I Reading the West Indies

Home , Jean Lafitte, Juan Francisco Manzano, Piracy in the Caribbean, Roberto Tapia, Transatlanticism

Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel

by Victoria Barnett-Woods

M.A. in English, May 2013, Marquette University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Science of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 20, 2018

Dissertation directed by

Tara Ghoshal Wallace Professor of English

Daniel DeWispelare Assistant Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Victoria Barnett-Woods has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of March 8, 2018. This is the final approved form of the dissertation.

Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel

Victoria Barnett-Woods

Dissertation Research Committee:

Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director

Daniel DeWispelare, Assistant Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director

Ralph Bauer, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland, Committee Member

Jennifer James, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

iii

Dedication

To Bryan and Declan: my allies in love and life. You have made me strong and have given me the faith to believe I can accomplish anything.

Acknowledgements

There are many individuals who have helped this dissertation come to fruition. I am grateful to the English Department at The George Washington University for their support of this project these past five years. My dissertation directors, Tara Ghoshal

Wallace and Daniel DeWispelare, have both been generous with their guidance and unwavering in their encouragement. Their thoughtful attention to my work at each step of this project shaped and reshaped it for the better. My third reader, Ralph Bauer, graciously attended to each chapter with great care. His insight provoked me to reflect on the ways that I can transform this dissertation into a monograph in the future.

I also want to thank the people from various institutions who have helped guide me in my research. At the Institute for Caribbean Studies in Río Piedras, my many thanks go to Nadya Menedez Rodriguez and Humberto Garcia Muniz. It is because of them I was able to explore the Hispanophone Caribbean in ways that I had not thought possible.

I also want to thank Lucy McCann and Gillian Humphreys at the Bodleian Library at

Oxford University for their assistance in acquiring materials that were invaluable to the successful completion of the third and fourth chapters. The most critical institutional support came from The George Washington University Graduate Student Fellowship

Office. It was because of that department I was able to conduct research in England and

Barbados and was granted a summer dissertation completion fellowship grant during my last summer of writing.

Finally, I want to express the deepest gratitude to the friends and family who have kept me going throughout this journey. Thanks to Kimberley Clarke, Leah Grisham, Alan

Montroso, Leigha McReynolds and Sam Yates for their open ears and hearts. Most importantly, I want to acknowledge the greatest support I’ve had these past years—my husband Bryan Barnett-Woods. He was (and continues to be) my emotional coach, grammar expert, sounding board, and partner in the world that exists outside this dissertation. He also gently reminded me from time to time that this outside world is rather large and worth exploring and that I should take a break. I want to also thank

Declan, who has just recently come into our lives, for delaying his arrival until I had finished a draft of this work. He has been a beautiful and disarming distraction since.

Abstract of Dissertation

Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel

This dissertation contends that the historic events of the eighteenth-century Caribbean directly shaped the rise of the novel. The first chapter considers the conflicting cultural representations of the eighteenth-century pirate in the burgeoning genre of the maritime picaresque. The second chapter reads the role of mixed-race women in the Atlantic

Bildungsroman, what would later be categorized as domestic fiction due to the gendered politics of eighteenth-century long-prose writing. The third chapter examines the rhetorical value of silence in autobiographical slave narratives, a genre of writing foundational to the

African-American literary canon. The fourth and final chapter posits that the Caribbean gothic, formulated during the height of the slave trade debates, was influenced by slavery apologist anxiety over slave rebellion in the Atlantic. Each chapter is dependent upon postcolonial theory and empire studies and is grounded in primary source material spanning from 1690-1840. In providing a more globalized vision of the novel’s rise, my dissertation offers a unique perspective on the long eighteenth century and the literary history to follow.

vii

Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Abstract of Dissertation ...... vii

Introduction: Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel...... 1

Chapter 1: Moveable Worlds: The Maritime Picaresque, Piracy and Resisting Empire .. 19

Chapter 2: Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and the Woman of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century ...... 81

Chapter 3: Listening to Silence in the Autobiographical Slave Narrative ...... 153

Chapter 4: Tropical Terror: Obeah, Vodou, and Plantocratic Anxiety in the Caribbean Gothic ...... 224

Conclusion: Memory, History, and Reading the West Indies ...... 295

Bibliography ...... 309

Appendix A ...... 327

viii

Introduction: Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel

This dissertation project operates under a simple premise: the imperial and diasporic history of the eighteenth-century Caribbean had a direct influence on the so- called “rise of the novel.” The concept of the novel rising out of the eighteenth century, particularly out of the English literary tradition, has earned its qualifying scare quotes over the years due to the critical interrogative gestures of the scholars who have informed this project. Scholars like Ian Watt, Michael McKeon and Benedict Anderson maintain that the social conditions, changing literary practices, and advances in print technology in

England led to the novel as a form. This claim carries significant weight, as it has informed the curriculum of classrooms and inextricably and exclusively tied the bibliographic history of the novel with a European, specifically British, history. In more recent years, scholars of the British imperial eighteenth century have complicated the insular nature of these claims and illuminated the cross-cultural fluidity of literary colonial contact. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theoretical contention that the genealogy of

European thought falsely universalizes the Enlightenment to a global scale, is what lays the foundation for the intellectual road on which my project treads. In his Provincializing

Europe, Chakrabarty critiques Eurocentric formations of modernity, and his work

“struggles with the problems of representation that [European political thought] invariably creates.”1 His seminal claim seeks to pluralize modernity to a global scale.

While his project gives greatest focus to South Asia, his critique offers other scholars to

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22.

consider his conceptual framework in other geographical spaces. Within the field of literary history, Srivinas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism is another work that problematizes the naturalized lineages of European modernity. In it, Aravamudan argues that English imperial contact with South Asia and the Middle East fostered new forms of long-prose writing that resisted the telos of the European metropolitan realist novel. His argument rests on the idea that there was a literary transcultural exchange in the imperial contact zone, allowing for the perforation of forms and narrative modes to inform different types of literary production.2 Following Aravamudan’s and Chakrabarty’s claims, I argue that the imperial and diasporic events that occurred in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean were essential to the evolution of the novel as a form and still resonate in literary tropes and figures to this day. As the novel is arguably a historical signifier of a unique “climate of social and moral experience,” as well as a critical marker of a secularizing nation-state, the novel form serves as a critical artifact in which the historical Caribbean is relayed. There is a methodological symmetry inherent to this project. Just as the history of the Caribbean informs the evolution of the novel, so too, does the novel chronicle the historical events that have shaped the Atlantic world. In effect, the novel becomes a type of keeper of historical memory. While many scholars have considered individual themes found within the transatlantic Caribbean novel of the

2. Srivinas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago Press 2012).

long eighteenth century, few have attempted to read the novel’s history through the history of the West Indies and its contributory role to the novel’s “rise.”

While the project stakes its theoretical approach on the foundational works of eighteenth-century global Enlightenment scholars, the organizing logic is wholly dependent on Atlantic history and integrates both imperial and diasporic literatures. 3 As such, slavery’s history in the eighteenth-century Caribbean inevitably becomes a central focus. The Spanish had developed the methodology for slaving in parts of the

Hispanophone Caribbean in the sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth century the

British and French interventions on the Spanish monopoly amplified the number of slaves being brought from the African continent. Governmentally sanctioned slavery existed in the Caribbean for hundreds of years (Spain: 1510-1886; England: 1601-1834;

France:1578-1848), irrevocably altering the demography of the region and impacting geopolitical engagement on a global scale for years to come. The economic sustainability of slavery in the Caribbean was perpetuated by European demand for consumable and transportable goods like sugar and coffee, just as the systemization of African displacement became more viable for traders and planters.

3. Jason M. Payton rightly claims that the turn toward Atlantic studies necessitates an interdisciplinary approach: “It is hard to imagine how Atlantic historians could tell the cultural history of the Atlantic world without a detailed consideration of the literary forms produced by maritime workers and an understanding of the impact of their writings had on the history of those forms. It would be equally hard to imagine a literary history of the maritime world that did not include an extensive grasp of the material, economic and political history of mariners” (Early American Literature: 48:2), 338. While Payton is speaking to specifically maritime affairs, this claim can also be extended to the larger Atlantic world.

Over the course of this history, fictions of racial difference and dehumanization became naturalized within a European context, allowing proslavery thinking to coincide with Enlightenment discourse of humanism and subject autonomy.4 In the words of Alan

Cobley, metropolitan “racism would smooth the path of Western commerce by making it easier for those involved in the trade to see the enslaved as trade goods rather than as fellow human beings.”5 Eventually, rising political and ethical tensions in both Europe and in the Caribbean ushered in active abolitionism, leading to the eradication of legal slave trading and eventual emancipation of those enslaved. Though there were individuals who expressed earlier moral and ethical concern with the transatlantic trade and with the institutionalization of slavery, these thoughts did not motivate into action until much later. Within the imperial history of maritime and agricultural mercantilism,

4. In his Second Treatise of Government, a piece recognized as highly influential to Enlightenment thought, John Locke argues that “[t]he natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man […].” However, upon closer examination, slavery appears to be legitimized. In chapter 4, paragraph 23, Locke declares that “the perfect condition of slavery between a lawful conqueror and a captive [is war],… if once compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the other, the state of war and slavery ceases as long as the compact endures…” For Locke, if a “lawful conqueror” and captive agree on their individual conditions, then the idea of “slavery” ceases. Given the racialized discourse of the period, when those of African descent were deemed inferior to the English, the exercise of authority over them through enslavement may be seen as legitimate.

5. Alan Gregor Cobley, “Changing Metropolitan Attitudes to the Atlantic Slave Trade.” The Journal of Caribbean History 42:1(2008): 91-110. Project Muse. Web. 14 Jun 2015.

African slavery, and eventual emancipation, it is important to consider these shared histories and colonial legacies.

As this dissertation project is also focused on the novel’s “rise,” it is also important to identify the theoretical frame in which I am approaching its literary history.

The literary aesthetics of this historical and cultural triangulation between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean colonies, is particularly manifest in long prose fiction and writing. In many ways, the rhetorically powerful tool of representation within the various forms of long-prose writing was significant to the success of European supremacy. Representation of subjects also served as a tool within counterhegemonic narratives designed to interrogate eurocentricity within global power structures. 6 Enmeshed within these politics of representation is the fact that reality and fiction were often blurred. As cited by historians on the “rise of the novel,” at the turn of the eighteenth century, fiction was often mistaken for factual accounts of the Atlantic world. Lennard Davis, for example, argues that the novel form was the aesthetic result of a convergence between the proliferation of print technology and a metropolitan curiosity for journalism.7 For Davis, the novel became a medium for “reported events” and “accounts” of current affairs and

6. Christopher Brown’s Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolition (2006) convincingly traces the slow rise of abolitionist thought. He complicates previously articulated assumptions that the English public suddenly and arbitrarily woke in a fervor of humanitarianism, filled with the discourse of liberty and freedom. “Neither public opinion nor slave resistance, together or alone, originated the British antislavery movement” (24). Like abolitionism in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Spain, it was a slow, complicated process that had as much to do with the evolution of Britain’s national character as with humanitarian efforts.

7. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 1997.

social issues, but as a mimetic form, the novel was not as subject to libel as a purported work of non-fiction. Conveniently, as Davis posits, the novel became the medium of truth-telling and social critique, protected by the façade of being fictionalized. He coins the ambiguity of fiction being represented as fact as “factual fiction.” Eve Tavor Bannet, in her Transatlantic Stories, writes that long eighteenth-century writing, predicated on history, struggles with the concept of “truth” when conveying a narrative. The figures in many novels, she writes, instead of regurgitating the desired relay of a singular “factual” account of a historical moment, rather reflect the multitudinous possibilities of “truth.”

Characters “repeatedly demonstrate for the ignorant or unwary how many different stories could be hung on the same facts.”8 Readers encounter what Ian Baucom calls an

“experimental fidelity to historical truth” and not only brush up against a single rendering of truth, but multiple truths when engaging with the novel.9 Types or tropes within a work offer insight into the imaginative collective thought that existed in the reality of both the metropolitan center and its more “exotic” peripheries. Arguably, too, works that mean to reflect the truth of people’s lives are also actively participating in the creation and solidification of that truth; hence, the symmetry of this dissertation project.

As novelistic tropes would emerge, circulate, and repeat with each new publication on the Atlantic world, both abolitionist and apologist communities understood the power of metropolitan literary consumption on the cultural economy.

8. Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720- 1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 230.

9. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke UP, 2005), 214

Long prose writing, even in its ambiguous or inchoate forms, could and did shape the way people thought about the institution of slavery, while also allowing an alternative form of reception from the didactic sermon or the political pamphlet. The novel became a primary form in which cultural economies of subjectivity, class distinction, and social evolution were promulgated. The novel also became a site where subtle, yet subversive critiques of empire could be written and read, bound and sold. Though as Ian Baucom mentions, the novel “demanded an epistemological revolution [that] transformed the epistemological by fantasizing it” through fiction, it also became an artifact of social thought, constructed through the various outlets of ever-developing generic categories.10

The novel, now recognized to house a number of genres today, was not as concretely organized in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. As such, the history of the transatlantic Caribbean co-created the epistemes of empire and diaspora that inform its “factual fiction.”

The theoretical infrastructure of this project rests on the multiplicities of historical

“truth” that circulated in the long eighteenth-century Atlantic. Another key foundational thread of this project that owes its credit to Ian Watt’s seminal work is that of the fictional representation of the individual experience. Watt contends that “there was a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality; and this transition would seem to constitute an important part of the general cultural background of the rise of the novel.”11 The literary representation of realism as an individual experience can be seen in the titles of some of the English

10. Baucom, 214.

11. Watt, 14. 7

masterpieces that Watt discusses at length in his work: Robinson Crusoe, Pamela,

Clarissa, Tom Jones, etc. The title characters are those in which the formal realism of the novel is conveyed to a reading public. In his examination, however, Watt presupposes that these texts epitomize the absolute realities of their readership, and for the purposes of his general argument, they do. Yet, the eighteenth-century everyday reality of the metropolitan subject, in which many of the novels discussed by Watt convey, was at least indirectly influenced by the events of the Atlantic world. My project moves beyond the constructed national borders of the English isles that limit Watt’s literary examination and considers the fact that narrative “truth” iterated in long eighteenth-century fiction was pluralized by its transatlantic history. Every novel examined in this dissertation project

(discussed in detail later) bears a title reflecting the individual transatlantic experience:

Captain Singleton, Ourika, The History of Mary Prince, The Story of Henrietta, and

Autobiography of a Slave to name a few. Each is the name of a transatlantic subject, relaying the historic West Indies to its reader. Across the imperial and diasporic literary continuum of eighteenth-century transatlantic fiction, there were multiple and even contradictory novelistic representations of historical truth; each of these chapters’ discussions explores a nodal aggregation of literary works founded within critical moments of transatlantic history. In my exploration, I offer a broader understanding of the novelistic renderings of formal realism—of the individual experience of the long eighteenth century. With my readings of these works, I offer the notion that transatlantic fiction represents a more “globalized” formation of eighteenth-century formal realism.

While this project ambitiously calls for an expansion of the historical and transatlantic influences on the rise of the novel, it does have its limitations. It focuses geographically and historically on the eighteenth-century Caribbean and its transatlantic

metropolitan connections. It does not consider domestic European historic events nor the

European influence on the novel as a form. Nor does the project dive into the hemispheric connections that contributed the novelistic subject. Therefore, North American novelists writing about the Caribbean, as exemplified in Leonora Sansay’s The Horrors of Santo

Domingo (1808) and Zelica the Creole (1820) are absent from this examination. It is quite possible that the inclusion of these works would strengthen my claim, further contending that the Caribbean also had developmental influence on the North American novel.12 Yet, in keeping the focus of the dissertation project to transatlantic literature, I am afforded the opportunity to engage with the concrete and specific historical evidence that provides the nuanced readings provided in the following pages. The literary history of the eighteenth-century Caribbean is robust and thriving independent of its participation with the larger hemispheric canon.

This project is also limited by the genres that are discussed: the maritime picaresque, the Bildungsroman, the slave narrative and the gothic. Approaching each chapter by genre facilitates the claim that narrative conventions are informed by the realities of a given moment. Genre, in this sense, speaks to that history. The choices for these genres is strategic, as the interdisciplinarity of this project demands a literary

12. In the third chapter, I allude to this argument as the literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims that the slave narrative is the foundation for the development of African American literature. For more on the Caribbean influence on North American social thought and literature, see: Sean Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

intervention on the long eighteenth-century Caribbean. In other words, the works I examine coincided with modes of writing that were either forming or increasing in popularity during the historical periods I discuss. Franco Moretti’s argument of generic clustering between the years 1740-1900 is useful in this regard, as it enlists a general periodization of the rise and fall of certain genres.13 While the attempt to categorize a genre through periodic clustering has been met with skepticism by a number of literary scholars, Moretti’s data provides a prefatory gauge for reviewing generic trends.14 For example, Moretti identifies the picaresque as one of the earliest genres in the British tradition, having derived the narrative mode from the Spanish. He locates the picaresque’s beginning in 1740. My reading of the genre, specifically the maritime picaresque as it coordinates with the Golden Age of Piracy, has its start in 1720 with the publication of Defoe’s Captain Singleton. While there is a twenty-year gap between

Moretti’s “big data” reading and my close reading of the novel, we both claim that the picaresque was an early novel genre that occurred roughly around the same time, the early eighteenth century. This is also true of the gothic novel: his general periodization of

1780-1820 coincides with the historical transatlantic debate over the slave trade and slavery, which also coincides with where I locate the origin of the Caribbean gothic.

Unfortunately, the slave narrative is missing from Moretti’s discussion, but if one were to consider Brycchan Carey’s claims regarding the slave narrative’s historical confluence

13. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso, 2005), 19.

14. See Jonathan Goodwin and John Holbo, eds., Reading Graphs, Maps and Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti (Anderson: Parlor Press, 2011).

with sentimental fiction, then Moretti’s location of the sentimental novel would coincide roughly within the same period as the slave narrative, between the years 1760 and 1800.

Equiano published his Interesting Narrative in 1789, during the political rise of the

Abolition Movement, and within Moretti’s generic temporal cluster for sentimental fiction.15 There is, however, a major departure from Moretti’s periodization of the

Bildungsroman genre and my rendering of it; this discrepancy is taken up in extensive detail in my second chapter. The analysis that Moretti provides establishes a useful blueprint for the generic decisions I made for this project. However, my work goes beyond the English literary periodization established by Moretti, as I consider the transatlantic and cross-imperial influences within either a comparative Francophone and

Hispanophone text in all my chapters.16

While this project only allows for the discussion of four genres as they are linked to the history of the West Indies, it is by no means an exhaustive examination of the its influence on the rise of the novel. For example, if we were to continue with Moretti’s

15. Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760-1807. Though I claim that the Abolition Movement had its political rise at the time of Equiano’s publication, it suffered a brief suspension due to its Jacobin associations after the French Revolution. See: Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

16. In my project, I allow for slight temporal disjuncture between the three Euro- Atlantic literary traditions, as I allow for genres to proliferate across Europe and the Atlantic. Hence, the sentimental tone found in Equiano’s narrative voice in his Interesting Narrative can also be found in Manzano’s Autobiografía published fifty years later. Further justification of slight temporal difference between works of the same genre occurs within the chapters.

taxonomy, the epistolary novel circulated in England between 1760 and 1800. As a genre, the epistolary novel is constructed so that the private experience and the “individual consciousness” of a character may be read for public consumption.17 Consequently, an author’s personal outlook on a growing capitalist urban environment, or private politics of the current moment, can be ventriloquized through a novel’s protagonist. The works of this dissertation’s second chapter, specifically The Woman of Colour, succeeds in demonstrating this point. Yet, there are epistolary novels that also construct a political framework for their narratives that are not included in this project. William Earle’s Obi;

Or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack is an immensely politicized epistolary novel, written through the missives of George Sanford, that vilifies the slave trade and calls for immediate and full emancipation. Discussed in the fourth chapter for its connection with

Obeah, this work undoubtedly draws personal politics into the public light. Another generic example that would fit within the realm of this project is the anti-Jacobin novel, a genre that existed briefly during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Exemplified by the works of Elizabeth Hamilton and

Maria Edgeworth, the anti-Jacobin novel is considered a genre of political backlash against the French Revolution and the principles of British Jacobinism. There is a distinct recuperation of pre-revolutionary conservative orthodoxy and sympathy for stringent class-based hierarchies in this genre.18 Anti-Jacobin sentiments expressed in Europe on

17. Watt, 177.

18. For an excellent reading of the anti-Jacobin novel and its proliferation during the period, even exceeding that of Jacobin fiction, see: M.O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin

issues of class were also expressed on issues of race, as hinted throughout the anti-

Jacobin canon. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), and the novel’s stark transition from the successful marriage of her slave character Juba in the first edition to his complete disappearance in the second edition, for example, demonstrates how class politics seeped into the race politics of the era within the genre.19 Further research into the epistolary and anti-Jacobin genres and their connections to the eighteenth-century Caribbean is still needed to substantiate these claims. Yet, the transatlantic links between novel and history are there, just as they are in the novel genres that I discuss in the following four chapters.

Each of the dissertation’s chapters is a dedicated discussion of a novel genre that was generated or importantly altered through imperial transactions in the Caribbean. Each chapter also tackles with a specific concept or theme that mediates a historical moment with a literary movement. The first chapter, “Moveable Worlds: The Maritime

Picaresque, Piracy, and Resisting Empire,” examines the Spanish and British representation of the British pirate subject in early maritime narratives. This chapter takes up the concept of enlightenment masculinity on the imperial frontier, with the represented pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy as the focus. Spanish narrative construction of the pirate as villainous cannibal and ruthless killer is figured in the 1690 narrative of Alonso

Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

19. The racial politics of Edgeworth’s Belinda, including the discussion of Juba and his role within the novel, particularly in the second edition onward, has been discussed at length. See: Susan Greenfield, “‘Abroad and at Home”: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda. PMLA 12.2 (Mar. 1997), 214-228; Allison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” New Essays on Maria Edgeworth. Ed. Julie Nash (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 1-29. 13

Ramírez, wherein the Puerto Rican hero is captured by an English privateer, possibly

William Dampier, and held aboard his vessel for two years. Once aboard, Ramírez is subject to horrendous torture and is witness to brutal crimes committed by the pirates against the indigenous populations along coastal Central and South America. A politicized and loathsome figure within the Spanish Atlantic, the pirate is contrast with that of the British iteration of his figure, particularly in the work of Daniel Defoe’s

Captain Singleton (1720). As I discuss in the chapter, formations of enlightenment ideology and secularizing subjectivity are embraced by the underdog Singleton, presenting the reader a piratical subject who is a redeemable hero and an iconic figure within the imperial capitalist enterprise. These competing narratives of West Indian piratical representation—that of vicious killer and empathetic picaro—set the stage for how the eighteenth-century pirate of the Caribbean is represented to this day.

The development of underdog masculinities within transatlantic fiction, as I track them in chapter one, generates questions on the topic of represented femininity in the imperial space. I take up these questions in my second chapter, “Models of Morality: The

Bildungsroman and the Woman of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century” which focuses on the coming-of-age genre of the Bildungsroman. My examination of imperial femininity begins with a direct rebuttal of Felicity Nussbaum’s claim in The Limits of the

Human (2008) wherein she writes that the woman of color of the eighteenth century was not “associated with or entitled to” the representative idealized femininity granted to the metropolitan white woman.20 Though Nussbaum’s claim is correct when considering the

20. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 156. 14

represented woman of color across time, there are works of literature that contradict this position in its sweeping entirety. I contend that within the French- and British-Caribbean contexts, the transatlantic woman of color was, in fact, an active participant in the developing domestic fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this chapter, I analyze three novels—The Female American (1767), The Woman of Colour (1808) and

Ourika (1823)—to trace the development of the Bildungsroman and idealized feminine citizenry within a Euro-Caribbean framework. The represented woman of color in the

New World, specifically from the West Indian islands, provided an experimental center of moral and social reformation for European readers during the rise of domestic fiction.

Reading women of color in novels contextualized by the history of the eighteenth- century Atlantic in the second chapter turns to the racialized politics of slavery in third chapter. Entitled “Listening to Silence in the Autobiographical Slave Narrative,” the chapter works with the autobiographical slave narrative, and sets the form against the political pamphlets circulated by pro- and anti-slavery groups that “narrate” the slave experience. Though the autobiographical slave narrative is itself not a genre of the novel, it was a critical prose form for black writing, importantly the African American literary canon. While the “voice” of the enslaved grew to have its own rhetorical and literary impact from contemporary writings of the Abolitionist Movement, there have been no literary analyses about the affective weight of recording moments of silence or ineffability within these works. Reading moments of narrative ineffability within the autobiographical slave narrative produces three powerful rhetorical interpretations discussed at length in the chapter. Briefly put, the literary representations of silence in these narratives: firstly, contradict proslavery interpretations of slave silence; secondly, authenticate the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade through the individual experience;

thirdly, when mediated through narrative form, silence draws a unique conduit between the collective slave experience and metropolitan readership. In providing a new analysis of the canonical works of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), Mary Prince’s

History (1828), and Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía (1839), with an emphasis on moments of silence, I argue that the slave narrative creates an affective bridge between the narrator and the reader, and, more importantly, a rhetorical link between the reader and the enslaved across the Atlantic.

The Abolition Movement, comprised of narratives describing the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade discussed in chapter three, was met with pro-slavery writings of

African barbarity and plantocratic anxiety over slave rebellion. Engaging with this complex perspective is the topic of my fourth and final chapter, entitled “Tropical Terror:

Obeah, Vodou, and Plantocratic Anxiety in the Caribbean Gothic.” Evidence from the

Parliamentary Papers, political pamphlets and novels show a plantocratic fear of the creole religious practices of Obeah and Vodou, as well as the motivations of abolitionist missionaries from the metropole. In the chapter, I examine how transatlantic pro-slavery discourse of the period was fundamental to the Caribbean gothic novel, and highlight the major plantocratic anxieties over slave rebellion, Methodist missionary work, and racial miscegenation. I conclude that the Caribbean gothic is a genre that is intrinsically affiliated with anti-abolitionist politics. By interrogating the pro-slavery tropes of early

Caribbean gothic fiction within Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta (1800), Cynric

William’s Hamel the Obeah Man (1827) and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1825), this chapter illuminates the inherent racialized politics of plantocratic amelioration mediated through the representations of Vodou and Obeah. These readings are further

contextualized by the conceptual formations of terror and the sublime as Vodou and

Obeah are reinterpreted and consumed by metropolitan readership.

Considered collectively, these four chapters make the argument that the

Caribbean, over the course of its imperial history, was a critical and direct influence on the rise of the novel. From experimentation with domestic fiction, to the creation of a new genre, to the modification of generic tropes to fit a colonial environment, the history of the Caribbean and the rise of the novel cross-pollinated to create works that are a part of a globalized literary history. This project’s conclusion traces these generic features of the novel in twentieth and twenty-first century transatlantic literatures. For many contemporary Caribbean writers, making meaning of a past through literature requires an immersion into a violent historical narrative of oppression, hatred, and racism.

The project strongly asserts that the cross-cultural permeations between the

French, Spanish, African and English within the Atlantic further push the boundaries of the origin story of the novel and the important role the West Indies played in its development. In doing so, it also reads through the intricate and nuanced transatlantic actions that compose a larger global history. Life in the West Indies did inform the representation of the secularized, capital-driven “enlightened” subject of the early eighteenth century (Chapter One).21 It also draws connections between gender and New

21. For an interesting read into the historical connection between the Enlightenment and Cromwell’s “Western Design,” see: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Over the course of her Competing Visions of Empire, Swingen’s historically-oriented work examines, in microscopic detail, the transatlantic and triangulated relationship between metropolitan government, the founding and building of the Royal African Company, and the political agendas of the West Indian colonists. Implied is the notion that the capitalist ventures into the West Indies helped motivate the British Enlightenment in the seventeenth century. 17

World national ideology (Chapter Two), slavery and vocal agency (Chapter Three), and transatlantic ambiguity found within raced-based cultural constructions (Chapter Four).

Collectively, this dissertation taps into the evolving conceptualizations of gender, race, and empire as they span from the late seventeenth century to the threshold of emancipation in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. This project is historical, transimperial, and diasporic in its examination of the novel, imbibing the cross-influence of both narrative and representation in the eighteenth-century Caribbean contact zone.

Chapter 1: Moveable Worlds: The Maritime Picaresque, Piracy and Resisting Empire

“Well may the World against us cry, for these our Deeds most base, For which, alas! We now must dye, Death looks us in the face; Which is no more than what’s our due, Since we so wicked were, As here shall be declar’d to you, Let Pyrates then take care.” --Villany Rewarded; Or the Pirates Last Farewel to the World22

The six pirates were hanged at Execution Dock on November 25th, 1696. The month-long trial of these “Hainous and Notorious Offenders” and their publicly spectacularized punishment was the result of the collaborative efforts of the Crown and other British government agencies to hunt and destroy Captain Henry Every and his crew.

23 Villany Rewarded, a ballad sung to the tune of “Russels Farewel” circulated around

22. Villany Rewarded; Or The Pirates Last Farewel to the World: Who was Executed at Execution Dock, on Wednesday the 25th of November, 1696. Being of Every’s Crew. London: Charles Barnet, 1696. Housed at Magdalene College, Pepys Library 2.199. Access through English Broadside Ballad Archive, EBBA 20813 .

23. Proclamation for apprehending Henry Every, alias Bridgeman, and sundry other pirates, (Scotland Privy Council 10 Aug 1696). Accessed via EEBO 1 Oct 2017. . Henry Every is more commonly known as John Avery. In the late seventeenth-century trial documents, “Every” is consistently used. However, in the 1709 pamphlet, The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery, Defoe’s 1720 The King of Pirates, and the 1724 General History of the Pyrates, the authors adopted the “Avery” spelling and it has stuck since. See: Jan Rogozinski, Honor Among Thieves: Captain Kidd, Henry Every, and the Pirate Deomscray in the Indian Ocean (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2000), 80.

London, along with dozens of other broadsides, pamphlets and paraphernalia sponsored by the British government. Accompanying the ballad are three illustrations, each featuring the violent deeds perpetrated by Captain Every during the height of his piratical intrigue on the high seas. The largest of these is particularly gruesome, as it shows the image of a man, conceivably Henry Every himself, kneeling behind a naked female corpse that has been sliced open from the base of her neck to her genitalia. The man holds a blade in one hand, and her heart in the other. In the background, human body parts held up by spikes are scattered across what appears to be a fortress or prison. Immediately behind the kneeling man is a severed head in profile, about to be consumed by the three birds of prey shadowing over it.24 The ballad and the illustrations together create a representation of the pirate’s life come full circle: during his life, he commits acts of violence, terror, and rapine, but when ultimately caught, the “due” that comes to him is the death he faces at the hands of justice. Pirates, the ballad warns, need to “take care” of the inevitability of their own demise.

The expansive amount of ephemera circulating about the trial and execution was also a demonstration of the British government “taking care.” The execution needed to be well-publicized to thwart the intentions of disgruntled sailors who would otherwise follow in the footsteps of Every and his men. It was also designed to influence the public’s opinion of Every, who, by 1696, had been mythologized for his exploits in the

24. See Appendix A.

South Asian Sea. It was, as Douglas Burgess puts it, the British government’s singular attempt at “media manipulation.”25 Despite the efforts of the Crown, the metropolitan populace was enamored by Every and what he represented; he was held as “a person of great Consequence” and “as one that raised himself to the Dignity of a King.”26 In the public eye, Every represented the destabilization of static class structures in the late- seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, and embodied a particular ideal of anti- authoritarianism and, in many respects, of successful entrepreneurship. The efforts of the

Crown failed, as evidenced by Charles Johnson’s popular 1712 stage production The

Successful Pyrate, and Daniel Defoe’s The King of Pirates, published in 1719 in addition to the dozens of other publications aggrandizing Every and pirates like him in the early eighteenth century.27 Every and his men, during their lives and well after their deaths, were lovingly locked into the British popular memory as the “scourges of the Indies.”28

25. Douglas R. Burgess, “Piracy in the Public Sphere: The Henry Every Trials and the Battle for Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Print Culture,” Journal of British Studies 48:4 (Oct 2009), 888-889.

26. A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (Mineola: Dover, 1999), 49.

27. For a summative account of these two works and other contemporary works that capitalized on the mythology surrounding Captain Every, see: Mark Hanna, Pirates Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 394-408.

28. Quoted in: Jenifer Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean (Malabar: Krieger Publishing 1992), 212.

The struggle between the British government and the metropolitan public demonstrates how media—pamphlets, plays, ballads, etc.—shapes, and is shaped by, history. The valorization of the “noble privateer” by the public was at odds with the official narrative of the pirate being hostis humani generis.29 At the center of the debate of the representations of the eighteenth-century pirate is the medium in which these representations are being circulated. The formalistic features of the pirate subject were constructed by the politics of the Atlantic world. Rising along with the ephemera of the era was the novel, a form that also participated in the shaping of the pirate, especially during the early eighteenth century when the “Golden Age of Piracy” reached its peak and suddenly fell with the onslaught of governmental acts of suppression.

As a developing narrative form in the early eighteenth century, there has always been a generic thread of maritime adventure in the genealogy of the novel, from the 1719 publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe onwards through the British metropole, and outwards throughout Europe and the early Americas. Margaret Cohen, in The Novel and the Sea, traces the connection between the early novel and maritime tales, introducing her readers to the helpful genre term “maritime picaresque,” which encapsulates the developing novelistic features of sea adventure fiction: “the maritime picaresque portrays

29. Originating in admiralty law, labeling a pirate as an “enemy against all men” indicated that pirates and illegal slavers could be attacked by any vessel on the high seas, independent of national allegiance. For an account of the pirate in legal and political thought from antiquity to the modern era, see: Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

the adventures of roving protagonists buffeted around the globe.”30 It is also a genre that includes what Cohen calls the “mariner’s craft,” the demonstration of fictional characters conjoining possible (if not probable) circumstances that must be resolved or overcome through the detailed and realistic modes of resolution.31 For example, as Crusoe faces the very real concern for sustainable food sources on the island, he methodically notes the process for raising livestock, harvesting raisins, and hunting island birds. For maritime fiction to successfully seep into the imagination of the reader, the work must be anchored in the material reality of a historical moment, or at least the social memory of a historical past.

Though Cohen’s work is foundational for understanding the link between the early novel and the sea, and the importance of the mariner’s demonstration of “craft” at the height of oceanic exploration, little mention is made in her work about how literature deploys representations of the pirate. Additionally, there is little discussion of the importance of specific maritime spaces that may have maintained a resonance in not only the imperial imagination, but also the imagination of those living in the “New World.” In this chapter, I would like to engage with Margaret Cohen’s theoretical framing and substantially expand the scope of her approach. Here I will explore the importance of the historical Caribbean as a space for the western social imaginary in its literary

30. Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 8.

31. In his essay “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes argues that the descriptions of minute detail, initiated by Crusoe’s empirical calculations and methodical accounts and perfected in later eighteenth-century novels, deconstructs the authority of the writer, allowing the reader to identify with the characters and plot outside of the author’s construction (Malden: Blackwell, 2006). 23

representation of the pirate. The fascination with piracy was not strictly a European affair in its literary construction, but a transatlantic one. This chapter will tangentially contend that, as an emerging transatlantic form, the maritime picaresque’s development can be registered as a literary barometer for the historical pivot from predominantly Spanish to

English colonial power in the Atlantic world. For the duration of the long eighteenth century, all major European powers had some stake in the maritime and territorial events unfolding in the drama of the West Indian colonies. By the early eighteenth century,

Britain’s imperial power dominated in the Western Hemisphere, with the West Indian islands producing great wealth for both colonies and metropole alike. The maritime picaresque, and sea fiction in general, reflects that pivotal imperial shift.

British maritime presence in the Atlantic brought with it a set of cultural values that permeated through oceanic exchange. As such, the popular representation of the pirate both in the Atlantic and in London, as this chapter will discuss, is one of enlightenment masculinity. I am defining enlightenment masculinity as the representation of a subject or literary protagonist that embodies the Enlightenment formations of self- awareness, secularization, anti-hierarchical sentiments, and physical and social mobility.

Inspired by Ian Watt’s reading of homo economicus, the enlightened (male) voyager is enlisted in a vision of a globalizing world.32 At the heart of his cosmopolitan demeanor is an economically-driven understanding of transatlantic production and exchange. The embodiment of these values signals the ongoing class restructuring and substantial urbanization during the period, when working and bourgeoisie classes garnered

32. Watt, 67-78.

increasing influence on the daily life of Britain and its colonies. Within the popular

British imagination, the pirate captured this vision of laissez-faire politics, the realities of social versatility, and secularized self-determinism.

However, as this chapter will also show, the representation of the pirate was not so always nor so universally beloved in popular opinion. Within the larger scope of the

Atlantic world (outside of Britain), the pirate was more synonymous with violence, rapine, and anti-enlightenment sentiment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. This chapter will discuss the two competing visions of the pirate and how both visions influenced the developing genre of the maritime picaresque. In short, the role of the Atlantic pirate, along with the history that he carried and the legacies that he generated, informed the literature of Europe. Methodologically, I will trace the legacies of both historical and fictional pirates in the Caribbean as represented by the Spanish,

British, and to a lesser extent, the Dutch to its geopolitical importance in the transatlantic social imagination and the novel.33

This chapter is divided into two sections. Subtitled “Under the Dark Flag: Piracy and the Social Imagination,” the first section examines Los Infortunios de Alonso

Ramírez (1690), the novelistic account of a Spanish-creole citizen held captive by

English pirates. The work not only exemplifies the early ambiguity between the reality of

33. In this chapter, I will be using the gendered pronouns “he” and “his” to describe the pirate in general terms. Even though there are female pirates recorded as having existed, the world of the pirate was “rugged” and “overwhelmingly male” (Rediker, Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 104.

the pirate experience and the fictional representations of that reality in transatlantic writing but is also an excellent case study of how the maritime picaresque was informed by the “factual fiction” of maritime narratives. The discussion of the representation of the pirate in this maritime “factual fiction” will be put into conversation with contemporary

“non-fiction” works of piracy and privateering written by Alexander Esquemeling (1684-

1685) and William Dampier (1696).34 This section lays the foundation for the claim that the image of the pirate is inseparable from the frontier space of the Caribbean, in addition to being a crucial element to the rise of the novel.

The second section of this chapter, titled “Turn of the Tide: Rebels, Men, and

Political Pirates in the English Novel,” considers how Anglo-Caribbean fiction represents the pirate as an icon of enlightenment masculinity, patriarchal resistance and frontier fraternity. This discussion will center on Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of

Captain Singleton (1722), a novel that signals the narrative re-rendering of the pirate from its debased position in the Atlantic to embrace the enlightened masculinity marked and celebrated in the West to the present day. Specifically, this section demonstrates that it is with the British appropriation of the pirate as a subject for fictional writing, that his representation, motivations, and interiority change in western popular reading. The developing maritime picaresque, as a genre, served as a vessel for this symbolic remediation. Similar in method to the first section of this chapter, Captain Singleton will

34. Within the context of this chapter, I understand “factual fiction” as literary works that are historically or factually plausible, but are represented as fiction. These works tend to draw on historical precedence or important events.

be read alongside the “factual,” but fantastic accounts of piracy found in A General

History of the Pyrates (1724).35 From the works of Esquemeling and Sigüenza portraying the pirate as an unforgivable cannibal and sadistic monster, there is a stark representational shift in the works of Defoe and A General History, whose authors portray the pirate as a man with a traumatic past, who is subjected to corrupt governments, and who justifiably resists that corruption.

An addendum to the historical context surrounding Defoe’s representation of the pirate in Captain Singleton is required. By the time of the novel’s publication, though at the peak of its Golden Age, piracy in the Caribbean was under direct military attack.

British naval power forced piracy in the Caribbean to dwindle to a few isolated rag-tag crews by the late 1720s.36 Piracy became less of an actual threat to transatlantic trade as

35. The authorship of A General History of the Pyrates is still under some debate. While scholars like Manuel Schonhorn believe that Daniel Defoe is the author of the work, this argument has not been historically verified. Though a great deal of effort has gone into the argument of Defoe’s authorship of this work (please see editor’s introduction in the Dover edition, 1999), since the author is not confirmed, he will be represented here as “Captain Charles Johnson,” the original pseudonym for the 1724 publication. This mode of reference has precedent as both Margaret Cohen and Marcus Rediker refer to Johnson as the author of the History. Colin Woodard points to the possible authorial candidate Nathanial Mist, “a former sailor, journalist, and publisher of the Weekly Journal… As a former seaman who had sailed the West Indies, Mist, of all London’s writer-publishers, was uniquely qualified to have penned the book, being well acquainted with the maritime world and the settings the pirates operated in” (New York: Harcourt, 2007), 325-326.

