Contenu du sommaire : La recherche du bonheur

Closing a novel on a wedding is the formulaic ending of most popular 19th century fictions. Yet, when it comes to Cooper's and Sedgwick's historical romances the final union is loaded with a symbolical meaning. As the story opens onto the future, the concluding epithalamium pictures a white, patriotic, common-man America, as heralded in the Jacksonian era. However, the unifying discourse of national concord superimposed on the heroes' happy end covers up diverging paths: the eulogy of both spinsters and bachelors and the possibility of miscegenation eventually tends to blur the harmony showcased in the epilogue.

While historians of the early American republic have long argued that deism disappeared at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this study intends to explore the resilience of a deistic form of free thought as it appears through the spiritual belief system of the communities of the Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform. Highly critical of the American society – which they considered plagued by many evils – these communities advocated a radical refashioning of the social, political and economic structures but sought above all a spiritual regeneration of man by forging a secular religion suffused with panentheistic undertones as the only path to practical happiness.

The history of the British colony of Virginia began in the late sixteenth century with the dark unmitigated misfortune of Roanoke, and continued in the early seventeenth century with Jamestown, in a kind of Hobbesian state of nature. There the settlers suffered trials that denied the European immigrants' expectations to reach the state of happiness. Little by little, while the Virginian colony organized into a coherent structure, as if it had achieved the Lockean contract, it did not succeed in bringing happiness to all of its members. With the extensive growth of the colony, human groups differed from one another, never succeeding in sharing an equal degree of happiness. At this point, many questions arise : Is general happiness possible in a colonial society ? Is everyone apt to enjoy happiness in a civil society based on the idea of colonization ? In British America, the ideology of the pursuit of happiness became a true promise to some groups, while others such as slaves and Native peoples were kept apart and suffered an ordeal which made it possible to bring happiness to the most privileged. By the 1860s, the discrepancy between the happy ones and the oppressed others ended in the catastrophe which destroyed the American society.

This paper analyzes conditional or differed manumission by will in South Carolina by underscoring how it initially served as a means of controlling the enslaved population while respecting the unalienable right of slave masters to dispose of their bond property as they chose. As the question of slavery became increasingly politicized, South Carolina prohibited the private manumission of slaves, thus sacrificing the individual rights of slave owners for the benefit of public safety. However, some masters sought to assert their slaves' natural right to happiness and granted them a precarious freedom, by illegally freeing them in the hope that their freedom would one day become effective.

Colson Whitehead's latest novel, The Underground Railroad (2016) is a take on both the slave narratives of the 19th century and the “neo-slave narratives” of the late 20th century. It mimics these genres' ambivalence towards the core American belief in the pursuit of happiness: flight is the protagonist Cora's pursuit of happiness in the face of the contradictions of the American promise. But happy endings remain elusive: all temptations to stay and find contentment in waystations are revealed to be illusory. Moreover, the text veers away onto the territory of fictive history. The Underground Railroad is a literal subterranean railway network, and each visited State allegorizes possible ways to deal with race in America, in a wide spectrum that ranges from—deceptive—utopia to Fascist nightmare. The freedoms taken with history and the original genres amount to a pursuit of literary pleasure which has sometimes been associated with a “post-Black” aesthetic. If the latter does not attempt to neglect the racial question in American culture, but to imagine more diverse ways of articulating African American artistic expressions and identities, Railroad may find its place in such a movement, as it prolongs, through imagination and satire, the work of symbolic resilience and political involvement of the 19th-century originals.

In Walden, Thoreau wanders less around the pond then he does in language, and the joy of wandering takes its source in words. The vagrancy and the ecstatic contemplation of nature are accompanied by un-limited speech: « I desire to speak somewhere without bounds… ». Exploring his self, the subject registers the benefits of his walks and life in the woods, but he also accounts for his profits and losses (sums and lists constituting the minimal degree of the narrative). Traces of loss are lodged in the interstices of the triumphant didactic discourse. The heroic morning work is also a work of mourning, as the parables of the baskets, of the dog, of the bay horse and of the turtledove discreetly testify.