Cable’s first novel, it
won him immediate success, including a speaking tour with Samuel Clemens. It was first serialized in Scribner’s from November 1879 to October
1880. However, as popular tastes moved
to realism and naturalism, what Michael Kreyling refers to as Cable’s “genteel,
romantic habits of mind” and local color stories fell out of favor, and Cable
never enjoyed any comparable success with his later work. While contemporary readers enjoyed the
romantic aspects of the novel, they were less sympathetic to his outright
opposition to slavery and a color-based caste system. Cable himself was German, which made him an
outsider in the Creole society of New Orleans about which he wrote. After the publication of his 1885 Freedman’s Case in Equity, in which he
voiced his objection to the condition of African Americans in the South, he had
to move to Massachusetts for his safety.
He was discovered by
Edward King from Scribner’s, and was
included in his “Great South” series (which many credit with the “invention” of
Southern literature). The novel is an
examplar of local color, as it relies heavily on dialect and dramatizes life
within the complex racial hierarchy of New Orleans life immediately following
the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. As a
local color novel, it uses detail and dialect to present such an unfamiliar
world to its readers—and its very unfamiliarity makes it easier to justify While the local color conventions relies upon
an outsider who is won over to the local customs (thinking as far back as even Swallow Barn), Cable is doing something
different here. The novel relies heavily on a sense of nostalgia as well as a
focus on domestic, every-day problems such as paying bills. The combination of such mundane details with
such deep, resonant feelings, allows for a critique of the system—particularly the
role of women in this society, as it shows how their options are limited by
societal norms. Poor women can’t simply
go out and get a job.
The novel follows
various members of the Grandissime family—black, white, mixed-race, rich and
poor. The story begins when Honoré Grandissime, the scion of the white branch
of this powerful New Orleans clan, takes in Joseph Frowenfeld, a young man from
Philadelphia whose entire family has died from yellow fever. Honoré's
conversations with Joseph about the New Orleans caste system shed light on the
dilemmas at the center of the novel. Honoré finds himself caught between an
idealistic Joseph, who advocates sweeping social reforms that would end slavery
but essentially erase Creole culture, and his prideful uncle Agricola Fusilier,
who ostensibly holds onto a racist past in order to preserve the Grandissime
way of life—one built on the foundations of slavery. Honoré wants to establish
a business partnership with his quadroon half brother (Honoré f.m.c.) and do
right by Aurora Nancanou, who was widowed and destitute when Agricola murdered
her husband over a gambling dispute. Yet his decisions regarding this tarnished
family history are further complicated by his secret love for Aurora.
The story of Bras
Coupé, retold several times, connects the novel's divergent strands and is suggestive
of Honoré's struggle against his past and a New Orleans society that remains
tainted by slavery. Bras Coupé, an enslaved African prince on a Spanish Creole
plantation, is engaged to Palmyre, Aurora's maid. Inspired by the indignity of
his plight, Bras Coupé attacks his white overseer, and is soon viciously
pursued by a mob of Creole aristocrats (including Agricola) through the New
Orleans swamps. Honoré tries to prevent the African prince's punishment but to
no avail. Upon his capture, Bras Coupé issues a curse on both his master and
his plantation. He is summarily beaten to death, though only after his ears are
cut off and his hamstrings slashed. Bras Coupé, literally meaning "arm cut
off" in French, personifies the cruelty of slavery and the degeneracy that
lies at the heart of a so-called genteel southern society.
Character responses to
the story are as important as the story itself, through its frequent
repetition. Further, the Bras Coupé
story shows that even if you ignore race, another caste system will
emerge. Cable illustrates that tragedy
is the preferred genre for societies which stake a lot on nobility, as tragedy
requires an inversion of order. Myths
require replacement, and as Americans are a people without a history, then
novel dramatizes the necessity of storytelling and myth. As a nineteenth century novel, it ends with a
sort of reconciliation plot, although with a twist of ending, after a final
declaration of love, on Aurora saying “No” to M. Grandissime.
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