36. Between the years 1718 and 1719, Woodes Rogers, the primary commander for a special mission against piracy in the Caribbean, attacked the island of Nassau with the full force of the British Navy, capturing many pirate ringleaders and effectively destroying the The Golden Age of Piracy. Captain Charles Vane, the most politically active pirate against the Hanoverian government, and one of the most ruthless pirates, was hanged in March of 1721. “After 1722, most pirates had abandoned any hope of

the English naval presence continued its war against it. Over time, the represented pirate of the maritime picaresque and his enlightened masculinity overwhelmed the ambiguity of his official title of “enemy against all mankind.” The imagined eighteenth-century pirate ship, holding men of varying languages, cultures, creeds and social stations, became a symbol of resistance and egalitarianism for creole writers born in the colonies in the early nineteenth century.37 As Margaret Cohen succinctly puts it: “With the nation modeled on a shipboard fraternity soldered by craft, sea fiction idealizes a vision of the modern nations forged and maintained by the bonds of skilled work.”38 A final brief discussion of works that speak to this developed, complex and fully evolved heroic portrayal of the pirate will round out this chapter’s conclusion. Considered together, these sections contend that the pirate and the events during the Golden Age of Piracy generated a subset of tropes now constitutive of the maritime picaresque and the literary legacies of piratical representation in the Western canon.

carving out their own republic or helping overthrow the Hanoverian kings of England and spent most of their time fighting for mere survival” (Woodard, 320).

37. Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation is one of the earliest works to engage with creole resistance in the Atlantic. Linguistic creolization in the Caribbean rendered a mode of colonial resistance against the monolingual hegemony. For Glissant, “creolization carries along then into the adventure of multilingualism and the into the incredible explosion of cultures. But the explosion of cultures does not mean they are scattered or mutually diluted. It is the violent sign of their consensual, not imposed, sharing” (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 34.

38. Cohen, 153.

Section One: Under the Dark Flag: Piracy and the Social Imagination

English privateer captain William Dampier, while off the coast of Cavite in the

Philippines, logged an entry in his now famous historical recounting of his adventures on the high seas. Commissioned by Queen Mary II to harass the Spanish in both the East and

West Indies, Dampier was a well-respected contributor to the preservation of England’s global imperial reign.39 During his time, and for generations to come, he was heralded as the face of British imperial conquest.40 Given this governmental license, Dampier and his men would haunt the world’s oceans, disrupt international commercial voyages, and wreak general havoc on Spanish colonial villages and trading posts. On February 23rd,

1687, he wrote:41

39. With government license to buccaneer across the West Indies and into the Far East and in being one of the first Europeans to give an account of yet-explored Australia, Dampier was held in high regard by the crown and the British scientific community. Historian Percy Adams writes that Dampier dined with Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, and appeared before the council of Trade and Plantations as an authority on Spanish America” (Mineola: Dover, 2007), ix.

40. José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 133.

41. According to the Julian calendar, which would have been the calendar that Dampier would have followed. Ramírez, on the other hand, would have followed the Gregorian calendar. Fabio López Lázaro explains: “As a Catholic subject of the king of Spain, Ramírez was using the Gregorian calendar promulgated by Pope Gregory declared that October 4 of that year was to be followed immediately by October 15, forcing the date forward by ten days. Dampier, however, was naturally enough following English practice, which continued to reject the “Popish” calendar until 1752, when Parliament officially gave up on the medieval Julian calendar” (33). Even though the dates may appear different from the accounts of Dampier and Ramirez, once a Julian-Gregorian

The 23rd day we took another Spanish Vessel that came from the same place as the other. She was laden with Rice and Cotton-Cloth, and bound for Manila also. These Goods were purposely for the Acapulco Ship: The Rice was for the Men to live on while they lay there, and in their return: and the Cotton-cloth was to make Sail. The Master of this ship was the Boatswain of the Acapulco Ship which escaped us at Guam, and was now at Manila. It was this Man that gave us the Relation of what Strength it had, and how they were afraid of us there…We took these two Vessels within seven or eight Leagues of Manila.42

Dampier’s casual manner of “taking” the two vessels a few miles from the Spanish port in Manila speaks to his extended experience of privateering for England in the late seventeenth century—attacking and looting Spanish vessels had become a familiar enterprise for him and his crew. Between the years 1679 and 1691, Dampier traveled the world with the sole objective to attack and plunder Spanish ships in the Americas and

Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines which at the time was the Spanish colonial stronghold in the East Indies. However, as his account will testify, Dampier attacked far more than Spanish ships, and became a threat to both Dutch and French trading as well.

On board one of these Spanish vessels was a simple carpenter by the name of Alonso

Ramírez, a Puerto Rican by birth who was looking to make a fresh start in the Philippines after his wife and child died in New Spain (what would be later day Mexico).43 It would

conversion is made, adding the time zone differential that was already instated by the seventeenth century, the dates catalogued by Ramírez and Dampier are the same.

42. William Dampier, Memoirs of a Buccaneer: Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World, 1697 (Mineola: Dover, 2007), 260.

43. It is a matter of debate as to whether Dampier and Ramírez were on the same vessel for two years. Buscaglia-Salgado writes that while this is not the case, there was some overlap between the two men in Con Son. Lázaro makes a convincing argument that it was Dampier who abducted Ramírez. For the purposes of this chapter, I side with Lázaro’s claim, yet the importance of the chapter rests on the representation of the pirate

be Alonso Ramírez’s account of piratical cruelty aboard the English vessel that circulated across the Atlantic, generating not only the first “novel” of Latin America according to some scholars, but certainly an early representation of the pirate that would remain a singular icon in the transatlantic social imagination.44 Though Dampier was not a pirate by technical definition, Ramírez’s narrative of his capture and release by Dampier’s crew reflect the many narrative tropes that would remain quintessential to the character of the pirate. For all intents and purposes, Dampier and his crew were pirates in the eyes of the

Spanish and Hispanophone Atlantic.

Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (translated as The Misfortunes of Alonso

Ramírez) was written by Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, the king’s cosmographer who was fascinated by Ramírez’s story of misadventure in uncharted waters that had “spread throughout Mexico.”45 What Sigüenza published, and was approved by a censor, was the

Anglophobic narrative of an ordinary Spanish colonial subject who had been kidnapped by vicious pirates and was held enslaved for two years on board a ship of which its men

subject in the work, not whether the pirate was Dampier. See: Buscaglia-Salgado, 156; Lázaro, 29-46.

44. Though the work being argued as the first “novel,” creates some debate amongst scholars, particularly with the elements of “fictional truth,” those that have worked intimately with the text claim its status as the first Latin American novel. These scholars include J.S. Cummins, Alan Soons, Lorente Medina and Fabio López Lázaro.

45. José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, “The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690) and the Duplicitous Complicity between the Narrator, the Writer, and the Censor,” Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism 1.1 (2005), 1.

knew no moral bounds.46 The ship he was aboard traversed various regions of the South

China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and around the Cape of Good Hope, eventually parting ways with Ramírez and his men in the Gulf of Mexico. According to J.S. Cummins and

Alan Soons, the story follows the conventions of a maritime captivity narrative: the empathetic “everyman” becomes a hero within the narrative, and shows remarkable courage and irreproachable fidelity to his high moral citizenry. 47 A hero of this quality invites the reader “to reassess himself spiritually after his vicarious experience of captivity and disaster.”48 What the narrative also does is intentionally perpetuate the image of the villainous English subject to fit within a long-standing social construction of the “perfidious Albion,” a socio-political move that helps dehumanize the English as a race, while also maintaining Spanish solidarity across the Atlantic and into far-flung

Spanish colonies around the world.49 Ramírez’s apparent loyalty to Spain and his

46. According to Lázaro, anti-English sentiment was a standard trope in Spanish imperial writing, reciprocated by the “inflammatory English pamphlets” that would equally condemn Spain for their barbarity in the New World. “These tracts justified pirates’ pillaging of the Spanish Empire through stereotypes of Spaniards as latter-day conquistadores following in the footsteps of Hernán Cortes and Francisco Pizaro” (25). Additionally, according to C.H. Haring in his Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century, “Two great empires, Mexico and Peru, had been subdued by treachery, their kings murdered, and their people made to suffer a living death in the mines of Potosi and New Spain. Such was the Protestants Englishman’s conception…of the results of Spanish colonial policy” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Hamden: Archon Press, 1966), 33.

47. Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora. Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, eds J.S. Cummins and Alan Soons (London: Tamesis Text, 1984), 20.

48. Ibid.

49. Lázaro, 25.

Catholic faith prove to be unwavering, even when faced with imminent death. Indeed, his infallible demonstration of moral upkeep in the face of both his impoverished beginnings and Protestant barbarity seems impossible at times. So seemingly impossible, in fact, that many scholars doubt the veracity of the narrative. Los Infortunios, was filtered and mediated through three individuals, each with his own agenda; Ramírez, above all, needed to protect his position as a loyal subject to colonial Mexico.50 An actual account of abduction and innocent witnessing to the atrocities of and English pirate crew is still under question, and may not be ever known. What is known is that Alonso

Ramírez did travel with a pirate crew (possibly Dampier’s) from Southeast Asia, around the world to shipwreck off the Yucatán Peninsula. The journey also did take roughly two years to complete. However, Ramírez may not have completed his journey as a victim and a slave to the pirates, but rather traveled voluntarily as a pirate himself. Arguably,

Ramírez’s narrative proves to be an invention founded on real-life events, cloaked in

Anglophobic propaganda and a rhetoric of Spanish supremacy. As Lázaro states, “the civilian fear of pirate attacks on their Catholic world was shared by all levels of a highly hierarchical society…and reinforced the elite superstructures of worldwide monarchy.”51

50. José Buscaglia-Salgado, “The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690) and the Duplicitous Complicity between the Narrator, the Writer, and the Censor,” Dissidences 1:3 (2005).

51. Ibid, 10.

In other words, Ramírez’s account was the perfect political gesture against the Protestant

English forces in the West Indies.

The fictionalization of Ramírez’s “factual” recounting of his tribulations under the duress of Protestant villainy had a number of motivations. Not only was it important for the Spanish government to recognize Ramírez “as having been the victim of pirates and not pirate himself,” there was also a political pressure to stress the importance of New

Spain growing into an empire of its own. Mexico was quickly growing economically, out-producing and out-trading Spain by the late-seventeenth century.52 In making the protagonist an Atlantic creole subject from Puerto Rico the account also helps promote the notion that colonial Latin America and the Caribbean were developing ideologies and economies independently from those prescribed by European sovereignty.

Another element that coincides with an Atlantic sentiment of mindfully detaching itself from the moribund clutches of Spain has to do with law enforcement against piracy itself. New legislation in both the Spanish and British colonies promoted colonial autonomy to sentence and execute pirates without the need for metropolitan approval.53

52. As noted by J.H. Elliott in Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, Spain was under tough economic and social times, with the rising concern of who would become Carlos II’s heir to the throne. “By the 1690s, the problem of the Spanish succession had become acute…. The last years of the dying King presented a pathetic spectacle of degradation at Madrid. Afflicted with convulsive fits, the wretched monarch was believed to have been bewitched, and the Court pullulated with confessors and exorcists and visionary nuns employing every artifice known to the Church to free him of the devil…” (New York: Penguin, 2002), 372-373. The weakening colonial stronghold Spain had over its strengthening colony, in addition to the uncertainty of Spain’s power after Carlos’ death made striving for colonial autonomy all the more crucial.

53. Lázaro, 55-56.

Both the pirate and the systems that had him tried and condemned belonged in the space of the New World, complicating the unidirectional transatlantic hierarchy held between

Europe and the Americas. The Atlantic had begun to foster its own culture of crime and punishment. Preserving the West Indian colonies from predominately British privateering and piratical attacks became endemic to the circumstances that existed within the Spanish

New World, particularly after the War of the Spanish Succession.54 In effect, the need for the West Indies to exist with more legal autonomy led to new policies that would allow for pirates to be tried and hanged without metropolitan sanction. The pirate of the

Caribbean in Ramírez’s text became not only a subject of imperial menace, but was also a subject generated and punished within the insularity of the West Indies, a burgeoning center of New World commerce and growing colonial independence.

It is within this historical context that the trope of the pirate, intertwined with the factual fiction of maritime writing, became increasingly connected to the West Indies as a geo-political space. The islands themselves were also a shape-shifting political seascape that agglomerated into site for capital venture, maritime adventure, and unfettered wealth.

Additionally, within the Spanish political framework of religious fraternity and imperial

54. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1712), many British sailors had been “let off,” no longer needed to serve in the war. According to Johnson, these men were limited to only two options: “either to find employment for the great numbers of seamen turn’d adrift at the conclusion of the war, and thereby prevent their running into such undertakings, or to guard sufficiently the coast of Africa, the West Indies and other places that pirates resort.” Privateering during the war bred seamen to be violent on the sea, their own moral compass adrift on the waves: “privateers in time of war are a nursery for pyrates against a peace.” (A General History, 3-4).

supremacy, the British privateer/pirate was the archenemy to the success of Spain’s colonies. Los Infortunios, riding the line between fact and fiction, lays the foundation for the ways in which the pirate as a novelistic subject would be introduced to Europe. The pirate was a rhetorical and political figure of violence, rapine, and soullessness; he was also an iconic start to a literary movement of realistic fiction and the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century.55

As the maritime picaro of the imperial frontier, the pirate was both resistant to and a marker of an expanding British empire, making him also a political subject. As such, both historical pirates and their literary counterparts, were constructed and informed by the political agendas and colonial gossip continued by deck-hands and viceroys alike.

Considered together, the genre of Los Infortunios, as an adventure tale, a maritime picaresque and a factual accounting of events taking place between 1687 and 1689, amalgamates to create a new genre specific to and dependent upon the West Indies and their pirates and buccaneers. As Margaret Cohen notes: “The new eighteenth century studies have drawn attention to the impact of overseas colonialism on European literature and culture, including how European inventors of the novel ‘novelized’ the textual genres that emerged from the practices of empire.”56 There are forms of prose writing that were entirely dependent upon the Caribbean space for their development and social and

55. Scholars including Ian Watt and Michael McKeon write that fiction rooted in realism began with the picaresque, a narrative that presents a middle-class ideology in a modern and capitalizing society. In many of the contenders for the “first novel,” including Robinson Crusoe and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), these narratives take place in the early Atlantic. The blurred lines between the reality and fiction of a transimperial network of the West Indies was an important component to earliest conceptions of the novel form.

56. Cohen, 135. 36

cultural impact mediated through the central hub of information and trade in the eighteenth century. The maritime picaresque became a distinct genre that is dependent upon the knowability of the frontier and the West Atlantic for its literary backdrop.

Within the growing genre of the maritime picaresque, and for the purpose of meeting the anti-piratical sentiments felt in Spain, its colonies, and other concerned citizen-traders of the New World, the represented pirate needed to generate and maintain some defining characteristics. In Los Infortunios, and in the travel narratives of

Alexander Esquemeling, these features include insatiable predation, cannibalism, and ruthless torture. In the early Americas and Europe, these features would color the image of both privateer and pirate from the late-seventeenth century until the eighteenth century, when the social memory of his subjectivity would then be overwhelmed by the romanticized Anglo-centric narratives in circulation. In both Esquemeling’s The

Buccaneers of America, originally written in Dutch, and in Los Infortunios de Alonso

Ramírez, predation, cannibalism and particularly scatological torture fed into the maritime picaresque and its novelistic development.57 As the pirate subject was built

57. Esquemeling is most unforgiving to the Welsh buccaneer Captain Henry Morgan in The Buccaneers of America, dedicating nearly one-third of the work to Morgan’s exploits. Esquemeling describes Morgan as virulent and violent, attacking villages without “mercy or justification.” Esquemeling also describes Morgan as malicious at heart, but captivating to his men, possibly fomenting the romantic nostalgia that surrounds Morgan’s memory to this day. He is once quoted as saying, “If our number is small, our hearts are great. And the fewer persons we are the more union and better shares we shall have in the spoil,” (London: Routledge, 1924), 136. This spirit of abandon and disregard for consequences was most certainly seen as a threat to the Spanish and French in the middle of the seventeenth century. The quote is also reminiscent of the speech Henry V gave to his men before fighting the French,

upon the barely-human characteristics of hunting, consuming, and defecating, the

European social imagination was, as well, consuming, digesting, and recirculating these images and accounts for an entire generation of sailors and merchants. The corporeality of both pirate and the works about him reflected, reinforced and built each other.58

Predation appears to be second nature for the buccaneers and pirates of the late- seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. After all, in most instances English privateers would be given protection by their government for any crimes that they had committed against the Spanish Empire.59 They would also be given a handsome commission for any loot “acquired” from Spanish merchantmen. In Dampier’s accounts, predation is typically recorded as a passive “taking” of ships; specific details about the violence in “taking” a ship is predominantly left out. Yet, in the accounts of Esquemeling and in the novelistic work of Ramírez, the minutiae of a pirate take-over are written in chilling detail. In The

Buccaneers of America, Esquemeling records that there was a piratical code of “no prey,

highlighting Morgan’s supposed devout patriotism. In this instance, however, Morgan is not after to prove his national allegiance but rather is about obtaining undeserved wealth.

58. As Jon Latimer and J.S. Bromley note, there is a great similarity between the historical pirate and the already established character of the picaro, “the rogue-hero of the seventeenth-century Spanish novel.” The authors agree that both picaro and pirate possess “self-will, caprice, dislike of work…on their blasphemies and debaucheries” (Bromley qtd in Latimer). The buccaneers established a myth of mercenary pursuits of liberty and fraternity, that would “destroy the ancient régime little more than a century later” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 76.

59. In fact, privateers like Sir Francis Drake and Morgan were both knighted for their services to the government. For his efforts in depravity and pillaging in Central America and the Caribbean, as recorded by Esquemeling, Morgan was rewarded with a governorship to Jamaica.

no pay,” a code reinforced and obeyed amongst the pirate crew who “committed many horrible crimes and inhuman cruelties against the Spanish nation.”60 Similarly, in Los

Infortunios, at the point that Ramírez and his men encounter the pirates, just moments before their enslavement:

…y entrar mas de cincuenta ingleses con alfanjes en las manos en mi frigata todo fue uno. Hechos señores de la todilla mientras a palos nos reiraron a proa, celebraron con mofa y risa la prevención de armas y municiones que ella hallaron – y fue mucho major cuando supieron el qu aquella fragata pertencía al rey, y que habían sacado de sus almacenes aquellas armas. Eran entonces las seis de la tarde del día martes, cuatro de marzo de1687.61

[… more than fifty Englishmen came onto my frigate with cutlasses in hand; it was instantly over. They made themselves the owners of the ship while they beat us with sticks toward the forecastle, celebrating their capture of our guns and ammunition with mockery and laughter. They laughed even greater when they discovered that the frigate belonged to the king, and it was his arms that they had sacked. It was Tuesday, six in the afternoon on March fourth, 1687.]62

The level of detail in this excerpt is surprising, given not only the fact that this is from a recalled memory of two years earlier, but also given Dampier’s account of the same encounter and kidnapping off the coast of Manila discussed at the beginning of this section. Not only were the pirates able to take hold of the frigate with a kind of cavalier alacrity, they did so with mocking smiles and jeers. These sinister affective traits are at the forefront of the narrative’s description. Along with the primary narrative descriptions of the pirates, it is also important to note how Sigüenza and Ramírez time stamp the event. Cataloging in this way registers the work with an objective historicity and lends to

60. Esquemeling, 60, 79.

61. Sigüenza y Góngora, 37.

62. All translations are mine. Some modified punctuation in this excerpt derived from the Lázaro critical edition.

Ramírez’s credibility as a narrator. While it may have been more appropriate for the narrative to continue its focus on the quantifiable to maintain that credibility, instead the story pivots to a qualified description of the vessel’s captors, and enters into the realm of subjective observation and novelistic flourish. Ramírez and Sigüenza keep their focus on the insidious treatment of the kidnapped multi-ethnic merchant crew, composed of men from Spanish, Filipino, and sanglay descent.63 The language of inhumane predation would continue in Ramírez’s narrative, describing the pirates as they would violently sack the governor’s house whenever a village was attacked; or in another instance, recall their “desperate resolution” when hunting down foreign frigates in the South Seas in the middle of the night.64 The pirates of Dampier’s crew, though technically privateers for

British government, were represented as predators of the sea—out for blood, glory, and gold.

As Ramírez would narrate, any man, woman, or child who got between the

English pirates and their loot would suffer a most torturous and violent death. Predation would not only be met with violent consequences but sexually violent ones as well. In an early moment in Ramírez’s imprisonment, the crew landed off the coast of Cambodia on the island of Con Son, where the indigenous “husbands would deliver their own wives, recommending their beauty to the Englishmen in exchange for a cloak or some other

63. Sanglay refers to Philippine immigrants of Chinese descent.

64. Lázaro, 121.

equally cheap trinket.”65 After four months of sleeping with the wives and daughters of this village, being treated like guests within the community, the pirates “attacked them in the morning as they lay asleep, unsuspecting, and slit the throats of the very women they had made pregnant.”66 In his reflections on this scene, Ramírez declares that the sexual violence carried out against these innocent women was one of the worst crimes a human can commit—only second to betraying God and King. Piratical predation, as it is described in these novelistic terms, included the immoralities of material desire, rape, and unjust murder. Ramírez as narrator, and Sigüenza as author capitalized on these representations of nihilistic predation and violence. In relaying these events as a helpless observer, Ramírez rhetorically distances himself from the heinous acts, vilifying the

English pirates, as he elevates the morality of the Spanish subject. As Gerardo Gómez

Michel argues, these descriptions are a literary strategy to legitimate the Spanish imperial presence in the West Indies as they delegitimize British imperial competition.67 Within the descriptions is also the cementation of the tropic figure of the pirate. Initiated by

Esquemeling and verified by Ramírez, the novelistic narrative components of the pirate solidified into a transatlantic icon of barbarism and unenlightened savagery. The tropes of

65. Ibid, 117.

66. Ibid, 117-118.

67. Gerardo Gómez Michel, “Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez y el discurso imperial español en el siglo XVII” Estudios Hispánicos, 65 (2012), 159-172.

violent predation and death culminate into the macabre when both narrative witnesses attribute cannibalism as a marker of piracy.68

Cannibalism had long been associated with those identified as “savage” by early- modern European travelers.69 In the documented European accounts of cannibalism in

South America, for example, there is a determined aim to separate the “savages” from the

“civilized,” politicizing the differences between western and non-western cultural groups and religious practices.70 Though cannibalism in the New World was predominantly affiliated with native West Indian communities such as the Caribs, reports of pirates cannibalizing their enemies locates them in the realm of the foreign, savage, and

68. It is important to note that both Ramírez and Esquemeling record their narratives as passive witnesses to the brutality of English privateering, not active participants. Richard Frohock discusses Esquemeling’s imperative to rhetorically detach himself from the pirates he accompanied in order to assert his moral authority and respected ethos. See his “Exquemelin’s Buccaneers: Violence, Authority, and the Word in Early Caribbean History,” Eighteenth-Century Life 34:1 (Winter 2010); 56-72.

69. See Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2004), 19 and Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 131.

70. In his essay “Cannibalism, the Eucharist, and the Criollos Subjects,” Carlos Jáuregui notes that the early European construction of the bestial cannibal is layered with a number of complicating anxieties, particularly when contextualized by the religious iconography of the Eucharist, or the consumption of Jesus’ flesh and blood. Jáuregui contends that “the cannibal, one might say, is at once a sign of America’s alterity and figurative device for the continent’s westernization or peripheral inscription in the west” (Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, eds. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, Durham: University of Chapel Hill Press, 2009), 62. In noting the similarities between cannibalism and the religious practice of the Eucharist, Europeans can justify the violent colonial displacement of indigenous subjects, while also justifying religious conversion and theological obedience of this same population.

depraved.71 Esquemeling’s account of the French pirate Francois L’Ollonais dramatizes a fraught sequence of such an act of cannibalism in his Buccaneers of America. During a second voyage to Nicaragua, L’Ollonais and his men are consistently foiled by the defense of the Spanish colonials and native Central American bravos.72 Knowing that the privateer crew was after the wealth of Central American mining and logging, the Spanish set up a series of ambushes along several trails, debilitating the crew with each new assault. After one of these minor ambushes, in an act of desperation L’Ollonais interrogates one of his captives to learn if there were more ambushes ahead. The silence of his prisoner, in addition to that of the others captured, drove L’Ollonais to grow

“outrageously passionate; insomuch that he drew his cutlass, and, with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth like a ravenous wolf saying, ‘I will serve you all alike if you show me not another way.’”73 The violent death of the Spaniard, and the cannibalistic events that followed, served as a form of psychological torture for those that remained alive. L’Ollonais deliberately demonstrated that he would move beyond

71. A notable novelistic portrayal of Carib cannibalism comes from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In asking Friday what his “Nation” did with captured enemies, inquiring as to whether or not these enemies were eaten, Friday replies, “Yes, my Nation eat Mans too, eat all up” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1719, 2007), 181.

72. According to Esquemeling, “Indios bravos” or “Wild Indians” were those that “never could be subjugated by the Spanish. Some of these groups formed unofficial trade agreements with pirates until the middle of the seventeenth century when “the Pirates committed many barbarous inhumanities against them, killing many of their men on a certain occasion, and taking away their women to serve their disordinate lust. These abuses gave sufficient cause for a perpetual cessation of all friendship and commerce between them and the pirates” (62).

73. Ibid, 103.

any form of reasonable interrogation, also revealing his proclivity for debased behavior when provoked into a piratical tantrum. Esquemeling’s recounting of this scene is accompanied by an illustrated plate of the sequence. His recounting of the event, accompanied with the illustrative plate, elicits a visceral response to a depiction of the consumption of viscera. Esquemeling finishes his depiction of the buccaneer just as dramatically as it is introduced. After a series of Spanish and native attacks against his dwindling band, L’Ollonais met his end at the hands of a group of indigenous men, and according to the sole survivor of the attack, L’Ollonais was “hacked to pieces and roasted limb by limb.”74 His being roasted, and possibly consumed by the indigenous attackers, appears to a just retribution.

In Los Infortunios, cannibalism is not necessarily seen as a last-ditch device of threat or interrogation in the heat of maritime warfare or privateering. Rather, the jocularity with which the pirates eat a villager’s arm after the sacking of Con Son constructs the pirate at an entirely nihilistic level:

Entre los despojos con que vinieron de el pueblo…estaba un brazo humano de los que perecieron en el incendio. De éste cortó cada uno una pequeña presa, y alabando el gusto de tan linda carne entre repetidas saludes le dieron fin. Miraba yo con escándalo y congoja tan bestial acción, y llegándose a mí uno con un pedazo me instó con importunaciones molestas a que lo comiese. A la debida repulsa que yo le hice me dijo que seindo español, y por el consiguiente cobarde, bien podía para igualarlos a ellos en el valor no ser melindroso. 75

[Among the spoils that came from the village…was a human arm from one of those that perished in the fire. Of this, the pirates cut a piece, praising the taste of the meat between salutations of good health. As I was watching on in disgust of such bestial action, one of them came up to me with a piece, pressuring me to eat it. With a natural repulsion to this annoyance, he told me that it was because I was

74. Ibid, 117.

75. Sigüenza y Góngora, 41.

Spanish, and therefore cowardly; if I ever wanted to be as brave as them, I should be less picky.]

Feasting off the arm of an unknown villager binds the pirate community in an unsanctimonious performance of consuming shared flesh, echoing an uncanny form of the Catholic Eucharist. For the English and (ostensibly) Protestant pirate crew, cannibalism is an action that promotes a sense of fraternity. However, Ramírez’s refusal of the flesh not only speaks to his godly alliance with the Catholic practice of only consuming the flesh of Christ, but also speaks to his allegiance to Spain.76 In an instant,

Ramírez isolates himself from the barbarity of the English piratical crew, while also kindling the tensions between Spanish and British imperial forces. Given some of the political motivations of New Spain’s colonial authorities to separate British Protestant savagery from Spanish Catholic righteous sovereignty, the incorporation of this sequence serves to portray the pirate crew as an emblem of debasement, corruption, recklessness, and a threat to the sustainability of global trade and commerce.77 Whether it can be verified that the English pirates shared in the feasting on another human is less relevant

76. This sequence further upholds Jáuregui’s argument about the Spanish Catholic negotiation of physical cannibalism and metaphoric spiritual cannibalism of the New Testament. As Ramírez refuses to consume the flesh, he’s also dissociating himself from the Protestant (most likely nonreligious) English pirate crew. The Eucharist can only be performed by those of the “true faith,” in this case Catholicism.

77. The rhetoric of “debasement” is discussed at length in David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire, though in a different context (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 76-91. He further argues that the rhetorical deployment of “debasement” is rather a defense mechanism, as a means to disengage from “a desire for and identification with the Other…” (80). As Lázaro points out, since Ramírez was in fact part of the pirate crew, in a way identifying himself with the Other, it would seem imperative to reiterate his surveillance of and disgust with the pirates as they consume the charred arm in a state of fraternal camaraderie.

than the fact that the barbarous act is an important one to represent in the Spanish New

World, already wary of British privateering and predation.

The portrayal of the pirate as predator and cannibal is completed when augmented by affiliation with scatological torture and excess. Just as he preys and consumes, the pirate is also constructed to be an active force of defecation and dissemination, leaving in his wake pillaged towns and broken people. No other privateer embodies this brutality as

Captain Henry Morgan in Esquemeling’s narration of his commissioned expedition and command over Panama City in the late seventeenth century. English reports claim that all towns and villages “were restored ‘in as good condition as they found them,’ and the people were so well treated that ‘several ladies of great quality and other prisoners’ who were offered ‘their liberty to go the President’s camp refused…and so voluntarily continued with them [Morgan’s crew].’” 78 However, this is not the story told in

Buccaneers of America. Born in Wales, Morgan was raised in unhealthy and impoverished circumstances. Due to crimes committed in his youth, he was deported to

Barbados for the typical seven-year indenturement as punishment. Also, typical of men in his condition, upon his release Morgan had not developed any commercial or trade skills, giving him little option other than a life of further crime: borderline piracy through privateering.79 Morgan’s ruthlessness developed into a reputation of bravery against the

78. According to Haring, from which the above excerpt is derived, Morgan’s official report “places their conduct in a peculiarly mild and charitable light” (154).

79. There is a wealth of scholarship on the topic of governmental injustices on the indentured servants in the Caribbean. Criminals, enemies of Cromwell (usually Scottish and Irish political combatants), prostitutes and the general “undesirables” of England

Spanish, and he quickly moved up in the maritime ranking to become Captain at the age of twenty-seven. In Esquemeling’s account, the command over Panama City would not only be seen as a political gain for the British, but as a personal gain for Morgan, whose own piratical hero Francois L’Ollonais attempted to take over the city but failed. Much like Dampier, Morgan is also an ambiguous figure in maritime history. For the British, he was registered as a hallmark of English imperial expansion in the West Indies. For all other imperial forces, he was a crazed and ruthless pirate.

Throughout Esquemeling’s chronicle of Morgan’s expedition across the coasts and into the jungles of the Caribbean and Central America, it is his willingness to torture any person that crosses his path that generates a sense of awe amongst his crew; they found his confidence captivating, just as his victims found it painful and deadly. For example, as Morgan takes over the small town of Puerto Principe (a small town close to present-day Portobelo, Panama), he is quoted as saying, “If you surrender not voluntarily, you shall soon see the town in a flame and your wives and children torn to pieces before your faces.”80 Unfortunately for them, it is quite likely that the villagers did not speak

English, unable to negotiate their safety. This inability to communicate with Morgan was enough proof of their resistance, and he and his crew destroyed the village, “tormenting

[the villagers] daily after an inhuman manner, thereby to make them confess where they

would be shipped to its West Indian colonies. See Jenny Shaw’s Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013).

80. Esquemeling, 131.

hid their goods, moneys, and other things, though little or nothing was left of them. Unto this effect, they punished also the women and little children, giving them nothing to eat; whereby the greatest part of them perished.” 81 The cycle of “search and destroy” is repeated as Esquemeling painstakingly details Morgan’s privateering ventures in Central

America and around the Caribbean Sea. When privateers were not torturing the colonial

Spanish for their “moneys” and “goods,” they would squander it away on unrestrained drinking, carousal, rape, and all “manners of debauchery and excess.”82 Sexual fulfillment would be sought once the men’s bellies were full, threatening the women of these towns and villages “with the sword” and “constrained to submit their bodies to the violence of these lewd and wicked men.”83 Morgan’s fame for unforgiving violence against the Spanish colonials and indigenous groups is succinctly summed in the following ballad:

Ho! Henry Morgan sails today To harry the Spanish Main, With a pretty bill for the Dons to pay Ere he comes back again

Him cheat him friend of his last guinea, Him kill both friar and priest—Oh dear! Him cut de t’roat of piccaninny, Bloody, bloody buccaneer.84

81. Ibid, 132.

82. Ibid, 140.

83. Ibid.

84. Qtd. In Latimer, 182.

The torture, debauchery, and rape found in Esquemeling’s narrative completes the animalistic process of predation, consumption, and dissemination assigned to the socially imagined little-more-than-human pirate. In Ramírez’s narrative there are similar forms of torture and debauchery that are described at length. However, there is a specific sequence of scatological psychological torture found within the account that has not been recorded in any other “factual” repository of privateering and piratical exploits. At this point in

Ramírez’s narrative, he and his Spanish captives have been mysteriously given a frigate and released off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Without his oppressive captors around, Ramírez has the freedom to reflect on the cruelties “Captain Bel” had bestowed upon him and his fellow Spanish during their two-year voyage. One of these unfortunate men had gotten ill from something Captain Bel had attributed to as either a “flux or distemper,” playfully noting that he had an easy cure:

…redújose éste a hacerle beber desleídos en agua los excrementos del mismo capitán, temiéndole puesto un cuchillo al cuello para acelerarle la muerte si lo repugnase.85

[The captain forced the man to drink his watered-down excrements, putting a knife to his throat to quicken his death should he refuse it.]

This treatment resulted in the Spaniard to vomit so violently that whatever had sickened him was flushed out of his system and he soon began to recover. Believing that his treatment “worked,” Capitan Bel prescribed his fecal elixir to all the sick Spanish on board. This is a disturbing tableau, particularly when considering the poor hygiene habits, venereal diseases, and salty diet of the men onboard. Sophie Gee’s Making Waste:

85. Sigüenza y Góngora, 50.

Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination would treat this sequence as doubly important for a Spanish-creole metropolitan reader. Not only is there a physical reality to the forced consumption of fecal matter, but there is also a symbolic manifestation of the act itself, generating a metaphoric representation “differentiated from the natural object.”86 The unknown Spaniard, in his fleeting role as the ultimate victim in Ramírez’s tale, supplies the perfect faceless face for a reader’s father, brother, or even the reader himself. The single Spanish creole captive represented potentially all Spanish New World men, and the potential consequences of their vulnerability to the unfettered piracy wreaking havoc on their coasts. Like many other narrative instances of piratical ferocity, there is an implied political critique of both English complicity and Spanish weakness. To include such a scene in Los Infortunios stresses the Spanish creole imperative to reinforce their Atlantic maritime presence. The more grotesque and inhumane the situation, it appears, the more penetrative it is in the social imagination, and the louder the call for intervention becomes. It is quite likely that the scene illustrated above, as it is recorded in

Ramírez’s narrative, is highly embellished if not entirely fabricated. If indeed Ramírez and his men were working alongside the pirates voluntarily, then Captain Bel would not have risked the death of one of his men, even if that man was of Spanish or Spanish- creole origin.87 Naturally, in William Dampier’s own New Voyage around the World, any

86. Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9.

87. Dampier’s accounts have both expressed concern for his crew, but also loathing for the Spanish. In his journal, he writes: “"fir it is strange to say how grosly ignorant the Spaniards in the West-Indies, but especially in the South-Seas, are of sea

allusion to him force-feeding a captive his own excrement is absent from the official record.88 Furthermore, in The Buccaneers of America, the chronicle that has served as a starting point for the harrowing and disturbing portrayals of privateering in the

Caribbean, does not contain any similar incidents either. Whether this story was generated or embellished by any of the three men presiding over the completion of Los

Infortunios—Sigüenza, the censor, and Ramírez himself—the point is that the narrative constructs a political figure of violent excess and lawlessness. For the purposes of this chapter, the depictions exemplify what would be a non-British narrative representation of a British maritime subject—the pirate. Through the elaborate novelistic tropes of the

English pirate as predatory, cannibalistic, and scatological, Los Infortunios helped generate a composite structure of a subject that would be imbedded in the transatlantic imagination. While Spanish picaresque narratives of New World British piracy go back to the late sixteenth century, this is the first in that tradition to be wholly constructed within the Atlantic world: Sigüenza y Ramírez were both New World subjects born and bred, and Los Infortunios’ novelistic appeal was curated by their experiences and motivations.89 Los Infortunios is the first work of novelistic quality that makes the

affairs." He reasons it is because the Spanish are “too proud,” “ignorant” and inexperienced (135-6).

88. As succinctly noted by Lazaro, “Dampier—for obvious reasons—did not reveal the cruel side of ‘privateering’ (his term for the pirates’ private war against humanity), so he offers no evidence of his captives’ collaboration” (143).

89. Bauer, 169-178.

maritime picaresque, and the piratical subjects of its narrative operations, a mode of storytelling that belongs to the West Indies.

Section Two: Turn of the Tide: Rebels, Men, and Political Pirates in the English Novel

The Spanish Atlantic representation of the pirate in prose was not the only one propagated by the middle of the eighteenth century. Since the constructed mythos surrounding Sir Francis Drake and his exploits in the sixteenth century, popular English opinion has accommodated the contradictory nature of its piratical anti-heroes.90 The novel, coming into its own at the turn of eighteenth century, capitalized on the long- standing British imagination of the blazing buccaneer and renegade pirate. A generation after the publication and translation of Los Infortunios, Daniel Defoe’s The Life,

Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton was circulating for a public readership. Originally published in 1720, it has been recognized as one of Defoe’s “minor works,” existing in the shadow of his most renowned novel Robinson Crusoe, which had been published the previous year.91 Indeed, J.R. Moore, in his Defoe: Citizen of the

Modern World, writes that the author was peripatetic, if not totally meandering in

90. For a discussion of Sir Francis Drake, see David S. Shields, “Sons of the Dragon; or, the English Hero Revived,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts Identities, eds. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 101-117.

91. In Shiv Kumar’s Introduction to the Oxford Edition of the novel, he notes that previous scholarship, particularly that of J.R. Moore, has been quite unforgiving to this work (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). In comparison to Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton has had significantly fewer editions and translations.

Captain Singleton: “ when Defoe was uncertain what story he meant to tell, he could make sad work of it…Four stories in Captain Singleton, yes; and each not without merit.

But here the parts remain greater than the whole.”92 Shiv Kumar, though a great proponent for the novel’s “significant fictional expression of some of Defoe’s fundamental ideas,” also notes even Defoe himself saw not much merit in Captain

Singleton; there is no mention of the novel in any of Defoe’s extant letters.93 Among the works of long fiction written by Defoe, Captain Singleton is critiqued by many scholars as an unsuccessful dud, one that could be, as put by Joshua Grasso, “dashed off on the way to his next great work.”94 Particularly when juxtaposed to Defoe’s masterpiece

Robinson Crusoe, critics could call the novel underdeveloped, the characters two- dimensional, and the writing devoid of aesthetic pleasure.

However, in recent years there have been those who sought to vindicate Defoe’s

Singleton and his motley crew and the novel’s critical contribution to eighteenth-century literary scholarship. Manuel Schonhorn, one of the early scholars who attributes The

History of Pyrates to Defoe, argues that the novel makes light of piracy, making the act

“an agreeable and humorous operation,” adding to the jocularity of the picaresque that

92. As quoted in Joshua Grasso’s article, “The Providence of Pirates: Defoe and the ‘True-Bred Merchant,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 2:1 (fall 2010): 22.

