Revenge Tragedy: Harriet Martineau, the Haitian Revolution, and Reparations

This essay argues that Harriet Martineau’s “Historical Romance” of the Haitian Revolution, The Hour and the Man (1841), might help us think about the complex knot of anxieties and aspirations that come together for perpetrators—or, more often, for those who feel connected to or responsible for perpetrators—in the wake of atrocity. This is not an obvious approach to a text that has so consistently been read as unproblematically, even naively, optimistic about a post-abolition social order. The claim of this essay is that a tragic vision of ineradicable guilt complicates, but does not displace, that unrelentingly positive official through line. Further, it argues that this complexity might help us tease out certain impasses or contradictions in contemporary discussions today of how to achieve what Ta-Nehisi Coates has described as the “airing of family secrets [and] settling with old ghosts” necessary to heal “the American psyche.”