claim to have witnessed the events of a tale “down to the smallest detail” [dans ses moindres détails] as another obstacle to her modern reception (Vidrine 2007, p. 24).1

A counterpoint to the characterization of La Houssaye as a moralist appears on the Éditions Tintamarre website, where publishers ascribe to the author a liberal purpose: “Antiracist and proto-feminist, de La Houssaye sought to inculcate in her young readers values that were threatened by southern conservatism, American capitalism, and crushing poverty”. [Anti-raciste et proto-féministe, de La Houssaye voulut transmettre à ses jeunes lecteurs des valeurs menacées par le conservatisme sudiste, le capitalisme américain et la brutalité de l’indigence.] (Les Éditions Tintamarre 2008). Neither of these authorial portraits, which share a generalizing tendency, springs readily from the texts. Indeed, the publisher’s choice of “inculcate” for transmettre, where they could have said “pass on” or “impart”, betrays alignment with Perret and Vidrine: the lessons delivered are clear and forced. As I and others have argued, literary tales navigate good and evil through poetics—allusion, metaphor, and irony—which rarely coalesce into a simple worldview (see Seifert 2000; Schacker and Jones 2012; Jones 2016b). Even vocatives and false truth claims—forms of self-referentiality—are standard features of literary tales that put the reader at a critical distance from the story’s action.2 La Houssay’s tales operate in this complex mode and deserve more poetic attention than they have received.3

In their sophistication, La Houssaye’s tales borrow formulae and tropes from European folk and fairy tales.4 They make direct allusion to Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales and Antoine Galland’s The Thousand and One Nights, and take inspiration from George Sand, whose long-form fairy tales were also addressed to her grandchildren. Like the classic tales in the French tradition, they are written in the literary tense (the passé simple) and their lexicon is rich with cultural materiality. Their dramas also unfold as human agency clashes with adverse power. However, in contrast to the work of the writers above, the threats in these stories do not come from magical realms or fantastical creatures. Instead, they take the form of everyday hardship and social strife. Even when domestic conflicts are inspired by moral crises, they have a mundane iterative quality that makes them relatable.

Indirectly, La Houssaye participates in the nineteenth-century trend to import and repurpose fairy tales. Like her Victorian counterparts in England, she adapted fairy tales by way of “creating and compiling national narratives” (Hillard 2014, p. 26). Repurposing European tropes offered La Houssaye a vehicle for self-reflection as a French Creole writing, just as they had provided nineteenth-century England with “opportunities for reflection on the oral Other, but also on the modern self, on the transformation of popular culture, on the nature of “Englishness” in the midst of rapid social, cultural, and technological change’ (Schacker 2003, p. 12). Finally, the real-seeming environments in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are a helpful corollary to La Houssaye’s familiar natural and social settings. His flawed, melancholic figures could be antecedents to La Houssaye’s protagonists. Misguided beliefs also cause them to perpetrate harm/self-harm and isolate them from others, making them vulnerable to suffering. Yet, in this case, once characters experience the perils of isolation, they have an opportunity to learn and cultivate community.5

Although La Houssaye’s critics have identified character transformation with moral didacticism, the fact that experiential learning relieves suffering does not necessarily imply moralism. On the contrary, when characters change, the tale’s resolution serves as a corrective to historic prejudice and disrupts the simple moral breakdown of inherent goodness and badness. In the sole study on the novella “Cinq Sous”, Nathan Brown credited La Houssaye with “establishing and then immediately challenging gender roles” (Brown 2015, p. 75), which creates the conditions for an ostensibly traditionalist story to promote “gender transgression” (p. 77). Similarly, I will argue that by embedding classism and racism in their plots, the tales do not reify those positions but rather “incorporate that which they aim to contest” (Hutcheon, quoted in Bacchilega 1997, p. 20). By writing stereotypes her readers knew and giving characters agency to challenge them, La Houssaye deploys what Cristina Bacchilega identifies as a postmodern strategy in contemporary tales, wherein history finds itself “de-naturalized and re-evaluated in the present as another made up story” (Bacchilega 1997, p. 20). The close readings of four tales below illustrate that while La Houssaye’s ethical arc bends toward justice, the plots still waver—sometimes skillfully, sometimes inelegantly—between ingrained prejudice and the vision of a fairer world. This wavering—the messiness of the narrative re-evaluation of history—results from the instability of moral panic even as it constitutes the way through it.

Before turning to those readings, I want to locate the seeds of this panic in two poetic texts that constitute front matter for the tales and were reproduced in the published collection: “Grandmother’s Flowers and Gems: Dedication to Violette” (Les Fleurs et Bijoux de la grand-mère: Dédicace à la Violette) and a brief encomium to the same, “Flowers and Gems” (Les Fleurs et Bijoux). Both short pieces allegorize the grandchildren as natural riches and directly address them as intended readers. The dedication laments hardships of the past and those yet to come, which center on abandonment: “Oh, my beloved angels! A time will come when, one by one, all the flowers in my bouquet will be ripped from my embrace…” [“Oh! Mes anges aimées!6 Un moment viendra, où l’une après l’autre toutes les fleurs de mon bouquet seront arrachées de mon sein…”] (p. 27). Grandmother muses that, God willing, she could defy fate and the cruelty of death by attaching them (Violette and Camélia, the dedicatees) to herself permanently with a “stunning diamond brooch” [splendide agrafe de diamant] (pp. 27–28).