93. Kumar, vii.

94. Grasso, 22.

characteristically drives motivations or plot developments.95 Srivinas Aravamudan argues that “Captain Singleton rationalized the rise of venture capitalism through adventure. The peculiarity of Singleton’s story, however, is more than a compulsive conflation of the narrative with the financial accounts.”96 Aravamudan adds that Defoe’s work cements the connection between the financial accounting of venture capital in the

West Indies, and the “accounting” of one’s own adventure in an experiential way, the latter inevitably justifying the former in terms of overseas British capitalism. David

Cordingly, in his Under the Black Flag, briefly traces the origins of Captain Singleton’s journey with that of the pirate captain Henry Every. Captain Singleton, for Cordingly, is the representative sum of all of Defoe’s imaginings of a pirate’s life—his origins, his drive, and his compulsive desire to return home.97 In each of these scholars’ literary interpretation of Defoe’s Captain Singleton, the work contributes to a larger archive of early eighteenth-century writing that negotiates the moral and social implications of a commercial British presence in the New World. The novel, as the prose form of a social contract between truth, fiction, and representing the possible if not probable, was the site of negotiation for Defoe’s political agendas and speculations on a global future.

95. Quoted in Grasso, 31.

96. Aravamudan, 79.

97. According to Cordingly, Captain Every is also the subject in Defoe’s The King of Pirates, published the same and had achieved the same amount of success as Captain Singleton (New York: Random House, 1995), 139. 54

While it is quite unlikely that Defoe read Los Infortunios, the proximity between publications, thematic overlaps, and similar contributions to maritime fiction allow a reader to examine these texts side by side when constructing a comparative analysis of the pirate. When engaging Ramírez’s recounting of his two-year imprisonment and comparing it with that of the fictional “account” of Captain Singleton, a new novelistic principle of the maritime picaresque becomes apparent: the British pirate subject is registered as ethically and morally coherent, and therefore a subject who is feasibly redeemable. Singleton’s journey across Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the African coastline, and finally the West Indies, produces a narrative of sin, maturation, and redemption like that of Ramírez. However, unlike the pirates of Los Infortunios, Defoe’s

Singleton is the hero of the maritime picaresque, not its villain. Singleton is given a functional if damaged moral compass, a sense of interiority and a desire for some semblance of fraternal utopianism.98 Defoe represents the pirate subject as one who can be absolved of, or at least forgiven for, his crimes against humanity. The redeemed pirate of the novel also then redeems his novelistic role in long-prose writing. In the eponymous work, Singleton’s actions appear understandable, if not entirely justifiable, and the animalistic qualities that are inscribed into the Spanish New World pirate are

98. “Interiority” as it is defined here, is founded on both the Aristotelean philosophy of “decency” and Charles Taylor’s notion of identity and the good and the formation of a moral subject. In Captain Singleton, the reader is witness to Singleton’s internal struggle against hedonistic or nihilistic actions, despite his checkered past. His value system is in part generated by the ability to act with decency in volatile environment and gauge his actions against a socially-determined ethical barometer.

minimalized in Defoe’s narrative. Simply put, Defoe follows the British popular opinion of the pirate, applauding his economic prowess and general disregard for governmental authority. Aravamudan writes that the “conversion of the pirate into a merchant, as represented in Singleton’s case, evacuates the ontological essence of pirate (hostis humani generis), replacing it with a contingent and relative persona.”99 While Defoe is structuring his character on the long-standing British tradition, this is an early, if not first, attempt to grant the pirate a sense of interiority. In providing the pirate with motivations, desires, regrets, and other attributes along a social and emotional spectrum, Defoe’s

Singleton is more evolved than the two-dimensional representations of praised buccaneers in earlier generations. Defoe’s Singleton is an early, if not the first, fictional pirate that embodies a sense of true enlightenment masculinity.

For additional historical context, the timing of the publication is also an important component to Defoe’s portrayal of Singleton. The “Golden Age of Piracy” had reached its peak in 1720, influencing the English government to search and destroy pirate vessels, as earlier mentioned in this chapter’s introduction. Burwick and Powell succinctly write that the pirate did not gain popularity in the social imaginary “until after his death… The chaotic history of the representation of pirates is: ‘one hunts them down and then laments them with nostalgic fondness.’”100 However, as Defoe’s Captain Singleton demonstrates, early formations of the heroic pirate were in circulation before piracy’s “death” in the

99. Aravamudan, 102.

100. Burwick and Powell, 15, 18.

Atlantic. Admittedly, iconic literary pirates did not surface until after the end of piracy’s

Golden Age. With his physical destruction came the British metropolitan nostalgic and fantastic re-creation of him. Yet, I contend that the timing of this shift has more to do with England’s political engagement with pirates than piracy’s actual end. English’s literary experimentations with the novel as a form, considering the rising interest in a subject in the social imagination, generated a new literary vessel, one who could feasibly contend with “all tyrannical power structures” in a position of secular and capitalistic enlightenment thought101 The historical Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean, coupled with the literary precedence of the redeemable picaro generated new topoi within the picaresque genre. This section of the chapter will read Captain Singleton, along with A

General History of the Pyrates to demonstrate the shift that Defoe made in reconfiguring the political body of the pirate in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. The British representation of the pirate would encapsulate the essence of the enlightened maritime picaro and generate a literary subject that would resist imperial hegemony, live democratically, and be the quintessential subject of social reformation. In generating a figure of affect, justified in his actions and joined by a band of brothers who think similarly, the novelistic portrayal of the pirate developed into the romantic vision of the

“Robin Hood” of the seas that still clings in the Anglo-American imagination of today.

Following the literary conventions of the picaresque, and similarly to Los

Infortunios, Singleton tells the reader his story in the form of a memoir, reflecting on his

101. Ibid, 22.

humble beginnings and rise in commercial wealth. Much like in his other works, Defoe excises himself as the author of the text, supposing that the reader’s likely suspension of disbelief in Singleton’s tale is contingent upon Singleton being a “plausible” person with an experience to share.102 According to Lennard Davis, this is characteristic of the politically capricious journalist and novelist who was ambivalent about claiming authorship in most of his prose. Davis writes that Defoe’s “act of disownment shifts the focus of narrative to the being of the protagonist, to the authenticity of the document, to the verisimilar human life itself.”103 Authenticating the protagonist’s voice at the start of the narrative immediately allows the reader to humanize and possibly identify with that voice, an excellent method to begin affectively investing in the hero’s growth and development.104 This sense of affective investment is particularly heightened as Singleton begins his narrative in the dire straits of abject poverty, an abandoned child with few resources and no education. Singleton, with his surname denoting isolation and

102. Formal realism is a key element in Davis’ Factual Fictions. There is a paradox in between the factual “news” that one gives (such as that found in a biography or memoir), and the story of a fictional hero. “…by affirming that [a work] is new and true it denies those qualities at the same moment” (56). The desire for the ‘authentic narrative’ is, in part, what drives the seeming factuality of fictional narratives. There is a final authority of truth found in the observations of a detached “editor” as found in many of the works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

103. Davis, 16.

104. Davis also notes that in removing himself as the author of his works, Defoe also removes his culpability from any possible cases of libel (85-87). Though written discourse of the early eighteenth century was shaped by English libel law, it does not discredit the fact that the factuality of the characters as the “authentic” author of the narratives produces a great deal of emotional connection with a reader.

loneliness, easily becomes a subject of pity and a character of sympathetic readerly value.

And like many of the actual impoverished youth of the time, the story of his early life is embedded in the benighted and dangerous fringes of metropolitan society. Singleton’s precarious beginnings along with the death of his adopted gypsy mother provide a traumatic start to the development of his character in the novel.105

As Moore noted in his critique of Captain Singleton, the novel is arranged into four sections, the first being the introduction to Singleton’s unlucky infancy and of being spirited away into the hands of a gypsy mother. His roguish and isolated childhood led him to be picked up by the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen. The Royal Navy was, in the early eighteenth century, notorious for taking advantage of destitute and out-of-work single men, particularly to serve in the 1702 War of the Spanish Succession.106 The second section of the novel covers the protracted journey on foot across Sub-Saharan

Africa after Singleton and his men mutiny on the island of Madagascar. Once the crew reaches the western African coast, the third section of the novel relays his piratical adventures in the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean with his eccentric friend and spiritual guide Quaker William. Finally, the two men, no longer addicted to high adventure in the

West Indies, abandon their crew and eventually return to England where Singleton

105. Singleton’s gypsy mother is accused of and hanged for witchcraft. At age six, he becomes a ward of the parish (2).

106. General History, 3; Rediker, 29; Woodard, 49-51.

completes his integration into British normative society by marrying William’s sister.107

The men have returned to their home country of England, but because of their criminal past must be in perpetual disguise while in public, lest they should be recognized as pirates and condemned to hang. The tone of the novel’s end is burdened with uncertainty—the reader is unclear as to whether Singleton is fully satisfied living in disguise on the outskirts of society, with the end of his life mirroring that of his disadvantaged childhood. Or, does he continue to daydream about looking out on the expansive blue of the sea and sky, the floor beneath him gently rocking? As the reader attempts to gain insight into how Singleton reflects on his past life, Defoe leaves the narrative’s end vague, consciously aware of the denied closure for his piratical hero:

And now, having so plainly told you that I am come to England, after I have so boldly owned what life I have led abroad, it is time to leave off, and say no more for the present, lest some should be willing to inquire too nicely after your old friend CAPTAIN BOB.108

Singleton’s mysterious exit shrouds the novel’s otherwise happy ending with a sense of unfulfilled desire on the part of a reader who wants to know the final chapter of

Singleton’s life story. Both the armchair sailor and his fictional hero have gone on

107. It is safe to argue that Singleton’s marriage to William’s sister (unnamed in the novel), demonstrates what Eve Sedgwick has famously identified as “homosocial desire” in her work Between Men: “a male friendship…a social bond between persons of the same sex” that demonstrates a desire for fraternal intimacy but is not necessarily sexual in nature (New York: Columbia University Press), 2. With the marriage, Singleton and Quaker William guarantee a life-long friendship without arising suspicion in their small community of their illicit piracy.

108. Defoe, 277.

extended journeys, encountered and traded with (and in) indigenous Africans, and pillaged Spanish merchantmen in the name of British nationalism—the final farewell abruptly tears apart the bond between reader and protagonist.109

From the novel’s beginning, Singleton is written with a sense of interiority. He is a figure of the social imagination and a prominent trope of the early novel, following in the footsteps of Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Blas—a young boy struggling to face the conditions of the world in which he grows to be a man.110 A protagonist’s interiority provides the reader the opportunity to cognitively align, or deflect, their values with or from those of the hero. It is a character’s interiority that helps define the relationship that a reader has with him or her; the reader responds to characters, not only evaluating a work as a whole, but also giving traction to a novel’s representation in a given historical moment. A novel may be a continuation of certain prosaic tropes, an evolution in prose, or even a rupture in artistic or social conventions. In the case of Captain Singleton, Defoe

109. Susan L Feagin in her Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation, contends that there are two different processes that occur when a reader identifies with the characters that she reads. Firstly, the reader must recognize some cognitive element about the position that the character is in. “…Having an emotion requires having a propositional cognitive component—generally a belief—of a particular sort. For example, being afraid requires believing that someone is suffering serious or undeserved fortune…” The second element she discusses is one of “aesthetic appreciation,” the “ability” to not only identify the self in an object of desire, but to also be attracted to the object as itself (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 6, 45. For the reader to feel like Captain Singleton by the end of the novel, she would need to both “appreciate” Singleton’s character and identify with his sense of unfulfilled desire.

110. The picaresque, and the supplementary interiority of the protagonist as he struggles to survive has its origins in Spain, the hub of early experimentations with the novel as a form. Ardilla writes that the novel came out of the negotiation between the “romances of the upper class and the 'reality' of common-place life" (16). The novel is a way for a nation to find its social and cultural voice, using the picaro as an embodiment of that national struggle.

continues, through the novel the popular British accolades of the pirate. By also granting

Singleton interiority, this representation deviates from conventional representations of the

English pirate. Earlier explorations of the pirate-as-subject for European and New World readership constructed a man with very little interiority, his role being relegated to that of a cannibalistic heathen, or, in the British context, a two-dimensional figure of abstract patriotism.

Yet, Defoe’s Singleton tells his story from an autobiographical, “factual,” perspective, locating Singleton as more than a character, but also a person who could exist in the world, allowing for a multiplicity of expressive emotions including desire, regret, greed, and even feelings of injustice. As a character molded by the larger social conditions that he must face, Singleton becomes the relatable protagonist of the maritime picaresque. As an example of these moments of self-reflection and evaluation, Singleton reflects on his life as a pirate early in the narrative,

I was exactly fitted for their society indeed; for I had no sense of virtue or religion upon me. I had never heard much of either, except what a good old parson had said to me when I was a child of about eight or nine years old; nay, I was preparing and growing up apace to be as wicked as anybody could be, or perhaps ever was.111

Despite his declaration of destined wickedness, Singleton directly links the conditions of his upbringing and the general disregard he felt as a child with his impaired morality. His introspection in this moment produces a tension between Calvinist doctrine and social analysis, signaling him as a subject of both social and moral awareness. He is detached from his fellow man because he had not been properly educated in a loving household.

111. Defoe, 6.

Though complicit roguery is not typically condoned within the social consciousness mediated through the literary, Singleton’s “feeling” that he was perfect for privateering is founded on the fact that he also felt that there were few alternatives for the “wickedness” that he was raised to believe that he embodied. Those who are told they are damnable as children are likely to fulfill that role as an adult.112

The interiority of the fictional Bob Singleton is echoed in A General History of the Pyrates, which discusses the poor treatment of sailors by the Royal Navy, highlighting that many English men had little choice in their ship-bound lives. The preface condenses the historical causes and consequences of men turning to piracy, specifically at the start of the eighteenth century, when The War of the Spanish

Succession forced “men to engage themselves headlong in a Life of so much Peril to themselves.”113 In times of war, English men would be impressed into the Royal Navy:

“Press gangs would patrol waterfronts and raid taverns, hoping to pick up deserters or idle mariners…even ‘landmen’—able-bodied but impoverished individuals who could be trained in the basics of seamanship.”114

112. In “Defoe in the Footsteps of the Goddess of Reason,” Maximillian Novak notes that Defoe contemplated the injustices of the existing education systems in London, particularly for the poor and underrepresented, including children (Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe, New York: AMS Press, 2014), 56, 65- 66.

113. General History, 3.

114. Daniel James Ennis, Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 15.

At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession over a decade later, two-thirds of these sailors were let off without severance pay within the same year, leading to an oversaturated labor market and a desperation in workers. There were far more men than jobs available, and a sailor with only maritime skills to support himself, and possibly his family, was presented with two options: “either to find employment for the great numbers of seamen turn’d adrift at the conclusion of the war, …or to guard sufficiently the coast of Africa, the West Indies and other places that pirates resort.”115 National license to privateer against Spanish ships during the war bred seamen to violence while on the water, their own moral compass adrift on the waves as the English crown supported their destructive actions against enemies in foreign lands and seas. Consequently, violent plundering became a perfected skill for English crewmen, a skill that was to continue after the war was over. Concisely put in A General History’s preface, “privateers in time of war are a nursery for pyrates against a peace.”116 For many of the sailors returning from a war, violence and the “mariner’s craft” were all that they were trained to know.117

115. General History, 3.

116. Ibid, 4.

117. Rediker gives a much more detailed account of the consequences of the War of the Spanish Succession, including the reasons for why the Caribbean was such an ideal site for the “Golden Age of Piracy.” The Caribbean, a central point within the the Triangle Trade, was host to an onslaught of new money and goods ripe for the pillaging. The topography of the area would also fit the needs of pirates: “The West Indies were a classical setting and a ‘natural security’ for such people and ships, as its small inlets, lagoons, and shallow waters made it difficult for larger vessels such as men-of-war to pursue the bandits by sea” (29). It is the combination of these elements that made piracy a predictable outcome after the War of the Spanish Succession.

As reiterated by Rediker, “when the war ended, [leaders of European nations] found that they could not control the privateers they had once employed. In 1716 a gang of pirates, for example, …announced that ‘they never consented to the Articles of Peace with the

French and Spaniards’ and would therefore continue to attack their ships.”118 With an uncertain environment and no governmental support, marginalized sailors had little option than to continue what they had been doing—privateering—but this time, their actions were no longer politically sanctioned.

The desperation these mariners must have felt after being dismissed by the Royal

Navy is reflected in contemporary descriptions of historical pirates. For example, in some early eighteenth-century accounts, including A General History, the lore surrounding

Captain Every’s wealth was dismissed as rumor. The work claims that although he was a celebrated icon, he had, in reality, died impoverished and isolated from the very public that had admired him. As catalogued in A General History, “all these [accounts about

Every] were no more than false Rumours... at the same Time it was given out he was in

Possession of such prodigious Wealth in Madagascar, he was starving in England.”119

According to A General History, after several years at sea fighting the Spanish, French, and Dutch as a buccaneer, Every and his crew wished to return home.120 The group of

118. Ibid, 7.

119. General History, 49.

120. Hanna writes that Every was a devout patriot, following in step with General History’s account (212).

men dispersed across the United Kingdom; Every, in the town of Biddiford changed his name and sought to sell his captured jewels on the black market since he had no other source of income. Penniless, but afraid of being called out as a pirate, every was careful to avoid conventional avenues of buying and selling goods and felt obligated to trust a supposed friend in finding him buyers of the precious jewels. The buyers in Bristol, however, conned him out of his money: “they silenced him, by threatening to discover him, so that our Merchants were as good Pyrates at land as he [Avery] was at Sea.”121

Due to his life at sea, Every was ignorant of the complex systems of corruption that inhabited the metropolitan world of capitalism and commerce. In speaking of Captain

Every as a representative figure for the mariner collective, the author of A General

History writes that the life on land could not “supply him;” without the ocean, all seamen, including pirates, are inept and helpless to the shark-like merchants of imperial trade. The last that is heard of Every, as recorded in A General History, is that he managed to gather another crew of men bound for the West Indies, never to be heard from again.122 Though the actual history of Every’s life and death are still under debate, the claim established by

A General History explicitly criticizes the harsh treatment of sailors, and reiterates the sentiments that buccaneering for England ends in difficult conditions once a sailor returns to port.123 It was the popular escapist fantasies about privateers living in wealth and

121. Ibid, 57.

122. Ibid, 62.

123. See Burgess, 892; Hanna, 212-213.

splendor, represented by Drake, Dampier, and a host of other buccaneers and pirates, that fed into the British mariner desire to turn to piracy after the war.

Like the fictional narrative of Singleton, this account of Every is one that reflects a reality hardened by unsympathetic laws and self-serving men in the early eighteenth century. Henry Every is written as having little choice in his life after privateering; he was to either starve at the hands of corrupt merchants or return to the sea and end his days in anonymity on West Indian shores. Much like A General History’s account of Every,

Singleton lives out the remainder of his story in disguise, afraid that should he be discovered he would be condemned for piracy. There are a precious few moments in which Singleton can reveal himself to a trusted “friend,” as the signature to his farewell implies. The added complexity of these men’s situations, both the real and the fictionalized, add an important element to the tales of piracy and the men who have only abject poverty or death as alternatives.

The social injustices that condemned the impoverished and desperate eventually led to a representation of a pirate who was imbued with a sense of social egalitarianism, granting him the ability to reflect on both his corporeal and political state. The piratical political body and his internal ethical toolkit are then deployed within fiction to rectify the hardships of actual metropolitan corruption. Prompted by social welfare issues, this representation was broadened to also create a pirate subject who was an active combatant in collective fighting against larger systems of governance. Some of the many men abandoned by the Royal Navy at the end of the war in 1712 aligned with Jacobite forces and factions in the Caribbean. Pirates were not just representative of the consequences of

a corrupt naval power, but aggregated to become a unionized force set against that corrupt power responsible for their plight.124

In December of 1717, King George I, fearful of the growing threat of piracy to the transatlantic trade, issued a pardon for pirates, hoping to reduce their number before

Woodes Rogers and the Royal Crown declare war.125 In the monarch’s mind, the promise of forgiveness would allow for pirates to legally expunge their treasonous actions and, without the threat of death by the hand of the criminal system, would eagerly attempt to assimilate into the Anglo-imperial market. The royal pardon for their maritime crimes

“against humanity” did not exactly work as George I anticipated, but instead bifurcated the pirate groups in the West Indies; one-half welcomed the royal pardons with open arms. The other half, however, led by pirate leader Charles Vane, was “infuriated” by the pardon and the King’s own refusal of accountability for piracy in the first place. Many pirates publicly declared themselves for the Jacobite cause and declared insurgency against England. 126 In Nassau, Vane and his men “rushed the walls of a fort, evicted the

124. As discussed at length by Rediker, and throughout A General History, men from the Royal Navy would voluntarily join the pirate crew, leaving their national fidelity behind. For Rediker, piracy was born of the ill-paid labor, inedible food, unsanitary boarding conditions, and corrupt government officials along the bureaucratic maritime chain.

125. Woodard, 226.

126. Vane’s resistance to George I went so far as to plot a Jacobite overthrow of the island of Bermuda. In a letter to one of his fellow Jacobite contacts in England, Captain George Cammocke, Vane requested that a “‘Captain General of America, by Sea and Land’” be sent to Nassau, so a surprise attack could be launched against government officials and “secure the colony for the Stuarts” (Woodard, 230). Pirates, however, were not necessarily promoters of the the Stuart cause. Rather, they were more concerned

revelers within, and pulled the Union Jack down from the flagpole. In its place, they hoisted a flag that left no ambiguity about their allegiance: ‘the Black Flag with the

Death’s Head in it.’”127 This story, amongst others, circulated throughout the metropole and Caribbean islands, helping to create the commonly-held belief that pirates were an allied force of aggrieved seamen who fought against the hegemonic and oppressive agencies of state government. Defying national authority became a staple attribution in the representation of the pirate collective, A General History and Defoe’s Captain

Singleton, emphasize the justification for piratical actions against not only the Spanish, but against English vessels as well. In the English intervention of the maritime picaresque, the pirate was a singular man with a story to share and a morality to recover.

He was also a piece of a larger whole—a group of men who would search the seas for both justice and booty.

Singleton’s early narrative of cruel captains, masters, and mutiny illustrates the political collectivity of the pirate crew that was reinforced by A General History’s description of Captain Vane’s Jacobite exploits. At the novel’s start, the young Singleton passively moves from house to house, treated poorly in his role as a common houseboy.

His last master was a stereotypically “wicked” and “cowardly” Portuguese merchant, who would refer to Singleton as his “English dog,” and “beat and torture…for every

about joining allies against a common enemy. Burwick and Powell write, “It was natural for pirates to blame the Hanovers for their woes: their Jacobitisim was a reaction against the current government, rather than being positively pro-Stuart” (21).

127. Woodard, 230; A General History, 143.

Trifle.”128 Even at his young age, Singleton considered murdering his master as a means of liberation, “...But Providence, either for his sake or for mine, always frustrated my designs, and I could never bring it to pass; so I was obliged to continue in his chains till the ship, having taken in her loading, set sail for Portugal.”129 It is not until he is on the

Goa, bound for Southeast Asia, that Singleton is able to join the collective of the sailing crew, also agitated by the treatment they were receiving from their captain. While on board, the crew talks of mutiny, and with rumor winding its way through hushed conversations between the crewmen, Singleton sees his opportunity to abandon his life of enslavement and join the liberated collective. The captain, having taken notice of these thoughts against him, had men both tortured and bribed to confess “the Names of the

Persons concerned…no less than sixteen Men were seized, and put into Irons, whereof I was one.”130 Tensions aboard the Portuguese ship led to a separation of the men into two camps—one in favor of the captain’s decisions, the other utterly opposed (like the ideological divide the pirates had faced in Nassau). To avoid violence, the captain allowed twenty-seven of the crew to desert the ship on the island of Madagascar,

“provided with every thing but victuals.”131 From here, Singleton and the Portuguese- based crew began their journey across the Mozambique Channel and through the African

128. Defoe, 9.

129. Ibid.

130. Ibid, 10.

131. Ibid, 19.

continent on foot.132 The sequence of events that resulted in Singleton’s freedom and eventual title of Captain was brought about by the crew’s resentment of their poor treatment and their first captain’s indifference. On his own, Singleton would have had to suffer at the hands of his master in Portugal, but from the communal effort of those on board the ship with him, Singleton’s life was now no longer as “single” as his surname would suggest. His acceptance of a community-oriented life is most evident when describing their travel across the “dark continent” of Africa:

We had nations of savages to encounter with, barbarous and brutish to the last degree; hunger and thirst to struggle with, and, in one word, terrors enough to have daunted the stoutest hearts that ever were placed in cases of flesh and blood. Yet, fearless of all these, we resolved to adventure and accordingly made such preparations for our journey as the place we were in would allow us, and such as our little experience of the country seemed to dictate to us.133

Admiringly, Singleton takes comfort in the bravery of himself and his men to overcome the obstacles of the brutal elements, uncharted terrains, and dangerous African tribal territory. It is only as group that they can face these seemingly insurmountable obstacles

132. It is from his experience with this crew that Singleton acquires certain skills, including his “Portuguese Tongue” and a “little superficial Knowledge in Navigation.” Most importantly, Singleton notes, it is from the Portuguese that “I learnt particularly to ban an errant Thief and a bad Sailor; and I think I may say that they are the best Master for Teaching both these, of any Nation in the World.” His comical anti-Iberian sentiments continue throughout the novel, with begrudging tolerance for his Portuguese crew (Defoe, 5). Additionally, though the group of deserters are predominantly Portuguese, by the end of the protracted trek across Africa, the group is considerably more culturally mixed, with French, Italian, English, and indigenous African composing the group of men.

133. Ibid, 48.

day after day.134 As their successful but protracted adventure proves, the men would not have made it out of Africa alive if it were not for their democratic voting systems, shared trust, and cooperation.

Metropolitan readers enraptured by Singleton’s success, gained in the collectivity of joint-decision making and revolt against maritime monocracy, began to construct a social discourse of connecting piracy with fraternal utopianism. The group of merry men that would “rob from the rich” appeared justified in their actions when descriptions of egalitarian sharing, welfare programs for the sick, elderly and disabled, and multi-racial crews riddled pirate narratives—both fictional and factual alike. For example, once

Singleton commits to piracy in the Caribbean, he exemplifies these novelistic tropes of maritime democracy, fraternity, and the oceanic utopianism that, when in concert with other stories of historical pirates, would generate a new world order. Though he repeatedly claims that he has no nation to anchor himself to, Singleton espouses certain codes of conduct in respect to community decisions and universality amongst seaman:

“but I thought all nations in the world, even the most savage people, when they held out a flag of peace, kept the offer of peace made by that signal very sacredly; and I gave him

[Quaker William] several examples of it in the history of my African travels, which I have here gone through in the beginning of this work, and that I could not think these people worse than some of them.”135 Life at sea for Singleton unites all men on a ship’s

134. Though Singleton does not provide an estimate for how long the crew spent crossing the continent, it appears to be approximately five to six years, counting the months the crew was either be mining for gold, or rendered immobile because of either heavy rain or enemy attacks.

135. Ibid, 222.

deck, independent of nation, creed, class, or race and engenders an imagined community that is connected to the sea. Though enemies certainly inhabit the seas or coastal shores, men on a single ship are joined by a common goal and abide by the same governing principles. Though Singleton has no “nation to serve,” his allegiance is to his crew and his ship, his purpose unwaveringly united with those onboard with him. In collaboration with Quaker William, Singleton’s moral guide through the Caribbean and South Asian seas, Captain Singleton and his crew create, codify, and follow a different social system of maritime governance—a system romanticized by the land-locked metropolitan readers of Europe and the New World.

In some instances, the British representations of “factual” pirates are more fantastic than that of explicitly fictional ones. This is particularly true in the case of

Captain “Black” Bart Roberts, who had started his life aboard a slave ship, employed as a second mate aboard the Princess. According to A General History, Roberts was

“naturally averse” to his life as a slaver, and when his ship was attacked by the pirate

Captain Howell Davis, Roberts volunteered to abandon his life serving the transatlantic trade and joined the pirate crew.136 Rising in the ranks aboard The Ranger and The

Swallow, Roberts was eventually elected captain and, as captain, implemented a set of

“articles” that each pirate including himself would follow.137 Roberts believed that the

136. General History, 194.

137. It was common practice for the pirate captain and quartermaster to be elected for demonstrations of courage and forced to resign should they be indecisive or cowardly in battle. The quartermaster was also an important figure: “As the most trusted man on board the ship, the quartermaster was placed in charge of all booty, from its initial

security of the men was dependent upon their observation of these following rules, with no exception: no gambling, no hoarding of money, lights out at night, no woman or boy was to be allowed on the ship, equal shares amongst the crew, and men who were disabled during their service were allowed 800 dollars out of a public stock.138

Additionally, each pirate aboard the ship had to respect the work and the opinion of their fellow crewmembers. Should there be a dispute between two pirates, they were asked to resolve it once they were docked, ensuring that there was no civil fighting on board.

Roberts’ regulations, though more stringent than most, resulted in the strongest pirate crew that sailed in the Caribbean, capturing more than four hundred vessels between the years 1719 and 1722—more ships than any other recorded pirate in history.139 Not only did Roberts’ crew encapsulate democracy and fraternal utopianism on the high seas, both he and the men that he commanded were mixed-race, boldly proud, and “the very negation of imperial social order.” 140 Equality on board not only eradicated rigid class structures but was also signified racially. Roberts’ Swallow “had 40 Guns, and 157 Men,

capture, to its transit and storage aboard the pirate ship, to its disbursement to the crew” (Rediker, 67). It was also common practice for pirate officers to ask that all men who volunteer their lives to piracy follow a set of rules stipulated by the ship’s captain. Both merit- and volunteer-based modes of ship operations differs from that of the Royal Navy. In the Royal Navy, status on a ship was predominantly determined by purchase power and class rank.

138. The articles are laid out in explicit detail in A General History, pages 211- 212.

139. Rediker, 33.

140. Ibid, 174.

45 whereof were Negroes…the Flag had the Figure of a Skeleton in it, and a Man pourtray’d with a flaming Sword in his Hand, intimating a Defiance of Death it self.”141

The circumstances surrounding Roberts’ life and even his death became legendary. During battle, Roberts was shot in the throat, ending his life the way that he wanted: merrily and quickly.142 After his death, the crew broke apart, dispersing into the farthest corners of the English-speaking world, carrying with them their stories that would evolve into legend. Ballads about “the Great Pirate Roberts” were sung about him in his native Wales. Rediker writes that “this was only the beginning. An entire romantic literature about pirates, for children and adults, has followed, as has a starry-eyed cinema.”143 Indeed, the ten-year reign of the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean

(1712-1722) rewrote the renegade mariner into a man of conviction and heroism—an icon of respect and folksong in the darkened corners of portside taverns.

The romantic lore and legend of historical Golden Age of Piracy is recapitulated and revitalized with fictional works like Defoe’s Captain Singleton. Published just as the

Golden Age had reached its peak, the novel ossifies the pirate subject as anti-

141. General History, 24. In a discussion about the now recognizable iconography of piracy, Rediker writes that “pirates did not invent their symbols. All were common in the gravestone art of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The skull, the crossbones, the skeleton, the hourglass, the dart, and even the color black suggested, in the Christian worldview, mortality, the transitoriness of life, and the swift passage of time” (166).

142. Roberts is written to have said: “In an honest service, there is thin Commons, low Wages and hard Labour; in this [piracy], Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on the Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or tow at choking, No, a merry Life and a short one, shall be my motto.” (General History, 244).

143. Rediker, 174. 75

authoritarian yet communal, violent yet obedient to a vessel’s articles, self-serving yet fraternal. Singleton embodies the pirate subject that not only carries these polarizing characteristics but is also distanced from the mediocrity of life on land. He must tell of his adventures on the high seas; he must keep the romantic legends of the pirates of the

Caribbean alive.

Conclusion

The frontier of the early Atlantic shaped the way that figures of its landscape would be read and understood by European metropolitan centers, these representations being circulated both at home and abroad. Captain Singleton and Los Infortunios are emblematic of two disparate narrative traditions that informed the development of the maritime picaresque. Los Infortunios relays the (arguably) semi-fictionalized account of a creole man imprisoned by English pirates. Captain Singleton is an early novel that contends that the pirate was also a prisoner, subject to the caprice and violence of a betraying government. The portrayals of the monstrous and the redeemable pirate between Ramírez and Defoe also attests to the shifting Atlantic histories that inform the motivations for piracy in the early Caribbean. Within the novel, the British construction of the heroic pirate arguably remains the primary figure in the literary imagination, and is conceivably what resides in the literature and film of the West today. In works of the later eighteenth century, well into the nineteenth and beyond, the novelistic pirate culminates in the figures represented in Tobias Smollett, Alejandro Tapía y Rivera, and Philip

Maxwell. Margaret Cohen writes that Smollet’s Roderick Random (1748) encapsulates the sanitized version of the mariner: after his wandering career, “he rises tempered by the

wild world beyond the line; he ultimately renounces its amoral temptations.”144 As an educated but impoverished Scotsman, Random faithfully serves as a privateer in the

Royal Navy until he abandons it, on the lookout for better circumstances. Throughout

Smollet’s novel, Random remains a forgivably errant man of conviction, shifting allegiances and even nations as a means of survival. It is due to his education, his cultivation of foreign tongues and assured sense of morality that by the novel’s end

Random embodies the cosmopolitan mariner returned to civil society.145

By the end of the nineteenth century, the image of the pirate is consistently represented as a complicated, but otherwise redeemable hero. Following in the footsteps of Roderick Random, later pirates would reinforce experiential and secular education in addition to importance of constituting a cosmopolitan and enlightened nature. Maxwell

Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca; Or, Blighted Life, A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854), is highly philosophical in its justification of piracy as an anti-authoritarian institution. The mixed-race pirate captain Appadocca is as well versed in the classics as he is of manning a schooner. He uses these advantages to not only attack the imperial British when they approach his island home of Trinidad, but also justify his actions with European theories of natural right inspired by the Anti-Slavery movement in the United States.146 Piracy,

144. Cohen, 98.

145. Throughout the novel, Random is seemingly more morally corrupt. While in London, he does gamble and solicit some women of the night. It is not until his trip to the West Indies and his “return” to England that he is a morally reformed man. 146. Maxwell Phillip, Emmanuel Appadocca; Or, Blighted Life, A Tale of the Boucaneers. 1854. Ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe (Amherst: University of Amherst Press, 1997). For more on how Philip was inspired by the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Wells Brown, see the novel’s introduction, pp. xxix-lv.

and its anti-imperial network of encounter and exchange, serves as one element of a larger complex, inter-cultural system within the Caribbean region of the nineteenth century. It is because of the evolution of the pirate’s role in the literary imagination and the sense of unending “possibility” in the Caribbean, that Appadocca can fight for freedom, abhor slavery, and openly contend with the injustices of English sovereignty in the West Indies. Though piracy indirectly combatted slavery, Philip’s novel directly attacks this inhumane method of commercial gain, while also embedding within the work

“a broader, panoramic canvassing of the barbarism, materialism, and rapacious conduct that have dominated all phases of human history.”147 In this sense, the piracy of

Appadocca consciously critiques the piracy of commercial trading companies and imperial domination in the Caribbean.

The novelistic representation of the pirate that was developed by the English was even appropriated in the Spanish-speaking New World. Spanish novels featuring the maritime picaro in the nineteenth century perpetuated the trope of a self-fashioning mobile subject fighting for freedom in a burgeoning Caribbean. Cofresí, written by the prolific Puerto Rican writer Alejandro Tapía y Rivera, is the historical fictional portrayal of the Caribbean’s last known pirate, Roberto Cofresí, who was executed by firing squad on March 29th, 1825.148 Though the novel was adapted from the story of a real man, as is the case with Alonso Ramírez, the fictionalized narrative of the last year of Cofresí’s life provides a distinct commentary on the injustices of the Spanish government, and a lament

147. Ibid, liii.

148. Alejandro Tapía y Rivera, Cofresi. (Rió Piedras: Editorial Edil Inc., 1975).

for the loss of a uniquely Puerto Rican icon of freedom and self-determinacy. The novel takes place in and around Puerto Rico, the pirate crew having not only oceanic knowledge of the surrounding waters, but also a topographical knowledge of their island home base. While a pirate in the eyes of the law, Cofresí is portrayed as a man of virtue and conviction, continuing the literary legacies established by Anglo-Atlantic writers.

Particular to Spanish America, however, Cofresí serves as a critique-writ-large against the stringent policies Madrid imposed upon its colonies. Gerassi-Navarro writes that “as pirates defied the law and refused to submit to any form of authority other than their own, so Spanish Americans defied Spain’s authority and struggled to impose their own laws and regulations.”149 Cofresí served as an allegory for the larger struggles for freedom in the New World—this tropic allegory also continuing in works of the present-day.150 At the novel’s end, an opposing pirate force sinks his ship the Mosquito, and Cofresí is taken prisoner and executed by a local government militia. Though a pirate, Cofresí ends his life as a sympathetic character suffering cruel injustice, much like Appadocca, who commits suicide by his eponymous novel’s end. As these novels illustrate, not only does the pirate evolve into a subject of maritime heroism but can also serve as a literary martyr for a greater cause of Atlantic justice.

It was not only the representation of the pirate that was dependent on the West

Indian frontier as a space for his evolution in the mind of the western social imagination.

As an embodiment of enlightenment masculinity, he was an experimental subject in the

149. Gerassi-Navarro, 7.

150. An immediate example could be found in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, as the pirate hero Jack Sparrow contends with the capitalistic monopoly of the East Indian Company. 79

mind’s eye of the metropole and colonial settlements of the New World alike. Another subject produced by the legacies of European occupation in the Caribbean, the West

Indian woman of color, has also undergone a number of novelistic experimentations and will be the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 2: Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and the Woman of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century

Must Ethiopians be employ’d for you? Much I rejoice if any good I do. I ask O unbeliever, Satan’s child Hath not thy Saviour been too much revil’d? --- Phillis Wheatley, “An Address to the Deist,”

In the year 1767, a fourteen-year-old Phillis Wheatley published her first poems in a local Rhode Island newspaper. In these poems, she urgently writes that those who participate in the transatlantic trade, those who dehumanize and displace their fellow man

(and woman), could not possibly call themselves practicing Christians. The poignancy of the poems is striking—mediating herself through the discourse of religious shaming,

Wheatley transfigures her role to that of a woman of moral authority. As a slave in colonial North America, her youth, skin color and gender would demand a complicit silence. And yet, in her poetry she demands a social and moral overhaul of the white, male, and morally-corrupt slave practices of the New World.151 With her coterminously published poems “An Address to the Atheist,” and “An Address to the Deist,” from

151. Though the terms “New World” and “Old World” are used to mark the difference between the growing Caribbean and North American presence in the eighteenth century from Europe, they are not the most appropriate terms. As noted in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849, these terms are too static in their political divisions, contending that Europe is construed as “temporally and spatially prior, static, and given in advance of America” (Durham: Duke University Press), 24.

which the epigraph above derives, Wheatley appropriates a “persona of authority” and represents herself as an agent of moral reform in colonial America.152 She vocalizes her stark opposition to the institution of slavery and the inherent moral corruption that the practice carries with it.

Wheatley’s poetic agency and moral strength were uncommon in the middle of the eighteenth century, especially for an enslaved woman. According to historian Jennifer

Morgan, women of color were more frequently associated with lasciviousness, hyper- reproductivity, savage stupidity, and alien exoticism.153 “Labor” for women of color,

Morgan writes, was more cemented in hemispheric slavery practices than the intellectual labor of religious ideology written for a predominantly Euro-American public. In her

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Morgan succinctly argues that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the representation of women of color is “inseparable from the landscape of colonial slavery.”154 Literary historian Felicity

Nussbaum also laments that women of color were not just an image of labor in the West

Indian colonies of the eighteenth century, but nearly invisible in European metropolitan art, literature and theatre: “Women of color in eighteenth-century England are seldom represented as possessing personhood or subjectivity, and a seemingly insurmountable

152. Vincent Caretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 58.

153. Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

154. Ibid, 3.

difficulty in analyzing women and race in eighteenth-century England is the scant testimony from the women themselves.”155 Nussbaum, in her The Limits of the Human, gives focus to the “whitening” of Imoinda, and the “blackening” of Yarico on the English stage, highlighting the instability of the represented woman of color in the public imagination.156 She continues: “As we have seen, the ‘noble Negro’ in eighteenth century literature is very rarely a woman. Femininity, so significant in determining the limits of the human, […] is contorted with the noble Negro as a woman.”157 For Nussbaum, though characters like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and public writers like Ignatius Sancho

155. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 156.

