The Strange History of the American Quadroon by Emily Clark

Author:Emily Clark [Clark, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781469607528
Google: Gc7gn5SHL98C
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2013-01-15T04:01:38+00:00

Ingraham followed his quadroon short story with a full-length novel in 1841, The Quadroone; or, St. Michael’s Day. Set in the late 1760s, when the Spanish took control of New Orleans from the French, the work is saturated in orientalism. The villain of the piece, the Spanish Count Osma, comes to New Orleans to take possession of the city for Spain. One of the cavaliers he sends as his advance guard, Don Henrique, is wounded and brought unconscious to the home that the beautiful quadroon woman Azèlie shares with her quadroon brother, Renault. As Henrique awakens, “His glance at the instant rested on a hand and arm like moulded pearl, laid upon the head of the ottoman. His heart leaped to his mouth” as he gazed at the figure before him. “Half in the moonlight, half in the shade, supported by her arm, with her face hidden in the abundance of her jetty hair that fell over it, reposed the most graceful form his imagination could pencil.” Henrique, thinking he must have died from his wounds, exclaims, “Surely this is Paradise; and this is an Houri!”11 Henrique, the Catholic Castilian, awakes not to an angel welcoming him to a Christian heaven, but to a houri, “a nymph of the Muslim Paradise,” a being of incomparable beauty and sensuality that some believed welcomed virtuous Muslim men to the afterlife.12

Azèlie is dressed for the part of a Muslim beauty, in attire that would be very much at home in a famous North African scene conjured by the French orientalist Eugene Delacroix in 1834 and recapitulated in similar images created on both sides of the Atlantic (see Figures 9 and 10).13 Dressed in a vest “of the finest lawn, with large and loose sleeves, open at the neck and breast, embroidered with gold, and ornamented with little diamond buttons,” Azèlie’s costume mimics exotic sartorial habits, with “drawers of the finest linen, deeply bordered with lace, and around her waist . . . a broad sash of silk and gold folded together, the ends of which, entwined with precious stones, hung long from behind.” To complete her incarnation as an oriental enchantress, Azèlie replicates the signature conventions of the seraglio right down to her toes. “Her slipper of golden tissue, curiously embroidered, had fallen off too, and a naked little foot, all warmth and beauty, and like a child’s in its minute and soft proportions, caught the moonlight and finished the picture.”14

Not only is Azèlie taken for a houri and dressed appropriately for a North African harem, but the dramatic conclusion of the novel reveals that she is not a quadroon at all, but a Moroccan princess. In his youth, Count Osma was held captive by the “Emperor of Morocco” for several years. While there, the emperor’s daughter, Zillah, fell in love with him, and they were married in a Muslim ceremony. Osma, however, abandoned his Moroccan wife and returned to Spain, where he took a Christian wife. Zillah followed him to Spain and

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