The encomium to the flowers and gems portrays them as the essence of the grandmother’s happiness and wealth. Each one is described as more precious than the last. The passage ends on a somber note, shedding light on the Diamond’s symbolic role in the dedication: “The Diamond is a talisman, a precious amulet. When I cry, he consoles me, when I suffer, he is the cure. [...] Oh, if a diabolical hand ever tore him from me, you would see the poor grandmother hang her head and die” [Le Diamant est un talisman, une amulette précieuse. Quand je pleure, il me console, quand je souffre, il me guérit. {…} Oh! Si jamais une main sacrilège venait l’en arracher, on verrait la pauvre grand-mère courber sa tête et mourir!] (p. 31). While the dedication and encomium both announce a fearful cynicism about the endurance of love relationships, they prescribe a solution: stay close, stay connected.

Both short pieces are allegories in which the narrator’s notes in the manuscript pages identify each flower species and stone with one of La Houssaye’s grandchildren (Vidrine 2007, pp. 153–54). Together the allegories perform a role for this collection that is analogous to that played by Charles Perrault’s 1697 frontispiece and dedication for the Mother Goose tales, namely, intercalating an audience and justifying the composition of the tales based on their perspicacity.7

Indeed, throughout the published tales, diverse ‘brooches’ address challenges to the social fabric embodied by characters, often but not always very young, whose biases threaten their welfare and the welfare of others. Read through the allegory of the pin, justice is not as simple as discerning right from wrong or good from evil. Pins must also find ways to cling and sustain life, lest at any point they be torn asunder by a “diabolical hand” and extinguish it. There is urgency in the call: a body’s fate lies in the pins’ ability to resist, to choose connection again and again. Translated into the lifeworld of the tales, the allegory suggests an ethics of sociability: fate is made not sealed, trust builds through iteration, and choosing well takes fortitude that can be learned.

2. Brooches for Times of Chaos

The four tales taken up here illustrate social ills that follow from supremacist behaviors—from imperiousness to violence—and the various fasteners necessary to repair the damage they do to the social fabric. “A Rainy Day” (Un Jour de pluie) presents a frame story of housebound and inconsolable siblings to stage lessons in self-governance. In “Pistachio Man” (Bonhomme Pistache), the chance encounter of an alienated man and a penniless boy opens the former to the comfort of a chosen family. “The Little Soldiers” (Les Petits Soldats) levels Christian Humanism against the learned dehumanization that justified enslavement. Through the mediation of “An Old-Fashioned Doll” [Une Poupée d’autrefois], a young character confronts her internalized myths about indigeneity in North America.

2.1. A Rainy Day: Close Quarters, Loose Bonds

The first case study, “A Rainy Day”, presents family dynamics as learned behaviors and illustrates their fragility. This brief story takes a cue from the Renaissance conceit of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, whose would-be travelers are held up and tell stories to pass the time. In the tale, disappointed siblings find themselves trapped in the family playroom by inclement weather motivating the adults to devise ways to pass the time and stave off bickering and ennui. At the start of the story, three siblings eagerly prepare for a visit to their grandparents’ orchard. However, heavy rain traps them indoors. The delay is lamentable because they will miss the apple harvest and the chance to try the strawberry jelly their grandmother makes each year.

Several elements of the setting are worthy of note. The children have access to a family farm that is far enough away to require a drive. Details in the story suggest they spend the day there when they go and have learned the basics of orchard growing and harvest. They know that when apples ripen, they spoil if they remain too long on the trees, and the season for jelly lasts only as long as the stored jars.

Rather than demonstrate their maturity, this backdrop of knowledge instead serves to put their youth into high relief. The natural inevitability of seasonal rain does not suffice to quell the wailing and fussing that comes from frustrated anticipation. When they realize it is too inclement to drive to the farm, the children at first prove inconsolable. Not even the assurance that grandma will save the jelly for them suffices to distract them from the misery of canceling their trip. When the oldest sibling, Hélène, asks the real question on their minds, their age and lack of resilience come to the fore: “But, Aunt Marie, asked Hélène, what are we going to do all day?!” [Mais, tante, dit Hélène, qu’allons nous faire pendant cette longue journée!] (p. 50).

After setting the stage, the narrator turns the story over to the characters, intervening only to describe a gesture or movement the reader cannot otherwise see. Since dialogue structures the story’s logic and length, it unfolds as a one-act play whose diegetic temporality aligns with the act of reading it. Two adults enter the scene to manage the collapse of order and the children’s interpersonal dynamic. The first is the children’s Aunt Marie and the second is their father. Serving as a governess in their father’s absence, Aunt Marie suggests the games that occupy them and the narrative. Both games capitalize on the backdrop of knowledge the children exhibit even through their tears to draw them out of their funk.

In the first game, Marie sets up a storefront at a table in the room that offers fresh molasses candy for purchase with safety pins. The young clients easily collect a pocketful of currency from the various drawers in their bedroom, an activity that achieves immediate distraction from the day’s disappointment and dries their tears. They have only to approach the table with their pins to request a portion of candy. Newly flush with wealth and showcasing a personality trait that becomes important later in the tale, George requests two portions. But before anyone receives candy, a visitor to the house causes Marie to leave and the promise of satisfaction again to disappear. When panic floods back, a refined version of the question Hélène posed above sounds in unison: “Oh, God, what will we do without you?!” [Oh! Mon Dieu! qu’allons nous faire sans vous?] (p. 51). Absent the adult charisma that drove the action of the first game, the second one must instead set the children up to interact directly with each other.