156. Both Yarico and Imoinda, characters frequently discussed in transatlantic eighteenth-century scholarship, are representative women of the New World who have demonstrated great moral strength through their religious beliefs. Yarico from Frances Seymour’s “The Story of Inkle and Yarico” (1738), converts to Christianity and writes to her faithless and sadistic lover Inkle years after he had sold her into slavery while she was pregnant with his child. In her epistle, she recounts not only the horrors that she faced after her lover’s betrayal, but also forgives Inkle for the wrongs he committed against her. Imoinda from Behn’s Oroonoko (1668), pleads to be decapitated, despite being pregnant, firmly believing that she will see her husband in the afterlife. Both Seymour and Behn, in their own understanding of the woman’s body, have their primary female characters beg for death over being enslaved at some point in their works. The unspoken but understood desire for the unmolested female body can be seen here as not only the desire for self- preservation, but also having moral implications in Christian discourse. In the above quote, Nussbaum refers to the fact that while both women were frequently represented both in prose and on the theatrical stage, their racial identities are slippery and unfixed, moving through iterations of blackness and whiteness, dislodging any Euro-American connection between women of color and moral subjectivity.

157. Ibid, 191.

and Olaudah Equiano are able to capitalize on their assimilability into the European public sphere, women of color were denied entry.

Despite the overwhelming disregard for women of color in the eighteenth-century transatlantic public imagination, Wheatley still composes her poetry as a model

Republican with elevated moral conviction. Her Evangelical Protestant faith was committed to the literacy of those of African descent, which led to a transracial “sharing

[of] interpretations with others in the forms of religious poems and spiritual narratives.”

158 Wheatley mobilizes her moral exigency through the religious canons that taught her that all voices, independent of race, have equal right to express their devotion. Yet, outside of her immediate religious circle Wheatley was still burdened by the social pressures of collective disbelief that a woman of color could produce such intellectual and affective work either free or enslaved. Many people in positions of power, including

Thomas Jefferson, were skeptical of Wheatley’s artistic abilities, and directly undermined her talent. The social pressure she faced was, however, relatively easy when compared to many of her fellow enslaved sisters. The vast majority of women of color of the eighteenth century are lost to history, with the exception of cataloged bill-of-sale receipts, runaway slave advertisements, and the occasional court appeal of women of color fighting for the legal right of their children.159 These tangible accounts, claims and

158. Caretta, 52.

159. Camilia Cowling in her Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro, writes that women of color in the hemispheric Spanish Americas were a unique part of the social makeup of the plantocratic society. Similar to that of the transatlantic Britain, Spain had undergone an

advertisements allow us only a brief glimpse into the daily lives of women of color in both Europe and the early Americas. Silence and invisibility were the defining characteristics that applied to most women of color during this time.

However, Nussbaum’s claim that “at the end of the [eighteenth] century, the woman of color is not associated with or entitled to the femininity exemplified by her lighter counterpart,” is not entirely true.160 Further, Nussbaum’s definitive exclusion of the few women of color who were represented as moral models for transatlantic femininity only continues to perpetuate their historical collective invisibility. Though few women of color could represent themselves during this time (Wheatley as one of these women), there is a significant collection of eighteenth-century novels that do indeed represent women of color as embodying elements of Euro-American notions of normative femininity and embodied morality. In this chapter I will argue that the represented woman of color in the New World, specifically from the West Indian islands, provided an experimental center of moral and social reformation for European readers in the evolution of the novel. In these works, proto-feminist ideologies surrounding the

Republican woman are met with the race-based tensions of the Atlantic world.

abolitionist movement, predominately inspired by the rhetoric and actions constructed by the English. Within the Spanish abolitionist framework, an enslaved woman’s “modesty” was a crucial integration into the corporeal construction of the woman of color, so true in the British abolitionist context a half-century earlier. Women of color fought to been seen as not just slaves, but as mothers and self-preserving contributors to society. “Such a strategy would have been familiar to earlier British campaigners, who had highlighted the enslaved women’s ‘moral degradation’ at the hands of slaveholding men and, in the process, replaced stereotypes about licentious black women with notions that those women were innocent, passive victims of male lust” (106).

160. Nussbaum, 249. 85

It will be important to keep in mind that the novelistic experimentation of women’s transatlantic public and moralistic presence was not long lasting. There were many experiments with paradigm-shifting ideas of the role that women could play at an imperial scale within the eighteenth-century novel. Public formations of justice, morality and daily life were circulated, and the novel was a literary site where issues of the present-day, including colonial encounters and the moral implications of a mixed-race child may be resolved in case studies of fiction. In the eighteenth century, both novelistic and social experimentation could coincide within a single work, and ideas of naturalized normative female practices could be contested. The works that I discuss allow for the exploration of what Melissa Adams-Campbell writes as “an alternative vision” of naturalized definitions of femininity.161 By the nineteenth century, however, when imperial motivations and domestic social strategies were concreted, the “alternative vision” of the woman of color being a transatlantic model for female citizenry was only a scant memory.

Equally as experimental as the content of the eighteenth-century novel is the fluidity of the genres that could be read. The Bildungsroman was one of these genres. As an evolving literary form, among other things, the Bildungsroman served as a vessel for negotiating the transatlantic matters of race, gender, and empire in the long eighteenth century. Methodologically, in this chapter I directly problematize Franco Moretti’s restrictive discussion of the Bildungsroman to support my claim that the early iterations of the genre served as a vehicle for conveying the woman of color as, in fact, an

161. Adams-Campbell, Melissa. New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015.

experimental model of feminine morality for a transatlantic public readership. The

Bildungsroman of the eighteenth century is an important genre to observe and critique. At its essence, it is one that drives social normalcy—it both constructed and reinforced what was right and just within the sociopolitical framework of the “nation,” and by extension,

European empires. The early Bildungsroman also shares the tropes and topoi of what would become the “novel of development” or domestic novel. By the nineteenth century, the Bildungsroman and the domestic novel undergo a gendered split, as the domestic novel would serve as a fictionalized version of contemporary female conduct books.162

Yet, in the eighteenth century, the fluidity of structural forms was highly influential to the experimentation of the novel, leading to overlaps and generic cross-pollination.

Consequently, the works I discuss in this chapter could be read as early experiments of the Bildungsroman, but feature women who would be later considered heroines of domestic fiction. Thus, I argue that the early Bildungsroman merited a literary bi-racial woman and provided a historical moment of possibility that interrogated metropolitan concepts of feminine subject-citizenry.

The argument that the generic fluidity of the early Bildungsroman allows for bi- racial characters to inhabit the leading role of a novel ties into the larger scope of this

162. Armstrong, 20. Nineteenth-century domestic fiction would, at its surface, support the treatises of Locke and Rousseau. However, for Helen Thompson in Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel, these female characters’ compliance to the patriarchal systems of authority is consciously done and demonstrated as an act of volition in domestic fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Adams-Campbell agrees that the representation of nineteenth-century domestic fiction is also more complicated than it appears at first glance: “the domestic heroine’s compliance shows that gender hierarchies are not natural or inherent to the body” (99).

dissertation project. The social politics of racial mixing in the Caribbean had both direct and indirect consequences for readership in the metropole. The consequences of

European imperial contact and race-based enslavement in the New World, indirectly created an avenue in which female authors on both sides of the Atlantic could experiment with the social injustices of both slavery and structural sexism in a single form. During the time of these works’ publications, women authors were simultaneously criticizing the institution of slavery as they were publicly (but cleverly) denigrating the patriarchal systems of authority that had condemned them to societal complicity. While distinct from the discussion of pirates in the maritime picaresque of the first chapter, this discussion does respond to questions about the novel and the representation of the enlightened female subject in the Bildungsroman. As this chapter unfolds in its discussion of the critical works, I show how imperial exchange and the frightening intimacies of Atlantic slavery produced a figure of novelistic experimentation that would complicate the racial and gendered structures established in Europe and across the Atlantic.

In the first section of this chapter, I provide the theoretical framework for understanding this argument in its historical context. I consider the works of John Locke and Jean-Jacque Rousseau as foundational for how normative female citizenry was conceptualized in the eighteenth century. Locke’s and Rousseau’s philosophical treatises on the formation of the public and education were two of the most popular works of the late eighteenth century, influencing European social thought throughout the French and

British empires. These works are further contextualized by Jürgen Habermas’ important analysis on the “transformation” of social structures during the period and the rise of the public sphere. In the following two sections, I will argue that both Unca Eliza Winkfield of The Female American, Or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767) and Olivia

Fairfield of The Woman of Colour (1808) emblematize an alternative to the naturalized

European formation of the female subject, while also problematizing the social framework of Locke’s and Rousseau’s paternalistic notions of domesticity and moral education.

As a complement to the discussion of Unca Eliza and Olivia, the final section of this chapter will address a dynamic literary counterpoint in Claire de Duras’ eponymous protagonist in Ourika (1823), who arguably serves as a ‘failed’ figure of the Bildung heroine. In providing the counterpoint of Ourika, whose little exposure to public life differs from that of Unca Eliza’s and Olivia’s, I show that experimentation with the

Bildungsroman featuring women of color can also attend to the politics of her subjectivity. These three works demonstrate that as social hierarchies founded on the economic systems of settler colonialism and slavery were becoming cemented, and within the Bildungsroman the yet-defined educated woman of color was an experimental subject of moral reform in New World ideological writing.163

Section One: Palimpsests of a Nation: Locke, Rousseau and the Naturalization of Domestic Femininity

John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) were two of the most influential social philosophers of eighteenth-century Europe. Both men were invested in the development of what Jürgen Habermas later identifies as the public

163. Arguably, both Yarico and Imoinda (discussed in footnote 5), are novelistic prototypes for the figures of Unca Eliza and Olivia Fairfield. These two figures in each respective work had founded their strength and conviction on their religious beliefs.

sphere, an evolved social order that was in part constructed by increased commercial trade (both domestically and internationally) and the diminishing power of feudal hierarchies within land-holding aristocratic systems. Locke, witness to the evolution of social progress in England and Europe at large, recognized the value of capitalism in a citizen’s socio-economic mobility between classes. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this social mobility not only led to new groups of public voices contributing to the evolution of a transatlantic collective ideology, but also brought about representative figures, both real and fictional, who would embody these politics.

Locke’s major contribution to understanding the importance of bourgeois autonomy in the early Enlightenment is his four-book collection An Essay Concerning

Human Understanding published the same year as Los Infortunios (1690).164 In it, Locke ardently defends the idea of joint agreement leading to public “opinion.”165 He expounds upon the idea that the formation of laws, legal systems, and paradigms of authority are directly contingent upon a network of social compliance. In his mind, social and political decisions should be made from the educated and market-driven public, not from what he

164. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book I: Innate Notions.1690. Editor Jonathan Bennett, 2004.

165. It is important to note that not all opinion should be considered as viable: Locke adds that “Floating other men’s opinions in our brains makes us not a bit more knowing, even if the opinions happen to be true…In the sciences, what you possess is what you really know and comprehend; what you only believe and take on trust is merely shreds; however valuable the whole fabric of which they are shreds, gathering them piecemeal won’t add much to your stock” (16-17).

identifies as the inept and antiquated prescription of the aristocracy. In his Political

Aphorisms, published a year later, Locke interrogates assumed sovereign power: “What can be more absurd than to say, that there is an absolute subjection due to a Prince, whom the Laws of God, Nature, and the Country, have not given such Authority? as if Men were made as so many Herds of cattle, only for the Use, Service, and Pleasure of their

Princes.”166 Locke’s philosophical writing in the late-seventeenth century espoused political freedoms and natural rights that would organically form into what Habermas calls an “informal web of folkways” as a means to determine collective virtues, vices and values.167

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered “one of the first authors of the French

Revolution,” expands on Locke’s theories a half-century later, writing about the rights and responsibilities of a united bourgeoisie force.168 Within his Social Contract or,

Principles of Political Right (Du Contract Social ou, Principes de Droit Politique),

Rousseau frequently employs the idea of the “common force” (la force commune) to describe a united ideological social framework that would structure a larger national identity. “Force” used in this way not only aggregated a collective of people to form into

166. Locke, John. Political Aphorisms: or The True Maxims of the Government Displayed. Third Edition. (London: 1691). Wing H917E-1926, 32. Accessed via EEBO

167. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991) 91.

168. James Swenson, On Jean-Jacque Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3.

a “citizenry,” but also anticipated the active force of the French Revolution fifteen years after this work’s initial publication.169 Rousseau writes that there is a difficult balance to maintain between the values of a single individual or citizen, and the larger collective in which he lives. In his Social Contract, he explains that one must:

Find a form of association that will bring the whole common force to bear on defending and protecting each associate’s person and goods, doing this in such a way that each of them, while uniting himself with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before.170

The answer to resolving this difficult balance of individual thought and universal agreement, according to Rousseau, can be found in the way that citizens are being educated. Published in the same year as the Social Contract, Rousseau’s Emile, or On

Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation) provided a treatise for a nationalistic model for the development of French citizenry. His collection espouses hard labor, kindness, and above all experiential learning through unrestricted inquiry: “Therefore freedom, not power is the greatest good. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform and does what he desires. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it.”171 A liberal education with distinct national values inculcated in the home at an early age would supply Rousseau with the important balance between individual autonomy and a collectivist national identity. In other words, though

169. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, 1762. Editor Jonathan Bennet, 2010. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf

170. Ibid, 6.

171. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or A Treatise on Education, Selections. Edited by Catherine Elgin.

an individual believes that he is thinking freely, there are enough free-thinking men, learning in the same manner, to share a common foundational ideology that generates a sustainable public sphere and preserves a uniform opinion of both moral and aesthetic values.

In writing about Locke’s and Rousseau’s philosophic contributions, Jürgen

Habermas reflects that “Locke’s “‘Law of Opinion’ became sovereign by way of

Rousseau’s Contrat Social. […] The Opinion publique derived its attribute [sic] from it, that is, from the citizens assembled for acclamation and not from the rational-critical public éclairé.”172 In his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas succinctly synthesizes and develops the philosophical thinking of preceding European social philosophers. Particularly when speaking of the bourgeois public sphere, which he defines as “the sphere of private people com[ing] together as a public,” Habermas idealizes the liberties associated with public voice echoing private, but collective, values and concerns.173 He contends in his work that the bourgeois public sphere provided a number of freedoms for the rising middle class, including the fact that the public sphere did not privilege “status,” it provided an ideological (and physical) space for state-society relations and political change,174 and was:

172. Habermas, 97, 99.

173. Ibid, 27.

174. Since Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, there has been a nearly uncontested argument that the late-seventeenth century coffeehouse was an institutional marker of the transformation of private peoples congregating in public places, creating a rising bourgeois attitude and value system that

always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who—insofar as they were propertied and educated—as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate. 175

The numbers of people who were able to participate was increasing in both scale and scope due rising capitalist formations, the building of global commercial empires, and the depreciation of sovereign power.176 Habermas repeatedly posits throughout his work that this “transformation” of the bourgeois public sphere, including the widening inclusion of its participants, was entirely dependent on the “private realm.” It is from the private sphere, he argues, that “private autonomy” evolved, and generated a model of liberal thought predicated on capitalistic success and financial and social autonomy. As Melissa

Adams-Campbell succinctly puts it, Jürgen Habermas theorizes the “two-sphere” phenomenon “by arguing that the development of an intimate private sphere of the family of the eighteenth century made possible the development of a rational public sphere.

was distinguished from the aristocracy. By the year 1710, London had hundreds of coffeehouses, each composed of regulars and foreign visitors, with many of these coffeehouses often supplanting governmentally regulated services, like the Post Office, in handling letters. For Habermas, the coffeehouse “not merely made access to the relevant [social and political] circles less formal and easier; it embraced the wider strata of the middle class, including craftsmen and shopkeepers” 32-33. For more about the role of the coffeehouse in the public sphere, see Brian Cowan’s The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005) and Woodruff Smith’s Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 (2002).

175. Ibid, 28-37, his emphasis.

176. Ibid, 141.

Thus, the privacy of the family, specifically the bourgeois nuclear family…is, for

Habermas, the seedbed of personal and political freedom.”177

Yet, for all the discourse of inclusivity generated by Locke and Rousseau, there were many within the “private realm” excluded from access to the public sphere. These groups included women and the vast majority of non-Europeans living in Europe.

Though the two philosophers considered the importance of the bourgeoisie for social and cultural development, both naturalized the discourse to be almost exclusively white and male. Recent scholarship has considered the problematic relationship between the eighteenth-century rhetoric of universal right and the fact that women were absent from its inclusion. For example, Helen Thompson writes that Lockean “daughters and wives are not necessarily able to be free, because they are implicated in the defense of masculine freedoms signally framed by Locke.”178 With much more deliberate phrasing,

Adams-Campbell writes, “Locke ignores and erases women’s agency in the contracting process and presumes masculine authority—patriarchy—as a baseline.”179 Indeed, in his

Two Treatises of Government, Locke writes that “the husband and wife, though they have but one common concern, yet different understandings, will unavoidably sometimes have different wills too; it therefore being necessary that the last determination, i.e. the rule, should be placed somewhere, it naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and the

177. Adams-Campbell, 5.

178. Thompson, 4.

179. Adams-Campbell, 26.

stronger.”180 Locke’s argument here is that the right to public opinion, the right to “rule,” is “naturally” apportioned to the male of any given household, even if there should be discrepancy between the prioritization and value systems of husband and wife. As the intellectually and emotionally “abler” and physically “stronger” subject within the household, the husband determines what is considered a topic of “public opinion.” The universalism and uniform collectivity of the rising middle class slips into a naturalized male-oriented ideology that permeates from the private household outward into the public sphere.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophical formations of a bourgeois nation have also been subject to critique in terms of their gendered exclusion. Roddey Reid, in his

Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, claims that Rousseau’s ideology constructs a paradigm in which women are the harbingers of a household education that promotes nationalism, but that women, now mothers and wives, cannot actively participate as citizens within its public-oriented framework.181 According to

Reid, social systems of governance for Rousseau polarized women’s naturalized role as wives and mothers against the non-normative formations of womanhood, including women who could not reproduce or chose to remain single. In his Emile, or On

180. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: In the former, the false Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer… (London: 1694). Wing L27767-793, book 2, para. 191. Accessed via EEBO.

181. Roddey Reid, Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

Education, Rousseau writes: “If women would only nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled.”182 His enthusiasm for breastfeeding aside, Rousseau gives a great deal of responsibility to French women to become domestic mothers, wives and educators, fostering a nation of men who would reproduce the patriotic values of citizenry that were inculcated in their youth. Yet, women as subjects were not granted the same freedoms of the “awakened heart,” despite the “every” preceding the phrase. Rather, they were to embody a figure within a new system of governance that enables the Lockean vision of the “public opinion.” In the words of Joan Landes, “man…is not housebound but a subject endowed with rights: He is […] at the bar of human liberty, and participant in the public assemblies. Yet he is also joined to a woman—a person who is not similarly free but [rather] affirms his identity as a free subject.”183 Childrearing and domesticity became gendered and binding conditions inculcated to young girls from infancy; female citizen- subjects were to remain excluded from the discourse of the public sphere.184

182. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 46.

183. Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 137- 138.

184. The palimpsestic role of women in eighteenth century Europe is connected to the ways in which “patria” is consistently constructed as female in contemporary art. Joan Landes, in Visualizing the Nation, thinks through the relationship between man and the feminized representation of “nation.” “One of the privileges of nationhood for every man is the promise of possessing a female, whom he pledges in turn to protect and honor, under the aegis of the nation” (137). For Landes, the feminization of the nation reflects man’s desire to “possess” that nation.

The cyclical reproductions of Rousseau’s treatment of the idealized female citizen had a lasting impact throughout Europe and its colonies. His treatise on uniform and nationalistic education influenced later works, that then also couched their language in a gendered division between private and public spheres. The 1801 publication of the three- volume manual, Practical Education. is one such work.185 In their guide to parents and guardians, Maria Edgeworth and her father R.L. Edgeworth write extensively on the ways that young Britons should be educated, both in terms of technical education

(mathematics, grammar, etc.), and social demeanor. In fact, fourteen of the twenty-five chapters of the manual focus on socially appropriate manners and habits that should be instilled in a young child, including such topics as “Temper,” “On Sympathy and

Sensibility,” and “On Obedience.” As a representative manual that maintains Rousseau’s philosophy on women’s domestic roles both at home and abroad, Practical Education reinforces Emile’s gendered binaries. In the manual’s discussion on temper, for example,

Edgeworth writes: “A man in a furious passion is terrible to his enemies, but a woman in a passion is disgusting to her friends; she loses the respect due to her sex, and she has not masculine strength and courage to enforce any other species of respect.”186 Echoing

Locke’s theory of resolving domestic disputes by assuming the superiority of masculine will, Practical Education functions under the reasoning that a woman is limited in both

“strength” and “courage” to win over any opposing force. Indeed, she would be

185. Maria Edgeworth and R.L. Edgeworth, Practical Education. 1801. (New York: Woodstock Books, 1996).

186. Ibid, Vol. 1, 258.

considered “disgusting” by all those around her if she were to voice an opinion contrary to the dictates of her position.

A close reading within the chapter titled “Female Accomplishments” further demonstrates the ingrained social presumption of an ideal European woman’s education.

The chapter predominantly focuses on the virtues of music, drawing, and singing, but also gives one piece of advice to its readers:

Women cannot foresee what may be the tastes of the individual with whom they are to pass their lives. Their own tastes should not therefore be early decided; they should, if possible, be so educated that they may attain any talent in perfection which they may desire, or which their circumstances may render them necessary. If, for instance, a woman was to marry a man who was fond of music, or who admired painting, she should be able to cultivate these talents for his amusement and her own.187

It would appear that the purpose of a woman’s accomplishments is to help ensure the gratified “amusement” of her husband. Domestic accomplishments, born and groomed for the sake of winning the “matrimonial lottery” forecloses a number of possibilities available to women who would otherwise seek an alternative lifestyle.188 Their education according to Edgeworth’s manual is focused on the way that a woman may please her future husband, not on the priming of a young girl to be a woman of opinion in the public sphere. The acute focus on “Female Accomplishments,” (as there is no chapter on “Male

Accomplishments”), and the several asides throughout the work that deliberately exclude women from instruction on self-assertion and prohibit them from reading current

187. Ibid, Vol. 3, 15.

188. Ibid, 6.

periodicals furnish a draconian vision of a woman’s place within a Republic. From the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth, the naturalized exclusion of women---and especially women of color---from the public life perpetuated and reinforced the theories generated and espoused by Locke and Rousseau from generations earlier.

Habermas’ analysis of the public sphere as a gathering of “private people…articulating the needs of society” is a generative insight into the social politics of the era. However, he does not acknowledge the disconnect from the representation of who constituted these “private people” and those who actually lived within the private realm of European and colonial households. The eighteenth-century public sphere, despite its aspirations, was only truly accessible to a select group of white, middle-class educated men. Public participation by women was not condoned by this newly formed social system, and was in fact delegitimized as “irrational” by the bourgeoisie. As

Practical Education demonstrates, complicit domesticity was written within the very foundation of European education. Consequently, it is through other means that women would circulate their concerns, represent their own needs and voice critiques against the social systems in which they existed. One such avenue was through the publically (and privately) circulated novel.

Emerging long-prose fiction of the eighteenth century provided an avenue in which a larger constituency of the private realm could represent themselves and their reality, with characters divined from both the quotidian and the imagined. Patricia

Meyers Spacks, in her Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English

Fiction, argues that early formations of the novels of this period “often reflect in recognizable ways the assumptions and disturbances of the society from which they

100

emanate. The novels’ realistic aspects matter: their attention to and reflection of social problems, their interest in the implications of social class, and their effort to investigate psychological depths.”189 Though previous novel scholars like Ian Watt have argued that the eighteenth-century novel was structurally founded on formal realism, Spacks claims that his “broad stroke” declaration of the novel dismisses the “multiplicity of eighteenth- century fiction.”190 In conjunction with Spacks’ argument, it is also feasible to claim that

Watt’s understanding of the “reality” on which formal realism is predicated, may also be limited in its demographic scope—just as there was a “multiplicity” of fictional forms, there was also a multiplicity of those who were represented in these forms. Allowing the novel to become a material vessel for ideological critiques, concerns and affirmations was important for its development, both in terms of content and authorship. As such,

Spacks contends that it was female authors, not male, who were the “major experimenters” of the period.191 Though socially conditioned to be more the “markers” of commercial global empire than participants, women were beginning to make “not only money but reputation: a place for themselves on the literary scene.”192 Women writers, consequently, had found an approach to public engagement through their private readership. The novel, in its many forms, served as a mediating material force in which

189. Patricia Meyers Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth- Century English Fiction. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 3-4.

190. Ibid, 5-7.

191. Ibid, 7-8.

192. Ibid, 9.

101

women could not only represent themselves but also provide a platform of social critique and reformation.

Contextualized by this complex history of female republicanism, the

Bildungsroman genre evolved to ostensibly reflect the realities of a rising metropolitan bourgeoisie. According to Franco Moretti in his The Way of the World, the

Bildungsroman genre differs from the earlier land-locked picaresque or maritime fiction on the high seas, as its attention to formal realism allows a protagonist more “interiority” and emotional “mobility.” 193 Moretti writes that the new capitalistic forms of financial and social versatility of the rising middle class led to a literary expansion of the kinds of characters that could be written in fiction. For Moretti, the Bildungsroman was a symbolic form, a form that represents “youth epitomized…[by both] inner dissatisfaction and mobility, mak[ing] novelistic youth ‘symbolic’ of modernity, shar[ing] in the

‘formlessness’ of the new epoch, in its protean elusiveness.”194 The elusiveness of modernity is worked out by the youthful protagonist, either assimilating into a community by the novel’s end or rejecting it altogether, usually through death. There are different evaluations of what modernity “means” to a larger cultural structure and the

Bildungsroman, as a genre, symbolizes those tensions and struggles.

With new literary figures that could now feasibly move upward through the social classes, reflecting the realities of the popular readership, the Bildungsroman demonstrates intra-class exchange, implying a more fluid social structure than cultural historians have

193. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Trans. Albert Sbragia, (New York: Verso, 1987, 2000).

194. Ibid, 5.

102

granted. Particularly, Moretti contends with Habermas on the latter’s organizing logic of the private and public spheres, highlighting that in the Bildungsroman, European history is “hardly a ‘sphere’ of action, but merely its horizon. Even in decades when public life has become explosive and passionate, novels opt resolutely for the private sphere (which is also, of course, the scene of their reading), with its stubborn, ‘realistic’ capacity to survive the tempests of social conflict.”195 The “horizon” of history, as it is represented in novel forms like the Bildungsroman, does not maintain a sphere-like social geometry in which borders are clearly defined between private and public spheres, and for Moretti, the private reading of public figures in literature work to level the private and public realms of existence into a spectrum of social thought. While Habermas’ observations of a gendered divide of public and private spheres existed within a historical understanding of the rise of bourgeoisie culture, the work of Spacks and Moretti support the claim that the novel served as an artifact of resistance against this strict social paradigm.

My intervention in this discussion is to complicate the parameters of Moretti’s

“horizon,” as a means to speak to a broader reception of the Bildungsroman on a transatlantic scale. In The Way of the World, Moretti writes that the traditional hero of the

Bildungsroman is “this new novelistic hero—young, male, just arrived in the city, socially mobile—the typical representative of that middle class, in vertiginous growth, which shapes the public opinion of the metropolis: his spiritual physiognomy must necessarily be linked to the development of the bourgeois culture.”196 The protagonists of

195. Ibid, viii.

196. Ibid, 165.

103

the Bildungsroman are traditionally male, highlighting the historical disadvantage of women’s social mobility in eighteenth-century Europe, as the genres of the adventure tale and the picaresque also predominantly feature men of the rising lower and middle classes.

However, global expansion and imperial contact also generated new subjects of Europe, and women of color grew to have a more significant presence in the eighteenth-century metropolitan social imagination. Though Moretti writes of “the common hero” who embodies the social mores of an emerging democracy and the values of spiritual and social equality, this hero was not only figured in a youthful male public subject.197 The experimentation of the Bildungsroman allowed for a multiplicity of representative protagonists, including educated women of color, to resist the social conventions of gendered and raced inequality in the eighteenth century. The remaining sections of this chapter will consider the ways in which women of color, new subjects within Europe and its colonies while also tied to the legacies of imperialism and slavery, created an alternative social model in which citizenry, mediated through morality, may be embodied. Furthermore, the heroines of the following novels also work to complicate the existing naturalized theories of women’s ability to be autonomous subjects within an expanding empire. The Female American (1767), The Woman of Colour (1808), and

Ourika (1823) are all works that open up a discussion about the social position of the educated woman of color in the relatively new and unstable Atlantic world.

197. Ibid, 191.

104

Section Two: Building the Bildung: Model Citizens in The Female American and The

Woman of Colour

The Bildungsroman, a generic form that evolved to be the novel of “formation,”

“education” and “maturation,” should not be limited to Moretti’s European middle-class male protagonists. Women of color were also subjects of the genre in its early iterations, complicating notions of citizenry and gendered equality both at home and abroad. Two early Bildung figures that support this argument are Unca Eliza Winkfield of The Female

American and Olivia Fairfield of The Woman of Colour. These heroines epitomize the classic model of the Bildungsroman in their formation of idealized feminine subjects and in their capacity to give voice, mobility and interiority to a new type of represented citizen of the British Atlantic. Moreover, in their representation of idealized femininity, adhering to the gendered determinants prescribed by the philosophies of Rousseau and

Locke, their characters directly challenge British imperial corruption and metropolitan religious and social degradation. In other words, because they are irreproachable in their representations of female republicanism, they cannot be socially condemnable for their actions. In their consistent negotiations with their larger world, these two figures demonstrate the tension “between self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization” the genre seeks to explore.198 The Bildungsroman, as an evolving

198. Moretti, 15.

105

eighteenth-century literary form circulating between the public and private realms, also harbored the transatlantic material concerns of gender, empire and citizenry.199

Like many other novels of their time, The Female American, and The Woman of

Colour were published anonymously (The Woman of Colour) or under a pseudonym (The

Female American). There were women writers who did publish under their own name—

Francis Burney, Lady Mary Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, etc.— but few female writers could guarantee their social reputation, as well as make a living, by producing a work that contradicted social norms. Authors who bucked the patriarchal representation of the self- restrained, unadulterated, and pious heroine would risk becoming a social pariah. Women were at the forefront of novel writing by the nineteenth century, even publishing with enough frequency to pursue a literary career. Yet, with the gendered conservatism that influenced English and French social thought, the more women writers aligned their work with patriarchal biases, and the more likely that the writer would be “lavishly praised, widely read, and therefore paradoxically all the more capable of attaining [her] independence.”200 The anonymity of the authors of the following two novels in this

199. Though Unca Eliza’s adventures are chronicled through journal entries and Olivia’s narrative is structured in the epistolary form, the organizing framework of each work does not exclude them from being a Bildungsroman. As Patricia Meyers Spacks writes in her Novel Beginnings, “the epistolary novel does not define an exclusive category, nor does the novel of consciousness. Pamela, as striking case in point, is both an epistolary novel and a story of development” (94).

200. Stuart Curran, “Women Readers, Women Writers.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 175.

106

chapter further alludes to the pervasive influence of Lockean and Rousseauian philosophies regarding women’s domestic roles. As these novels critiqued the norms of republican womanhood with the radical representation of a mixed-raced heroine, it is safe to say that their anonymity marks both prudence and caution on the authors’ part.

The structure of the Bildungsroman includes a rather formulaic plot sequence.

The reader is introduced to a yet undetermined heroine who embodies the “symbolic youth” of modernity. Rising conflicts between the protagonist and the surrounding world eventually lead to a “harmonious solution” that balances the Rousseauian dilemma of individual values and larger societal ideologies.201 Over the course of the novel, the heroine will develop into a subject with worldly awareness and determine how she will contribute to her identified “public.”202 In other words, the protagonist directs “the plot of

[her] own life so that each moment strengthens one’s sense of belonging to a wider community.”203 The reader’s understanding of the “complete” heroine is through this lens of experiential learning and eventual matured social identity by the novel’s end. In tracing the evolved figure of the Bildung in Unca Eliza and Olivia in each work, the

201. Moretti, 15.

202. As this section will show, the identified “public” is situated in the Atlantic world. In Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities writes that creole pioneers exemplify both an anti-metropolitan resistance as well as citizens of “plural…imagined communities” in New World colonies that needed to be “defended from [metropolitan] depredations.” For Anderson, “in accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim creole functionaries…played a decisive historic role” (London: Verso, 1983, 2006), 64-65.

203. Moretti, 19.

107

reader is witness to their development as models of moral citizenry and femininity in a transatlantic Britain. These heroines also resist normative social structures and values, and in doing so, interrogate the prejudiced assumptions of race and gender on which these values stand. Furthermore, these readings also complicate Moretti’s parameters for the Bildungsroman as a genre.

A crucial categorical stipulation in the classical Bildungsroman is the reader’s ability to witness the initial emergence of a heroine susceptible to external forces, whose journey is perceived in the “text through the eyes of the protagonist.”204 In The Female

American’s beginning, the mixed-raced Unca Eliza demonstrates her youthful ignorance during the first stay at her uncle’s house in England, after having spent her budding years in the “infant state” of her early-American colonial environment.205 In reflecting back on her experience of leaving Virginia for England, Unca Eliza collapses her identity with that of the borderland frontier she calls home. A connection between the wild and unformed colony of Virginia is fastened to the unformed state of Unca Eliza’s being, both uncertain if they will be shaped more by Eurocentric social thought or by the indigenous populations that live just beyond the imperial border. Upon her arrival in England, the

204. Moretti adds that this is the most logical process for the reader to identify with the protagonist, “since [she] is undergoing the experience of formation, the reading too is intended to be a formative process,” (56).

205. Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseud), The Female American; Or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield. Ed. Michelle Burnham (Toronto: Broadview, 1767, 2001). Unca Eliza is the daughter of an English settler and a Native American princess.

108

ambiguity surrounding her identity continues, particularly when her New World otherness is sensationalized by her English family and neighbors:

My tawny complexion, and the oddity of my dress, attracted every one’s attention, for my mother used to dress me in a kind of mixed habit, neither perfectly in the Indian, nor yet in the European taste, either of fine white linen or a rich silk… My uncommon complexion, singular dress, and the grand manner in which I appeared…could not fail of making me much taken notice of.206

As an adult writing back to these moments of childhood, Unca Eliza reflects on her younger self having a partial, but not full, comprehension of her exotic novelty that is neither totally European nor completely foreign. Feelings of otherness are only exacerbated when, in these early days in England, she is referred to by the sobriquet of

“princess” by the same neighbors whose attention she captured. Though born of North

American royal blood, the namesake ties her indigenous identity with an essentializing difference, effectively barring her from a European self.207

The uncertainty of the protagonist’s early identity, along with metropolitan logic linking her subjectivity to otherness is not only found in Unca Eliza’s beginnings, but also in Olivia Fairfield’s, the daughter of a Jamaican planter and his slave mistress.208 In

206. Ibid, 49.

207. It is important to note that her projected identity of a Native American princess allows her some privileges otherwise unavailable to her. Though Unca Eliza is not granted acceptance into European modernity, her indigenous class and rank allowed for her to be educated in England, to possess servants, and be regarded with distinction. Her English neighbors may not have behaved so well had she been a mixed-raced woman without any title.

208. Anderson notes that in Rousseau’s writing, there is a distinct argument that those born in non-European climates were negatively impacted by their surrounding

109

The Woman of Colour, Olivia is introduced as triply delegitimized at birth: her sex deprives her of much legal authority within the metropolitan public sphere and born out of wedlock, she is cloaked with social stigmatization.209 Most importantly, she notes, the mother who gave birth to her also gave her a color that “could never be considered in the light of equality by the English.”210 Upon the death of her father (her mother dying in childbirth), Olivia is obligated to go to England and marry her cousin, Augustus Merton.

Though The Woman of Colour was published forty years after The Female American,

Olivia experiences the similar pressures of spectacle and novelty from those who accompany her on her voyage from Jamaica to England. In a light-hearted manner Mrs.

Honeywood, a fellow passenger on the ship’s journey to England, off-handedly comments, “‘I never view you on that seat, with Dido [Olivia’s maidservant] standing in her place of attendance, without figuring you in my imagination as some great princess going over to her betrothed lord.’”211 As with Unca Eliza, Olivia’s identity as an othered

“princess” allocates her in a place of distance, unable to fit within the normative conventions of a distinctly “English” everyday life. While a seeming compliment for both

environments. The natural conditions in which one was raised would have a direct impact on their “natural” character. “It was only too easy from there to make the convenient, vulgar deduction that creoles, born in a savage hemisphere, were by nature different from, and inferior to, the metropolitans…” (60).

209. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour. Ed. Lyndon Dominique (Toronto: Broadview, 1808, 2008).

210. Ibid, 53.

211. Ibid, 57.

110

Unca Eliza and Olivia, as a princess of the New World there is an implicit exclusion from

European modernity.

This sense of exclusion is thematically central to the women’s growth, understanding, and critique of the imperial world. Moretti points out that an initial estrangement from the mechanics of the modern world are, in fact, what helps to “realize a determined identity” in the Bildung figure.212 Though educated within a metropolitan system of learning, each heroine remains unassimilated due to her mixed-race identity, her inability to “pass,” and her affiliation with the untamed newness of the colonial fringes.213 Yet, it is in fact their being “the outsider looking in” on a world foreign to

212. Moretti, 176. Both Unca Eliza and Olivia are both financially independent, a necessary contingency for the youth to have the time and means necessary for maturation and development. Their social estrangement and their financial independence (or disinterestedness) coincide with the introduction of the classical Bildung hero. Moretti would consider other novels, including Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack (1722), to be more of the picaresque genre than the Bildungsroman. The hero’s impoverished conditions and drive for capital would be seen as social barriers to the full realization of the Bildung hero and his exemplary role as a model citizen.

213. In Prudentia Homespun’s (pseudonym for Jane West) The Advantages of Education; Or, The History of Maria Williams, a Tale for Misses and their Mammas (1793), the eponymous heroine and her mother discover similar challenges of experiential education in both a West Indian and English context (London: Minerva Press, 1976). For both figures, the corruption of metropolitan vanity is set against the licentiousness of Jamaican planter liberties and recklessness. Those susceptible to the venality of the West Indian “climate,” (particularly young English women), would then be sent across the Atlantic, only to be the victim of deceitful “Fancy” (87). Maria, unlike Unca Eliza and Olivia, never goes to the West Indies. When she asks her mother to justify the reasoning, her mother replies: “I felt unwilling to expose your constitution to the baleful influences of the climate, or your tender mind to be vitiated by the no less pernicious examples of pride, cruelty and luxury, which is unhappily prevalent in a spot.” (Vol. 2, 143). Carolyn Vellenga Berman also notes in Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery, it was common practice to “send the Creole daughter of a Jamaican

111

them, that allows Unca Eliza and Olivia can set the model of moral reformation, decidedly much needed in a corrupt London. Moretti’s primary argument rests on class- based formations of metropolitan difference. Yet, my reading considers the gendered and race-based social dynamics, informed by the politics of the Atlantic world, that inform the Bildungsroman’s novelistic debut. These fictional females, who both represent a figure of the social imaginary, but also a figure that exists in the reality of a historical moment, are positioned to be both “in” and “out” in their critiques of empire, education, and gender.214 In other words, the very real moral issues of late-eighteenth century

England, including the national hypocrisies of poorly-educated women and slavery, are mediated and challenged by these women of color, particularly as they grow more aware of the conditions in which they exist.

For example, upon a return trip to London, Unca Eliza’s life is violently threatened when she refuses the ultimatum of either marrying the captain’s son or forfeiting thirty-thousand pounds once docked in England. “I did not know law enough then, or else I might have given the bond, and have avoided the distress that my refusal

planter [in this case a Virginian landowner as well], for an education” overseas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 3.

214. There are a number of works in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries that would use the colonial subject of empire to critique the British metropole. Initially visiting for education and the development of cultural sensibility, the ‘native informant’ focuses on the inherent moral degradation of London. This corruption, including the exposure to superficial vanity and gambling, is typically juxtaposed with the moral fortitude of the colonial space. Novels in this mode include Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot (1746), Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of the Hindoo Rajah (1796), and Anna Marie Mackenzie’s Slavery; Or, The Times, (1796).

