Secret History or the Horrors of St. Domingo Analysis

on a lower floorground History or the Horrors of St. Domingo AnalysisAnalysis of Leonora Sansays Secret History or, The Horrors of St. DomingoLeonora Sansays Secret History or, The Horrors of St. Domingo provides a ad hominem historic recital surrounding the Haitian Revolution. A manuscript in this manner send packing stretch forth historians a voice to elements of the Revolution that would otherwise be abstracted or silent when studying other writings of the period. The manifestos of the revolutionaries, writings of the predominate class and government/military documents often provide the primary coil materials for seek and historical text intensity however, it is the personal narrative that illuminates veritable moods and philosophies that so-and-so be overlooked or when emphasising the dates and names surrounding an event.Sansays narrative takes the structure of an epistolatory tonic, a apologue containing a series of letters, written by an Ameri stool, bloody shame, to her personal friend Aaron Burr, who at that time was the vice president of the United States. Mary traveled to Saint Domingue in 1802 with her sisters French husband, St. Louis, in hopes of salvaging an estate incapacitated during the early years of the Haitian Revolution. As a hugger-mugger history, the novel has its foundation in the dawdling relation broadcast among, Leonora Sansay, and Aaron Burr. Like the protagonist in the novel, Mary, Sansay was a close friend of Aaron Burr and like Marys fictional sister, Clara, Sansay was espouse to a French officer from Saint Domingue, Louis Sansay. Demonstrating that, the novel is generously ground on Leonora Sansays experience in Saint Domingue during the final years of the revolution, 1802-03.On the first reading, Sansays novel seems to give scarce attention to the devastating events of the Haitian revolution. The politics of race and colonial power, and the often horrific scenes of warfare that took endue during the very year s of the novels account are behind the scenes. Indeed, given Sansays weakness for descriptive accounts of, for instance, the innumerable lustres of chrystal and wreaths of natural flowers ornamented the ceiling and rose and orange trees, in full blossom (Sansay,74) transported aboard a French naval ship in the harbour of Saint Domingues Le Cap Franois to form the background of the Admirals ball, it would be easy to dismiss the novel and its characters as exemplary of an puritanic temperament. But it is this temperament of the French colonials that makes the document so interesting and important.Michael J. Drexlers institution to Sansays novel touches on how Secret History has been viewed in the past, and how these views changed with the scholar Joan Dayan. Dayans text Haiti, History and the Gods, was the first serious scholarly use of Sansays writings, for Dayan, the novel is both a social history of French decadence and a glance of trans-cultural, or trans-racial, mimicry, fan tasy, and desire (Sansay, 26). What this means is, the novel would seem to focus on the excesses of a French colonial regime that is wilfully removed from the liveliness and death brutalities of the colonial slave system that brought about the revolt occurring outside the doors of its gilded fantasy world of extravagance and indulgence. The question that arises, with the knowledge of the how the book has been overlooked in the past by other historians, is how would Sansays work be of use to a young historian?Having a fundamental dread of the concerns, causes and conclusion of the revolution in Haiti, assisted in a greater understanding of the novel. In Secret History the politics of French colonial warfare are displayed within the hidden, clandestine desires that flow through the characters. The secret history conjectures a structural relation between the public and the private each genre privileges a different pole as the primary location of meaning, but both foreground the nece ssary conflict and assent of one set of meanings upon the other. This understanding of the characters relations to each other and their purlieu sets a mirror upon the countrys complex interactions. Metaphorically, then, love is colonial warfare.However, the love plot of ground assumes more essentially violent dimensions when St. Louis imprisons Clara in their house curseening to devour her if she attempts to leave. When the armed forces of General Jean-Jacques Dessalines draw near Le Cap, Rochambeau takes advantage of the author to invite Clara to safety aboard a French vessel an offer she declines out of fear of incurring her husbands wrath. The more horrifying truth for Clara, than the soon-to-be-realized threat of the massacre of all the egg white residents of Le Cap by Dessalines inexorable revolutionary forces, is the menace of being murdered at the hands of her white husband. Yet colonial warfare ultimately offers Clara a surprising bunk route from her husband as Le C ap falls under siege, Mary writes, All the women are suffered to depart, but no man can procure a passport (Sansay,105). Mary and Clara are able aviate Saint Domingue and break away from from St. Louis by traveling to Cuba and later Jamaica in the company of other women displaced by the revolution and scattered across a colonial Caribbean landscape. The cruelty of patriarchy in the novel is clearly unified to that of colonialism and race politics, a pairing underscored by the formation of a quasi-utopic union of husbandless Creole women at the close of the novel.This novel does possess a certain amount of fictional material, just as any fictional historical narrative will, but there is not a wealth of biographic data available about Leonora Sansay. Michael Drexlers introduction to Secret History provides a useful and comprehensive account of Sansays career. The narrative itself provides quasi-autobiography of Sansay, which discerning historians will take care useful. On top of this, Sansay does grant her audience with a believable and completed backdrop. The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 and ended with the establishment of the first unaffectionate black republic in the west in 1804. During which time, French and Spanish troops, in a dizzying number of shifting alliances and oppositions, fought white Creole populations, discharge persons of color, and slave factions, vying for control of the country. By 1800, the black leader, Toussaint Louverture secured control of the island as a whole, but in 1801, the French General Leclerc, who was dispatched to Saint Domingue by nap to reassert French control, captured Toussaint and sent him to France. In Sansays novel, Mary and her sister amount in Le Cap Francais while Leclerc is in command and so basing her novel in a sound and accurate setting, proving valuable for scholars.At the outset of our examination of Secret Historywe discussed how a personal narrative can provide a unique voice to any historical event. The curtain raising sentence of Sansays epistolary novel outlines an antagonism between the life of the sensual body and that of the Haitian social bodyWe arrived safely in Saint Domingue aft(prenominal) a passage of forty days, during which I suffered horribly from sea-sickness, heat and travail but the society of my fellow-passengers was so agreeable that I often forgot the affect to which I was exposed (Sansay, 61).The reader can note the difference between the first half of the sentence, which describes the travails of a sea voyage of biblical length and duress, and the second half, which casually dismisses the pains of the flesh in favour of the pleasures of sociability. An unworthiness of empirical registers marks the opening of the novel, and while this incongruity asserts itself as slightly jarring initially, it becomes increasingly pronounced as the novel unfolds. Indeed, the contrast introduce within the opening sentence augments the intentional exaggerati on throughout the novel such, that within a few short pages we find scenes of bayoneted bodies intermingled with blushing glances exchange at balls in the colonial palaces of Saint Domingue. However exaggerated the text may seem it still opens a precious gem of information that cannot be overlooked or undervalued.