Marie declares that they will play “children’s hospital” (aux enfants malades) and prescribes gendered roles: Hélène and Jane play mothers with ailing dolls and George plays the doctor (p. 51). Readers learn that their father, a physician, provides the model for this initiative and has schooled his children in the language of medicine. The group excels at acting in Marie’s absence because they know a host of diseases that can befall babies on the bayou and the remedies to address them. George begins by prodding the dolls, then launches into a Q&A with the mothers: Has your child had varicella? Chicken pox? Scarlet Fever? Measles? When the mothers answer yes to all, eliminating these culprits, he finds his diagnosis in the last malady he knows: Yellow Fever, curable by the remedy he has on hand, ‘mononia’. While the diseases are real-world, the antidote neologism does not come from medical history.

Editors suggest that the word may be a deformation of ammonia and share anecdotal evidence for the use of that chemical in medicine.8 Again, youth creeps into the children’s speech, reminding the reader that their adult dynamic is theatrical and announcing its breakdown in the next scene. At Marie’s behest, Jane had filled vials that George would eventually use as ‘mononia’ with lemonade. When he should be dispensing them, he instead decides to drink them all himself. His betrayal of the Hippocratic oath would have spoiled the game’s happy ending had the children’s father not entered the room with Aunt Marie. They arrive to announce that the rain has stopped, and the trip can happen. The children rejoice and Hélène offers the moral of the story: “We will know what to do on the next rainy day” [nous saurons que faire quand nous aurons encore un jour de pluie] (p. 53).

Ostensible lessons can be drawn from Hélène’s reflection: her aunt knows best, sweets mollify children, and games that mimic real-life situations are absorbing and pass the time. But if the rain had not stopped, the cycle of occupation and unrest could have continued all day. Youthful self-absorption prevents children from disciplining themselves for long periods in the ways adults have learned to do. Hélène’s moral insight might have continued, ‘that is, make a list of amusements long enough to fill the time so that when one loses our interest, we can move on to another one and hope no one breaks the rules’. Another way to read the end of the tale acknowledges the lesson’s ambiguity. Not unlike Charles Perrault’s moralités, which scholars construe as ambiguous at best and at worst in conflict with the tales, the lessons above are a loosely relevant addendum to the scene’s resolution.

The children’s pleasure is not a result of learning. Rather, it stems from the return of good weather, which means they can finally travel for apples and jelly. In the language of the narrator’s initial metaphor, “Huge clouds streaked across a dark sky […] There was also a storm in the children’s room […]” [De gros nuages couraient sur un ciel noir {…} Il y avait aussi de l’orage dans le nursery {…}] (p. 49). Moreover, the game ends with George betraying its rules to satisfy his sweet tooth, leaving nothing to suggest that these children could safely be left on their own without descending into boredom or conflict. Hélène’s remark to her aunt, offered as gratitude for her wisdom, may suggest a maturity her siblings lack. However, it does not necessarily resolve the scene’s ambiguous ending. If we allow the ambiguity to relieve the tale of the burden of portraying how good children learn, it offers an adult-facing theme: when things go wrong, even the most perspicacious children may fail to process their stormy emotions. Other tales, notably “Pistachio Man”, move their settings to the public sphere to amplify the intricacies—and fragilities—of filial dynamics.

2.2. Pistachio Man: Creating the Comfort of Home9

When family is taken from you, what constitutes your home? “Pistachio Man” addresses the social fractures that can result from chronic grief by borrowing the trope of doubling from traditional literary tales. In tales that feature this conceit, two characters, often siblings, embody right and wrong. In Perrault’s “Diamonds and Toads” (Les Fées), for example, a beautiful daughter speaks respectfully to the poorly dressed fairy she meets fetching water from a source while her sister, on the same mission to the same fountain, encounters a lavishly dressed fairy whom she treats with contempt. The fairies mete out reward and punishment accordingly: eloquence turns into gems that fall from the first sister’s mouth when she speaks while the other’s scorn emerges as vipers and toads. The plot dooms the ’wrong’ sister by presenting her with an opulent fairy (where she might theoretically have helped a beggar), but the sisters each represent a clear moral position with their bodies, demeanor, and speech.

La Houssaye’s story of two young boys named Jean, each of whom independently approaches Pistachio Man with a different motivation, resists that binary relationship. Jean the slightly older and Jean the very young do not embody moral contrast. One boy prepares the plot for the arrival of the other and, in the end, both contribute to the emotional reparation of Pistachio Man, whose name is Ignace Wilson. For his part, the old man standing in for the fairy presents himself similarly to both boys such that their fates need not diverge and can even intertwine with each other’s and align with the old man’s future. Doubling creates an opportunity for intrigue that extends the plot, as it would in a conventional tale. But with the binary trope triangulated, neither child needs to be disciplined or eliminated from society, and opportunities for forging bonds expand exponentially.