112

occasioned, as in equity I might have been released from the penalty.”215 Unca Eliza writes with a fuller understanding of legal discourse, as this memory is being recorded retrospectively, but she also points to the gendered inequalities of her youth, exemplified by the sexually aggressive captain and her own knowledge gap in pecuniary law. Had she been granted education in financial policies, typically omitted due to her gender, she arguably would not have been abandoned on a West Indian coastline.216 It is with these gendered circumstances of her desertion, in addition to the brutal killing of her servants on board the ship after her refusal to the captain, that the conclusion about metropolitan immorality is cemented. In this harrowing sequence, the novel establishes Unca Eliza and the ship’s captain as polar opposites along a spectrum of metropolitan corruption—the captain will return to the diseased city (London), while Unca Eliza is left on an apparently untouched and uncorrupted land, its ecological and economical virtue (much

215. Winkfield, 54.

216. Though the novel does not give an exact location to Unca Eliza’s utopic island, textual clues proffer it being somewhere in the northern Bahamas. According to the text, Unca Eliza’s ship “had not been above a day” before the captain began to make his threats (53). As Unca Eliza continued to refuse the captain, he slowed down the ship’s speed in order to ambush her, her servants, and maids. “A few hours afterwards,” they arrived at the deserted island (54). Should the captain have turned south in his premeditated plan to abandon Unca Eliza and take possession of both her ship and also her riches, then the Bahamas makes the most sense as the site of her adventure. Further evidence is provided by the indigenous islanders, who, having access to precious metals and an “Aztec-like” appearance would suggest a relative proximity to mining in Central America and Florida (Burnham 20). Though the island is a fictional one, the implication is that the Caribbean, as a geographical space, is a place of opportunity and of pristine ecological and social potential.

113

like Unca Eliza’s) still intact. Neither her body nor the land that she occupies have been plundered by a larger colonial enterprise.

As the novel progresses, it is this island, not England, that is the symbolic site of

Unca Eliza’s self-actualization as a subject who is neither an indigenous American nor a

European. Rather, she embraces her mixed cultural identity and her hybridized

“citizenry.”217 The island, like Unca Eliza, is unclaimed by any settler forces. Also like

Unca Eliza, the island is a part of the New World while also influenced by European religious teaching; she and her island become reciprocal metaphors, cultivating spiritual instead of material wealth.218 During her exploration, Unca Eliza finds a pagan idol of a sun deity. Finding a way into the emptied shell of the larger-than-life golden statue through an underground tunnel, she begins to speak through the idol at a moment when neighboring native islanders approach to worship it. As Phillis Wheatley saw herself as a

217. Hybridity, a term most affiliated with the works of Homi Bhabha “represents a crucial emancipatory tool, releasing the representation of identity as well as culture from the assumptions of purity and supremacy that fuel colonialist, nationalist, and essentialist discourses,” (Amar Acheraïou, Questioning Cultural Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization. New York: Macmillan, 2011, 5). The hybrid may be argued as originally fragmented, a collection of conflicting representations of self or culture, but then coalesced to form a complete whole—unique from the former two parent national or cultural representations.

218. The connection between the female body and the terrain it occupies has been the foundation for ecofeminism, first coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 with her essay “Feminism or Death?” Since then, scholars have incorporated many works into the cannon of ecofeminism, tying the Bildung of a young female protagonist to that of her home space. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this space would be considered ecologically ‘frontier,’ ‘wild,’ etc. Examples of this include the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder in the North American context and the poetry of Helen Maria Williams in the Anglo-French context.

114

voice of moral empowerment in this chapter’s epigraph, Unca Eliza, when she embodies the idol, sees herself as an “instrument to promote the knowledge and glory of God, and the salvation and happiness of any of his creatures[.]”219 Unca Eliza’s ventriloquizing through the empty statue marks a religious threshold of hybridity, inhabiting an

“American” body while also internally possessing European moral values. Furthermore, her continuing desire to live with and educate the indigenous islanders marks Unca Eliza as a new kind idealized Christian woman and transatlantic citizen. A present-day reader may take issue with her unrelenting religiosity and proselytization, and could convincingly collapse her mission with religious colonialism and the eradication of indigenous belief systems. Admittedly, Unca Eliza could be seen as an example of imperial religious contact with an impulse to indoctrinate the islanders with the “true” faith. However, in many instances of European missionary work in the Atlantic world, religious conversion screens the ulterior motive of commercial advantage over an indigenous group, natural resources, or land.220 With a genuine desire for community integration and no interest in material gain, Unca Eliza’s own mission appears unsullied by commercial opportunism. Given her religious upbringing, she sees herself as an advocate for the true faith, and an instructor to those uninformed by Christian doctrine.

Olivia Fairfield makes very similar negotiations with herself and with those around her. Using her body as a tool for instruction, Olivia demonstrates her agency and

219. Winkfield, 84.

220. An example of religious screening for ulterior motives can be found accounts in the Bartolomé de Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552). Both English and Spanish forces would condemn the other imperial power for their brutalities against indigenous populations in the New World.

115

reflective autonomy within the metropolitan public sphere, arguing for the possibility that those who “share her color” across the Atlantic may also share in the same religion and citizenry. An example of this is during Olivia’s residence at the Merton household, when the racist Mrs. Merton offers Olivia rice instead of bread, feigning ignorance by assuming that all Africans preferred rice. Olivia responds, “‘I thank you for studying my palate, but

I assure you there is no occasion; I eat just as you do, I believe: and though, in Jamaica, our poor slaves are kept upon rice as their chief food, they would be glad to exchange it for a little of your nice wheaten bread here;’ taking a piece in [her] hand.”221 Olivia calmly argues here that, regardless of race, African and English alike would prefer bread to rice, discounting the racial hierarchies associated with dietary choice and cultural foodways.

In other scenes in the novel, Olivia deliberately identifies herself with the Afro-

Caribbean half of her heritage, further complicating naturalized associations of feminine virtue with whiteness and privilege.222 For example, her stalwart efforts to identify with her mother and the enslaved subjects across the Atlantic is in one of her letters to her governess in Jamaica, written in the third person plural:

We are considered an inferior race, but little removed from the brutes, because the Almighty Maker of all created beings has tinged our skins with jet instead of ivory! —I say our, for though the jet has been faded to the olive in my own complexion, I am not ashamed to acknowledge my affinity with the swarthiest negro that was ever brought from Guinea’s coast!— All, all are brethren, children of one common Parent!223

221. The Woman of Colour, 77-78.

222. Ibid, 53.

223. Ibid, emphasis in text.

116

The epistolary format of the novel allows the reader to see into the inner complexities of

Olivia’s personal and political struggles, despite the fact that they are guarded by her cool and graceful exterior. The development of her character throughout the novel generates a multi-dimensionality that would be granted to any other lead heroine of contemporary

British fiction. With her moments of austere confidence, self-restraint, but also possession of strong interiority, in spite of (or because of) her color, “Olivia makes whiteness recognizable as a set of discrete cultural practices subject to change,” rather than something as inherent to an imperial system.224

Most importantly, throughout the novel Olivia deploys a classic abolitionist argument of Christian universalism, modeling herself as a beacon of idealized femininity as she also resists racialized assumptions of her character.225 Her moral pedagogy finds a subject in her prospective nephew, George Merton, and in her educating the young Briton

224. Adams-Campbell, 107.

225. Olivia’s claim of racial equality in Christian scripture anchors onto to one of the the earliest English anti-slavery arguments. Thomas Tryon (1634-1703) critically considers the complaints of slaves, in spite of the fact that he couches his moral concerns in advice for the benefit of the plantation owners in his work Friendly Advice to Gentlemen Planters […] (1684). The treatise is divided into three parts, with the second section entitled, “The Complaints of the Negro-Slaves against the hard Usages and barbarous cruelties inflicted upon them.” Here, Tryon emphasizes not the unchristian nature of the slaves, but rather the unchristian behavior of those participating in the slave trade; that the “exploits and practices” of the plantation owners are oppressive and negligent of Christian doctrine. The rhetoric of Christian brotherhood on the part of the African, and unchristianly behavior on the part of the Europeans was a point continuously made during the institution of slavery and was foundational to the British Abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth century.

117

about alternatives to existing social hierarchies, Olivia revises contemporary works like

Practical Education. In a scene where George compares his own skin color with that of

Olivia’s, he remarks, “‘Mine looks clean and yours looks not so very dirty.’” Olivia replies, “‘I am glad it does not look so very dirty…but you will be surprised when I tell you that mine is quite as clean as your own, and that the black woman’s below is as clean as either of them.’” By the end of her conversation with George, Olivia effectively convinces him that both hygienic and spiritual cleanliness come in all colors.226

In both instances, as Unca Eliza takes on the role of a mixed-race female missionary, and as Olivia educates her prospective nephew about skin color and similitude, there is a distinct appropriation of religious discourse as a means to represent the idealized feminine subject. This is a common trope in the established generic conventions of domestic fiction. These heroines, similarly to the historical Phillis

Wheatley, make their autonomy legible through their Christianity. Their evolution as subjects in each work also coordinates with the narrative arc supplied by Moretti. From youthful ignorance to respected educators, these novels trace Olivia’s and Unca Eliza’s journeys into self-actualization, with the heroines’ culmination as representative harbingers of a more egalitarian worldview. Moretti writes that the Bildungsroman “seeks to show that non-bourgeois organic principles embody a social cohesion unknown to the culture of critical individual autonomy…It is the bourgeois who must be educated, convinced of the absurdity of his cultural values. It is the bourgeois reader who must be

226. The Woman of Colour, 78-79; emphasis in text.

118

shown the advantages of social reconciliation.”227 Though Moretti addresses the reconciliation between the male protagonist and his social order, what these two novels have thus demonstrated is that women of color seem equally capable of being the represented subjects of “social reconciliation.” They are both educated, detached from capitalistic motives, and ideologically cemented in the “non-bourgeois organic principle” of Protestant Christianity (a foundational tenet to “English” citizenry).228 Given these criteria, Unca Eliza and Olivia are Bildung heroines, templates for idealized citizenry and femininity, particularly dynamic ones at that when considering their transatlantic, mixed- raced identities. Arguably, their model performances are of such importance to metropolitan reformation that both women are “granted” the opportunity to completely integrate into the “British” national community through marriage. For Moretti, and the single female protagonist he writes of (Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice), “it has been observed that from the late eighteenth century on, marriage becomes the model for a new type of social contract…founded on a sense of ‘individual obligation.’”229

227. Moretti, 65.

228. In his Ideological Origins of Empire, David Armitage traces the idea of the British Empire historically, interrogating the ideological underpinnings that bolstered Britain’s focus on the nation and the empire as being Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free. In writing of the early importance of Protestantism on the English national identity, Armitage claims that the British were not inherently all unified in their religious beliefs, but that the political, therefore, national stance of England was that it was antagonistic to Spain. Writers and philosophers of the time, though with differing opinions about religion, “nonetheless […] remained part of a common anti-Catholic bloc within Northern Europe….and could therefore be joined as limbs in the common cause of anti-popery” (85).

229. Moretti, 22. Patricia Meyers Spacks also speaks of the marriage plot and a character’s integration into society, particularly within “novels of development” (60).

119

Community integration through marriage and childbirth are the philosophical underpinnings to Locke’s and Rousseau’s notions of women’s role in the larger socio- economic structures that constitute a nationality. Indeed, each character feels a sense of obligation to marry, and is married at one point. However, what the next section of this chapter will discuss is that through the emblematizing of their character to embody enlightenment femininity in a transatlantic Britain, both Unca Eliza and Olivia demonstrate the inherent flaws to the gendered and race-based systems in which they exist. These flaws not only include racial prejudices against indigenous Americans and

Africans, but also the gendered restrictions imposed upon women of every color.

Section Three: Empty Promises, Failed Marriages, and a Rejected Europe

Within Moretti’s overly simplistic classification of the Bildungsroman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female protagonists were predominantly written to have marriage as the crux of their existence. Their represented desire for domesticity has been a major point of discussion for scholars of the nineteenth-century novel.230 The popular works of Jane Austen most demonstrate Moretti’s argument; with each publication, there is an underpinning anxiety that a woman’s character is only as worthy as the husband that she acquires. However, in earlier experimentations with the

Bildungsroman featuring a female protagonist, this was not entirely the case. For

230. See: Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5; Joan Landes, Feminism, The Public and Private (1998); Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (1984); and Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995).

120

example, Jane West’s The History of Maria Williams (1796) features a scene in which the eponymous heroine, after an arduous education and fluctuating courtship that ended in her suitor’s suicide, is finally on the brink of marrying a deserving man. Her mother, a

West Indian creole repatriated in England, tells Maria, “I am far from thinking that female happiness is of necessity connected with marriage; many sensible reasons may be adduced in favor of celibacy… indeed, experience teaches us that they ought to be most valued.”231 Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is another famous example of women writers debunking the notions of a conjugal imperative. In her view, a liberal democracy, to include gender equality, is the only political arrangement which enables women to fulfill their God-given purpose as “human creatures” placed “on this earth to unfold their faculties’ and to acquire the dignity of conscious virtue.”232 Wollstonecraft’s ethical argument here indicates that states of government in which men and women are equally educated are the only ones that will allow women to reach their fullest moral potential. Intellectual labor, not marital, appears to be the generative mode for women’s progress.233 Though novels of the nineteenth

231. Jane West, The Advantages of Education; Or, The History of Maria Williams, a Tale for Misses and their Mammas, 1793, (London: Minerva Press, 1976), Vol. II, 224.

232. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792. E-text, The University of Virginia Library. Ch. 2, par 12.

233. Wollstonecraft directly addresses Rousseau’s philosophical works in an earlier paragraph: “Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning,

121

century would concentrate on marriage as fortuitous to both subject and nation, works including The Female American and The Woman of Colour sought to critique the system of marital enfranchisement, the protagonists holding onto their Christianity as a pillar of strength against the gendered and racialized injustices that are imposed upon their characters. In fact, there is reason to suggest that these two heroines were morally and ideologically stronger when unmarried. As works of fiction, these novels also traverse a literary frontier in which mixed-raced women can both embrace the life of a single, moral woman while also embodying the “democratized” subject stipulated in Wollstonecraft’s

Vindication.

The narrative arc of each novel demonstrates that the heroine’s individual moral compass is what determines her active contribution within the public sphere. For example, after two years of dedicated religious teaching in her island community, Unca

Eliza successfully converts the majority of the native population: “I passed near two years very agreeably among them; in which I not only finished the translation of the

Bible, as well as that of the Catechism, but indeed of most of the prayers in the Common

Prayer-Book.”234 Her missionary labor is steadfast, quantifiable, and well cataloged. In

and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. […]with respect to the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigour. What nonsense![...]If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have the same aim.” (Ch. 2, par. 9-10).

234. Winkfield, 119.

122

earlier eighteenth-century publications, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the hero of the tale gives focus to quantifying the value of the material resources he acquires.

However, instead of echoing the precedent of the island-castaway-accumulator of Crusoe,

Unca Eliza represents “an apostolic woman who practices missionary zeal and religious colonialism in order to make of a New World island a cross-racial Christian utopia that remains deliberately isolated from Europe.”235 For Unca Eliza, the opportunity of the

New World is not founded upon the commercial networks of global capital run by

Eurocentric metropoles. Rather, the New World becomes the site of religious opportunity. Her spiritual wealth is achieved by intellect, will-power, and her ultimate dismissal of a strictly European approach to her role as a woman.

Yet towards the end of the novel, Unca Eliza’s utopian paradise comes to an abrupt end with the introduction of her cousin whom she begrudgingly marries. This man, whom she does not grant the intimacy of calling by his first name, instantly falls in love with her, and even though his is the “language of a lover, ill suited to the present time and circumstances,” Unca Eliza’s cousin manages to affix himself to her West

Atlantic religious enterprise.236 In addition to his excitement about being with Unca Eliza,

“Cousin Winkfield” is also overly-enthused with the prospect of proselytizing within her community, while she can think of nothing else but of how to “dispose” of him.237 “What

235. Burnham, 20.

236. Winkfield, 132.

237. Ibid.

123

a series of amazing providences!,” he declares, “I will learn their language, and end my days carrying on the great work you have so wonderfully begun amongst them for never shall I be able so successfully to fulfil the duties of my function as among a plain uncorrupted, honest people as these I find are…”238 Even though she takes him on as a companion and a fellow missionary, marrying him within a year’s time, Unca Eliza is less than thrilled that he should join the community. Following the conventions of

European practice of feminine submission, she marries her cousin because “it appeared to me, indeed, as if it must be as he would have it, yet the reflection gave me no pleasure…”239 Unca Eliza does not want to marry her cousin, yet feels obligated to do so, whether it be grounded in customary tradition or ingrained social stigmatization of an unmarried woman living with a man. She does not feel this sense of oppressive duty with any of the indigenous men on the island; it is only with her cousin that Unca Eliza feels the tinge of English propriety creep up on her mixed-race, British-educated body.

The frustration Unca Eliza feels at being undermined by her husband is evident in the novel’s remaining pages. Though she, her husband, and the late-comer Captain Shore live peaceably on the island, selling all material goods with the exception of a library of books and linen, there is a modicum of regret and self-effacement in the tone of Unca

238. Ibid, 135.

239. Ibid, 139, my emphasis. Spacks writes of Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless in similar terms: “Nominally, this novel accepts as given an order of things that makes women the property of men, surrounds women with dangers, denies women moral dignity as well as autonomy, and burdens women with an impossible array of imperatives, while making allowances for the self-indulgences of men. Yet the book sets forth this state of affairs so clearly and forcefully that it allows readers to suspect that, at the very least, it does not endorse the order that it describes” (80).

124

Eliza’s voice. The primary actions of the novel after her meeting with her cousin-husband no longer focus on herself, her faith, nor her community, but rather radically shift to center on the incidents surrounding Cousin Winkfield and Captain Shore. Her proto- feminist role as a religious leader is compromised once her cousin learns the language of the native population, in spite of all the earlier work that Unca Eliza had done as the primary missionary and doctrinal translator. Additionally, her new passive role is augmented by the fact that her husband takes a journey to England to settle material affairs while she is left behind, echoing contemporary metropolitan gendered divisions of public and private spheres. The island itself is then reconfigured into a new “domestic” space, a place where moral femininity may be maintained. Of course, given that her refusal to leave is motivated by her disgust with metropolitan corruption, her New World home could be read as a respite from British secular toxicity. The novel ambiguously ends with Unca Eliza inhabiting the domestic position of a wife, just as she also reforms the very meaning of domesticity within a New World context. In understanding her ambivalent position as both a domesticated wife and domestic New World woman, Unca

Eliza sets the bar for the balanced attributions of moral self-restraint, religious conviction, and remolded education that is both of European letters and transatlantic experience. In generating a subject that embodies the values of female republicanism, while also alluding to its inherent flaws in domesticating women, this early Bildungsroman critiques as it represents the realities of women both at home and abroad. This is particularly evident in transatlantic literatures, as creole women enter the liminal space between

European and Atlantic worlds, where ideology and praxis frequently conflict.

125

Maintaining this balance of Old and New World epistemology will become an experimental trope for the creole women in transatlantic literature.240

In The Woman of Colour, Olivia represents the continued struggle against matrimonial oppression and customary patriarchal authority in England when she marries her own cousin, Augustus Merton, after a stumbling engagement. In her case, though, the marriage is annulled after it is discovered that Merton’s wife from an earlier secret marriage had not died as previously thought. Despite the return and marriage proposal of the early romantic interest Mr. Honeywood (Mrs. Honeywood’s son), Olivia refuses him and writes of her intention to return to Jamaica, her final epistle stating her route to

Bristol. In a letter to Mrs. Milbanke, Olivia writes:

YES! My beloved friend, I am coming to you. … We will revisit Jamaica. I shall come back to the scenes of my infantine happiness—of my youthful tranquility. I shall again zealously engage myself in ameliorating the situation, in instructing the minds—in mending the morals of our poor blacks. …Eager to be with you once more, I almost count the tardy minutes as they move along.241

Despite the harsh circumstances that catalyze Olivia’s move to England and eventual return to Jamaica, she also maintains the difficult balance of feminine self-restraint and agentive thought. In her letter to Mrs. Milbanke, Olivia’s ambitions in the West Indies

240. There are many literary representations of the “creole woman,” a woman of European descent living in the West Indian and South Asian colonies. Carolyn Vellenga Berman writes that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the creole woman as at the heart of social reformation: “A creole woman serves as a powerful reminder of slavery, exposing the effects of the European and American women’s subordination within the home by likening it to colonial modes of bondage” (13).

241. The Woman of Colour, 188.

126

reflect her infallible moral stature and political engagement with racial equality in

Jamaica. Olivia recognizes that her faculties will be of better use in Jamaica by improving the social and spiritual conditions of her “poor blacks” with religious education. Like her literary precedent Unca Eliza, Olivia takes pride in her missionary- like role in the West Indies, but unlike Unca Eliza, is not tethered to the domestic obligations of marriage. Though married even briefly, Olivia never becomes pregnant and refuses its possibility when she rejects Mr. Honeywood’s marriage proposal.242 In her new self-declared social position as a “widow,” Olivia frees herself from the stipulations of her father’s will, and has also liberated herself from the laws of coverture; her legal and social mobility is concurrent with her physical departure for Bristol. Her leaving signals another similarity to that of Unca Eliza—Olivia also makes the Caribbean “into a domestic retreat for the psychic damage of the metropole--a move that expressly reverses the typical domestic fiction plot in which virtuous British women return to rural England to restore health and morality after exposure to the West Indies.”243 Finally, in refusing to marry Honeywood, Olivia resolves the matter of feminine submission to patriarchal authority in a way that is left unresolved by Unca Eliza in her marriage to her cousin. In

242. The fact that Olivia and Unca Eliza never become pregnant counters Anglocentric tropes on the sexual fecundity of African women and the reproductive animality of indigenous North American women (as illustrated by Unca Eliza’s more savage-like aunt). Jennifer Morgan argues it was African women, and their roles as both productive and reproductive laborers that created a central ideological crux, justifying and perpetuating slavery. This mode of racialized and gendered slavery had already been reasoned and supported with over two hundred years of Eurocentric and ethnographic cataloging and othering.

243. Adams-Campbell, 111. 127

these two novels, the unmarried woman of color of the New World is the epicenter of morality and embodied critique of corruption and paternalism.

In the readings offered here, there is a distinct arc in the development of each heroine’s cycle of departure and return. It is during their journeys that the heroines are exposed to religious education and morality through the British education system and the applied knowledge of inter-personal exchange in the Atlantic. With a fuller understanding of the mechanisms of a globalizing empire, both protagonists decide to either return to or stay within the “tranquility” of the New World; England is too far gone in its prejudice, and as such, is not deserving of their comparatively heightened moral aptitude.

Importantly, their mixed-race identities, serving in conjunction with their dismissal of

England for more freedom found in the Atlantic, supply the reader with literary progenitors of creole individualism. Though each heroine would acknowledge her

English national connection, either by marriage or by filial duty, Unca Eliza and Olivia occupy a represented liminal space that will eventually evolve into creole ideology distinct from Europe. In her description of the “liberal creole project,” Mary Louise Pratt writes that “liberal creoles” sought to distinguish themselves from Europe, though complicatedly bound to European values of white supremacy.244 Benedict Anderson claims that the “creole pioneers” born in the New World were already consigned to differences established by metropolitan logic. In spite of shared “language, religion,

244. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 172.

128

ancestry or manners,” for the New World creole there was an irredeemable exclusion from Europe.245 The above discussion of Olivia and Unca Eliza and their representative distrust with metropolitan imperial values ties directly with Anderson’s and, to a lesser extent, Pratt’s assessments. In fact, these characters directly challenge normative structures of hierarchy within the metropole on the grounds of race, sex, and national heritage. For many scholars, particularly those invested in early Spanish colonial nationalism, it is due, in part, to European wariness of New World “creole subjects” that an ideological otherness would eventually create a transatlantic schism.246 What these two novels further offer in this examination is a protagonist who performs the same aesthetic and moral supremacy of the “liberal creole,” but is also a literary experiment with the mixed race nature of many of the “creoles” who inhabit a “Europeanizing” modality. Not only do Unca Eliza and Olivia point to the moribund conditions of Europe while providing a model of existence that is feminine, mixed race and Atlantic. They also aggregate all of these qualities to provide the literary and social kindling for a mixed-race creole subject that would serve as an icon for the New World. Fictional avatars of the consequences of imperial contact, these mixed-race heroines made it possible for the

245. Anderson, 58.

246. “Creole Subject” is a term derived from the edited collection of the same title, Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. In the collection’s introduction, editors Bauer and Mazzotti make the claim that the term has pejorative implications, the creole subject of the early Americas embodied “an imperialist discourse of colonial difference” (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 7. According to the OED, one of the earliest records of “creole” being used to describe a person of mixed ancestry is in Bryan Edwards’ second volume of The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies (1793). In it, he uses “creole” to describe “Native Whites” (those of European descent born in the colonies) and “Creoles of mixed blood.” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “creole”).

129

public to see a woman of color embrace Republican virtues and assume the model of transatlantic feminine modernity. In both The Female American and The Woman of

Colour, Europe is courted, proven an unworthy suitor, and finally rejected for New

World possibility.

Section Four: Desire and Death in Claire de Duras’ Ourika

Twenty years after the publication of The Woman of Colour, French author Claire de Duras published Ourika (1823), a novella based on the historical account of an

African girl “adopted” by a French governor who was an acquaintance of Duras.247

Similar to heroines Unca Eliza Winkfield and Olivia Fairfield, Ourika finds herself trapped within the racial and social injustices that riddle the French cultural mind. Also much like her two previous eponymous heroines, Ourika is educated within the racially hierarchical European system, and spends a good portion of her young adulthood

247. Claire de Duras, Ourika, translated by John Fowles (New York: Modern Language Association, 1994). Of the three works discussed in this chapter, Ourika is the only one with a known author. Briefly, Duras was the daughter of a French aristocrat, who was decapitated for his royalist leanings, even though he was a staunch advocate for the abolishment of slavery in the French Caribbean. While Duras and her protagonist were of different racial backgrounds, there is a great deal of biographical overlap between Duras and Ourika (Françoise Massardier-Kenney in Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783-1823 Kent: Kent State University Press, 1994),189. According to Massardier-Kenny, Duras was friends with François-René de Chateaubriand, “who used her influence as a woman of position to further his career but who did not consider her need for long lasting commitment. Duras’ ‘dear brother,’ as she would call him, treated her as her character Charles would treat Ourika: as a necessary, but ultimately invisible and dismissible other” (187). The initial attraction Duras had to the Senegalese story that Ourika was founded upon was intensely personal: “the theme of an isolated individual excluded by society because of race or class was to be a constant in [Duras’] work, and the depression of the character seems to have reflected Duras’ own state as it is documented in the accounts” (190).

130

combating issues related to her mixed desire for European social integration and the realization that such a desire is futile. Thematically, the novella shares the same argumentative framework as The Female American and The Woman of Colour: women, of any color or mixed heritage, should be granted the same legal and social privileges as their male counterparts. However, unlike her literary predecessors, Ourika’s internal struggles and attempted negotiations with the larger social values that permeate her existence end in utter failure. Ourika does not “return home,” as Unca Eliza and Olivia do, nor does she realize her role in a larger community, either in France or in the West

Indian colonies where she was originally bound. Within the generic conventions of the

Bildungsroman, the protagonist is meant to mature into a productive and active member of a specific community; Ourika, however, fails to assimilate. By the novel’s end, she is in a self-generated social suspension that neither gravitates towards a black European identity, nor a New World creolized subjectivity. Since Ourika is unable to locate and assimilate to her “community,” she illustrates what Moretti has identified as a “failed

Bildung,” a hero who cannot assimilate and therefore dies. He explains:

Just as the happy ending implies some kind of ‘success’, which it sublimates into something wider, so the unhappy ending demands the protagonist’s death […]. His death must first of all isolate the hero: not only from the social order in which he never felt completely at ease, but especially from those collective expectations which he has never wholly betrayed, and to which—within himself—he has perhaps entrusted the ultimate meaning of his existence.248

Yet within the context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, the European model for the failed bildung is entirely too simplistic. As an analytical counterpoint to the readings of

248. Moretti, 119.

131

The Female American and The Woman of Colour, this section will read Ourika as a novella of “failed” development, and in being such, posits two major claims about the complex representation of the woman of color in the European context. First, it further illustrates the experimentation of representing the woman of color and its impact on

European reading culture of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Secondly, with the representation of a sympathetic protagonist in a transatlantic context, there is a continuing political pressure that the novella creates, discrediting the long-standing pro- slavery logic of many French metropolitans that people of color did not possess complex emotions or interiority.249 The Bildungsroman, even with a failed bildung (and perhaps even due to the fact that she has failed), provided a generic vessel in which the concerns about Eurocentric supremacy could be questioned and reconfigured onto the body of an

African-French woman who is neither French nor African. The novella, at its foundation, pressures the inherit fallacy of white European supremacy.250

249. The Haitian Revolution (1791) and its aftermath in the colony of Saint Domingue has a huge impact in metropolitan France and England. Discussed at length in Chapter Four, the Revolution was seen as a threat to the sovereignty of European imperial rule, and pro-slavery writers wrote in great detail the brutal savagery of the atrocities that had taken place during the rebellion. Africans were constructed to be nothing short of villainous.

250. The French, though similar to English social thought in terms of racial hierarchical difference, which then justified African slavery, maintained legal structures that were more definitive than that of the English. For example, in the year 1685 (early in France’s participation with the slave trade), they established the Code Noir, a set of legal proceedings that held planters accountable for the humane treatment of their slaves. Blackburn writes that, within the French context, there were certain privileges allowed for people of color in the Caribbean: “African slaves should be instructed and baptized, and planters were required to supply them with regular rations of bread and meat or

132

The plot of Ourika is simple, although profound in its examination of a socially oppressed and emotionally complex Afro-French victim of the transatlantic slave trade.

Ourika was rescued from a slave ship as an infant, her mother already dead aboard the slaver docked at one of the “factories” along the West African coast.251 Considered a possible “pet,” Ourika was taken from the Senegalese ship that was bound for the West

Indies and transported to France, where she was given to the widowed and aging foster mother “Mme la Maréchale de B.” as a gift. Mme de B. is described as a generous and caring woman, who treats Ourika more like an adopted daughter than a subservient companion.252 Ourika is raised with all the benefits of high aristocracy; she had a devoted mother and is trained under prestigious tutelage. Though African born, Ourika has ostensibly been granted the rich, but sheltered life of a French aristocratic child.

fish…the Code did recognize the existence of a small number of free people of colour. Article 59 awarded freedmen and women…the same civic rights as the free-born” (74). However, similar to the coartación in the Spanish West Indian colonies, Le Code Noir, was flexible in its interpretation, and “depended not just on the owner’s will but on the enslaved person’s ability to save money, their knowledge of slave law and customary practice, and their ability to put that knowledge into good effect” (Cowling, 52).

251. “Factory” as a word has its own interesting etymological tracing. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, among others, argue that “factory” has its origins on the West African Coast. Linebaugh and Rediker claim that the “factory” is directly associated with the “factor,” or trading representative, who would be permanently stationed at sites along the coast to ensure that West Africans would be gathered, housed and cargoed for the colonies. For many of those fettered onboard, this meant anywhere from three to six months of imprisonment on a docked ship, a dozen feet away from free land (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 150. Also see Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Stephanie E. Smallwood discusses the horrible conditions of the littoral factories in the first two chapters of her Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007).

252. Duras, 7.

133

Yet, in the novella, Duras represents Ourika as educated within the racially hierarchical enlightenment European system, spending a good portion of her young adulthood combating issues related to her mixed desire for French social integration and the realization that such a desire is futile. By the novella’s end, Ourika’s internal struggles and attempted negotiations with the larger social values that permeate her existence end in failure and conclude with her death. Typically, within the

Bildungsroman, the protagonist is meant to mature into a productive and active member of her social and economic environment. Or, as demonstrated in works like Samuel

Richardson’s Clarissa, exposure to continuous corruptive behavior leads the morally- stained heroine to die, consciously or not removing herself from social circulation. In either of these situations, the novels culturally perform the gendered social expectations of the European woman. Yet, in the case of Ourika, the heroine remains morally coherent: she retains her virginal purity, is well educated and courteous, and obeys all the trappings of her aristocratic training. Yet, she dies. In this section, I argue that moments of “lack” and “denial,” informed by existing racial structures of white supremacy, feed into her psychological “melancholy,” absent agency, and (to employ Orlando Patterson) her “social death” when considering her personal and relational identity politics throughout the course of the work. To accomplish this, I consider the limiting parameters of her raced and gendered body as she meditates on her inability to integrate into French aristocratic society (her “community”) and the impact of the Haitian Revolution. The final portion of this section will discuss Ourika’s death at the novella’s end, maintaining the claim that while she desires and deserves to be an assimilated bildung figure, the social contingencies placed upon her black body prohibit her novelistic success.

134

Alluding to the seeming critical worldview that shapes Ourika’s identity, the narrative begins with her on her deathbed. Consequently, death haunts the story, as the reader is aware that Ourika is on the brink of her demise recalling the memories of an emotionally tormented life. Further, as Ourika also recognizes that she is dying, her detailed memories are riddled with social critique and keen sentimental observation. As an example, when recalling her earliest memories Ourika notes that while she was

“fondled, spoiled, loaded with presents, praised [and] held up as the most clever and endearing of children,” she was also “dressed in oriental costume, seated at [Mme de B’s] feet.”253 Quite pointedly in the early narrative recollections, Ourika marks her youth as one informed by categorical racial difference. Plausibly considered a novelty among the aristocratic class of which Mme de B. belonged, Ourika was fashioned to model the

French imperial collapse of the Orient and colonial West Indies, a popular mode of the time for black servants.254 Additionally, during a dance performance in honor of her adopted family, Ourika was to perform as “Africa” even though she was reared in a

French cultural context and had to conduct outside research to perform “Africa”

253. Ibid, 7-8.

254. For an extended discussion of the French and British imperial collapse of West and East colonization through fashion, especially that of masters dressing West Indian or African slaves in “oriental” attire, see: Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 1- 28; Felicity Nussbaum, “Between ‘Oriental and ‘Blacks So Called’, 1688-1788” in Postcolonial Enlightenment. Eds. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 135-166.

135

properly.255 Much like Olivia and Unca Eliza, these narrative moments underscore

Ourika’s othered status within metropolitan social structures. However, as a child Ourika did not acknowledge that socially-imposed difference; it is only with the clarity of hindsight that she transfigures her childhood into one of racialized complexity.

What Ourika does emphasize in her reflections is that early on her racial identity and intuitive sense of difference molded her complex sense of interiority—she was

“thoughtful before I could think.”256 Her aristocratic world was composed of critical contemplation and “good taste.” The inclusion of her difference is brought to the fore of her early reflections when Ourika comments that her demand of good taste would have been “dangerous, even if I’d had a future. But I had no future, though I was totally unaware of that then.”257 At the work’s start, Ourika poignantly associates her death with the reflection that, due to the color of her skin, she had “no future.” Fatalistically rendered, Ourika is also intensely critical of her earliest memories—her childhood appears to be constructed out of series of opposites; treated with special care, Ourika was also treated as a black girl without a future, marked by instances of categorical racial difference that would ostensibly determine her status.

As the record of her life pivots from her youth to young adulthood, Ourika points to her continued isolation and failed socialization. At fifteen, she overhears a

255. Duras, 10.

256. Ibid., 8.

257. Ibid.

136

conversation in which Mme de B. laments that “the poor girl [will be] alone, always alone in the world” due to her racial tie to the Africans of the West Indies.258 The social circumstances that constructed her skin color as “unworthy” for French society haunts

Ourika for the duration of the work, particularly when concerning love, marriage and childrearing. She is constructed as being too black for the French aristocratic or bourgeoisie classes, but too well educated to be happy with “some fellow of low birth.”259

Feeling abandoned and hideous by this revelation, Ourika begins to change her behavior.

She eats less, takes down her mirrors, and covers any exposed skin, including using a veil to cover her face.260 With an intimate view of her narrative interiority, she becomes detached, “cut off from the human race. […] From the time that I felt ostracized, I became more exacting. I analyzed and criticized almost all that had previously satisfied me.”261 Briefly she considers the social implications of radical change and racial egalitarianism, particularly as her narrative is back-dropped by the French Revolution.

The circumstances surrounding the Revolution were simultaneously a source of hope and worry—in her observations of it, Ourika considered how class equality could spill over into race equality. Yet, also with it would come the fall of the aristocracy, and the life that she had grown accustomed to since infancy.

258. Ibid., 12.

259. Ibid., 13.

260. Ibid., 28.

261. Ibid., 16-17.

137

Self-scrutiny appears as a major thrust in the novella’s representation of Ourika.

As she develops a sense of emotional nuance as she matures, her simultaneous developing sense of worthlessness implies that she has embraced the racial taxonomies that would categorically identify her as inferior. While the French Revolution represented the manifestation of enlightenment thinking founded on the rise of bourgeois political power and growing injustice at the corruption of the aristocracy, revolutionary ideologies did not open the possibility of racial equity, though it may have appeared with some promise to do so given the Republican logic circulating at the time. While it may seem that Ourika has the intellect to critique this obvious lacuna in the revolutionary logic of the 1790s, she instead inverts that critique inward, subscribing to Hegelian philosophies of inherent black inferiority. Even at the time of the novella’s publication, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s failed attempt to reclaim Haiti for France and resuscitate slavery in the former colony, Afro-French subjects were excluded from the political and cultural evolution in France. Embodying the larger politics of black exclusion, Ourika quite literally veils herself from the public eye; the desire to cover her skin reflects her larger social exclusion from the political body.262

Ourika’s narrative emotional and psychological dilemma comes to a head when faced with the realization that the romantic love she has for her adopted brother Charles is unrequited. The two of them had grown up together, and she had been a faithful confidant. Yet, at a critical point in the novella, Ourika realizes that her attention was not

262. For an extended discussion about the “excluded” subject of the polis or political body, see: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).

138

reciprocated, and Charles actually knew very little about her. His proposal and marriage to another woman leads Ourika to her final emotional breakdown:

Why had that same God given poor Ourika life? Why wasn’t it ended on that slaver from which she had been snatched—or at her mother’s breast? A handful of African sand would have been enough to cover my small body, and I should have found it a light burden. What did the world care whether I lived? Why was I condemned to exist? Unless it was to live alone, always alone, and never loved. I prayed God not to let it be like this, to remove me from the face of the earth. Nobody needed me, I was isolated from all.263

It is important to note how her attitudes toward her being taken from the slaver in Senegal to France have changed since the novella’s beginning. At its start, Ourika believes that she was “rescued [me sauver] from slavery.”264 However, in these moments of depression, she uses the word “snatch” [arrachée] to describe the event. The connotative difference between “rescued” and “snatched” alludes to the complexity of her personality in addition to the shifting modes of perception that may exist within a transatlantic

French context. The difference between “snatch” and “rescue” also signals how she identifies herself along the Afro-French national spectrum: either grateful for being raised in France or bemoaning a quick and easy death on African soil. This excerpt consciously reflects the ambivalent emotional and ontological fluctuations Ourika experiences in her attempts to locate herself within French society. A position of gratitude, as indicated by

“rescue,” echoes that of white paternalistic formations of racial difference: ostensibly, her exposure to French culture has only “benefited” Ourika and therefore she should be

263. Duras, 33

264. Ibid., 7.

139

grateful. The second option of an infantile death implicitly posits that the black life in nineteenth-century France is a “bare life,” where her social and political existence is effectively erased (destroyed, yet not socially ‘sacrificed’). Ourika’s short jeremiad languishes over the purpose of her existence, contemplating the idea that her lived life seems on equal terms with a life that could have ended as an infant on African soil.265

Ourika’s constructed self-hatred and isolationist behavior perpetuates the notion that she does not belong to any community, and thus she cannot see beyond the injustices of her own personal condition. Within the novella’s plot, this recognition of her internalized racial “lack” is specifically manifest in her “desire” for her adoptive brother

Charles.266 She physically and emotionally longs for him as he represents an idealized formation of the white, male and complete European. In this gendered mode of social integration, Charles then becomes the singular avenue in which Ourika can socially participate vis-à-vis the idealized nuclear family. As Roddy Reid mentions in his

Families in Jeopardy, early nineteenth-century France was attracted to “the modern domestic family [that] has existed only insofar as it has been lamented in discourse as loss or absence and thus desired.”267 Ourika’s desire for integration is aligned with the

265. Agamben, 4.

266. As Reid expounds upon in his work, the social construction and internalization of a subject’s “lack” becomes a “discursive technology” that feeds into a “desire” to accommodate or satisfy the lack in some way. As an example, a woman’s social “lack” on the grounds of being a woman will result in the “desire” for marriage and family. The paradigmatic subject position of “lack” and “desire” is a naturalized condition, a bio-political governance of paternalism (5-7).

267 Ibid., 9-10.

140

larger social obsession with the French nuclear family, and as she recognizes that she could not affix herself to the society through marriage, her access to any semblance of a community appears denied. While her inability to consider alternative communities outside of the French nuclear family contributes to her failed assimilation and social death, her behavior also signals larger social concerns that circulate around the politics of both women and Afro-French subjectivity.

