Marvels & Tales

Abstract:

White and American born of French descent (Louisiana Creole), Sidonie de la Houssaye wrote with her finger on the pressure points of multicultural life in Louisiana. Her fairy tales are set in and grapple with the socially transformative years around the Civil War. I argue that they document oppression to advance a cultural literacy project—one that displays for the reader the vexed social landscape of the 1880s. If driven by a moral vision of fundamental human equality, her characters nonetheless act within the linguistic and interpersonal landscape of an America forged by conquest and newly emerged from slavery.