The tale is free to align good with hope and evil with despair in a way that does not graft easily onto an affluence–happiness/poverty–misery binary. Actions identifiable as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ intermingle ambiguously with loss and recovery. To establish ambiguity, the narrative leans, incidentally, on a violent racial stereotype. Ignace Wilson’s son left their Pennsylvania farm to seek his fortune out west and was killed, the title character explains, by “Indians”. This unnecessary detail racializes the cause of the loss while also framing white poverty as a consequence of it.10 In the absence of the husband/father, the son’s widow and son moved to New York but never sent word to Wilson, who eventually sold his land and moved north in the hopes of seeing his grandson again. After eight years, he has failed to locate him. Nonetheless, as in other tales in the collection, the stereotype does not credibly inform the plot. Like “A Rainy Day”, “Pistachio Man” explores conflict among racially and economically similar characters. It is the daughter-in-law’s silence and Wilson’s failure to overcome it that cause him to forsake the community. The reader meets him as an isolated man whose sole human interactions occur at his pistachio cart.

As the first scene demonstrates, Wilson treats even those precious moments as transactional. A penniless, inventive child, identified at first by the narrator as “little boy” and “our child” [petit garçon, notre gamin], engages the pistachio street vendor in conversation on Christmas morning (p. 115). His immediate and ostensible goal is to acquire a frugal holiday meal for himself. He does not beg because he intends to pay for the pistachios by bartering with a tattered stamp worth USD 0.1 for a pound of pistachios that cost USD 0.12. His logic is sound: sell them to me for a little less because it is Christmas, and this meal will allow me to celebrate the holiday. The old man flatly refuses, arguing that the stamp is too worn to still hold value and he does not celebrate Christmas. As the boy bargains unsuccessfully, it becomes evident that the vendor, not the street-dwelling child, is the miserable one, and a relationship grows out of that acknowledgment.

When bartering fails, the tactic changes. Rebuff after rebuff, the boy plies the goodwill of “Papa Pistachio” [Père Pistache], as he is known in the neighborhood, which has the effect of drawing the vendor out. “Wish I was you, Papa Pistachio…I’d eat at least 3 bags of my pistachios [at Christmas]” [J’voudrais être à votre place père Pistache {…} je mangerais au moins trois pintes de mes pistaches] (pp. 115–16). The old man has no teeth and has stopped eating them years ago. “Then, asked the child, whataya like Papa Pistachio? … Do you like Christmas Day?” [Alors, demanda le gamin, qu’esque vous aimez père Pistache … aimez-vous le jour de Noël?]. He does not like Christmas anymore and does not want to think about the reason why or talk about the past at all. Finally, the man attempts to end the dialogue: “Go away, kid, and don’t come around reminding me of the past”. [Mais va-t-en enfant, ne viens pas me rappeler le passé]. But the child persists: “Wha- happened in the past that was so good, Papa Pistachio […]” [Qu’esqu’il y avait de si beau dans votre passé, père Pistache {…}] (p. 116). This push opens the door to a flood of memories, weakening the man’s resolve, and he tells his story.

At this point in the narrative, the older man has softened but is not yet ready to effectuate the commercial transaction, a ready metaphor for his unwillingness to entertain genuine dialogue. On this day, he has met his match in a tenacious child who insists on forging this bond: he offers to help the man find his grandson and then inadvertently reveals a personal detail that will earn him his pistachios for free: his name is Jean Durand. Still, the surge of humanity that causes Ignace to respond to this coincidence does not constitute an exchange, for he tells Jean to throw his valueless stamp in the street drain—the pistachios are a gift. Instead of fostering a true connection, the act of kindness only reinforces their competing narratives. The scene ends with Ignace declaring to himself that he wants to die.

The narrator identifies the second boy, younger and more raggedly clothed than the first, as an orphan. He is possessed of the same stamp, having fished it from the drain. More exacting in his diet, this child asks for 5 cents worth of pistachios and change, which he intends to spend on molasses candy. The conversation is also sweeter, as the orphan encounters an emotionally available vendor who chuckles when he sees the stamp again and converses with the boy. This time, the questions come from Ignace and recall those he might have asked of his grandson on Christmases past: “Has the good Lord been good to you? Is there anything you should thank him for?” [Est-ce que le bon Dieu et bon pour vous? Est-ce que vous devez le remercier pour quelque chose] (p. 118). The child responds that, yes, he has had two strokes of good luck already on Christmas, finding the stamp and receiving an invitation to a dinner for which he hopes to feel and look good.

Their amicable exchange nearly ends when the elder again refuses to accept the stamp, having rejected the last boy that tried to use it, and shares that he only gives pistachios to boys named Jean. When this child claims his name is also Jean, the man dismisses it as a lie until the boy produces from his pocket a personalized ticket required for the Christmas dinner at the local mission. It bears the name Jean Wilson and identifies the child as Ignace’s grandson. Upon this revelation, Pistachio Man’s surprise causes him to drop the ticket, which the wind sends aloft and the boy chases at a speed the man cannot match. Having found his grandson for an instant, the seller again returns alone to his cart. Pistachios are his economic livelihood but the cart also serves as a site of narrative hope and potential. Like the stamp and the ticket for the children, the cart plays that role for him.

If, according to the structure of the sibling plot, Pistachio Man occupies the position of the fairy who receives the two supplicants, La Houssaye’s rendition puts Durand in charge of enchantment and magic or, in this case, small miracles. Having arrived in the story with a common, if independent, predicament, Jean Durand and Jean Wilson find themselves on the same path forward, thanks to Durand’s ingenuity. With the expertise of having lived in the shoes and developed the habits of “street urchins” (les Arabes des rues)11, as the narrator calls them, he pledges to find Jean Wilson. The task proves straightforward when the reader learns that for children on the street in New York, Central Park’s Lake provides free-range, free-of-charge entertainment in the form of animal watching. There he finds his grandson Jean, his “Jeannot”, who returns with him to a Christmas dinner and reconstituted family at Ignace Wilson’s home.