The catalyzing event for her desiring death was the marriage between her adopted brother and another woman. As Charles was seemingly the only option for a companionate marriage, his marriage to another precluded Ourika’s opportunity to integrate into white French society. Within Moretti’s framework for the female bildung, marriage signifies the female protagonist’s establishment into a productive and active community. According to this logic, it is because Charles disavows Ourika’s affections that she fails to assimilate. Moretti’s Eurocentric reading of the “failed bildung” appears to mark Ourika’s fate. As she matures in the novella, she grows to effectively reinforce the social normative value systems operating against her, and therefore fails to acquire a spouse. If we are to read Ourika within Moretti’s understanding of the female bildung as one who assimilates into her respective society through marriage, then Ourika would be seen a novella of failed development.

Moretti’s reading of the successful bildung can be broadened to include transatlantic female characters of color when considering novels like The Female

American and The Woman of Colour. Yet, his proscriptive delineations for the failed bildung are complicated when presented with a novella like Ourika. The heroine embodies all the qualities of a bildung figure commonly found in the contemporary white

141

characters of domestic fiction. If Ourika had been white it would be quite likely, like

Fanny Price, that she would have married her brother-like character of Charles. But the social conditions that determine Ourika’s spinsterhood are the consequences of the slave trade and the structural racism embedded in French social philosophy and thought. Over again, the novella stresses the oppressive biopolitics of race configured in Ourika’s desire and struggle to assimilate. Though a “failed” bildung, this interrogates the assumed social realities of the bildung figure.

This critique continues to be evident when considering that Ourika’s self- perception is that of one who is inherently “lacking.” Within the classical framework of the Bildungsroman, the heroine undergoes an introspective examination to conclude if she is worthy of companionate marriage; her sense of value and worth overrides any failures or insufficiencies, making her integration through marriage possible. The constructed ideological complexity of “lack” as racially contingent marks a key separation between Ourika and her literary peers. A useful counterpoint can be found in the 1820 novel Zelica the Creole, where the mixed-race Zelica denies the prejudiced social belief that she is “lacking” because she is not purely white, and considers herself fully capable of marrying her white French love interest Lastour.268 Zelica, the daughter of a plantation owner and his mistress, educated in France and returned to Haiti during the height of racial warfare, is another figure who loves a white European but consistently navigates the rocky waters of her mixed racial background. By the novel’s

268. Leonora Sansay, Zelica the Creole; A Novel, By an American in Three Volumes, (London: William Fearman, 1820).

142

end, with the Haitian victory over the French invasion, Zelica is united with her French love interest, and the novel ends with the couple’s immigration to North America.

Throughout Ourika, however, the novella constructs the heroine as reaffirming her lack again and again, whether it be mediated through additional clothing, or the self-induced episodes of depression.269 Both works actively critique the imposing social forces of raced-based hierarchies and anxieties over miscegenation. Zelica, who is able to “pass” but is still connected to her black ancestry, directly confronts miscegenation laws.

Ourika’s critique is more nuanced; it emphasizes the internalized torment of the individual woman when ignorant laws enforce race-based oppression.

The process of social oppression leading to psychic depression runs its course as

Ourika comes of age in isolation. During an episode of internalized self-denigration,

Ourika is visited by the marquise, who dryly contends that “all your misery, all your suffering comes from just one thing: an insane and doomed passion for Charles. And if you weren’t madly in love with him, you could come perfectly well to terms with being black.”270 Functioning within her own subject-position of a white aristocratic French women, the marquise does not consider the fetters of racial difference that plague Ourika.

In effect, the marquise denies existing structural racism, and instead focuses on Ourika’s seemingly too delicate emotional state. She lays the blame of Ourika’s condition squarely at the young heroine’s feet, offering the suggestion that if Ourika would simply “come to

269. Additional examples of internalized racial self-loathing occur in pages 12-13, 15,17, 27, 36, and 39.

270. Duras, 42.

143

terms” with her unrequited love, then she would come to terms with her racial identity, implicitly suggesting that Ourika would comply with her destined social isolation.

Ignorant of Ourika’s true dilemma of structural racism, the marquise reiterates a major trope about French social integration: those who do not fit within the mold of a normative

French identity are not meant to marry and reproduce.

After her meeting with the marquise, Ourika’s depression gains no recovery, and she makes the decision to join a nunnery, believing she will find God as a companion.271

When Ourika enters the convent, she reorients her outlook on the purpose of her existence, conceiving that she was never meant to be socially integrated, but rather meant to remain within the enclosed but welcoming walls of the Catholic religious order. She is

“rescued from savagery and ignorance” by joining the sisters, but she is also outcast to a perceivably liminal space that she inevitably does not want to be in.272 Additionally, removing herself to the site of the exclusionary female-only nunnery cements Ourika’s resignation that she will be able to find a spouse who will replace her love for Charles and consequently guarantee her inclusion in the French metropolitan community. The novella ends with Ourika’s gentle death, close to her attending physician who is then able to record her story for posterity.273

271. Ibid., 46.

272. Ibid. Note that the language here shifts back to that of “rescue.”

273. Though scientific racism is not included in this reading, it is important to note that Ourika’s narrative is being recorded by a member of the scientific community, a community that appears to determine the lives and deaths of black subjects. Initially shocked that he was to record the story of a “negress,” the medical doctor may represent

144

The novella points to, but then quickly forecloses, the possibility of Ourika becoming a creole republican of the New World as the work attends to her meditations upon the Haitian Revolution. Informed by the works of Goudie and Anderson, the creole republican is represented as one who reconceptualizes European values of republicanism for the circumatlantic world, incorporating the histories of slavery and colonialism into the fluid and evolving formation of the early American nation-state.274 For Ourika, Haiti briefly symbolized the possibility of social integration amongst the African slaves in the

French West Indies as well as an alternative to her seemingly failed integration in France.

In other words, the Caribbean offered her the abstract opportunity for her to integrate into a new kind of “imagined community” as it did for Unca Eliza and Olivia. Her conflicting opinions about the Haitian Revolution and its ties to New World republican systems of equality are reflected throughout the text. Ourika pivots radically between wanting racial equality in the Atlantic, to outright dismissing Haitians as a collective group of degenerates:

About this time talk started of emancipating the Negroes. Of course this question passionately interests me. I still cherished the illusion that at least somewhere else in the world there were others like myself. I knew they were not happy and I supposed them noble-hearted. I was eager to know what would happen to them.

the systemic categorization of racial difference employed by the scientific community. Though he attempts to save her at the end of the narrative, she died with the “last of the autumn leaves” (Duras 47). The transition from shock to loss may imply the narrative desire for change within the sciences to eliminate its justification of racial difference.

274. Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic, (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2006); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (New York: Verso, 2006).

145

But, alas, I soon learned my lesson. The Santo Domingo massacres gave me cause for fresh and heartrending sadness. Till then I had regretted belonging to a race of outcasts. Now I had the shame of belonging to a race of barbarous murderers.275

The contradictory position Ourika takes here is of both desiring to identify with the former slaves of San Domingue, while also attempting to divorce her association through race-based shame. She also displays relative ignorance about the conditions of the

Haitian slave population, and appropriates the rhetoric of slavery proponents, arriving at a monolithic conclusion about those of her race (barbarous murderers).276 Neither does she consider the positive role that she could have played about correcting French cultural assumptions about African barbarity. Ourika embodied everything that contradicted enlightenment constructions of the black subject (she was intelligent, emotionally complex, dutiful etc.), but because she was too circumscribed in her desire to become integrated within French society (as indicated by her gendered desire for the nuclear family), the potential for her to act as an agent on behalf of her “fellow Africans” is rendered ineffectual. In short, Ourika demonstrates both internalized and socially constructed “lack,” both within the white patriarchal and colonial systems of race and gender. In doing so, she also projects that same lack onto the newly independent Haitians across the Atlantic.

275. Duras, 21.

276. For more historical information on the history of the Haitian Revolution, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World and Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

146

Her refusal here also then denies her participation as a creole republican of the

New World. Had she stayed aboard the slaver and survived the journey, she would have been integrated within a different kind of community, one that recognized the injustices imposed against its race and actively fought against those injustices. Though it is most likely that she would have died as an infant crossing over the Middle Passage, it is possible that Ourika could have survived. Had the circumstances of her life brought her to the West Indies, her views towards the black enslaved population would be radically different, her entire world order utterly dismantled and rebuilt to the perspective of a New

World creole. When she gestures toward the fact that there were people “like herself,” across the Atlantic, she refers to the diasporic collective of Haitians that recognized the injustices of racial difference. Yet, her use of the word “illusion” shuts down the possibility of her community integration. “Illusion” registers the fact that she recognizes her class-based and cultural differences from her Atlantic brethren; her life’s circumstances brought her to an aristocratic family in France, not Haiti. As Ourika recognizes her sense of lack within French metropolitan society, she also finds it impossible to entertain a revolutionary association with her saltwater brothers and sisters.

At the end of novella, our complex and emotionally suffering heroine dies in the nunnery. Her death is the consequence of an emblematic matrix of the racial and non- racial contingencies that are riddled throughout the novella. Conceivably, there is either an optimistic or pessimistic way to read Ourika’s death. Optimistically, her death could be read as a literary addition along a continuum of tragic heroines in fiction who have died because of their ability to integrate into reputable society. These characters’ deaths point to the great social injustices that are oppressively placed on the woman’s body. To

147

include Ourika along with the figures of Clarissa Harlowe and Tess D’uberville, and historically with Duras herself (who would see herself as a tragic heroine), the narrative supports the consensus of many literary scholars: that the text argues that women of all colors are thrust into patriarchal conditions that thwart their social and physical survival.

The novella’s doctor at the end of the Ourika, recording and memorializing the heroine’s plight is a testament to this idea—her narrative is similar to that of many women and is worthy of being recorded. However, Ourika does die unmarried and isolated, despite her education, wealth, and gentility. A white character with the same intellectual complexity, moral compunction, and financial security would not have met the same end. The pessimistic reading of her death registers Ourika as an Afro-French colonial subject undergoing the same processes as one enslaved: she is, in the words of Patterson,

“alienated from all claims of birth; she ceases to belong in her own right to any legitimate social order.”277 Even though she is not classified as a slave, Ourika is still enslaved to a social system that would alienate her from normative assimilation because of the race- based social prejudices that exist in both metropolitan France and its colonies.

Ourika complicatedly both embodies and denies the racialized stereotypes that have been assigned to her. She is a well-educated, aristocratic woman who defies race- based assumptions and embraces a naturalized French female subjectivity. And yet, it appears that the color of Ourika’s skin is the sole barrier between herself and her ultimate desire: marriage to a white man of at least bourgeoisie rank. Duras illuminates a great social injustice for her salon readers, but only at a point of disjuncture when considering

277. Patterson, 5.

148

Ourika’s limited optics for social integration. While I remain uncertain as how exactly to navigate the issue of race in this work, I am convinced that Ourika grants its reader a fascinating and multidimensional subject of long-eighteenth century domestic fiction.

This reading of Ourika complicates some foundational assumptions posited by

Moretti. In his assessment of “the way of the world,” Moretti demonstrates his own

Eurocentric biases concentrated on a white, male bourgeois ideology, a critique that he himself had against Habermas. As mentioned earlier, Moretti writes that the hero of the classical Bildungsroman illuminates the “organic principles” such as social justice and morality for the bourgeois reader, forming a social cohesion between “critical individual autonomy” and the larger social arena.278 Yet in the case of Ourika, in which the absurdity of the social values are not reconciled because they are blatantly wrong, the

“organic” normative principles of French racism could never be reconciled with Ourika’s individual self. Ourika, which exposes the marginalized individual’s inability to assimilate through internalized desire and lack, makes it possible to include a more multidimensional subject into the construction of the Bildungsroman of the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

During the long eighteenth century, there is a definitive exploration of the novel as a form, resulting in experimental subjects and situations. The Female American and

The Woman of Colour, as exemplifications of this literary and social experimentation,

278. Moretti, 65.

149

expand the boundaries of what can be considered a Bildungsroman. The making of the genre was not simply an insulated European endeavor, but was directly influenced by

English imperial transatlantic contact. In the discussion of Ourika, it becomes clear that

Moretti’s model for the bildung heroine is inherently flawed when considering that a heroine’s inability to assimilate through marriage is prohibited by the color of her skin.

In all three of the above works, the Bildungsroman considers both the raced and gendered components to the “beautiful balance between the meaning which will be lost in the prose of the world, and the meaning which will be found.”279 Each heroine combats social pressures that are constituted within her very ontology. And while working within the system in order to illustrate its flaws, each protagonist illuminates the oppressive forces and naturalized structures of racism both at home and abroad. Furthermore, in the close readings of Ourika, Olivia, and Unca Eliza, I argue that Moretti’s approach to the distant reading of the Bildungsroman forecloses the inclusion of many earlier transatlantic novels, including the ones here. The heroines of these three publications, who fit within the conventions outlined by Moretti, push against the Eurocentricity of his understanding of “community,” and who may represent the rising “symbol of modernity.” Among other things in this chapter, I attend to the idea that the Bildungsroman was a genre that was born in an era of New World transatlanticism and informed by the social history that surrounds it. By close reading these works, I methodologically claim that the generic range of the Bildungsroman is both temporally and spatially greater than Moretti asserts.

279. Moretti, vi-vii.

150

In spite of these dynamic social and literary constructions of a woman of color in the eighteenth century, her strength and interiority would fade by the middle of the nineteenth. Felicity Nussbaum has shown that eighteenth-century issues of race and gender were in a state of cultural flux, and multiple, even contradictory figures were created to grapple with the concept of “gendered virtue.”280 The flexible range for women of color’s literary and social representation, as Dillon notes, forms into a concreted trope of the social imaginary by the middle of the nineteenth century.281 By this point, she is signaled as a bestial other in England and France; this configuration would continue in both the novel and the theater well into the late nineteenth century, with images of Sara

Baartman and William Thackary’s character of Miss Schwartz circulating in Victorian

London. With Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the woman of color is nearly entirely erased, her affiliated white-creole counterpart hidden away mad in shadowed corners of a large estate. The alabaster-like “angel of the house” had taken her place as the model of morality.

280. Nussbaum, 157.

281. Dillon, in her New World Drama, strongly contends that the representation of certain “types” of subjects is mutually influenced by the politics of a time. She writes that “representation must be rethought in far broader and more complex terms that it often is within contemporary understandings of the political” (7). For Dillon, the shift of representation of the woman of color from political fluidity to stark social repulsion, deals with her increasing presence in the metropole. “Uneven structures of intimate distance thus required creating a sense of presence in the face of physical absence, and generating a sense of absence or erasure in the face of physical presence. This configuration is fundamentally structured by the colonial relation---namely, an ideology according to which race and geography subtend understandings of humanness, cultural intelligibility, and political belonging” (16).

151

Yet, in the early stages of the representation of women of color, the idea that these women could be the new role model of imperial femininity did exist, as these works have demonstrated. Using the mode of the bildung figure, Unca Eliza and Olivia resist the impositions of European centricity, unearthing and interrogating these impositions with moral fortitude and education-- this generic mode of prose fiction providing a platform to pressure white male sovereignty and enlightenment masculinity both at home and abroad. Ourika, as an example of the “failed” bildung, illustrates that within the

French Atlantic, there are social systems of racial prejudice that shape a subject’s conditioning and force their exclusion from the metropolitan imagined community.

These novels not only a critique the existing social conditions, but are emblematic of the quotidian struggles of a period. The novel is a form that organizes and refines

“this…existence, making it ever more alive and interesting.”282 As experimental subjects in the rise of the novel, Unca Eliza, Olivia, and Ourika pointed to a new center, a new morality, and a new world as a means to combat the horrid injustices and the capital- driven ideologies of the old. The political importance of representation within the long eighteenth century will continue in the following chapter, with, however, a dramatic shift to perhaps the most politically important representative subject of the long-eighteenth century—the enslaved subject.

282. Moretti, 35. 152

Chapter 3: Listening to Silence in the Autobiographical Slave Narrative

For I have seen them, ere the dawn of day, Rouz’d by the lash, begin their cheerless way; Greeting with groans unwelcome morn’s return, While rage and shame their gloomy bosoms burn… --Thomas Day and John Bicknell, “The Dying Negro”

Thomas Day and John Bicknell’s 1774 poem, which represents the sentimental despair of an African slave before his suicide, was one of the earliest direct attacks on the slave trade not explicitly founded on religious grounds. The complex depiction of the enslaved subject, including his unsanctioned love for a young English woman, and the visceral depictions of fellow slaves rising each morning “by the lash” was one of the earliest works that introduced the urgency of slave-trade abolition to the English public consciousness. Scholars of the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade, including

Wylie Sypher and Brycchan Carey, go so far as to say that it was the first abolitionist

“manifesto.”283 The literary affect it registers for the reader, as the narrator utters his final words on love and freedom lost to the horrors of slavery, had a major impact on the reading public. The poem, finalized in its third edition, circulated well into the mid- nineteenth century. A contemporary critic from The Monthly Review hailed the authors’ artistic merit, noting that “The fiery passion, and desperate resolution, which so strongly

283. Bryccan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 75.

153

mark the negro’s general character, are well expressed in this epistle; the spirit and the numbers of which equally manifest the philanthropy, and the poetical abilities, of the writer.”284 Indeed, the poem captures a number of discursive abolitionist motifs, including the humanity of the African subject, and the “rage” and “shame” that manifests in the slave’s demoralized station. “The Dying Negro’s” literary success catalyzed future political poetry from social and religious activists, including Hannah More’s important

“Slavery, A Poem,” published in 1788.285 In her poem, she asks the reader to eschew the plantocratic proposition that African slaves are without feeling, since “nothing is more frequent than this cruel and stupid argument, that they do not feel the miseries inflicted on them as Europeans would do.”286 What More notes in the abstract, and what Day and

Bicknell write in the particular, is that Africans are sentimental and feeling subjects, equally capable of experiencing every fragment of the wide range of human emotion.

They fervently declared that enslaving, torturing, branding, and commodifying a fellow human is an abomination to the English nation, and a hypocrisy to the Enlightenment philosophy of positive liberty. In both works, the subjecthood of enslaved peoples is

284. The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal from June 1773 to January 1774, vol. 49 (London: T. Becket and Co., 1774), 63.

285. Hannah More, “Slavery, a poem,” (London: T Cadwell, 1788). Accessed via ECCO TCP http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004901991.0001.000/1:4?rgn=div1;view =fulltext

286. Qtd in Carey, 85.

154

central to the construction of their interiority and the rhetorical appeal of the poems’ sentimentalism.

Both in poetry, and more prolifically in prose, social and religious critics of the transatlantic slave trade united under the common goal of abolishing the nearly two- hundred-year-old enterprise. The poetry of Day and More was supported by powerful political figures, including Members of Parliament like William Wilberforce and early founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Thomas

Clarkson.287 In his 1786 “Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African…,” Clarkson writes detailed descriptions of the daily life of the enslaved African in the New World, summarizing his accounts with an affective appeal to his reader. Much like Day and Bicknell, Clarkson envisions the quotidian degradations impressed upon New World slaves and writes from the perspective of an eye witness. He provides the reader with men and women of abject suffering, weary from their labor and seeking a swift death. For the duration of the Abolition and Emancipation movements in

England and the West Indian colonies, abolitionists fastened onto the humanity of

African subjects as well as the emotional and physical suffering they endured. Many early abolitionist writers did so by inhabiting an imagined construct of enslaved subjects

287. Clarkson was one of three Anglicans who founded the group, which was spearheaded by Quakers. Clarkson was joined by fellow Anglican and lawyer Granville Sharp and both men spent their political lives fighting slavery. For more information about the role of Protestant dissenter groups and their early connections to slave trade abolition, see Helen Thomas’ Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

155

and representing their experiences to an audience, drawing a rhetorical proximity between the metropolitan reader and the New World slave.288

Proponents of slavery, on the other hand, recognized the abolitionist inhabitation or ventriloquism of the enslaved subject as a device within a larger rhetorical toolkit.

Gilbert Francklyn, lawyer and West Indian planter in favor of the slave trade, condemned

Clarkson’s essay as fallacious.289 He writes that Clarkson’s “embellishment of African battles” and the “trappings of terror and woe, assist to melt the soul into the soft feelings of sensibility, we applaud the poet; we yield, with a willing complacency, to the delusion, and dissolve into tears, which we feel a delicious luxury in shedding.”290 Coinciding with the “delusion” of “soft feelings,” Francklyn further claims that Clarkson’s affective inhabitation is nothing more than a farce, a fabricated testimony to persuade the public into uneasy action. Responding directly to Clarkson, Francklyn writes:

Horrid picture of West India tyranny and brutality!... Are these accounts confirmed by all the books Mr. Clarkson ever perused upon slavery? I challenge

288. Ventriloquizing the experience of the enslaved subject has an early rhetorical tradition. Thomas Tryon, an early ameliorationist wrote in his 1684 Friendly Advice to Gentleman Planters (noted in the second chapter), employed the use of dialogue to support his argument. The section titled “Ethiopian or Negro-Slave and a Christian that was his Master” is the first account of a metropolitan inhabiting the voice of an oppressed slave as a means to speak of the injustices acted upon this demographic of people.

289. Gilbert Francklyn, An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African; in a series of Letter, from a Gentleman in Jamaica, to his Friend in London: wherein Many of the Mistakes and Misrepresentations of Mr. Clarkson are pointed out […] (London: Logographic Press, 1789), 2. Accessed via Bodleian Libraries

290. Ibid., 23.

156

Mr. Clarkson to produce a single man of decent character who ever gave such an account. I do not mean a gentleman---I do not mean even a white man: I defy him to produce a Negro of character who would not turn pale in fabricating such assertions”291

What would become a recurring accusation in the anti-abolitionist pamphlets and papers against the abolitionist cause is what literary scholar Lynn Festa refers to as “affective piracy.”292 Francklyn signals for his reader that the efforts of More, Day and Bicknell, and Clarkson are undermined when considered within an imperial context. The language, rhetoric, and figures of expression found in these works were European, not African; they were constructed through an assumption of racial paternalism and a Eurocentric understanding of forced slavery as an institution. Most importantly, they were written by

Europeans who draw upon recurring themes and reports of the slave trade, but were unable to produce first- or even second-hand accounts from the voice of an enslaved subject. In effect, though ventriloquism of the imagined African slave was designed to shed light on the cruelties and shame of the triangle trade, the appropriation of the

African subject became a target for anti-abolitionists during the Abolition Movement. To answer Francklyn’s demand to “produce a Negro of character” that would speak out against the slave trade, abolitionist societies sought out authentic and first-hand accounts of those who were condemned to suffer within the transatlantic slave system.

291. Ibid., 191-192, his emphasis. Though Clarkson did not provide any first-hand accounts from enslaved Africans, he did interview “over two thousand seamen and examined numerous shipholds and naval records, [and] presented his evidence to the Privy Council on 27 July 1788, thereby endeavouring to persuade the government to establish other forms of commerce in Africa.” (Thompson, Romanticism and Slave Narratives), 35.

292. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 2-3. 157

This chapter will examine three slave narratives that respond to this apologist call for first-hand “accounts” of the slave trade and slavery. These texts were, at the time, rendered as emotionally powerful for public readership and are now foundational works for present-day scholars of the slave trade. My approach to these texts is methodologically founded on the debate surrounding the authenticity of the slave voice, a frequent point of contention during the Abolitionist movement that has carried into current scholarship in empire and postcolonial studies. I will approach this examination, however, by closely reading slave trauma mediated through narrative moments of

“silence.” While the voice of the enslaved grew to have its own rhetorical and literary impact from contemporary writings of the Abolitionist Movement into the present day, there have been no literary analyses about the affective weight of recording moments of silence or ineffability within transatlantic autobiographical slave narratives.293 In providing a new reading of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Mary Prince’s

History, and Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía, I hope to generate two key interventions.294 The first is that the incorporation of moments of traumatic ineffability in slave narratives produces an affective bridge between the narrator and the reader, and,

293. In this chapter, I will be using “slave narrative” to refer to the autobiographical slave narrative, the account either written or dictated by the former slave first hand. There are literary slave narratives, which are equally powerful, but are works of fiction.

294. The following editions will be used for this chapter: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself. Ed. Vincent Caretta (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003); Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Narrated by Herself. Ed. Sara Salih (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004); Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiografía de un escalvo: A Bilingual Edition. Trans. Ivan A. Shulman and Eveylyn Picon Garfield (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). 158

more importantly, a bridge between the reader and the perpetually silent enslaved collective across the Atlantic. In their respective narratives, Equiano, Prince, and

Manzano serve as a conduit between metropolitan mass readership and the Atlantic mass of the subjugated and enslaved. Moments of silence in the three works generate great affective power while also facilitating the representation of those incapable of voicing their own grievances and injustices against the slave trade.

The chapter’s second intervention attends to the important invention of a genre: the slave narrative. Though the slave narrative is a prose-form distinct from the novel, it incorporates elements of rhetorical sensibility, rendered by the consequent emotions of a traumatic experience. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith writes that with affective narratives of “sorrowful” experience,

we place ourselves in his [the narrator’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.295

Smith’s pointed discussion on sympathizing with the narrator’s experience is demonstrated in Day’s and Bicknell’s inhabitation of the enslaved subject. Yet, the sense of immediate sympathy between reader and narrator is once removed with the writer’s creation of a fictional narrator and experience, which then signals inauthenticity of these

“enduring torments.” The “weaker in degree” mentioned by Smith becomes further

295. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: printed for A. Millar, 1759), 4-5. Accessed via biblio.org. 159

reduced with the European appropriation of the enslaved experience. The slave narrative, as a genre of biographical experience, is an important contribution to prose narrative as it more directly mediates the value of the factual life with the emotional power of literary tropes and political persuasion.

These two interventions into the narratives of Equiano, Prince, and Manzano are intricately linked to the larger argument of this project about genre and the historical

Caribbean. As will be discussed in much further detail, the genre of the slave narrative is arguably the foundation for the rich canon of African American literature that follows. In my reading of these works, and to a larger extent in the formulation of the early African

American canon itself, there is a critical tension between personal experience and public rhetoric. The narrative voices that collectively sound against the travesties of the trade are influenced by other authors, translators, transcribers, political agendas, economic motives, and propaganda. The slave narrative, then, becomes a very publicly wielded genre. Yet, the voices within these texts also detail the painful memories of an individual’s story of emerging out of abject deprivation and objectification: these stories recount the trauma of the trade itself. Reflecting the politics of the era and the social conditions for the enslaved in the West Indies, the genre evolved to encapsulate the struggle between personal trauma and public performance. Without the history of the trade and slavery in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean, it is possible this genre would not exist.

Though the slave narrative is the only generic mode that will be discussed in this chapter, there are other forms in which the horrors of the slave trade were publically disseminated. Treatises like Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments of the Slave

Trade (1787) and Robert Wedderburn’s The Horrors of Slavery (1817) both reflect the

160

virulent animosity toward the institution of slavery. However, these treatises, while informed by the individual experiences of their authors, predominantly focus on the ideological claims that can be made against slavery. Cugoano’s and Wedderburn’s works serve an overt abolitionist political agenda, and subsume their personal experiences within them. Since their narratives are predominantly and appropriately invective, with their first-hand testimony provided as evidence for their condemnation, their works would not fall into the generic category of “slave narrative.”296 Rather, they are political essays that infuse the ethos and pathos of personal testimony, along with other supporting arguments, to draw their conclusions about the incongruence of slavery with the nationally-held values of Christianity and natural right. Literary texts of the slave experience, like Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) and Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), constitute an additional important genre within antislavery writing; yet, like the poetry of More and Day, they are also subject to

“affective piracy.” Gómez de Avellaneda was herself the daughter of an aristocratic father and a wealthy creole mother from a socially prominent family.297 Stowe, the daughter and wife of staunch abolitionists, had a pre-existing support network in which

296. In his Signifying Money: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes of Cuguano’s Thoughts and Sentiments that while Cuguano’s narrative is “characterized by both polemics and autobiography…Cuguano leans heavily toward the side of the polemic” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 147.

297. Nina Scott, “Introduction,” Sab and Autobiography by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), xi.

161

her concerns and values regarding both slavery and marriage could be shared with a larger audience.298 As the historical longevity of Cugoano, Wedderburn, Avellaneda, and

Stowe have shown, antislavery treatises and fictional slave narratives are important contributions to the larger historic movements against the transatlantic slave trade. Yet, as a unique genre that considers the important literary link of the sympathetic readerly experience to a factual account, the slave narrative functions within a separate but dynamic prose category.

It will be important to situate what is meant by the “voice” of the slave within a theoretical context, given that the ideological and cultural politics of that voice have been important subjects among literary scholars and historians. One of the first critics to speak of the value of the late-eighteenth-century slave voice is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his now canonical Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. In his chapter, “Trope of the Talking Book,” Gates argues that the slave narrative, as a prose form connecting African subjects to European structures of reading and writing, is “the beginning of the African-American literary tradition.”299 For Gates, two forms of literacy were necessary for slaves to be able to write themselves into human subjectivity.

“Literacy” meant both in terms of reading and writing to signify meaning and in terms of

“cultural literacy,” or being able to perform or function with an awareness of

298. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 235-243.

299. Ibid., 127.

162

Enlightenment taxonomies of racial difference. “Black people,” he writes, “had to represent themselves as ‘speaking subjects’ before they could even begin to destroy their status as objects, as commodities, within Western culture.”300 Oral traditions of narration, biography, and self were reconstituted and inscribed within familiar western generic conventions designed for a western audience. The slave narrative, by extension, becomes a “double-voiced” discourse for Gates, a hybridized construction of pre-existing prose forms, generated by a black subject, who both speaks and writes himself “into being through artfully crafted representations in language of the black self.”301 The “trope of the talking book” is the rhetorical signifier of the former slave acknowledging his transition from object-to-subject in the slave narrative. At their start, slaves were not granted access to the orthographic and cultural literacies of the word (also connoting a biblical sense of

“the Word”), and remained just as much as an object as the book that is attentively being listened to without being understood. It is through the act of reading and writing, of voicing oneself through recognized European forms of selfhood, that the subject can speak and be heard.

Since Gates’ compelling claim about the importance of voice for the Afro-

European subject, other literary scholars have considered whether the voice of one could then represent the voice of the collective. This topic is still under debate, as it taps into

300. Ibid., 129. As “property,” and therefore objects, African slaves were “silenced” within the European-Atlantic socio-economic system.

301. Ibid., 131.

163

several theoretical frameworks for understanding the un-voiced slave. Gayatri Spivak would claim that the enslaved subject is a subaltern subject, and therefore could never in its condition be able to speak.302 Orlando Patterson equally identifies the same condition of the slave as a social death.303 Within these theoretical frames, each scholar acknowledges that without public voice or agency, commodified slave subjects are always already constituted by their conditions of non-agency and silence. Once a former slave is granted a “free” status, he or she is no longer among the collective body of the slaves, and consequently could not fully represent the subaltern or socially-dead slave collective.304 Most recently, Lisa Lowe in her The Intimacies of Four Continents, succinctly sums up the dilemma of the ex-slave representing the enslaved collective:

302. In her widely-read essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak moves beyond hegemonic subject-positions of literary and social authority “to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the trials, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat:” the subaltern (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 78.

303. Patterson defines slavery as: “one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and the total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave.” His definition correlates to that of the Hegelian theoretical dialectic of the master and the slave, in which the condition of the master exists because of his position of total and complete power over a slave. The slave is by necessity socially dead, thus reinforcing the power asymmetry with his master. The parameters of Patterson’s discussion of slavery throughout the work are: “slavery is a permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored people” (13).

304. In her attempts to give voice to the unvoiced subaltern subject, however, Spivak concludes her essay by writing that though “the subaltern cannot speak,” it is up to the intellectual, once removed from its subaltern status, to speak on behalf of the

164

As the autobiographical subject writes his life, and comes to possess the meaning of slavery as his own ‘past,’ the genre does the work of subjugating the history of the collective enslaved within a regulative temporality in which slavery is only legible as a distant origin out of which the free modern subject can emerge. As such, autobiography, a genre of liberal political narrative that affirms individual right, may precisely contribute to the ‘forgetting’ of the collective subject of colonial slavery, a heteronomous subaltern collectivity necessary to colonial slavery and its abolition…. The exemplary tale of individual freedom had the power to defer the larger scale transformation of slavery as a collective condition in the empire.305

For Lowe, the autobiography, as a narrative genre that reinforces western notions of liberalism and individual experience in effect “forgets” the enslaved collective and defers the enslaved subjects’ freedom. At the same time, the genre also reinforces a “colonial division of humanity” by privileging western narrative values as inherently “white” values to which former slaves must acculturate.

Dwight McBride, in his Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave

Testimony, considers another issue with the theoretical framework of “voice” within the slave narrative genre. He argues that the disjunction between the experience of a singular subject and the representation of the slave collective is impossible.306 From his rhetorical analysis of the slave narrative, the “abolitionist discursive terrain” generates an overdetermined narrative formula for how slave testimonies could be read or understood

“silenced center.” (104). It is the only compromise that can be made in her theoretical impasse.

305. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 50.

306. Dwight McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

165

by metropolitan readers. He argues that “slave witnesses had to understand clearly the terms of the discursive terrain to which they addressed themselves. Once they did, they had to determine how best to mold, bend, and shape their narrative testimony within those [pre-determined and Eurocentric] terms to achieve their political aims.”307 For

McBride, while the slave consciously wrote of him or her self within a larger collective, the way their stories were told to metropolitan readers illuminated the European construction of the slave narrative. While Gates locates the black voice as originating with the black subject writing of his own experience to include tropes that would be passed on through a tradition of African-American literature, McBride argues that the black voices in slave narratives are consciously “mapped” onto the “discursive terrain of

[white] abolitionism…in order to bear witness and to tell the ‘truth’ about slavery.”308

What is at stake in the dialogue between McBride and Gates is nothing short of the rhetorical agency of the slave within his or her own story.

William Andrews, in his To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-

American Autobiography, 1760-1865, suggests a compromise can be made between the conflicting views of African-American agency and “voice” within the slave narrative genre. Andrews contends that the first fifty years of the Afro-American autobiography

(1760-1810) were indeed subject to a predetermined calculation by white abolitionist groups. Within these narratives, editors consciously drew connections between the slave

307. Ibid, 6-7.

308. Ibid, 8.

166

journey and that of existing discourses of “trials and calamities,” most often variations of works like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.309 However, similar to Gates’ assertion about the black discursive incorporation of tropes like “the talking book,” Andrews also argues that the early narratives, while functioning within a pre-formulated narrative arc of

“captivity and conversion,” were not fully subject to a Eurocentric framework for understanding their experience. He also concludes that while former slaves acculturated to European attitudes and epistemologies, the acculturation did not “efface from the narrator’s mind those special semantic fields in Afro-American culture that allowed certain words and concepts—Africa, black freedom, human, and evil, for instance—‘to reflect a specifically black segmentation and classification of experience.’”310 Much like

Gates, Andrews claims that even within the earliest slave narratives, the pre-fabricated terrain of abolitionist ideology hybridized with the authentic experience of the slave narrative to generate a new and important genre within literary history.

Within the scholarship of eighteenth-century transatlantic slavery, silence has been consistently acknowledged as simply the absence of this voice. Andrews notes that

“there are so many silences in these narratives, so little individualized expression or ethnic perspective divergent from the structures of discourse that the Judeo-Christian

309. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro- American Autobiography, 1760-1810 (Chicago: University of Illinois, Press, 1986), 36.

310. Ibid, 38-39. In this sentence, he is quoting Houston A. Baker Jr in his work The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 19-21.

167

literary and cultural tradition valorized.” 311 The result for Andrews is that the silences in the first fifty years of slave narratives “make invisible” the blackness of the enslaved subjects. In other words, the silences cloak moments of cultural difference, making the narrative more palatable for metropolitan readers.312 It is within the palatability of the narrative that the reader gradually becomes sympathetic to the narrator’s plight.

While Andrews’ understanding of narrative silence is useful, I would like to offer an alternative reading as to how moments of silence in slave narratives could be read.

Furthermore, as the texts I examine may prove, integrative silence in slave narratives does not stop at the end of the fifty-year time frame offered by Andrews’ examination, but is, in fact, a common motif that carries through the entire history of abolition in the

West Indies, traversing both time, geography, and language. My reading of the ineffable, or moments of narrative silence, is informed by trauma theory. By using trauma theory to examine moments of ineffability within the slave narrative, my reading attempts to register slave silence as something more powerful than a cloak or diversion for a reader’s digestion. As autobiographical narratives declare an ex-slave’s subjectivity within a

311. Ibid, 36.

312. As an example, Andrews cites an excerpt from Granniosaw’s autobiography, in which Granniosaw “corrects” his mistress about religion. Old Ned, who had instructed Granniosaw about religion was consequently punished by the mistress. The moment of silence within the tale is the fact that Old Ned was punished for Granniosaw’s actions. “All we are given,” Andrews writes, “is an unprobed narrative fact: James [Granniosaw’s] words to his mistress signified the opposite of what Ned’s message to James conveyed. […] In Afro-American writing, subterfuge and diversion have traditionally played a deconstructive role vis-à-vis conventional literary modes and messages.” (38).

168

culturally-specific semiotic system, I argue that moments of ineffability serve two distinct purposes. The first is that these moments of silence resist European structures of the written word, deliberately intervening on western articulations of selfhood and generating a space in which the authentic slave self can be rendered. Within the framework of this claim, deliberately including moments of silence could be an additional trope within the slave narrative genre, a moment in which the individual Afro-European subject can mark an ambivalence toward the oral/aural over the written word.313

The second claim that I am making is more abstract, attending to the theoretical debate as to whether a formerly enslaved subject can represent the silent enslaved collective. Many, if not all slave narratives, condemn either the slave trade or slavery as an institution. The narrators intentionally draw connections between themselves and the silent, still-enslaved collective. Feasibly, acknowledged moments of silence are an additional strategy for drawing a direct connection between the memories of an individual slave experience and the collective experience of the enslaved. Silence is a powerful rhetorical tool that unites those who can and cannot speak themselves into subjectivity. In reflective moments of silence, the former slave serves as a narrative conduit between the collective metropolitan readership and the collective slave

313. This portion of my argument is heavily informed by Helen Thomas’ Romanticism and Slave Narratives, wherein she writes: “The slaves autobiographical publications provided important declaration of cultural identity amidst the traumatic experience […] in spite of the prohibitions which forbade them to learn to read and write. As these autobiographical narratives manifested the first literary expressions of an unprecedented cultural upheaval and revised hierarchies of power, a predominant objective was their endeavor to redress pervasive ideologies which had classified blacks as either non-human of as objects unworthy of subject status” (162).

169

experience. While this argument does not fully address the social death of the subaltern slave, it does provide a new avenue in which the representation of the collective can be studied—through silence. These two claims (generic and authentic representation) can serve as individual or collaborative readings of the inclusion of slave silence within the genre.

Within trauma studies, ineffability is a critical theoretical term. It has been defined as a subject’s inability to articulate a traumatic moment archived in his or her memory. Many theorists in the field argue that the indescribable experience is in fact inaccessible to the subject, embedded so deeply within the memory’s repository that a subject is unable to psychically recover a trauma. Cathy Caruth, in her seminal

Unclaimed Experience, uses a psychoanalytic approach to the idea that an individual is so overwhelmed by a traumatic experience that the ability to recount the trauma through literature is impossible.314 She writes, “trauma is not locatable in the simple, violent, or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”315 Caruth also succinctly points out that, “[t]o be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. And thus the traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the repression of what once was

314. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

315. Ibid, 4.

170

wished.”316 Literature, she claims later, can allow a reader access to the hauntings by which a narrator is traumatized, generating a cross-cultural bridge between peoples and inviting the creation of a community unified by a shared history of ineffable trauma.

Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn build upon and echo Caruth’s work by writing that a survivor of trauma has different “forms of ‘holding’ a traumatic experience,” one of which is that an experience can be narrated, but the sufferer is “stuck with images and affect with which he cannot cope.”317 The inability to cope with a traumatic memory leaves the sufferer unable to utter it, or give it a language that names the experience or its affective response. As a point of conclusion, Laub and Auerhahn argue that “massive trauma cannot be grasped because there are neither words nor categories of thought adequate to its representation…”318 They argue that there is no language available to the survivor, neither at the moment when the traumatic experience is occurring, nor during a moment of recollection. Only the harrowing absence is left for the sufferer, and the representation of the absence is distinguished as ineffable when composed in a written narrative.

316. Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4-5.

317. Dori Laub and Nanette Aurerhahn, “Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory.” International Journal of Psycho- Analysis, 74 (1993), 290.

