Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
desolate when her lover abandons her to return to France, having, of
course, refused to marry her though often leaving her with a child who
will at least “lighten the race.” 41
As Burton points out, the character of the doudou arises from French
fantasies about Caribbean women. He focuses on the idea that the woman
is sexually available, but is also very desirous of a relationship with a
Frenchman or two with the intent on improving the quality of life of her
offspring by virtue of a lighter complexion. Burton discusses the history
and development of the myth and illustrates its eventual appropriation by
the local population, explaining that it was taken on
[f]irst by the white Creole elite and then, late in the nineteenth century, by
the colored and black bourgeoisie. For white creole novelists writing after
the abolition of slavery, the doudou myth not only legitimated béké sexual
exploitation of black and colored women—it’s not we who want them,
say countless doudou stories of the period, but they who want us—but,
beyond that, sanctioned the political, social, and economic power that
they, the béké phallocrats, exercised over a systematically “feminized”
black and brown population. 42
In conjunction with the marginalisation obvious from the depiction of
the black woman, Burton illustrates that a great political advantage was
gained by perpetuating the doudou myth. This enabled easier economic
exploitation of an enslaved people. Hilary Beckles discusses a similar point
in his History of Barbados. He points out that by sleeping with the enslaved
women, the master kept the numbers of his slave population up. 43 Therefore,
by encouraging the continuation of the image of the stereotypically
lascivious black woman, the slave master prospered, as Burton illustrates
in the French West Indies. The Caribbean woman’s inferiority is not surprisingly
taken up by many European writers.
One of the better known fictional examples in the Anglophone Caribbean
of the depiction of the Caribbean woman in general—and not limited
to the black woman specifically—comes from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre. Since a great deal of re-visionary work has been done on the text
since the appearance of Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, 44 it
will suffice to point out the author’s utilisation, conscious or unconscious,
of a colonial trope. 45 Jane Eyre is a novel ostensibly about an English hero-
41
Burton, op. cit.,p. 81.
42
Burton, op. cit., p. 81.
43
Beckles (1990), op. cit., p. 65.
44
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondswoth, Penguin, 1966).
45
Other texts where women are marginalised are Edward Long and Lady Maria
Nugent’s work. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica 3 vols. (London, T.
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