The word pistachio appears 45 times in the narrative, serving various roles—as a name, a commodity, and a sought-after Christmas treat. In the opening sentence, Jean Durand conflates merchant and merchandise in the neighborhood honorific Papa Pistachio, which turns the food and source of income Ignace takes for granted into his identity. Pairing it with ‘papa’ hints at the fact that the dialogues around the purchase of pistachios will return Jeannot to Ignace an orphan and thus prescribe for him a paternal function in the child’s life. The pistachio seed further becomes precious through the eyes of the Jeans, who are hungry and seek both to satisfy their appetites and to conjure Christmas out of an otherwise ordinary day on the street. Their persistence through engaged dialogue breaks a wall of silence and creates the conditions for filial bonds to restitch tattered threads of loss. Finally, with Ignace becoming a father to Jeannot and Jean Durand, notably giving them food and shelter, the seed of hope that drove the boys to his pistachio cart germinates into a family tree.

If the above tales explore the strategies of children in search of guidance and a parental figure, the two below pit the learned behaviors of children against the power of adults to teach them. In these longer narratives, there is more time to develop the non-instinctual, cultural patterns into which children fall or are seduced quickly. Each in its way explores the way socially sanctioned racism becomes inculcated outside the home and the struggle of parental figures to remediate it before it carries their progeny into a hate-filled adulthood.

2.3. Little Soldiers: Spirit of Virtue Against State of Violence

“Little Soldiers” is the story of children playing at war as a game under the ruthless authority of one boy with power and no restraint. Unique in the collection, it borrows a trope from nineteenth-century French art and lore and sets it in antebellum Louisiana. I have traced the source of this story to an obscure French tale about a bully who plays at war to terrorize his friends: “Le Petit Tyran Corrigé” (The Little Tyrant’s Punishment) by Tonin Castellan.12 Little is known about this author, the story’s composition, or how La Houssaye came to know it, but Castellan’s tale has a broader artistic context that will be instrumental here in understanding how and why La Houssaye alters the tale’s moral denouement for her audience: the theme of child soldiers in French art.13

In the years of the Napoleonic empire at the beginning and middle of the century, artists and engravers in France memorialized children enacting the martial rites of liberty: flag-waving, sword-wielding, and drum beating. Three such depictions illustrate the commonplace, even playful, tenor of the trope in a country for which revolt and restoration had become a way of life. Martin Drölling and Louis-Léopold Boilly both painted a version of “Les Petits Soldats” in the early years of the First Empire. Drölling’s children are dressed simply, focus on each other, and carry a pike (Drölling n.d.). Boilly’s are affluently dressed, hold real-seeming guns, and meet the artist’s eyes directly (Boilly 1804). Though the images differ in class and style, they share a symbol of French heritage popularized during the Revolution: the military snare drum. In both images, children carry the accouterments of combat, but their drum signals that they are defenders rather than aggressors, and their calm, Romantic faces embody the gentility of the game.

Similarly in 1853, Alphonse Longueville composed music for a children’s quadrille also entitled “Les Petits Soldats”. The illustrator who created the lithograph advertisement for the music, A. Forget, depicts the war game for which the quadrille is named. These elaborately disguised children represent two sides of the conflict. Imperial forces look the part waving banners in a drako helmet and ensconced in an elaborate horse costume while the revolutionary centerpiece of the image is identifiable by his makeshift hat, sword and shield, musketeer boots, and commedia dell’arte pose. French images of little soldiers consistently focus on the theme of revolution. Unwitting subjects in revolt could be described as childlike in their fight with power in that they are less organized, less experienced, and amateur in their resistance. Yet, for all the clarity of the roles their costumes depict to associate them with opposite sides of a political struggle, the children ultimately fight others who look like them. White French heritage is on allegorical display fighting itself for the soul of the nation. “Les petits soldats” images elide the racial realities of French global imperialism and the aftermath of outlawed slavery (Forget 1853).

La Houssaye’s tale transports the improvised dynamics of battle from the Continent into one of the most hotly contested territories of imperial conquest, the Americas, and its then 300-year-old racialized context of slavery.14 It is set on a plantation in Louisiana where black and white children play together. The only thing the children in this story have in common is their language. The young protagonist, Gustave, is first introduced in racially charged terms that align his beauty with his disposition: an only son of a doting mother, blond, blue-eyed, and happy, spending summers eating sugar cane at his mother’s plantation, Green Oaks in Attakapas Parish (or county).15 This is a context La Houssaye knew well, having grown up on a plantation worked by people her parents enslaved. Gustave could well be an avatar of a child the author knew or perhaps even herself. Against the backdrop of European tales’ “implicit politics of race”, often encoded in imagined territories and animal avatars (Lau 2016, p. 145), racialized human characters lay ideology bare.

