In Monsieur Toussaint, Glissant takes the figure of Toussaint, a hero of the country of Haiti, and brings him down to a human level with faults and failures. Glissant has chosen to depict Toussaint as a man who is not interested in his wife’s opinions and who suffers from a naivety that causes him to put too much faith his fellow man. By doing this, Glissant ensures that his play does not fall into the blend of literary works that elevate Toussaint to infallibility. When Glissant depicts Toussaint with his faults, his purpose is not to downplay Toussaint’s importance; instead, he makes Toussaint seem less like an untouchable hero figure and more like a genuine person in order to give Toussaint’s story more power.
In Glissant’s play, Toussaint is depicted as being fairly cold to his wife, which in …show more content…
By breaking his people out of slavery, Toussaint expects for his people to be treated as equals with those who once enslaved them, but he does not involve the same equality in the marital relationship. While the end of slavery will allow his people to voice their opinions and be proper citizens, Toussaint does not allow his wife the basic rights he fights for elsewhere. When she attempts to warn Toussaint of his folly, he silences her with “enough, wife” just like the slavers inevitably silenced the slaves that spoke out to warn the slave-owners of the moral wrong they were committing (102). Instead of respecting his wife for the wisdom born of her more compassionate nature, Toussaint shrugs off her concern with a simple “what are you muttering”