The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life

The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life is a novel by George Washington Cable, published as a book in 1880 by Charles Scribner's Sons after appearing as a serial in Scribner's.[1][2] The historical romance depicts race and class relations in New Orleans at the start of the 19th century, immediately following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.[3] The book examines the lives and loves of the extended Grandissime family, which includes members from different races and classes in Creole society.[4] The novel juxtaposes a romanticized version of Louisiana Creole people with the atrocities committed under their system of slavery in the United States.[5]

Contents

Key characters

Plot

White family head Honoré Grandissime takes in Joseph Frowenfeld, whose family has died of yellow fever. He describes the New Orleans caste system to Frowenfeld, an abolitionist whose desire to end slavery would also end Louisiana Creole culture as they knew it. Frowenfeld and Grandissime's uncle Agricola Fusilier, soon get into a dispute. Fusilier seeks to preserve the Grandissime way of life, which means continuing slavery. Grandissime and his quadroon half brother, also named Honoré Grandissime, want to go into business together. Grandissime also wants to help Aurora Nancanou, a woman widowed when Fusilier killed her husband. Grandissime is secretly in live with Nancanou.[6]

Grandissime later attempts to help Bras Coupé, a slave who is engaged to Palmyre, Aurora's maid. After Coupé attacks his white overseer, a mob of Creole aristocrats, including Agricola Fusilier, captures Coupé as he tries to escape through the New Orleans swamps. Honoré Grandissime tries to intervene, but Coupé is lynched by the mob, who cut his hamstrings, cut off his ears, and beat him to death.[7]

Adaptations

The book itself is an adaptation of the story of Bras-Coupé, pen name of a fugitive slave named Spirit who was murdered in 1837.[8]

The novel served as the basis for the opera Koanga, by Frederick Delius. Willa Cather's short story "The Dance at Chevalier's" has been described as "a cross between George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) and Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda (1894)".[9] The book is also known for its descriptions of local dialects and the practice of plaçage, a recognized extralegal system in which white French and Spanish and later Creole men entered into the equivalent of common-law marriages with women of African, Indian and white (European) Creole descent.

References

  1. ^ Richardson TJ, ed. (1981). The Grandissimes: Centennial essays. University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 087805149X
  2. ^ Lauter P, ed. (2002). The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume C: Late Nineteenth Century: 1865-1910, Volume 3. p. 379 ff.Cengage Learning,, ISBN 9780547201665
  3. ^ Pizer D, Harbert EN, eds. (1982). Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Realists and Naturalists. Gale Research Company, ISBN 9780810311497
  4. ^ Rubin LD (1966). Writers of the Modern South: The Faraway Country. University of Washington Press, ASIN B00128IG4G
  5. ^ Magill FN, Mazzeno LW, eds. (1996). "The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life," in Masterplots: 1,801 plot stories and critical evaluations of the world's finest literature, Volume 5, pp. 2624 ff. Salem Press, ISBN 9780893560898
  6. ^ Cleman J (1996). George Washington Cable Revisited, pp. 1-19. Twayne Publishers, ISBN 9780805739916
  7. ^ Andrews WL, Gwin M, Harris T, Hobson F, Eds (1997). The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, pp. 275-276. W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 9780393316711
  8. ^ Wagner B (2005). Disarmed and Dangerous: The Strange Career of Bras-Coupé. Caliber, University of California Press, Volume 92, doi: 10.1525/rep.2005.92.1.117
  9. ^ Catherine M. Downs, Becoming Modern: Willa Cather's Journalism, Susquehanna University Press, 2000, page 83

External links