Plantation life belies the brief description of Gustave as the sort of cherubic, healthy boy of petits soldats art. His mates are the progeny of enslaved adults who work the Green Oaks plantation. The only child who is white and free, Gustave plays with boys who have no rights in his country or on his land, making their power dynamics in life inexorably distorted and violent. On the morning that opens the story, Gustave declares that they must all play the eponymous game, his favorite—”war, or rather, mobilization” [la guerre, ou plutôt, les préparatifs de guerre] (p. 35)—with him at the helm. Playing war on a plantation is not a hypothetical re-enactment but an extension of the legal right of a child to own another in antebellum Louisiana. The story’s use of this trope, set against the reality of white supremacy and Black subjugation, creates moral tension; in this game, the rules are already written.

When Gustave demands the obeisance of his corps of “little negros” (petits nègres), they address him with the same title they and their parents are forced to use with him every day: “little master” (petit maître). They are named for a racial identity forced upon them and he bears a social title that, like a performative, confers privilege. When he commands and they do what he commands, they are all playing roles the state has assigned to them at birth. Nonetheless, in the redundant moment of domination-as-pastime that unfolds in the tale, Gustave gives himself the role of Captain to train the other children for a mock battle. Two of the soldiers in the game, the brothers Bob and Adam, have a status above their peers. Bob plays Lieutenant and Adam is tasked with making sure their dog, Malotru (Bumpkin) does not interrupt the action.

The narrator opens the tale by clarifying that within the context of chattel slavery, “poor black people” always suffered the rights of white people to own and abuse them, but masters could be cruel or generous. Granting masters the power of moral choice within an immoral frame offers a backdrop for the story. Through military maneuvers orchestrated by commands to halt and turn to the right, the reader watches Gustave exert his birthright over Bob and Adam’s bodies. In response, Bob and Adam move reluctantly and inevitably fail to satisfy Gustave. Screams of “Imbeciles!” and “Oafs!” [Imbéciles, Butors] foreshadow Gustave using his own body to discipline them (p. 36). Punches and kicks soon rain down on Bob, surely not for the first time, and he cries out in audible pain. Gustave operates like a bad master, choosing cruelty over clemency, because he can.

Madame Delavaine, who has been witness to the scene and remained silent during the ostensibly playful beginning of the game, interrupts the physical violence with moral indignation. Beating his friends is “very bad” and “signals an evil heart” [bien mal, dénote un mauvais coeur] (p. 37). Gustave argues that Bob botched the commands and had to be beaten to obey, then articulates a moral stance that sends his mother into a rage: “The little negros my ‘friends’, Mom? As if! They are my slaves…” [Ces petits nègres, mes amis, Maman. Allons donc! Ce sont mes esclaves.] (p. 37). Delavaine’s anger at her son crescendos during a monologue where she invokes God to position her late husband and herself as a moral compass against slavery as an institution predicated on violence and dehumanization. If fate (le ciel) made these children your slaves, she tells Gustave, God made men equal and it is your responsibility to protect them, not martyr them with beatings (p. 39). The choice of martyrdom to name what her son does to his fellow boys evokes the virtue of resistance in petits soldats imagery with a twist. Although Gustave is the central figure in the story, Bob and Adam, their bruised black bodies, are the celebrated figures of resistance on the side of justice and righteous revolt.

The fact that Gustave is on the wrong side of justice at the tender age of 8 bodes dangerously for his future. Tyrants cannot be gentlemen (honnêtes hommes), his mother declares, “[…] they will run from you as they run from wicked animals, and you will not have a friend in the world” [{…} on vous fuira comme on fuit un méchant animal et vous n’aurez pas un ami dans le monde.] (p. 39). Moved only superficially by his mother’s anger, Gustave inadvertently puts this theory to the test. Unable to assemble his army—all but Bob and Adam having abandoned him in his violent games—Gustave spies the gardener’s skiff and hatches the game of sailor. In this scene, Bob attempts to save Gustave, who cannot swim, from himself (a role that foreshadows the story’s end). Gustave insists that the three boys and Malotru take the boat across the water in search of blackberries despite the mortal danger. When it inevitably capsizes just before they reach the opposite shore, Bob swims ably back and Malotru drags Adam back across the water, leaving Gustave by himself. As night falls, he screams for help. A boy back on the plantation—one of his petits soldats—hears him but decides to leave him there, reminding him of his tyrannical beatings and noting that he got what he deserved (p. 46). This assertion of agency on the part of an enslaved child reifies the moral code Madame Delavaine sketched out for her son: they are equal in the eyes of God and morally responsible for their actions.

In a brief epilogue, the narrator explains that having been rescued from his plight as a “little castaway” (petit naufragé), Gustave changed his ways, and years later, he and Bob remained friends. Gustave’s growth embodies the commonplace ethics of classic fairy tales: what goes around comes around, and wise rulers use power responsibly. None of that would be incompatible with Gustave growing into his slave-owning father. But the dynamic of their racialized relationship has changed. Bob now serves as Gustave’s “personal servant” (domestique de confiance). Nominally, Bob had been identified by the term petit nègre. As in petit soldat, the word ‘little’ refers to age, but paired with ‘negro’ it functions as a tool of structural racism. Passing from the moniker nègre to domestique, named not for his race but for his position in the social hierarchy, Bob emerges as the legendary petit soldat of liberty for which the tale is named. The end of the story signals Bob’s passage to freedom through emancipation when the abolition of white tyranny as a legal political practice enforced Madame Delavaine’s social ethics on the national stage.

One of two exceptionally long tales in the collection again takes up race, focusing on the dangers of weaponizing history to distort the present. While the sphere ultimately remains domestic, the tensions in the next tale arise out of cultural fault lines on an international map.

