Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

by Rien Fertel

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning cultural pride of white Creoles in New Orleans intersected with America's golden age of print, to explosive effect. Imagining the Creole City reveals the profusion of literary output ―histories and novels, poetry and plays―that white Creoles used to imagine themselves as a unified community of writers and readers.

Rien Fertel argues that Charles Gayarré's English-language histories of Louisiana, which emphasized the state's dual connection to America and to France, provided the foundation of a white Creole print culture predicated on Louisiana's exceptionalism. The writings of authors like Grace King, Adrien Rouquette, and Alfred Mercier consciously fostered an image of Louisiana as a particular social space, and of themselves as the true inheritors of its history and culture. In turn, the forging of this white Creole identity created a close-knit community of cosmopolitan Creole elites, who reviewed each other's books, attended the same salons, crusaded against the popular fiction of George Washington Cable, and worked together to preserve the French language in local and state governmental institutions. Together they reimagined the definition of "Creole" and used it as a marker of status and power.

By the end of this group's era of cultural prominence, Creole exceptionalism had become a cornerstone in the myth of Louisiana in general and of New Orleans in particular. In defining themselves, the authors in the white Creole print community also fashioned a literary identity that resonates even today.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2014

About the author

I am a Louisiana-born and based freelance writer and professional historian. I've written on food and travel and books for Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Southern Living, Spirit, Saveur, The Local Palate, and other publications.

Currently, I am writing a personal narrative about my journey into the heart of barbecue, specifically whole-hog barbecue — a culinary art form that is disappearing and experiencing a renaissance at the exact same moment — and the professional pitmasters who make a living firing, smoking, flipping, and chopping 200+ pound pigs. That book is out in the Spring of 2016 by Simon & Schuster/Touchstone.

In addition to the freelance life, I wear a second, scholarly, hat, carving out a small niche in the academic world. I hold an MA from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in History from Tulane University. My first book, Imagining the Creole City (Louisiana State University Press, Fall 2014), is an intellectual and literary study of a circle of writers in nineteenth-century New Orleans. I am presently a Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at Bard Early College New Orleans and a part-time professor at Tulane University. I have also contributed essays to collections published by the University of Georgia Press and Vanderbilt University Press.

I call New Orleans home, and live part-time in a hundred-plus-year-old church in St. Martinville, Louisiana.

I can be reached at: rienfertel@gmail.com

Reviews

[RaeG · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-researched and balanced read - at first I thought the author would be buying into the race resentment the white Creoles had towards Creoles of color, especially considering the title is far more encompassing than his actual subject. But as he covered the backlash against George Washington Cable's works, he was unsparing in his evaluation of the motivations and execution of their writing. From time to time the author refers to relevant but not common knowledge events in history without so much as a brief summation of their impact, and that makes some sections convoluted, but overall an important history of a community and literary era.

[NOLaBookish aka blue-collared mind · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written and in-depth look by local historian Rien Fertel on Louisiana and New Orleans amid the age of periodicals, letters and novels in the 19th/20th century, a time responsible for many of the romantic American myths that we learned in schools and for some of us, from our own Southern forebearers. To show how these myths remain, one can simply recall hearing and regularly defended in open conversation the terms still used to describe the Civil War such as the "War of Northern Aggression" and "States Rights, Not Slavery."
Another relevant reason for this book is the recently reignited protests centering on race inequities and immigration across America, a conversation that is always sadly necessary in the American South. Fertel addresses it in this historical context by writing about the white Creole literary circle that, starting in the 1820s/1830s, largely created and sustained the story of the region's "exceptionalism." That era of virtuous manifest destiny was mirrored across the U.S and is largely to blame for the lack of understanding among those who continue to grow up amid their own ethnic myths.
Why most people know the story of Creole culture only through those self-defined Creoles of color who continue to inhabit the city is partly because they are largely responsible for much of what we continue to value culturally in New Orleans such as live music, street and family culture, and informal Carnival activities. However, it is also convincingly identified here as the shift from the writers contained in this book simply defining themselves and their "heroic" time as the heirs to French culture in the New World to their expanded Reconstruction-era unapologetic and often incorrect assertion of their whiteness and its embedded privileges. Yet, the historical details captured here give that shift context and perspective; Fertel's description of the politics of post-Louisiana Purchase New Orleans and the concern at the White House on any potential allegiance to the Old World as partially responsible for the Creoles' sensitivity about the eclipse of their history is especially informative.
By offering individual profiles of prominent writers of Creole history starting with eminent historian Charles Gayarré, "Transcendentalist" New Orleans Choctaw missionary Adrien Rouquette and through those writers who took up the "cause" in the 20th century, including Grace King, Robert Tallant and Lyle Saxon, Fertel has a more human-scaled and understandable timeline of events than has been previously offered. After all, New Orleans is a city that has had 4 flags fly over it: French, Spanish, Confederate and American and each era has its own stories to tell and its own heroes and demons. Having the book end with the profile of George Washington Cable and his more accurate and inclusive history of the Creoles and of the city in whole shows the correction of history that began with his popular works but also led to tension among his fellow writers and historians leading (partly) to teh beloved writer's self-imposed exile from the city. Fertel does his best to fairly catalogue both good and bad (or the long and the short) of that tension; for example, he shares how one of the most significant New Orleans voices of the 20th century, Grace King's later-in-life (albeit tepid) acknowledgement of Cable's value to the city showed the potential for change among those earlier devoted only to the "gallant" Creole story.

Certainly, the details gathered by many of these writers offer a rich tapestry of Louisiana life and therefore cannot be entirely eclipsed by their insistence on what Fertel aptly describes as heroic Sir Walter Scott-style epics or even their insistence on racial "purity" and entitlement that belied the truth that existed in the tumultuous and complicated times of Jim Crow's America. Even so, the dismissal of most of these writers works in the last 50 years as provincial cheerleading with either a stated or unstated allegiance to the "Lost Cause" should be a lesson in these Tea Party days and is vitally important for any writer or activist to consider.
New postscript: one of my favorite writers on New Orleans is C.W. Cannon who recently replied to the growing body of "anti-exceptionalism" (I don't view this book as in that camp btw); Cannon has rightfully addressed the lack of nuance in some of the criticism and believes that without context, both exceptionalism and anti-exceptionalism arguments both become modern reworkings of history that fail to capture the nuances. He contends that Cable also ignored or glossed over salient facts in order to make his Americanism argument. All good points and so I recommend that any reader of Fertel's history also track some of Cannon's work as well.