'Plant ikke Upas-Træet om vor Bolig': Colonial Haunting, Race, and Interracial Marriage in Hans Christian Andersen’s Mulatten (1840)
| Autor: | Pernille Ipsen |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Scandinavian Studies. 88:129-158 |
| ISSN: | 2163-8195 0036-5637 |
| DOI: | 10.5406/scanstud.88.2.0129 |
| Popis: | In Hans Christian Andersen's (1805-1875) play Mulatten (The Mulatto) from 1840, Eleonore, the Euro-Caribbean wife of a wealthy sugar planter on Martinique named La Rebelliere, begs her husband not to buy any more slaves because, as she says, they hate him: Du er forhadt! den Sortes Aftensbon Er den: at Du maa doe! Hans Drum er skjon, Naar Du fortvivlet bider i din Laebe! Hans Morgenbon er, Dig at kunne draebe! Plant ikke Upas-Traeet om vor Bolig, Det er hver Slave, og ved Dig! ved Dig! Vaer mere mild!--(fatter sig.) For Dig er jeg urolig. (Andersen 1878, 379) (You are hated! The black's evening prayer is this: that you might die! His dream is beautiful, when you bite your lip in despair! His morning prayer is to be able to kill you! Do not plant the upas tree by our home, it is every slave, and by you! By you! Be more gentle--[composes herself]. I am worried for you.) Eleonore's equation of buying and owning slaves to planting a upastr& (upas tree, Antitaris toxicaria) speaks to the disturbing and haunting effects that slavery and colonialism had on those who benefitted from them. For the upas tree is not just any tree. Not only does the word upas in Danish relate to upasselig or utilpas and upassende, meaning "unwell or indisposed and inappropriate," but in 1840 as today, the upas tree also metaphorically signified a poisonous or harmful influence or institution. (3) The tree could, as the Danish author Adolph Meyer (Mei'r Aron Goldschmidt) wrote in his bitter first novel En Jode (1845; A Jew), poison and kill all hospitality (Goldschmidt 1896, 53). (4) But it could apparendy also, as in the quote above, signify waves of haunting hatred caused by slavery. Slavery planted a upas tree by the home of Eleonore's husband, a colonial planter on Martinique, but the poison from the tree could not be contained in the plantation colonies. Quite to the contrary, as historians and literary scholars of colonialism and empire have argued, European colonialism and imperialism did not only happen elsewhere, externally to European culture, identity, or literature (McClintock 1995,5). Colonial slavery impacted Europe and Europeans in a myriad of direct and indirect ways. Paleme, the mixed race leader of a group of runaway slaves, hv see also Ipsen 2015, 90-2). In 1840, the question of slavery was vigorously debated in the Danish capital. Slavery had been abolished in the British West Indies in 1833, and the Danish abolition movement, established in 1839, was provoking debate about the moral implications of racialized slavery (Bugge 2003, 57). … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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