2.4. An Old-Fashioned Doll: Solidarity Against Supremacy

In place of the east–west contrast exploited by “Pistachio Man” and the binary racial dynamic of “The Little Soldiers”, “An Old-Fashioned Doll” juxtaposes conflicting visions of the European/Indigenous relationships in the United States and Canada. While it engages both lands as sites of usurpation and ethnic struggle, it holds Canada up as an instance of intercultural survival against the U.S.’s intercultural failure. The tale begins in the city of New York and unfolds in rural Quebec, territories of the Iroquoian and Algonquian nations, respectively, before Jacques Cartier mapped them in 1535 for French settlement along the St. Lawrence River. The violent European expansion across the North American territories is the backdrop of the tale, evoked materially in the shape of old dolls and existentially in interpersonal relationships. A family of women of French descent—a Canadian mother and daughter, and the third generation, who was born French American—forge real and imaginary relationships with an Iroquois trader. Through these bonds, the tale claims Christianity as a salve for the violent past and the condition of an amicable present between Indigenous tribal members and French settlers. It also exposes the enduring mythology of Indigenous violence in the United States as an effect of cultural ignorance and the erasure of America’s multicultural past through myth-making.

While “An Old-Fashioned Doll” denounces white supremacy in much the same way as “Little Soldiers”, it directly addresses the enforcement of systemic racism through childhood education. Like Gustave, Aimée (Beloved) is described in fairy-tale terms in the opening lines of the tale: blue-eyed with a button nose and curly blond hair cascading down to her waist. Like Gustave, at the tender age of 6, she has already internalized racial bias. Unlike Gustave, whose parents have attempted to contravene the supremacist mythologies he has absorbed from his environment, Aimée has learned her bias directly from a father figure. Two material possessions that embody the world as she knows it: her favorite doll, Évangéline, which has been imported from France, and a book purporting to recount the present violence of Indigenous tribes against Europeans, both given to her by her godfather.

By the time we meet Aimée, her perspective has been shaped by the influence of her doll and the book. Évangéline has arrived in her life with a trunkful of garments fit for a Parisian soirée that has taught her how women should look and dress. She models her suitcase after the doll’s when she packs. The godfather supplements the book of violence against settlers with anecdotes of his own about present-day threats that leave the child terrified to encounter an Indigenous American. Like Gustave, she must be brought out of her distorted comfort zone to experience the world another way, but because that zone has paternal oversight, her journey must take her farther from her lived reality than Gustave’s trip to the shore across the river. Aimée has never left New York and the narrative sends her abroad. While ostensibly foreign to her, the culture that awaits her is the childhood environment of her mother and her ancestral French–Canadian heritage.

The diegetic lessons above open with the tale’s narrator, who offers a morally charged three-sentence summation of Native Canadian culture:

It is true that there are a lot of Indians in Canada, but the bad ones are gone. Those who remain today are generally civil and have all adopted the Christian faith. Some among these Indians continue to wear the dress of their ancestors; they tend to live nomadically and hunt for a living, selling the fruits of their labor door to door.

[En effet, il y a beaucoup d’Indiens au Canada, mais, les méchants n’existent plus. Ceux qui restent sont plus ou moins civilisés et tous ont adopté la religion chrétienne. Parmi ces Indiens, cependant, il s’en trouve qui ont conservé le costume de leurs ancêtres; ceux-ci, pour la plupart, sont nomades et vivent de leur chasse dont il vont vendre le produit de maison en maison.] (p. 57)

The teller puts the real and present danger peddled by the godfather of violence against Americans and Canadians of European descent at a temporal remove with back-handed racist mythology. By invoking the then-reigning stereotype of native violence, which has endured far beyond the nineteenth century in American culture, the plot positions itself to shift the reader’s focus away from the past and toward the future. If the depiction of forced acculturation, conversion, and displacement—settler violence that purported to eliminate the threat of Indigenous violence—as a gentle adaptation to a more ethical way of life exacerbates one stereotype of settlement, the depiction also challenges the Doctrine of Discovery: Indigenous ancestry pre-exists French Canada and Indigenous communities are not of the past or continental West; they are neighbors. With the premise of present safety in place, the action of the story proceeds to upend the force of the negative stereotypes it invokes.

The nostalgic title, “An Old-Fashioned Doll”, directs attention to the action in the latter half of the story, which takes place in her grandmother’s Quebecois farmhouse, where Aimée finds an old doll in the attic. This setting ensures that not only the doll but indeed everything about the décor feels old-fashioned from Aimée’s perspective. Literarily, it is an opportunity for the narrator to name a dozen architectural, technical, and decorative elements with which young readers might not be familiar. In terms of temporality, the past appears through a child’s eyes as the composite of all time before her consciousness, undifferentiated and therefore ahistorical. Materially, the doll puts the past into Aimée’s hands, forcing her to contend with stories told by her godfather that continue to frighten her in the present.