318. Ibid, 302.

171

Within the context of the transatlantic slave trade, the ineffable is written as being unable to articulate, with language, the slave-narrators’ overwhelming psychological and emotional experiences; their accounts aligning with the argument that Laub and

Auerhahn posit in their work. There are, as Paul Gilroy notes, perpetual “moments of terror, moved beyond grammatical speech.”319 Within slave narratives, heightened moments of trauma are marked by their absence of description. In lieu of the description of the trauma, the narrator simple marks the moment as ineffable to the reader, so traumatic that it is “not to be described,” as Equiano writes.320 Representations of traumatic silence configure the narrators’ memories as accessible (they have access to these traumatic recollections). However, given the deficiency of language and the conditions under which these writers were writing, they can only render the moments as overwhelmingly silent within their published works. Additionally, these catalogued memories of silence, as they are recorded in these narratives, mark the narrators’ human subjectivity; the authors implicitly write themselves as capable of feeling the overwhelming power of a traumatic moment. Grappling with the framework provided for how trauma is both described by the narrator and read by a reader, I claim that these

319. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 71. Gilroy situates his claims within a different theoretical context, giving greater focus to contemporary movements in this work. Yet, in terms of his brief examination of the slave narrative, he writes: “It is important to note here that a new discourse economy emerges within the refusal to subordinate the particularity of the slave experience to the totalising power of universal reason held exclusively by white hands, pens, or publishing houses. Authority and autonomy emerge directly from the deliberately personal tone of this history….These tales helped to mark out a dissident space within the bourgeois public sphere which they aimed to suffuse with their utopian content” (69).

320. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 48. 172

integrative moments of silence bind reader and slave within a slave narrative. It is within silence that a slave’s trauma and sense of injustice can be understood. It is also within moments of slave silence that the authoritative voices of the white abolitionists of the

“discursive terrain” are not heard. The rhetorical power of silence is the narrator’s power alone.

Historically, a more outright political motivation for moments of ineffability is conjoined with the theoretical approaches mentioned above. Anti-abolitionist writers, thinkers, and pamphleteers have registered slave silence in one of two ways: as a marker of compliance and (at times) gratitude; or, conversely, as a sign of the slave’s uncanny barbarity and heathenish animality. Evidence of this comes from the excerpted pamphlets and essays that will be discussed in the following pages. Along with the nuanced formations of ex-slave agency in connecting his or her reader to the collective slave experience, integrative moments of silence serve a direct redress to pro-slavery logic about slave silence. The remaining pages in this chapter will discuss slave silence within the rhetorical, theoretical, and historical contexts mentioned above in further detail.

Section One continues the discussion of representative silence in anti-abolitionist social thoughts as they are published in the years leading up to abolition. Section Two discusses

Equiano’s and Prince’s narratives at length, and given that Manzano’s slave narrative was written in translation (which in turn carries an additional set of considerations), a discussion of his Autobiografía occupies the final section. In all three slave narratives, just as the power of voice was important to the abolitionist cause, moments of silence are just as critical to examine, especially given how silence was read and reiterated within a pro-slavery context.

173

Section One: Silence, Social Death, and Anti-Abolitionist Thought (1790-1807)

At the height of the slave trade debates, both sides attempted to speak for the values and feelings of the enslaved subject. Abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson sought to represent the slave experience with all its traumatic atrocities. Slavery apologists, however, consistently deflected and rebutted all claims posited by their more humanitarian counterparts. Slave silence, as echoed in Francklyn’s response to Clarkson was one entry point into the overall argument that apologists had about the enslaved.

Apologists read silence as a signature that slaves were either grateful for their social and legal condition of western enslavement, or that they were too barbaric and uncivilized to even be aware of their social status. These claims were circulated time again throughout the early nineteenth century. Jesse Foot, an English surgeon who had practiced on the island of Nevis in the 1760s, was a staunch supporter of the slave trade, and indicates as much in the second edition of his 1790 A Defence of the Planters in the West Indies.321 In this text, he poses a series of questions about the enslaved subject and then responds to these questions, justifying his own logic as he is foreclosing the voice of the African slave:

He is not exposed to be dragged away by a press gang, nor inveigled by a recruiting sergeant: it is a million to one but he falls, like a tree, on the same spot where he first grew into life, and that he dies in that hut which he himself erected. But what if he be turned over to another master---what if he be removed from one estate to another? ---Is there anything so formidable as that? ---If there be, how is it that peasants in England change their masters every quarter of a year? The good field negroe carries with him his own character: every body will know him

321. Jesse Foot, A Defence of the Planters in the West Indies; Comprised in Four Arguments (London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1792).

174

wherever he goes or whomever he serves under. Strokes of the cart whip raise the skin---fetters gall it: [of these he will have none], because he has not deserved them---he is known everywhere to be a good Negroe.322

For Foot, a “good Negroe” is recognized by his smooth back and his silent mouth. He strategically distorts the traumatic experience of slavery by comparing it to British naval impressment and displaced English laborers. He interrogates the value of living and dying in one’s home country and dismisses mass African displacement as a simple fact of life. Throughout the course of his Defence, Foot consistently compares actual and physical enslavement with metaphoric enslavement, comparing the life of a peasant or a soldier with that of the slave.323 Grossly inaccurate, as were the many other apologist accounts that obfuscated metaphoric slavery and the reality of the slave trade, this trope was an incredibly popular tool among slavery advocates.324 Rhetorically, it deflects the plight of the enslaved, and instead focuses on the nameless metropolitan victim “dragged away” through forced impressment and the peregrinating peasant with no stable income.

322. Ibid, 34-35.

323. Ibid, 28.

324. Additional examples can be derived from The Speech of Sir William Young, delivered in Parliament on the Subject of the Slave Trade, 1791; William Knox, Farther Reasons of a Country Gentleman for Opposing Mr. Wilberforce’s Motion, 1792; and most significantly in Alex Geddes, An Apology for Slavery; or, Six Cogent Arguments against the Immediate Abolition of the Slave-Trade, 1792. In it, he writes that slavery is a part of natural law. Man is always born a slave, "from under this petticoat-government he is removed to school, where a new tyrant awaits him.” Even as an adult, man is a slave to "idleness, dissipation, and vice. But, if a certain degree of Slavery be necessary portion of mankind, why should the Negroes, who are scarcely men, be exempted from the degree of Slavery that they can bear?... The Africans, whose black complexion, beast-like lineaments and mis-shapen members demonstrate them to be little more than incarnate Devils, are not naturally entitled to the same degree of freedom with ourselves"(21-23).

175

Though the domestic issues of an impoverished working class and the poor conditions surrounding naval impressment should not be dismissed, in this problematic passage Foot utilizes these to supplant systemic enslavement entirely. The final few sentences of the above passage are the most useful for my examination as they illuminate the plantocratic equation of silent laboring with good behavior.

The Duke of Clarence, writing on behalf of the interest of Liverpool, additionally equates the silent enslaved with good behavior:

Since the year 1792, and since the commencement of the French War, three events have raised in the British West India islands. The first, the Maroon War, in the island of Jamaica. A tribe of Coromantine Negroes (part of the Maroons) in amity with the British nation, unjustly made war upon the inhabitants of Jamaica…The second event was the Carib War. The third event was the insurrection of French slaves in Grenada, but they were not British. [In all three of the events,] the slaves belonging to the British never joined in the revolt, but remained quiet upon the plantations of their owners. I trust my lords, that these three material circumstances will bear me out in my assertion respecting the general good treatment of the British Planters to their slaves in the West Indies. I may also with truth affirm that the treatment of the Negro slaves in the British Islands is far superior to that of all foreign nations.325

The Duke writes that British plantation life in the West Indies is to such advantage for the enslaved that even when given opportunity to revolt, as had been done in the three

“events” mentioned above, slaves choose to “remain quiet upon the plantations.” Slave life is a matter of choice in this instance, and for the Duke, slaves actively chose their condition by their apparent silent complaisance. Considered in conjunction with his

325. Substance of the Speech of His Royal Highness The Duke of Clarence, in the House of Lords, on the motion for The Commitment of the Slave Trade Limitation Bill, on the fifth day of July, 1799 (London: Whittingham, Dean Street, Fetter Lane), 353-354, my emphasis.

176

argument that slavery benefits the African by rescuing him from a life of “famine and starvation,” the Duke emphasizes that some slaves are quite grateful for their condition, as “many natives sell themselves for food.”326 Optimistically, the Duke sees enslavement in the colonies is a new opportunity for a life otherwise destined for death. Along with other slavery advocates, the he emphatically argues that the institution of slavery benefits the Africans by not only saving their lives, but also enlightening them with Christianity.

327 Consequently, in the apologist mindset, a good slave remains eternally grateful and silently compliant.

A final excerpt that considers the proslavery understanding of slave silence as equivalent to compliance comes from Dr. David Collins, a “professional planter” who wrote a treatise on the proper medical management of plantation slaves.328 The work is designed as a manual for plantation owners moving toward more ameliorative practices.

326. Ibid, 341.

327. Another argument to this point comes from the Reverend R. Harris in his Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave-Trade, shewing its conformity with the principles of natural and revealed religion, delineated in the Sacred Writings of the Word of God (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1788). Not only does Harris argue that Christian law condones slavery, but slavery is the only means by which the word of god may be received. “Since not only one, but several Decisions of the Written Word of God, give a positive sanction to the licitness of the slave-trade; it is not from the principle of private or National advantages attending the prosecution of it, that the slave-trade is intrinsically just and lawful in the strictest sense of the word, but from the incontrovertible veracity of the Word of God, whose Decisions they are, and who is essentially incompatible with the least degree of injustice” (76).

328. David Collins, Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies. By a Professional Planter (London: Printed by J. Barfield, Wardour Street, 1803).

177

At the time of the treatise’s publication, the British metropole was on the brink of abolition and Collins composed it as a means to protect the interests of the planters in the

West Indies. Treatises like his “Practical Rules” continued to be published and recirculated between the years of abolition (1807) and emancipation (1834) in England and the British West Indies.329 In his introduction, Collins assumes the African is more beast than human when he writes: “Indulge to satiety his animal appetites, and a negro makes no account of his degradation. He does not speculate, nor when he labours does he murmur, that the rights of men are violated in his bondage.”330 In Collins’ medical opinion, the African minds are completely “contented” with their social status as unfree laborers in a foreign country. Though “Creoles are more hardy, healthy, more docile,” the colonies sill required the “foreign supply” of African slaves.331 Collins further assumes that complicit African slaves, once seasoned and of reproductive value, will willingly produce island-born offspring to supplement the colony’s dwindling labor force.

In addition to his claim that slaves enjoy their condition and are easily appeased with minimal comfort, Dr. Collins developed a degrading opinion of kinship networks amongst African slaves. He writes that young African children are the best to purchase

329. As Alvin O. Thompson writes in his Unprofitable Servants, ameliorative practices were less about improving slaves’ quality of life than it was about protecting plantation sustainability once the trade was no longer able to ship new “cargo” to the West Indies (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 28-41.

330. Collins, 22.

331. Ibid, 26, 39.

178

for the plantation, “for though they are incapable of doing much work, they will do enough to pay for their own maintenance, and they are, comparatively in little danger of dying; for their juvenile minds entertain no regrets for the loss of their connexions [in

Africa].”332 Collins justifies the purchase of kidnapped and displaced children as he contends that their inherent barbarity, coupled with their childish forgetfulness of their family members, becomes a solid investment for a planter. A young slave is more likely to be pliant than an adult male, and is easier to groom into obedience. Simply put, he argues that African children feel nothing when separated from their families and taken into slavery. Though not explicitly stated, his claim implicitly acknowledges that adults, more integrated in their respective kinship networks on the African continent, do remember and “regret” their traumatic loss. In this excerpt as well as the others mentioned above, there is a plantocratic assumption of an emotional stuntedness on the part of the African subject. This rhetoric would continue well into the nineteenth century, when the question of emancipation was put forward to Parliament.333

332. Ibid, 48.

333. An excellent example of this continuing rhetoric comes from Matthew Gregory Lewis’ Journal of a West India Proprietor, written between the years 1815 and 1817, but published posthumously in 1834 (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008). In his February 17, 1817 journal, Lewis makes a direct claim against emancipation: “As to the free blacks, they are almost uniformly lazy and improvident, most of them half-starved, and only anxious to live from hand to mouth...but few of them ever make the exertion of earning their livelihood creditably” (347-8). If it were not for his benevolence as a plantation owner, the Africans would be subjected to the most miserable conditions. Before embarking on his final trip back to England, never return to Jamaica (nor ever to get to England for that matter), Lewis makes a racialized argument that definitively locates him on the side of slavery (in a qualified way, of course): “as far as mere observation admits of my judging, there does seem to be a very great difference between

179

Plantation owners and anti-abolitionists did not only associate a slave’s silence with his or her compliance with the slave system. In some instances, slave silence was also represented as evidence for the pseudo-scientific notion that Africans were a different species of human. Edward Long believed that the unintelligible “gabbling of turkies” of some African groups was proof enough that, along a linguistic telos of civilization, they were “inferior in the intellectual faculties” in the great chain of being.334

He further substantiates his claim with a study done “in the case of Peter the wild youth,” a young boy raised in the feral environment of a German forest who eventually learned

English and became civilized. For Long, this appeared to cement the inherent gaps of linguistic learning between the European and the African.335 Long was one of many planters who argued for the innate superiority of the European race over the African, as it appeared manifest through the differing forms of verbal communication.336 Silence as a

the brain of a black person as a white. I should think that Voltaire would call a negro’s reason ‘une raison trés particulaire.’ Somehow or other, they [his slaves] never can manage to do anything quite as it should be done” (392).

334. Long, 370.

335. Ibid 371, fn. Scientists believe that Peter was a sufferer of Pitts-Hopkins syndrome, symptoms which include the inability to speak. Likely, Peter was unable to speak any language, let alone learn English.

336. Planter William Harper, who moved from Antigua to the American South after emancipation in the West Indies, continued to support slavery through ideologies founded in racial prejudice. In his Memoir of Slavery Harper writes that he has “little hesitation in saying, that if full evidence could be obtained […] the tendency of Slavery is rather to humanize than to brutalize…That the African negro is an inferior variety of the human race, is, I think, now generally admitted, and his distinguishing characteristics are such as peculiarly mark him out for the situation which he occupies among us…The most remarkable is their indifference to personal liberty. Another trait is the want of domestic

180

marker of animality continued in plantation representations of a slave’s stoicism even when being beaten or whipped.337 While abolitionists represented slave silence under physical duress as demonstrative of their heroic strength, anti-abolitionists manipulated these moments as proof that Africans “scarcely deserve to be ranked with the human species.”338 In recording these moments of silence, owners connected them with their perception of the inhuman qualities of the African.

In summary, these examples from the writings of plantation owners and anti- abolitionists construct a deliberate representation of slave silence. Planters intentionally characterized Africans as either silently complaisant or ineffably savage as a part of their overall anti-abolitionist strategy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

While the rhetoric of justified enslavement is most prolific during the debates on the

affections, and insensibility to the ties of kindred…the opportunities we have had of studying their characters, induce us to believe that they are a simple, honest, inoffensive, but weak, timid and cowardly race” (qtd in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1981), 99, 113-114.

337. Saidiya Hartman has convincingly argued that since pain is a “normative condition” that would otherwise label the African’s subjectivity, it was important that planters’ and anti-abolitionists claim that Africans felt no pain while laboring in the fields or “under the lash.” She writes succinctly that “the purported immunity of blacks to pain is absolutely essential to the spectacle of contented subjection or, at the very least, to discrediting the claims of pain. The black is both insensate and content, indifferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal punishment” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51. Jennifer Morgan has additionally written on European claims of African women feeling no pain at childbirth in her Laboring Women within the same conceptual framework (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2004), 35-40.

338. Long, 373.

181

slave trade, planters drew many of their arguments from existing travel narratives and racist ideologies of African difference. As noted by Paula Dumas in her Proslavery

Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition, “Contemporary beliefs about white supremacy helped to shape amelioration [as opposed to outright abolition], rationalize slavery, improve productivity while debasing blacks, and demonstrate opinions” supporting the ill-bred logic of supposed African inferiority.339 These readings provide, in conjunction with the many other pro-slavery and ameliorationist thoughts of the period, an alignment with Patterson’s theories of a slave’s social death. Only, this would be considered more of a social murder. Slavery advocates perpetuated the inhumanity of the slave collective, reinforcing and amplifying characteristics of difference, while dismissing those of similitude.

For Afro-British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were many ingrained cultural assumptions about race that would need to be redressed should their arguments against the trade be vindicated. With access to a ubiquity of printing presses and with the support of abolitionist societies, writers like Equiano, Prince, and

Manzano wrote their important personal narratives about the slave experience. Though it is difficult to determine to exactly how self-consciously selective they were about their personal experiences performing as counterdiscursive to slavery’s enterprise, all three effectively incorporated silence in dynamic ways, generating a rhetorical conduit between the metropolitan reader and the slave. Their narratives directly confront the plantocratic

339. Paula Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 76. 182

rhetorical dehumanization of the enslaved, just as the narrators authenticate their own traumatic experience.

Section Two: The Silence of the Enslaved: Trauma and Narrative in Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince

Contextualized within the abolitionist agenda to rectify contemporary apologist rhetoric of African inferiority, slave societies focused on the physical and psychological suffering of slaves, with the understanding that “[t]he enslaved African’s capacity to feel intensely is offered as proof of a human dignity deserving of respect.”340 The focus on the sentimental and the intense affective invocations in the published narratives of

Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince labor against the projected complacency composed by proslavery advocates. While these narratives were highly sentimentalized as per the literary mode of the time, the moments of represented silence are just as rhetorically effective as the hyperbolic sentimentality espoused by many abolitionist writers and thinkers.341 It is in these moments of silence that the trauma of slavery is written and read.

Here the ineffable reveals the very human qualities of psychological and emotional

340. Stephen Ahern, Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770-1830 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1.

341. Brycchan Carey’s British Abolitionism provides excellent readings of the multitudinous narrative frameworks for the sentimental representation of the slave subject.

183

suffering, rather than the animal-like silence of complicity that represented in contemporary pro-slavery works.

The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789), written as an autobiography, recounts the author’s experience as a slave in the West Indies and

Georgia. According to his own account, Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in East

Africa and kidnapped into slavery as a young boy.342 After a month in the West Indies, he was purchased by an officer in the British navy and served under him during the Seven

Years’ War. In 1766, Equiano purchased his freedom and worked as a maritime merchant, always keeping close to the ocean in his adult life. His narrative was published in 1789, as a part of a series of works written by former African slaves, “capitalizing,” as

Vincent Caretta points out in the introduction to the Interesting Narrative, “on the attention brought to the condition of Afro-Britons by the Mansfield decision” in 1772.343

342. The legitimacy of his birthplace has been of significant scholarly debate. Vincent Caretta was the first contemporary scholar to suggest that both written and circumstantial biographical evidence indicates that Equiano may have been born in Carolina on February 9, 1759, not 1745 in East Africa. See: “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?: New Light on an eighteenth-century question of identity” in Slavery & Abolition 20:3 (1999), 96-105. For the purposes of this chapter, the truth behind Equiano’s birthplace is not as significant as his representation of it. His descriptions of the Middle Passage mark a clear reporting of the slave experience. While there is doubt as to whether he did journey across the Atlantic, there is no doubt that the conditions that he was ostensibly place in were experienced by millions of others.

343. Vincent Caretta, “Introduction.” The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (New York: Penguin, 2003), xi. Briefly, the Mansfield Decision in the case of Somerset v. Stewart held that chattel slavery could not be supported by the English common law. Once a slave set foot on English soil, s/he would be technically free. For a close examination of the Somerset v. Stewart case and its implications on English common law, see Norman S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 286-300.

184

Equiano’s life following the publication and popularity of his autobiography included his ambivalent disengagement with the Sierra Leone project, the marriage and loss of his wife Sara Cullen, and his efforts to raise two daughters after Sara’s death.344 Equiano died in 1797, ten years before the abolition of the slave trade, and almost forty years before emancipation in England’s West Indian colonies. He was unable to witness the fruits of his arduous labor, but remained throughout his life an active member in the important political movement toward abolishing the slave trade.

Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was well marketed and generally well received.

Unlike the work of his good friend and fellow Afro-Briton Ottobah Cugoano, Equiano’s work—part slave narrative, part travel story—managed to write within an affective register that would appeal to the metropolitan readership. For example, a reviewer from the 1789 Monthly Review writes that Equiano “wears an honest face” in his narrative, as the reviewer commends the “artless manner in which he [Equiano] has detailed the

344. Amongst the abolitionist political experimentations during the late eighteenth century was the “resettlement” of British-occupied Sierra Leone. Initially a proponent of the project, Equiano agreed to join in a resettlement expedition for Granville Sharp and John Clarkson (Thomas Clarkson’s son). Though initially established as a voluntary opportunity for freed blacks, the Sierra Leone project quickly evolved into a “deportation scheme for the black poor.” Within three months of their arrival, the original group of 411 rapidly decreased to 130. Despite the strong efforts of abolitionists to seek the success of the Sierra Leone project, harsh environmental conditions and neighboring territorial African groups prevented it. As Helen Thomas puts it, “the promises of abundant land and the prospects of lawful trade were replaced by the stark realities of disease, death, infertile soils and hostile attacks from native rulers who challenged the settlers’ claims of land ownership” (3). Equiano was rightly upset by the scheme, and along with Ottobah Cugoano, voiced his concerns about the project’s continuation.

185

variety of adventures and vicissitudes which have fallen to his lot.”345 Mary

Wollstonecraft, in her highly influential criticism of the narrative, claims that Equiano’s descriptions of “his being kidnapped with his sister, his journey to the sea coast and terror when carried on shipboard” were emotionally striking. Though she employs a taxonomy of racial difference when noting that Equiano’s autobiography proves that he is “a par with the general mass of men [of a] more civilized society than that which he was thrown into at his birth,” she also writes that Equiano was of “extraordinary intellectual powers,” worthy of redressing the assumption that Africans are of an inherent inferiority.346 In both reviews, the authors consciously connect the life of the single African subject with the mass collective. The Monthly Review draws on the universalizing quality of

Equiano’s slave experience with that of all Africans, while also implying Equiano’s unique connection to the Western world through English Protestantism, therefore making him a “sensible” man.347 Wollstonecraft draws the conclusion that though it is “not our

345. The Monthly Review; Or, Literary Journal from January to June 1789. Vol. 80 (London: R. Griffiths, 1789), 551-552.

346. Quoted in Caretta, xxviii.

347. The Monthly Review, 552. First discussed by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, sensibility referred to a keen awareness of perceiving truth through observation. “The senses,” Locke writes, “at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in memory, and names got to them…” (I.II.21). Over time, knowledge is built upon the foundation of sensory perception and linguistic association with an observed object or idea. Truth is not innate, but acquired. By writing Equiano as “sensible,” the reviewer is locating Equiano as one who “accurately” perceives (that is, structured within English ideology) truth.

186

task” to collapse the singular narrative voice with the enslaved collective, Equiano’s

Interesting Narrative certainly works to “wipe off the stigma” deployed by slavery advocates.348 Both reviewers comment on the political timeliness of Equiano’s

Interesting Narrative, highlighting that though this work has merits of its own, it can also been seen as a polemic position on the “odium that has been excited against the West-

India Planters.”349 For these readers as well as others, the politics of abolition at a global scale is subtly balanced with the intimate experience of recounting a personal trauma.350

In Equiano’s narrative, there are moments of psychological trauma that are rendered ineffable, staking claim in his own subjectivity, and whether consciously or not, directly reconstructing silence to be read as human, as suffering, and as powerful. An example of this comes from an early moment in his account when, as a young boy, he and his sister were forcibly separated while still in Africa, both having already been kidnapped by slave traders the previous day:

The next day proved a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experience; [sic] for my sister and I were then separated, while we lay clasped in each other’s arms. It was in vain that we besought them not to part us: she was torn from me, and

348. Quoted in Caretta, xxviii.

349. The Monthly Review, 551.

350. Another positive report of the Interesting Narrative comes from the General Magazine and Impartial Review in which the author writes that Equiano’s story is “written with much truth and simplicity. The author’s account of the manners of the natives of his own province (Eboe), interesting and pleasing; and the reader, unless perchance he is either a West-India planter or Liverpool merchant, will find his humanity often severely wounded by the shameless barbarity practiced towards the author’s hapless countrymen in our colonies; if he feels as he ought, the oppressed and oppressors will equally excite his pity and indignation” (London: Bellamy and Roberts, Jan. 1789), 315.

187

immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not be described. I cried and grieved continually; for several days I did not eat any thing but what they forced into my mouth.351

Equiano’s experience of being separated from his sister is one of psychological trauma and ineffability. Even as an adult, reflecting in his autobiography years later, that moment in his personal history appears to be without description—there is no language for how he felt while being torn away from sister and the African life and youthful freedom that she metonymically represented. A key word for this emotionally-charged passage is his use of “distraction.” In his state of distraction, Equiano was unable to acknowledge his immediate surroundings, question authorities about what has happening to him, or eat food on his own accord. “Distraction” appears to be the internalized mental state for which silence is an externalized symptom. The sequence powerfully reflects his younger self’s inability to process the turmoil and isolation that accompanies with being newly enslaved. Unable to cogently vocalize his fears, the young Equiano is represented as in a traumatic state, only able to cry and scream as he moves from master to master within the

African continent. Within this excerpt, there is a use of psychological disassociation for

Equiano, as he is only able to focus on the loss of his unnamed sister.

Closely reading the passage within its historical context provides great insight into the complex emotional interiority of his experience. Many anti-abolitionists argued that young African children did not feel grief when separated from kin, as they do not beg their captors to keep these connections, nor cry out at the injustice of it; that they are, in

351. Equiano, 48, my emphasis.

188

the words of William Harper “in want of domestic affections” and “insensib[le] to the ties of kindred.”352 Yet, as Equiano’s testimony suggests, it appears that the trauma of the separation is so great that the slave subject is psychically unable to articulate his loss.

Equiano’s separation from his sister deliberately marks him a feeling subject, capable of emotional attachment to kin. This is of course doubly impacting as Equiano recounts in exacting detail how youthful and naïve he was at the time of his abduction. The clasping of the two young bodies and the resulting traumatic response to their separation, illustrate that not only did Equiano recognize his sister as a member of his kinship network, but also that she was foundational to his emotional and psychological stability. Since this passage is rendered through a distanced recollection of Equiano’s memory, the reader does not have access to all the internalized thoughts of Equiano as a child as he is experiencing a familial loss. But his lethargy and lack of appetite all indicate the very human bodily reaction of separation trauma. Silence, as it is represented in this memory, is one that humanizes Equiano, connecting him to his sister and the ineffable trauma that is a consequence of the slave trade.

This sequence of traumatic distraction, in which only the corporeal sounds of slavery (flesh torn away from flesh, crying, etc.), but not the language of slavery (words, naming emotions, expressing feelings) are recorded in narrative form is echoed in

Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments. In describing his own abduction and imprisonment on a slave ship bound for the West Indies, Cugoano writes that once boarded on the

352. Harper, 113.

189

vessel all he could hear was the “rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellowmen.”353 Though Cugoano does not reveal his own physical and mental state in the moment of these observations, it would appear that what Cugoano perceived of his “fellowmen” aboard his slave vessel is reflective of the interior registers of trauma reflected in Equiano’s personal account. In other words, what Cugoano observed in others, Equiano personally felt in his narrative of being bought and sold in

Africa (arriving at one of the coastal slave factories six months later).354 In making this sequence one of visceral anguish felt but impossible to describe, Equiano draws an intimate proximity between himself and his reader, intensified when read in light of

Cugoano’s recording.

Along with his personal experience which directly contradicts the “stupid argument” (to employ More’s phrasing) that Africans have limited emotional regard for kin, Equiano’s separation from his sister intentionally links to the collective of fellow displaced Africans. His introduction into the schematics of global commerce was exercised not through a local rite of passage, but rather with a passage of another kind, that of the transatlantic slave trade. Equiano’s family loss and entrance onto the ship encapsulate the all-consuming power of the slave trade enterprise. Once the recognition of his kinship networks is torn from him, Equiano is forcibly supplanted from a state of

353. Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 15.

354. See Chapter II, fn 229. Stephanie E. Smallwood discusses the horrible conditions of the littoral factories in the first two chapters of her Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007). Her convincing historical examination parallels what is described by Equiano and Cugoano.

190

subjectivity to that of social death. As Orlando Patterson writes in Slavery and Social

Death, the slave is a subject who has no “homeland— a slave’s greatest misfortune lay in the fact that he had no ancestral home, and hence no rights...A slave was a stranger in a strange land, unsupported by a chain of ancestors reaching back to the beginning of time.”355 Patterson’s observation of the passage into slavery, which includes a “symbolic rejection by the slave of his past and his former kinsmen,” is unconsciously acknowledged within Equiano’s sentimental separation.356 The mourning of his sister’s loss can be construed as a symbolic recognition that she will be “torn from me for ever,” and while he laments that she was the “sharer of my joys and sorrows,” simultaneously

Equiano knows that he will never see his sister again.357 The Interesting Narrative shares the affective power of the transatlantic slave trade with its reader early in Equiano’s autobiography, cataloging it from the perspective of an innocent child. In doing so, the representation of silence in this sequence powerfully coordinates the link between

Equiano’s individual experience with that of the many millions of others, equally separated from their families and homes as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade.

The Interesting Narrative not only grapples with the emotional loss of Equiano’s sister during his childhood, but also recounts moments of silence as the narrator ages into adulthood, continuing to represent the trauma of racial prejudice. As Equiano matures within his autobiography, so too do the episodes of his representative silence. Within the ebb and flow of the narration, he signals his own development while also pointing to the

355. Patterson, 39.

356. Ibid, 52.

357. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 51. 191

retrograde attitudes and ideologies of slavery advocates. As an example, Equiano records that in 1776, off the coast of present-day Belize, he was asked by a captain to join his crew bound for Cartagena. Equiano, who had already settled passage for Jamaica, refused the captain’s offer. In a quick pivot from casual professionalism to irate denigration, the captain threatens to sell Equiano to the Spanish should he continue to refuse:

I simply asked him what right he had to sell me? But, without another word, he made some of his people tie ropes round each of my ancles [sic], and also to each wrist, and another rope round my body, and hoisted me up without letting my feet touch or rest upon any thing. Thus I hung, without any crime committed, and without judge or jury, merely because I was a freeman, and could not by the law get any redress from a white person in those parts of the world. I was in great pain from my situation, and cried and begged very hard for some mercy, but all in vain. My tyrant in a rage brought out a musquet out of the cabin, and loaded it before me and the crew, and swore that he would shoot me if I cried any more. I had now no alternative; I therefore remained silent, seeing not one white man on board who said a word on my behalf.358

There are three instances in which silence is represented in the passage above: in the fury of the captain, in the terror of Equiano, and in the complicity of the crew. Undoubtedly, this recounted memory is a traumatic one—Equiano fears for his life—but there is also a feeling of social injustice and frustration at witnessing the impotency of the ship’s crew.

Equiano is both literally and metaphorically “hanged” for the crime of being a free black man.

As the captain confronts him, Equiano is recognizably culturally literate. He articulates his Eurocentric knowledge of justice and common law by referring to the fact that the captain had no legal right to sell Equiano to the Spanish. Acknowledging that the

English rule of law is undermined by the captain’s actions is also noted, with Equiano’s

358. Equiano, 212.

192

frustration that he committed no crime, nor was there any man to intervene on his behalf.

Navigating through the waters of eighteenth-century structural racism in the Atlantic world, Equiano is fully aware of the injustices committed against him, being able to express those injustices in a language understood by his metropolitan readers. The use of legal discourse marks Equiano as a “sensible” man, articulate during the description of his symbolic hanging, and the forced silence at the end of the passage escalates the sense of injustice for the reader. Equiano’s silence in this scene is not one of “distraction” as experienced in his youth; it is the silence that comes with the full awareness of violent oppression.

The silent hanging of our hero connects to a larger network of accounts cataloging the fates of many Africans subject to the arbitrary and cruel treatment of ship captains.

Among the most infamous of these historical cases is that of Captain Kimber and the two female slaves that he gruesomely murdered on his ship Recovery in 1792. One slave was tied upside down with the ship’s rope and “bounded up and down, or in other words, lifted up, and let fall again” five times on the ship’s deck. During each time she was lifted, she was severely beaten and was finally left to hang for about thirty minutes. By the time that she was let down, she was swollen, disfigured, and “welted in several parts of the body.” She died from her wounds two days later.359 Though Equiano’s narrative experience was years before the Kimber trial, both examples demonstrate that vindictive white men employed unlawful hanging as a means to assert their unquestioned power.

359. “The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the Murder of Two Female Negro Slaves, on Board the Recovery, African Slave Ship” (London: C. Stalker, 1792), 4-7. For an excellent reading of the inability to recover the voice of the two women, especially the one named Venus (nearly absent from the trial), see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small axe 26 (June 2008), 1-14. 193

Equiano’s silence as his life is threatened could certainly be linked to the eternal silence of the young woman brutally murdered by Captain Kimber. Bound by their shared states of physical and emotional trauma, and configured in their shared silence, Equiano and the unnamed girl emblematize the countless acts of injustice impressed upon black bodies, many of which result in a painful death. Both accounts are also powerful testaments to the inherent cruelty of the slave trade enterprise, as well as the men who volunteer to operate within it.

Just as Equiano demonstrates his cultural literacy when describing this moment of race-based victimization, he also generates a contrast between himself and his perpetrators. This is effectively crafted by recording the multifarious modes of silence that are represented in this sequence. The captain, “without a word,” resorts to immediate violence with Equiano, refusing to speak to him as he commands his crew to hang

Equiano by the ankles. The captain’s performance of brute power is also demonstrated as he silently loads his gun in front of both his crew and the now helpless Equiano. Though both Equiano and the captain are described as silent throughout this sequence, the motivation for each man’s wordlessness is on polarizing terms. Equiano contemplates this act of injustice through legal discourse, while the captain acts as if he is outside of the law. Sheer strength, power, and armaments are the only discursive mode in which the captain appears to operate. Much like Captain Kimber, who, in the recounting of the trial, appears to silently enjoy watching a young woman be slowly murdered, Equiano’s captain appears to silently enjoy the state of his power. If Equiano is a representative figure of victimization within the transatlantic trade (despite the fact that he was technically free at this point in the narrative), the Cartagenian captain becomes the representative figure of unjust white supremacy and brutish tyranny that the trade

194

inevitably produces, and in some ways, condones. Silence appears to represent both the oppression of the black subject, as well as the active tyranny of the white.

Representing the possibility of remediation and change, but failure in its undertaking, is the silence of the crew—the third mode of silence to be discussed of this scene. They quietly tie the rough rope around Equiano’s wrists, ankles and waist and watch as the captain loads his musket. Though the crew’s silence could be interpreted in myriad ways, what this instance may convey is the very silent complicity of the social order of the slave system. Those Europeans who remain mute to the inherent fallacies of an unjust system are culpable in its crimes against humanity.

Throughout the Interesting Narrative, silence serves as an important rhetorical and political tool. In the instances where Equiano represents his own silence, he is directly criticizing the systemic violence committed against the victims of the transatlantic trade: both young and old. In acknowledging his victimization over the entirely of his life, from childhood to adulthood, Equiano also registers the fact that the processes of physical and emotional torture will never end for the slave, nor even for the subject who is free but living in a world in which slavery operates. In the episode in which Equiano describes the silence of others, a close reading offers the possibility of how violent racism and complicity can also produce unique modes of silence.

Interestingly, it is in these representations of silence that Equiano powerfully calls for a voice—a voice to combat the silence that collaborates with the slave trade and those complicit with it. In the many renderings of silence found within the narrative, of which only two can be discussed here, Equiano affectively connects with his readers as he also politically condemns the slavery advocates of his era.

195

Along with Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative, Mary Prince’s The History of

Mary Prince, written in 1829 and published in 1831, gives voice to the enslaved subject during the British social movements toward abolition and emancipation. Though published forty years apart, each autobiographical narrative contributes to the decades- long debate about slavery in the West Indies. As Equiano advocated for the abolition of the slave trade, Prince’s narrative works to condemn slavery as an institution. Though supposed humanitarian efforts were made to ameliorate the slaves’ conditions across the post-abolition British Caribbean, Prince’s narrative deliberately counters these efforts as unchecked false promises. Slavery was still a cruel and violent, yet condoned, economic model for generating income for the British Empire, despite the accounts of metropolitan slavery apologists and West Indian planters. Like other Afro-British writers of the era between abolition and emancipation, Prince and her narrative recognized that their war against slavery had not yet been won, and amelioration was a false sentiment orchestrated by slavery advocates to continue slavery’s enterprise.360

The editor of her narrative, Thomas Pringle, who himself was a staunch advocate for emancipation in the West Indies, writes that Prince’s story is designed so that “good

360. Another transatlantic advocate for emancipation is Robert Wedderburn. In his The Horrors of Slavery, he writes that though he was never enslaved, his mother and grandmother were. He was a direct witness their treatment and finds the slaver’s action unforgivable: “My heart glows with revenge, and cannot forgive. Repent ye Christians, for flogging my aged grandmother before my face, when she was accused of witchcraft by a silly European” (edited by Ian McCalman, Kingston: Jamaica, 1991), 86. There were many significant political voices advocating for the end of slavery in the metropole; slave societies and organizations were run by William Wilberforce, John Clarkson, and John Stephen among others.

196

people in England might hear from a slave what a slave had felt and suffered.”361

Resonant of Smith’s conclusions that sentimental writing draws the reader and the narrator closer together to generate an affective kinship, Pringle implies that reading

Prince’s narrative will further drive a metropolitan reading public to action. Prince’s

“voice” in her History critically conveys the continuing horrors of slavery even though the slave trade itself had ended, a point that has been discussed at length by other scholars.362 As the following section will allude to, however, in many instances within her story, what the “good people in England” hear is the ineffability of Prince’s narrative experiences. Like that of Equiano, Prince’s autobiography includes interpolative moments of silence in the overall “vocal” emancipationist project. As her story indicates, the institutional racism inherent in perpetuated African enslavement continues to traumatize each individual fettered to its enterprise. While the abolishment of the transatlantic slave trade ostensibly severed the possibility that more future Africans will experience its horror, Prince’s History serves to remind its readers that there is still a

361. Thomas Pringle, “Preface.” The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave related by Herself (London: F. Westley and A.H. Davis, 1831), i. Thomas Pringle was the secretary for the Anti-Slavery Society at the time of Prince’s publication, and fervently supported her both in her public and private life. He financially backed her during the libel suit brought against her by her former owner Mr. Wood. Pringle also hired her on as a “domestic servant in his household when she fell on hard times” (Salih, xxv).

362. See K. Merinda Simmons, “Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Migration and the Epistemology of ‘Voice’ in Mary Prince’s ‘History of Mary Prince’ and Maryse Condé’s ‘I, Tituba.” College Literature, 36:4 (Fall 2009), 75-99; Kremena Todorova, “‘I will Say the Truth to the English People’: The History of Mary Prince and the Meaning of English History.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43:3 (2001), 285-302.

197

massive collective of people who remain unfree and whose experiences need to be recorded.

According to the History, Prince was born in Bermuda in 1788 under her owner

Charles Myers. During her youth, she was purchased and circulated by a number of different slaveowners in the West Indies, last purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Wood in

Antigua in 1815. By her account, the Woods treated Prince with the greatest antipathy.

She writes that she was subjected to both caging and arbitrary lashings under their long service.363 In 1828, she accompanies them to England. Once there, under law she had the right to free herself from her enslavement and sought refuge at the Anti-Slavery Society where she was introduced to Pringle.364 While she was never forced back into enslavement, she was also never technically manumitted. Under the auspices of supporters like Pringle, who published her narrative and gave all proceeds of the publication to her, Prince lived out the rest of her life in London. Though she had married a free black in Antigua, Prince never saw her husband again—her contingent freedom in

363. Prince, 26.

364. The case, recorded by Francis Hargrave as “An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett…to demonstrate the Present Unlawfulness of Domestic Slavery in England,” claims that since there are no laws governing slavery in England, then servitude (and by extension slavery) can only be legally permitted by contract. But contracts must be signed by two parties, and must not bind the servant to unjust duress. Hence, slavery and its laws in the colonies (only applicable to the colonies themselves under respective colonial governors and assemblies) would be inadmissible in the English court. Among the lord magistrates serving on the Steuart v. Sommersett case, Lord Hobart clearly states that the “body of a freeman cannot be made subject to distress or imprisonment by contract, but only by judgement” (London: W. Otridge, 1772), 80.

