"The splendid decorations of the room": Gender, Materiality, and Settler Colonialism in Upper Louisiana, 1763-1803

Abstract

The end of the French empire in North America after the Seven Years’ War did not spell the end of French community. On the western side of the Mississippi River in the Illinois Country, French Creole merchants continued to live in a manner defined by their Frenchness. In the newly established towns of St. Louis and its satellites, French Creole merchant-class women affirmed and reaffirmed French ethnic identity in the public-facing domestic sphere. Merchant life, though, was dependent on its connections to Indigenous kinship and economic networks, and French Creole towns represented only small zones of Frenchness on what remained “native ground.” Relying on ancien régime conceptions of gender and bienséance (decorum or etiquette), French Creole women worked to affirm and reaffirm Frenchness in their social world through their community-building and their domestic goods. Urban planning and architecture worked alongside women to facilitate French Creole festivities, their homes important venues for the upkeep of social cohesion and hierarchy. Table and service wares, particularly French-made faience, enforced French dining norms at the dinner table, imposing Frenchness on the diner and the food consumed. Finally, a chinoiserie decorative plate owned by the merchant-class Cerré-Chouteau household exposes French Creole views of the “Other” and the “Orient”, and how these ideas worked alongside women, their furniture, and other interior décor to enforce Frenchness within the household and on its visitors. This thesis examines how merchant-class French Creole women in Upper Louisiana used their roles as agents of socialization and their domestic goods to affirm and maintain this Frenchness in what remained a deeply Indigenous world.