This reckoning takes place once Aimée makes the climb up to the farmhouse attic, an adventure forbidden by her mother, who distrusts her on the rickety staircase. Enchanted by the dusty stockpile of forgotten things and sure of finding “Aladdin’s Lamp” [la lampe d’Aladin] (p. 59) she stumbles upon an old chest of drawers with a key left in one of them. Intrigued by the forbidden like the wife of Blue Beard, to whom the narrator compares her (p. 56), she turns the key. While she is not greeted by the corpses of past wives, as happens in Perrault’s tale (Jones 2016a, p. 122), Aimée nonetheless finds herself thrust into the past when she pulls the drawer open: a wardrobe that she recognizes as old-fashioned and haunted with meaning tumbles out revealing a corps of sorts. Below the garments, mummified with fabric and pins, she finds a comely doll made of turned wood. She bears little resemblance to the well-appointed Évangéline, with a painted face and dressed in a frock. The doll’s foreignness gives her power over Aimée, who regards her with fascination.

That fascination, in turn, endows the doll with a name, Hilda, and a biography, when slumber overcomes Aimée. From the titillating stress of disobeying her mother and the excitement of the unexpected find, she falls asleep and dreams a tale of Hilda’s past occasioned by her rustic look. The dream animates Évangéline with a voice to initiate a dialogue with Hilda. Doll to doll, they swap stories about their immigration travels to North America from France and Holland, respectively, with increasing hostility. Hilda, now 60, has made the 66-day voyage across the Atlantic in her youth. Made of wood and sold without clothing, she cost USD 1 and remembers traveling by horseback. As a young adult, judging from her accessories, the wax-headed Évangéline has sped across the ocean from France in a mere 6 days and, upon arrival, traveled by locomotive. Already outfitted with dresses, jewelry, a parasol, and a fan, her price is USD 5 (p. 61).

Évangéline is the product of modernity, has the material upper hand, and uses it to establish herself as superior in every way. Setting up this contrast prepares the plot and the haughty doll for a reversal of fortune. It comes when Hilda’s tale of rural life in America steals the fire and strikes fear in the Parisian and her dreaming girl. She describes a violent night on the prairie when her human family was brutally attacked by Indians, bringing to life the stereotypes Aimée absorbed through her godfather and the print material he gifted to her.

Oh, horror! We watched as that door fell to the floor and terrifying savages rushed into the cabin, shrieking and brandishing tomahawks. One of them grabbed my mistress by her long hair, no doubt to scalp her, and another raised his tomahawk over my master’s head. Just then, the alarm bells rang suddenly, ‘ding, dong, dong, ding’ sounding through the darkness of the night, and…

[oh! horreur! nous vîmes tomber cette porte et d’horribles sauvages se précipitèrent dans la cabane en poussant des cris affreux et en brandissant leurs tomahawks. L’un d’eux saisit ma maîtresse par ses longs cheveux, pour la scalper sans doute; un autre levait son tomahawk sur la tête du maître quand la cloche d’alarme: ding, dong, dong, ding résonna tout à coup au milieu de la nuit, et…] (p. 64)

An onomatopoeia wakes Aimée up from the dream, but not from the fear, until her grandmother, into whose arms she runs, assures her that the scene of violence was a nightmare with no connection to life on the farm.

Among other allegorical roles that they play in the tale, the dolls are dream-state avatars for the grandmother and Aimée, but their stories invert the ideologies of their human counterparts: the grandmother, who is of the age to have lived the purportedly violent history Hilda describes, has had no such experience, and indeed welcomes a native trapper with whom she trades into her home for lunch at the beginning of the story (p. 57). Aimée, who projects onto Évangéline her naïve sophistication, suffers delusions under the specter of the godfather, who is himself the dangerous force he projects onto Indians. The grandchild, in turn, projects his American racism onto rural Canada.

There is another layer of confusion here: dream-state Hilda, who lives in Canada, is Dutch, the culture that colonized, as New Amsterdam, land that became New York, Aimée’s home. Évangéline, who lives in America, is French, the culture that colonized Canada, the grandmother’s home. Those cultural parallels of France/New York and Holland/Quebec do not align historically. Moreover, Aimée’s dream locates rusticity and trauma in the old world and fashionable ease in modernity, although at the time of the narrative, the grandmother’s old-world Quebec enjoys intercultural exchange while the godfather’s modern America remains a site of intercultural violence. These complications speak to the tension—often present in French fairy tales—between the ostensible ‘moral of the story’ and the unresolved contradictions in the poetics of interpersonal relationships that create the diegetic life world. Here, too, the reader is invited to hear in the narrator an antiquated and unnecessary recognition of the godfather’s mythologies as historic phenomena. Neither of those voices speaks as loudly as the domestic setting of the story, in which actors of Indigenous and European descent blend modern and old-world habits to knit mutual respect from the threads of a violent history...

3. Conclusion

La Houssaye’s tales of Creole social life, set in a white world grappling with the consequences of its actions, seek to reimagine, mend, and rebuild fractured relationships. Conflict corrodes every layer of society—family bonds, generational ties, social systems, and intercultural relationships. In communities torn apart by a tearful tantrum, isolation, violence, and pseudohistory, each narrative proposes to its protagonist(s) a restorative thread commensurate with the age and depth of the tear to mend their lives and communities. Often, these threads are kept and offered by women to challenge ideologies handed down by American patriarchy. Therein lies a resonance with the linguistic motivations of the stories: to preserve French against anglophone dominance. That reparation occurs among or through children in the tales mitigates their didacticism to argue for the urgency of unlearning supremacy and America’s potential to learn the iterative habits of pluralism. If a broader lesson emerges from the stories taken together, it suggests that structural change is slow to heal cultural wounds. We must ourselves be the agents of a healthier community.