In all of these sources, like with Noun and her mother, either the mother or their children remain unaccounted for in the violence of the archive. The literary-historical archives of French letters, for example, show us that enslaved wet nurses make many appearances in penal and medical records as well as didactic fiction. And so if Noun is the only enslaved character named in the novel, where is her mother, the wet nurse, who makes Noun’s relationship to Indiana possible? Did Sand really lack for models of enslaved wet nurses when conceiving of her novel? While we cannot know Sand’s intent, the case of Noun’s missing mother in the literary realm still represents the potential to locate individual enslaved wet nurses in other sources. 2 Except for Noun, Sand presents the enslaved as a homogenous group, without any subjectivity. Scholars of George Sand have frequently characterized Indiana as an abolitionist text since Indiana and her husband Ralph liberate the enslaved persons working on their plantation at the end of the novel. Sand’s exclusion of Noun’s mother thus raises questions about the novel’s plot, the colonial setting, and its colonial characters.
In the few instances she is mentioned, her breast milk is regarded as a colonial commodity for the nourishment of Indiana, whose family owns the plantation on Île Bourbon. Since Sand emphasizes Noun’s mixed-race features throughout the novel, we can assume that she is the child of a coerced sexual encounter between her mother and a planter.Įven though the colonial kinship between these two women is a major aspect of the novel’s plot, Noun’s enslaved mother is nameless and mostly absent from the novel. A “milk sister” was the daughter of the often enslaved wet nurse, and under French slave laws, children of enslaved women carried the enslaved status of their mothers. In George Sand’s 1832 idealist novel, Indiana, the eponymous protagonist is raised alongside her sœur de lait or “milk sister” Noun in the French Indian Ocean colony of Île Bourbon (present day Réunion).
“Enslaved women and their children enter the archives in little more than fragments.” 1
0 kommentar(er)
