Creole Women and Counterdecadence in Lafcadio Hearn’s Antillean Writing

Critics often cast the Creole woman of color in Lafcadio Hearn’s circum-Caribbean writings as a figure of cultural moribundity—an emblem of a Creole world fading under the pressures of modernization. However, Hearn also presents Creole women as vivacious counterdecadent agents, disruptors of the political decline experienced by Martinique’s white Creoles after citizenship was restored to the colony’s men of African descent. Through historical contextualization of Hearn’s periodical writing and his correspondence with journalist Elizabeth Bisland, this paper explains why he employs the strategies of Decadent conservatism to imagine a moment in which formerly enslaved Creole women prevent an iconoclastic Republican attack on a sculpture of the Empress Joséphine. Erected in a reactionary period after slavery’s abolition, this monument originally commemorated the reinstatement of plantocratic dominance over the Black population, but by the time Hearn saw the statue, it had become an ironic reminder of weakened white authority. The imagined actions of Hearn’s Creole women resignify the monument, making its survival attest to the limited victory of Republican egalitarianism and the survival of pre-modern traditions of racial deference.