198

England was too valuable to sacrifice. After the publication of The History and following libel trial, very little is known about Mary Prince. She worked as a charwoman and domestic servant in London until her death. If not for her narrative, the specifics of

Prince’s life would be lost to history.

Just as little is historically known about the life of Mary Prince, there is little evidence of the contemporary public reception of Prince’s History. Moira Ferguson writes that “no reviews of the text in such prominent periodicals as the Athenaeum, The

Critical Review, The Monthly Review or The Edinburgh Magazine were published, probably because the narrative had provoked such immediate controversy.”365 Indeed, the history of the libel suit Mr. Wood filed against her at the time of the narrative’s publication is well-recorded by other scholars.366 Yet, there was one emotionally evocative, though brief, review of Mary Prince’s History in The Baptist Magazine for

1831.367 In it the author writes of The History:

365. Moira Ferguson, “Introduction” The History of Mary Prince edited by Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 30. To her list, I can add The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Methodist Magazine, and The General Magazine and Impartial Review for the year 1831.

366. Extensive discussions of Mary Prince’s court case for libel can be found within Ferguson’s introduction of the 1997 edition and Salih’s introduction to the 2004 edition of The History of Mary Prince. Another comprehensive examination of the court case can be found in Sue Thomas’ “Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Cases over The History of Mary Prince.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40:1 (Mar 2005) 113-135. A digital record of the court case itself can be found on the British Newspaper Archive for the date of Friday 22 February 1833. < http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/>

367. The Baptist Magazine is a foremost religious periodical, with articles on conversion, reprints of sermons, and theological philosophy. In the 1831 print, orthodox

199

It is a heart-rending account, and we see no reason to doubt the truth of its statements. If among our readers, there were any who needed to be excited to pray and labour for the earliest possible extinction of colonial bondage; or any who were declining in zeal in this sphere of benevolent exertion, we should advise them to read the History of Mary Prince.368

The reviewer’s political agenda cannot be lost on the reader. Baptist groups, along with

Quaker societies, were united against the slave trade on religious grounds. Though time may have waned the “zeal” of abolitionists at the height of their social movement in the

1790s, reading Prince’s narrative would rekindle fervent activism for the cause of West

Indian emancipation in the 1820s-30s.369 While the comment does not reflect on the style of the prose, the reviewer does not deny its emotional evocations. It is safe to argue that the quality of writing was significantly less important than the narrative’s political purpose. As such, an important note on the veracity of the History, mentioned at the above excerpt’s start, foregrounds the politics of the review. The pattern in which the reviewer discusses Prince’s narrative, in terms of both truthfulness and affective power, follows that of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. The formulaic structure of all these

religious doctrine is complemented by reviews of speeches given against slavery given by Baptist reverends as well as anti-slavery narratives like Mary Prince’s History.

368. The Baptist Magazine Vol. XXIII (London: George Wightman, 1831), 241.

369. Included in an earlier section of the magazine is “The Substance of a Speech on Negro Slavery, delivered at the Rev Mr. Barker’s Chapel,” in which B.C. Challis lectured on the atrocities of slavery. Invoking the highly sentimental language that informed the oratory of many anti-slavery lectures, Challis states that “as an Englishman, and above all as a Christian, I feel bound to step forward and plead the cause of those beings, who have no government but that of the whip—whose blood and muscles, have as much become article of the trade and profit, as those of a horse[…]---they look in vain for that assistance, which would restore them to that place in society for which nature had intended them” (21). 200

reviews signal the primary political efforts of ending slavery in the West Indies above any literary mastery.

To follow the comparative structure of the reviews of each slave story, a brief comparison of the History and The Interesting Narrative is in order. Two major differences between the autobiographies are worth noting. The first, also argued by Sara

Salih, is that Prince does not entirely generate a narrative voice of much dimension. Her

History is comparatively short, and does not allow for extensive discussions of slave life in Turks and Caicos, Bermuda or Antigua. Unlike the extensive descriptions of the immediate environment provided by The Interesting Narrative, Prince only briefly identifies the fact that she has moved to a new location once sold to another master. Also unlike Equiano, Prince does not offer her reader a profound insight into emancipation as she recounts her episodic history of brutal lashings or challenging labor. However, the journalistic approach to Prince’s narrative should not be dismissed as seemingly inferior.

Prince’s pithy accounts target the different kinds of relationships that she affectively experiences. What is significant in her narrative is how she is treated by others—owners, fellow slaves, free blacks—which then gives focus on the interpersonal consequences of racial inequality tied to slavery. Furthermore, the excision of details from her narrative allows the reader to give focus to the impact of slavery on the human condition mediated through her bodily experience. Prince, perhaps not nearly invested in the commercial success of her narrative as was Equiano, retains a raw and visceral portrayal of her experiences, unadulterated with ambivalent emotional conflicts or lengthy reflections.

Simply put, the History is an account that, time and again, constructs slavery as corruptive and physically painful. Though the narrative dimensions are certainly not as developed as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Prince’s History, in its distilled serial

201

accounts of brutality and violence, effectively compounds its political and affective power.

Arguably, the greatest distinction between Mary Prince’s History and the works of her many Afro-British narrative forbearers is that Prince narrates her slave experience as a woman.370 Female slave subjects keenly felt the sting of racial denigration and prejudice right along with their fellow enslaved male counterparts. Additionally, as mentioned in the last chapter, they carried the additional burden of being forcefully reproductive bodies as well. Being a woman posed a set of challenges not faced by men, challenges predicated upon their biology and the social and naturalized division between the public and private spheres, as well as patriarchal assumptions about women’s inherent subjugation to men. The retelling of the physical violence enacted against a female body produces an additional component of tabooed spectacle (typically relegated to male- dominated accounts). Prince disregards the common practice of withholding physical and libidinal violence in her History. She recounts episodes of being stripped to receive a lashing, and gestures toward the sexual violations she encumbers during her West Indian enslavement. Her narrative is one of sustaining violence and violation, and it was imperative for her and the Anti-Slavery Society that supported her, to disclose that excessive level of brutality for their metropolitan readership. The History also reminds the reading public that women were equal victims to slavery as men. Prince’s narrative therefore opens the seemingly more intimate connection between metropolitan female readers (conscious of their own place within the patriarchal system) and the female slave

370. For an extended discussion of the Prince’s History and the politics of gender see: Helena Woodard, African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race and Reason (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 133-151. 202

collective. Though metropolitan women were moderately protected by common law, female slaves were not, and Prince’s narrative articulates the unbounded licentiousness that occurs in a male-master/female-slave relationship. The fact that Prince escaped these circumstances and actively sought out her freedom, but also chronicled her life to be shared with a higher political purpose, makes the History even more dynamic in its historical moment.

Just as there are important differences between the two works, there are also important similarities. Prince’s narrative structure and modes of recounting are like those of Equiano, albeit significantly shorter in length. They both unfold their narratives in a series of chronological episodic memories, following European standardized modes of storytelling. Most significantly, their shared focus on slavery, either in a pre-abolition

(Equiano) or post-abolition moment (Prince), contribute to the core foundation of the

African-American literary tradition.371 Despite the “vocalization” within their texts, one final similarity between Equiano and Prince is that both authors interpolate moments of narrative silence which distinguish their subjectivity and humanity. The remaining portion of this section will discuss the interpolated silences of Mary Prince’s History, and their significance within her larger narrative of trial and freedom.

According to her account, Prince was separated from her mother at the age of twelve when her owner could no longer afford her. The traumatic separation from her mother is represented as ineffable:

371. See the discussion of Gates above.

203

It recalls the great grief that filled my heart, and the woeful thoughts that passed to and fro through my mind, whilst listening to the pitiful words of my mother, weeping for the loss of her children. I wish I could find the words to tell you all I then felt and suffered. The great God above alone knows the thoughts of the poor slave’s heart, and the bitter pains which follow such separations as these.372

Similar to Equiano’s narrative account of familial separation, Prince is woefully torn from her mother, a figure of protection and care. The separation is recalled in a memory, and while Prince can recollect the moment, she is unable to fully represent the experience to her reader. The sentence “I wish I could find the words to tell you all I then felt and suffered,” signals a gap between the lived trauma of departing from her mother, and the hopelessness that accompanies the inability to articulate that trauma. Separated against her will, Prince’s “wishing” to “find the words” importantly also signifies the linguistic separation of managing the trauma—if Prince were to at least find those words, she would have some semblance of authority over her body through identifying and speaking them. Yet, Prince remains speechless. Any agency that a stable kinship network may have offered is deprived, along with her language, when the trauma of her separation is recalled.

Prince can only recount the traumatic separation from her mother as a moment of emotional stress, invoking the divine as a coping mechanism. Prince claims in the above passage that only God knows the language of her suffering and can understand not only her trauma but the trauma of all those enslaved. The appeal to the divine in this passage creatively invokes several political and social gestures. By orienting her state with a religious turn, Prince is drawing a link to her reader, connected by a shared belief in

372. Prince, 10. 204

Christianity. A second important move that Prince signals for the reader is the collapsing of her emotional pain with that of those who are also enslaved. She connects her moment of separation and its debilitating affective power with that of the entire slave collective.

Briefly moving away from herself in this rare moment of reflection, she moves from first to third person--- only God can know the “thoughts of a poor slave’s heart.” The sentiments of her individual experience are applied to all slaves, each a sufferer of an unjust separation. Her experience is but an entry point into a nearly political reflection about the emotional suffering engendered by slavery’s institution in the West Indies.

The above sequence rhetorically triangulates silence, trauma, and slavery while also drawing the reader into Prince’s experience as a young girl separated from her mother. First, the separation from her mother is rendered ineffable during its narrative recollection. Second, Prince’s only form of solace comes in her Christian invocation, yoking herself to her (assumed) Christian metropolitan reader. And third, in that invocation, she shifts from the personal to the political with her claim that the “poor slave” is without agency in his or her state of enslavement. While the slave trade had ended, and amelioration procedures were supposedly under way, Afro-Caribbean families were still being ripped apart because of slavery. In her traumatic silence of separation from her Bermudan mother, Prince is also echoing the silence of others. All three rhetorical points—silence and trauma, Christian invocation, and political critique— concisely connect Prince to her reader and, consequently, her reader to the politics of the slave experience.

Over the course of Prince’s History, the reader engages with recurring episodes of aggressive injustice. In most of her narrative, these episodes are composed of cruel treatment or physical punishment, until Prince finally finds the “comfortable” haven of

205

Pringle’s residence in London.373 While in Bermuda and Turks and Caicos, however, her corporeal punishment is violently administered by men, where she is forced to “strip naked” and be whipped in front of her owners.374 In one episode, Prince recalls one master who “had the ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked, and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water. This was worse to me than the licks.”375 Her sexual subordination to her masters feeds into the compounded risk of being a female slave.

What is interesting to note about her History is that the reader is witness to the cruelty of both masters and mistresses equally. As a woman, Prince was more likely to be a domestic servant and attend to her mistresses’ demands. In illuminating the vile and distinctly unfeminine behavior of her mistresses, Prince records how the ownership of slaves corrupts a female Briton’s mind.376 This may be one of the more striking points of

373. Ibid, 36.

374. Ibid, 15.

375. Ibid, 24.

376. Within the American South context, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl, echoes the sentiments found within Prince’s History. Not only are there records of explicit sexual violence by her owner Dr. Flint, but Jacobs is also victim to Mrs. Flint’s jealous rage. In her descriptions of her vitriolic behavior, a reader would believe that Mrs. Flint had gone mad with jealousy over a young girl whom, Mrs. Flint believed, “desecrated her marriage” and “insulted her dignity” (ed. Joslyn T. Pine. Mineola: Dover, 2001), 29. The claims that Jacobs makes in her Incidents are similar to that of Prince’s, also collapsing the individual experience of pain and suffering to a general suffering that is felt by a large group of people. This rhetoric is repeated throughout, making it the story of not just Jacobs’ life, but all lives, and consistently arguing for large scale legislative action in order to rectify the injustices inflicted upon the African-American slaves in the antebellum South.

206

the narrative, especially given its political resonance. Prince gives a great deal of focus to scenes of female-to-female abuse in her autobiography, with an invested focus on her then current mistress, Mrs. Wood:

My mistress [Mrs. Wood] was always abusing and fretting after me. It is not possible to tell all her ill language. —One day she followed me foot after foot scolding and rating me. I bore in silence a great deal of ill words: at last my heart was quite full, and I told her that she ought not to use me so. […] She called her husband and told him what I had said. He flew into a passion: but did not beat me then; he only abused and swore at me; and then gave me a note and bade me go and look for an owner. Not that he meant to sell me; but he did this to please his wife and frighten me. [After he refused to sell Prince to a free black willing to buy her], my master whipped me.377

Prince’s silence in this sequence is directly contrasted with the unceasing vituperation of her master, and more importantly, her mistress. Prince, like any other feeling subject, was only able to restrain her emotional outrage at her treatment before attempting to rectify her abuses with Mrs. Wood. From what is written in this sequence, the slightest suggestion of slave agency results in accusations, threats, hateful scolding, and whippings. There appears to be no redemption or satisfaction for claiming her human dignity to her mistress: “I was very sorry for this, for I had no comfort with Mrs. Wood, and I wished greatly for my freedom.”378 It would seem that for Prince in this moment, like Equiano’s experience of hanging by his ankles, that announcing one’s subjecthood in an era of slavery is dangerous and even deadly.

Furthermore, in the above passage, Prince’s silence is directly juxtaposed with the unceasing vitriol of Mrs. Wood. In conjunction with the physical violence Prince endures throughout her History, this passage also illustrates that, within the West Indian colonies,

377. Prince, 26-27. My emphasis.

378. Ibid, 27. 207

the void produced by slave silence is filled by the denigrating language of planters. Mrs.

Wood’s behavior, corrupted by her experience as a slaveowner, is brutally aggressive.

She follows Prince, “foot after foot,” with nothing but angry reprimands filling up the colonial space. Mrs. Wood’s scolding was borne in silence until Prince’s final breaking point (which consequently led to a beating). Without the power to speak for herself,

Prince suffers the added trauma of verbal abuse. The two-fold experiences of both emotional and physical violence in the passage demonstrate the multitudinous ways that a slave is holistically disparaged while still expected to labor for their masters.

In the above readings of Equiano’s and Prince’s slave narratives, there are distinct representations of slave suffering through silence. Firstly, there are moments of profound emotional separation that render the narrator unable to speak of the moment, as she or he is too emotionally overwrought. Or, secondly, with scenes of abusive physical and emotional treatment, the narrator silently bears the injustices that are inflicted on him or her. In both moments examined here of the latter form of silence, there is an additional component of frustration at the narrator’s circumstances. The framework of trauma studies provides an alternative view into the readings of The Interesting Narrative and the

History than the usual politic renderings often given by scholars. An individual’s traumatic moment, through the representation of the unspeakable, does a great deal of productive work intervening and contradicting pro-slavery discourses that surround the silence of the enslaved. Though gender and geography separate these two stories and the people who lived them, their narratives directly address the atrocities of the slave trade mediated through their shared accounts of familial separation and injustice. It is in deploying the work of Caruth, Laub, and Auerhahn, that trauma, and its representation in literature, can be accessed in the canon of slave narratives in the eighteenth and

208

nineteenth centuries. Mindfully these important moments within Equiano and Prince demonstrate that even silence can speak volumes.

Section Three: Translating Trauma: The Case Study of Juan Francisco Manzano and

Richard Robert Madden

Emancipation for the British West Indies was enacted with the Slavery Abolition

Act of 1833, and slowly enforced across the British colonies over the following year. The transition from slavery to “apprenticed labouring” was accompanied with its own complications, including, as many scholars have argued, the continued oppression of

African-Caribbean subjects and the displacement of both South Asian and Chinese workers.379 The apprenticeship system was in continuation from 1833-1838, and its termination was considered the end of “the last vestige of slavery in the British colonies.”380 These events are just a few of the many outcomes that followed in the aftermath of British West Indian emancipation. For the purposes of this final section, two

379. A digital version of the 28th August 1833 Act of Slavery Abolition can be found at: http://www.pdavis.nl/Legis_07.htm. For more information about the transition from slavery to apprenticeship in the mid-nineteenth-century Caribbean see: Sidney Mintz, “The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area.” Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean. Ed. Michael M. Horowitz (New York: Natural History Press, 1971), Ch. 2; Contesting Freedom: Control and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean. Eds. Gad J. Heuman and David V. Trotman (Warwick: Macmillan Caribbean, 2005). As a result of the British colonial slave emancipation, many planters emigrated to the American South. More on that topic can be found in Edward Bartlett Rugemer’s The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009).

380. Edward Mullen, “Introduction.” Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba, recently Translated from the Spanish by R.R. Madden1840. (Hamden, Archon Book, 1981), 11.

209

other consequences of British emancipation will be discussed in greater detail: the rise of

“second slavery” in the Spanish Caribbean, and British reactions to this rise. The Spanish economic stronghold and increased dependence on slave labor in the 1830s consequently led to a British retaliatory response with the formation of the international Anti-Slavery

Society in 1839 and the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Specifically, this section will coordinate these two trans-imperial events (the rise of “second slavery” and the British response) as they are understood through the relationship of two men: Cuban slave Juan Francisco Manzano and Irish emancipationist Richard Robert Madden.

Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo is credited as being the only narrative in Latin

America that was composed as an “autobiographical account written by a slave during slavery that has surfaced to date [2001].”381 Richard Robert Madden was an active agent against the poor treatment of the recently enfranchised African-Jamaicans while living in the colony between 1833 and 1834, and continued documenting the atrocities of slavery while living in Cuba (1835-1840).382 It was Madden who first translated and published

Manzano’s narrative in English, as Spain had rigid censorship regulations and

381. Schulman and Garfield, 7. Also Mullen, 10-11.

382. Madden, an Irish physician with a penchant for travel, married a planter’s daughter and moved to Jamaica. He was employed by the British Colonial Office from 1833-1839 to function as a magistrate over the transition to emancipation. He was under constant harassment by plantation owners while in Jamaica, which led to his removal and departure to Cuba. In writing of his resignation from the position of magistrate he writes that those against him “went so far as to trample on the authority of my office, and one of his partisans to assault me in the public streets.—I found the protection of the negro incompatible with my own.” (A Twelvemonths’ Residence in the West Indies, Vol. 2. London: James Cochrane and Waterloo Place, 1835), 322.

210

criminalized African literacy.383 It would have been difficult if not entirely impossible to publish the Autobiografía in Cuba without facing criminal charges of insubordination to the Spanish government. Within the canon of Spanish-Caribbean literature, Manzano’s slave narrative is an important and unique contribution to transatlantic history as well as a counter-discursive testament against slavery in Cuba at a moment when slavery was at its historic peak. This chapter’s final section will read an excerpt of Manzano’s

Autobiografía and consider the role of translation when rendering the traumatic silence of the enslaved. This work is worthy of critical examination as it was a singular piece, showcased during the English Antislavery Society Convention of 1840, which highlighted the hypocrisy and abuses against the enslaved within the Spanish

Caribbean.384 Beyond this, Manzano’s narrative is an important demonstration of the transimperial and transatlantic networks that existed to end slavery across the Caribbean.

Before discussing the literary implications of Madden’s translation of Manzano’s narrative for a British metropolitan and emancipationist audience, it will be instructive to consider the historical circumstances that led to this strategic alliance. First coined by

Dale Tomich, and expanded upon by Anthony E. Kaye and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara,

383. Luis, 82-86. Schulman and Garfield also note that Manzano’s narrative is exceptional within the Spanish-Caribbean archive, since “the racial and social prejudices of the colonial period’s master discourse dissuaded writers from representing marginalized peoples or the theme of slavery in their texts” (7).

384. Gera C. Burton, Ambivalence and the Postcolonial Subject: The Strategic Alliance of Juan Francisco Manzano and Richard Robert Madden (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 23.

211

“second slavery” refers to the period where European demand for commodities like sugar were being met by “regions formerly marginal to the Atlantic economy.”385 Between the years 1790 and 1867, Cuba imported approximately 780,000 African slaves, more than the total number of slaves from the previous two hundred years combined. As illustrated by Schmidt-Nowara, the “unprecedented numbers” of imported slaves consequently led to Cuba producing 40 percent of the world’s cane sugar by 1870.386 Spanish Antillean planters found the increase of productivity profitable in Cuba and, to a lesser extent, in

Puerto Rico, which then also transferred to increased profits for imperial Spain. With the new wave of profit coming in, the Spanish crown vigorously fought to maintain colonial authority and cling onto its imperial share of the global market. Driven by a capitalist design to fill in the commercial lacunae left behind by the English emancipation, the

Spanish government fueled slavery and the slave trade in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

These actions consequently fueled the Spanish creole intellectuals to critically oppose the social and political implications of continued slavery and the perpetuation of

Spanish imperial power over the Caribbean colonies. Schmidt-Nowara argues that mobilization against slavery from within the Spanish colonial context was an impulse generated by the formation of the creole bourgeoisie in the colonies and the public sphere

385. Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth- Century South and the Atlantic World.” The Journal of Southern History 75:3(Aug 2009), 627. Also see: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 3- 5.

386. Schmidt-Nowara, 4.

212

intellectuals in Madrid.387 William Luis discusses at length the influences of one group that rose in opposition to West Indian second slavery: The Del Monte group, headed by creole intellectual Domingo Del Monte. Along with his official positions as the president of the Literature Commission and the Economic Society in Havana, Del Monte is best known for his literary circle. He invited young Cuban writers into his home to share their

“vision of a national literature.”388 Creole elites like those within Del Monte’s circle fought adamantly against slavery, “devoting themselves with enthusiasm to the dangerous task of combating the degrading and wretched secular institution.”389

The Del Monte group’s admonishment of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean demonstrated the complicated political condition of many creoles of the time. In a less direct way, the creole elites who did not directly benefit from slavery saw the institution as a marker of Spanish colonial tyranny; to be rid of slavery was to also be rid of Spanish control. Hence, there are contemporary Antillean abolitionists like Jose Saco, who fought for the abolition of slavery, but who was also complicit with race-based social hierarchies

387. Ibid, 13.

388. Luis, 29.

389. Ibid. The Del Monte group, and its larger hemispheric abolitionist networks in the Americas, is a part of what Anna Brickhouse calls a “transamerican renaissance,” where political ideologies and literary aesthetics underwent a border crossing. Del Monte not only collaborated with Madden, but reached out to American intellectuals on the topics of literature, annexation and importantly cubanidad. See: Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteeth-Century Public Sphere, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 134-173.

213

(with creole whites at the top) within the Spanish Caribbean colonial social systems.390

Yet, Domingo Del Monte and his group, regardless of what their internal motivations may have been, represented an active force for social reform and, for Luis, used literature to “define a national culture which included blacks and a changing society.”391 Manzano was introduced to Domingo Del Monte during one of these literary meetings, and Del

Monte swiftly became the slave’s patron.392

Del Monte and Madden were close allies in the fight against slavery at a moment when England was applying a great deal of political pressure on Spain to end its slave traffic. It is through this affiliation that Madden met Manzano in Havana in 1835.With the help of Del Monte, Manzano published his “Poesías líricas” (“Lyrical Poems”) while still in slavery, and in the same year, was commissioned to write his autobiography.

Madden returned to England with a portfolio of anti-slavery materials once his responsibilities as the superintendent of liberated Africans and judge of the Mixed Court ended in 1840. One document within this collection was Manzano’s slave narrative

(along with several poetry pieces composed by Manzano). With the publication of his

Autobiografía in London, Manzano was able to purchase his freedom.393

There are many similarities between the structure of Manzano’s slave narrative and those of the Anglo-Atlantic context, including Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and

390. Schmidt-Nowara, 18-21.

391. Luis, 30.

392. Burton, 18.

393. Luis, 36.

214

Prince’s History. All three works are prefaced by an authoritative accreditation, either through a series of letters and list of subscribers or, in the case of Prince and Manzano, in the form of an individual representing the values of a respected abolitionist society. All three works share a similar narrative pattern: they begin with a childhood bound within the security of their family members, to then be separated. The childhood, represented through the kinship networks established by the author, symbolically gestures to the narrator’s essential humanity and his or her “social death” when the kinship network is forcibly taken away. There is a narrative “loss of innocence” as the narrator is

“catapulted from the protected world of childhood to the full rigors of slavery.”394 All three narrators contemplate death in some way, inevitably refusing to take their own lives because of their (grateful) exposure to western religious doctrine. For the purpose of this chapter, there is as well an important rendering of traumatic silence in Manzano’s

Autobiografía that will be examined in its original Spanish and in two different English translations.395 The first passage is in the original 1839 Spanish manuscript, reprinted in a modern edition.396 The second passage is from the 1840 Madden translation of the

394. Mullen, 24.

395. There is no evidence that would lead me to believe that Manzano had read Equiano’s Interesting Narrative or Prince’s History. Such works would be banned in Cuba and no known editions were published in Spanish at the time. Here I am implying that by the time that Manzano was writing, there was a specific generic template for writing a slave narrative. This template then also includes interpolative moments of silence, affectively connecting the reader and narrator with the narrative thread of traumatic silence.

396. This edition comes from an original manuscript housed in the National Archives in Havana. It has been reprinted in the Schulman and Garfield edition with

215

original manuscript, also reprinted in a modern edition.397 The final passage is a modern translation of the original text, provided by Evelyn Picon Garfield in the 1996 bilingual edition.398 Each of these passages are of the same scene in the Autobiografía, in which

Manzano, while still a tender youth, is witness to the whipping of his mother for protecting him against the cruel treatment of the overseer.

1839 Spanish Edition:

La culpa de mi madre fue que viendo que el mayoral me tiraba a matar, se le tiró encima y, haciéndose atender, pude ponerme en pie. […] Viendo yo a mi madre en este estado, suspenso, no podía ni llorar, ni discurrir, ni huir. Temblada mientras que, sin pudor, los cuatro negros se apoderaron de ella y la arrojaron en tierra para azotarla. Pedía por Dios. Por ella todo lo resistí. Pero al oír estallar el primer fustazo, convertido en león, en tigre o en la fiera más animosa, estuve a pique de perder la vida a manos del citado Silvestre. Pero pasemos en silencio el resto de esta escena dolorosa.399

1840 Madden Translation:

The fault of my mother was, that seeing they were going to kill me, as she thought, she inquired what I had done, and this was sufficient to receive a blow

modernizations and grammatical edits since, according to the editors, “the modern reader of either Spanish or English would find the original text or its direct translation a chore to read” (Shulman and Garfield, 29).

397. The modern reprint comes from Edward J. Mullen’s 1981 edition in which he notes that no modifications of his edition were made (vii). The original 1840 edition of the text is housed at the British Museum and Library. Mullen notes in his introduction that Madden’s translation differs greatly in terms of narrative structure from the original Autobiografía. While a few explanations for this structural modification are supplied, Mullen notes that a likely explanation “would be that Madden’s translation is in reality a reconstruction of the Spanish original designed to reflect abolitionist views, which would explain why the text highlights in particular the degradations of slavery” (13).

398. This is the same edition that has been used as my primary source text.

399. Shulman and Garfield edition, 72.

216

and to be further chastised. At beholding my mother in this situation, for the first time in her life, (she being exempted from work) stripped by the negroes and thrown down to be scourged, overwhelmed with grief and trembling, I asked them to have pity on her for God’s sake; but at the sound of the first lash, infuriated like a tiger, I flew at the mayoral, and was near losing my life in his hands; but let us throw a veil over the rest of this doleful scene.400

1996 Picon Garfield Translation:

My mother’s mistake was that she assaulted the overseer when she saw he was about to kill me and, while he was dealing with her, I was able to stand up. […] Bewildered, seeing my mother in this position, I could neither cry nor think nor flee. I trembling as the four blacks shamelessly overpowered her and threw on the ground to whip her. I prayed to God. For her sake I endured everything. But when I heard the first crack of the whip I became a lion, a tiger, the fiercest beast, and I was about to lose my life at the hands of the aforementioned Silvestre. But let us pass over the rest of this painful scene.401

In all three editions of this scene, Manzano acknowledges the trauma of witnessing his mother’s beating, and abruptly ends it in a moment of silence. Manzano’s descriptive silence echoes that of Prince and Equiano: he encounters a recollected moment too emotionally traumatic to fully disclose to the reader, resulting into a narrative slip of ineffability. It is a moment in which his mother, his emotional anchor in a sea of slavery, is thrown to the ground and whipped into submission. The shame and sorrow felt by

Equiano and Prince in varying moments of their narratives, reverberates in this sequence.

Though eleven years separate the publication of Prince’s History and Manzano’s account, there appears to be a universalizing quality to the traumatic silence of oppression, catalogued in moments of narrative silence.

400. Mullen edition, 87-88.

401. Schulman and Garfield edition, 73. 217

Similar to the other works discussed in this chapter, Manzano’s recollection of this childhood memory is one in which the crime of self-preserving agency is met with brutal punishment. In this sequence, there are three moments of silence worth discussing: that of the mother, the “four blacks,” and the narrative silence in the moment of recollection. Unique to Manzano’s account is his witnessing of his mother’s punishment.

Unlike Prince’s mother and Equiano’s sister, in Manzano’s narrative both author and reader witness the physical abuse laid upon a member of a kinship network. His mother remains silent as she is stripped and thrown to the ground; neither begging for mercy nor defending her honor. She appears to silently accept the punishment for protecting her son.

The only sound that is heard, in all three renderings of this scene, is the sound of the “first crack of the whip,” as Manzano’s mother receives her first lash. Though it can be assumed it was the first of many, unable to continue his narration, Manzano represses the traumatic memory for both himself and his reader.

In recollecting the memory of a childhood trauma, the narrator doubly experiences the moment, once in moment as the witness to the event and a second time as the moment is recorded for the reader. As Saidiya Hartman notes, once the episode is recorded and archived, the reader’s experience duplicates the violence of the episode, and

Manzano’s mother will be stripped and lashed into perpetuity.402 True of both Equiano and Prince, Manzano’s witnessing affectively connects the slave’s torment with the metropolitan reader. Manzano prays to an assumed Catholic God, recalls the public and humiliating spectacle of his mother being stripped and lashed, and powerfully illustrates the very human reaction to that spectacle, which seems can only be articulated in

402. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2. 218

animalistic terms of overwhelming anger (“lion” and “tiger”). The language of animality employed by Manzano to describe his emotions reflects that found in Prince; he is unable to express the nuanced sentiments that witnessing his mother’s punishment generates, and therefore must rely on the primal reactions of hatred and anger. While the earlier two accounts of separation provided by Equiano and Prince produce the affective responses of lament and even pity, Manzano’s immediate response of anger to then be followed by resignation with the premature “veiling of the scene” evokes a slightly different response from the reader. Yet, it also rhetorically accomplishes the goal of inciting action against slavery in the Spanish Caribbean.

The third silence worthy of discussion is that of Manzano’s punishers, the “four blacks” who begin beating Manzano, and then turn to punish his mother. Within the canon of autobiographical slave narratives, punishment is typically represented as being doled out by white planters or overseers. Yet, what this sequence implicitly illustrates is that West Indian slavery was historically rife with black-on-black violence. It was not uncommon for black slaves, in an effort to protect themselves from violent punishment and hard labor, to become a plantation overseer, policing their fellow slaves and even inflicting more violence than a white planter may have anticipated.403 The incorporation of black-on-black violence as a component of slavery speaks to the naturalized systemization of race-based oppression. It would appear that the only way for a slave to

403. See, for example, James Ramsay’s An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves, in the British Sugar Colonies (London: James Phillips, 1784). Ramsay discusses the story of “Quashie” a black overseer who grew to hate the violence he inflicted on others. He committed suicide in front of his master, stabbing himself in the throat, as an act of protest against the systemic oppression of slavery (249- 254). 219

gain authority on the plantation is by capitulating to the inherent violence of slavery and enforcing it as a planter would. The sheer number of men also speaks to the systemic incorporation of black-on-black violence. There was no need for four men to strip and lash Manzano’s mother, but the spectacle of performing that violence upon an older woman represents the length at which oppressive violence has been ingrained in enslaved mind. Just as Manzano’s mother does not beg for mercy, she neither pleads to her fellow brethren as a fellow slave. Violence enacted onto slaves by slaves was a common practice, the silence of the scene illustrates just how deeply that violence is culturally engrained.

The importance of this passage in terms of its historico-political context can be registered by the ways it has been translated. Madden’s 1840 translation, the first to circulate in any language, significantly modifies the original 1839 Spanish text with a great deal more pathos and narrative interiority. Arguably, there is a polemic component to the translational choices that Madden makes, orchestrating the scene to appeal to

British anti-slavery organizations. The first, and most important modification to the original is describing how Manzano’s mother is first stripped down before she is thrown to the ground to be whipped. In the original text, there is no mention of this additional position of vulnerability. The image of the mother thrown to the ground, stripped half naked by four men ready to whip her, conveys a compounded message of both a physical and a sexual threat that is not illustrated in the original 1839 passage. The image becomes that much more disturbing for the reader to witness, and therefore much more justifiable when Manzano acts like a “lion, a tiger,” or “the fiercest beast.” A second compelling difference between Madden’s and the original text is that Madden’s translation secularizes Manzano’s plea to God for mercy. In Madden’s translation, he is represented

220

as asking the four men to take pity on her mother “for God’s sake.” Yet, in the original text Manzano prays directly to God. Whether the prayer is aloud or silent is undetermined, but a reader may suspect that if he “endured” [resistí] being witness to his mother’s cruel treatment, his application to the divine was done in silence. The reorientation of his pleas from God to man in the translation blurs the religious lines between Protestant England and the Spanish Catholicism to which Manzano adhered. In erasing religious difference between narrator and reader, Madden draws a rhetorical proximity between the two and unites them to a common cause. The World Anti-Slavery

Society was designed to universalize the atrocities of slavery on a global scale; eliminating cultural and religious difference in the translation further facilitated transnational uniformity.

The 1996 Picon Garfield translation is more faithful to the original text, though with some present-day modifications that help provide context for the reader. As an example, the Picon Garfield translation adds the word “bewildered” in the second sentence as a means to contextualize Manzano’s emotional state, and further establish the circumstances for why he is unable to run away or cry out. Another addition to the Picon

Garfield text is the word “shamelessly,” included as an adverb to describe the actions of the four men who threw Manzano’s mother to the ground. Certainly, the addition of

“shamelessly” is meant to rhetorically express the urgency of the scene, and the threat that the four men pose to Manzano’s mother. This is an emotional flourish, decided by

Picon Garfield to fully capture the moment for the reader.

This brief but important analysis of Manzano’s Autobiografía demonstrates that

“affective piracy” within the rhetoric of European renderings of the African-Caribbean slave experience is also present in seemingly faithful translations. This is particularly true

221

when the translations are informed by a political agenda, independent of how noble that agenda may be. Despite the affective piracy Madden administers for the purposes of politically motivating the Anti-Slavery Society to focus on slavery in the Spanish

Caribbean, the moment of traumatic silence from the original is left unchanged. The trauma of the moment is “veiled” but not forgotten. As Madden’s translation was the first global “voice” of the Autobiografía, representing both Manzano and his story, the ineffability of the scene does not need to undergo any cultural translation. There is a stark similitude in the slave experience across both imperial borders and across time. Slavery, and the silence that it produced, needed to be stopped, in all countries and in all languages.

Conclusion

Over the long history of slavery in the Caribbean, voices have risen up against it.

The slave narrative, as a political genre of long prose writing, provided an important literary avenue in which the victims of slavery could record their stories and contribute to a transnational cause. The discussed instances of recorded silence humanized the slave subject just as much as they authorized his or her own authenticity within the narrative of abolitionist thought. Even though British and Spanish abolitionists were motivated by separate epistemes of nationalism and identity, the representation of the Afro-Caribbean subject remained coherent between the British and Spanish abolitionists.

The narratives of Manzano, Prince, and Equiano not only all speak to the incredible affective power of silence within a political movement, but also are a testament to the counter-discourses that surfaced in opposition to the racist rhetoric of pro-slavery

222

thinkers. The Abolition Movement, as well as the World Anti-Slavery Convention were both political and social campaigns composed of men and women from across the socioeconomic spectrum, contributed by people from multiple backgrounds, races, and cultures. United against the centuries-long narratives of racial inequality, African barbarity, and justified slavery, abolitionists and emancipationists shifted social and political history. Without these voices, and without these moments of critical, interrogative, and emotional silences, it is quite possible that African slavery in the

Caribbean may have well continued into the twentieth century.404 What this chapter also concludes is that that traumas of slavery and the slave trade can be traced through moments of narrative silence. In rendering moments of traumatic silence for the reader, the narrator simultaneously distills a moment of genuine human experience, while politically engaging in the greater injustices suffered by a collective of people half a world away. Further, as an affective response to trauma, its representation in a narrative conveys a sense of authentic experience, absent from fictional slave narratives. While the voice of the slave was a critical inclusion in the fight against Caribbean slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I also argue that narrative silence, in a sea of conflicting voices, can be just as resonant to a reader. The final chapter in this dissertation will continue the discussion of slavery in the Caribbean. Yet, the chapter will center on the apologists who fought to keep slavery intact after the success of the

Abolition Movement greatly influenced their way of life. The plantation anxieties about the enslaved population are most pronounced in the Caribbean gothic.

404. The last country in the Caribbean to end slavery was Cuba in the year 1886. 223

Chapter 4: Tropical Terror: Obeah, Vodou, and Plantocratic Anxiety in the Caribbean Gothic

New-come buckra, He get sick, He tak fever, He be die; He be die. New come, &c. --Jamaican song, ca. 1807405

405. This song was overheard by Robert Renny upon his first arrival to Jamaica in 1807. He records that “three or four black females came to the side of the ship [in a canoe], for the purpose of selling oranges and other fruits. When about to depart, they gazed at the passengers, whose number seemed to surprise them; and as soon as the canoe pushed off, one of them sung the following words, while the others joined in the chorus, clapping their hands regularly, while it lasted” (An History of Jamaica. With Observations…, London: J. Cawthorn, 1807), 241. This scene is also discussed in detail in Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1-3.

224

Transatlantic travelers emigrating from Europe to seek their fortunes in the West

Indies were met with inhospitable climates, disease, the fear of slave uprisings, and death.406 For many, the fantasies of unfettered wealth that they imagined before their departure were upended and destroyed once docked in West Indian harbors. This is well illustrated by the 1800 “Johnny New Come in the Island of Jamaica,” a political cartoon by William Holland.407 In the twenty-one-frame narrative, the hopeful and idealistic

Johnny New-Come arrives in Jamaica, only to suffer a number of debilitating illnesses, to engage in drunken and licentious behavior, and finally to succumb to the “yellow claw of febris” before dying a gruesome and painful death.408 In the final frame of the narrative etching, Johnny is buried in a tightly-packed graveyard; the scattered bones of those who had come before him mark the long lineage of European death in the Jamaican environment. The universality of Johnny’s name, allocated to any prospective planter, signals the indiscriminate nature of death’s hand in the Caribbean; the cartoon provided an ominous warning to those tempted to find their fortune across the Atlantic.

Between the years 1807 and 1836, relatively successful plantation owners and their families were further worried that the life that they had known, dependent upon the economic apparatus of slavery, would degrade after the abolition of the transatlantic slave

406. Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 13-29.

407. William Holland, Johnny New-Come in the Island of Jamaica, 1800, etching colored, 30.3cm x 48.2 cm., John Carter Brown Library Collection, Providence. http://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~2~2~600~100495:Johnny- NEW-COME-in-the-ISLAND-of-JA#. A copy of this image is available as an appendix.

408. Holland, frame 14. 225

trade. Fear of both literal and metaphoric plantocratic death haunted the Caribbean planter class as France and England moved closer to slave emancipation in their colonies.

A wealth of legal documents and pamphlets testify to planters’ fears and anxieties.

Within the realm of fiction, these fears were manifest in the burgeoning novel genre of the Caribbean gothic. The genre term was coined by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert in her

“Colonial and postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean,” where she contends that the

“‘literature of nightmare’ was, from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to the colonial setting, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening.”409 For Paravisini-Gebert, the Caribbean gothic was a genre that was infused with the “darkness” of the colonial landscape. It was also a literary site where new and horrific representations of otherness produced a genre distinguished from its gothic antecedents in mid-eighteenth-century Europe.

Paravisini-Gebert’s conceptual framework for the Caribbean gothic is the starting point for this chapter’s discussion. She, as well as Carol Davison, provide a productive definition and overview of the Caribbean gothic.410 However, there has not been a scholar who has satisfactorily read through to the literary progenitors of the Caribbean gothic genre to establish its conventions and tropes. Similar to the Bildungsroman, the gothic is

409. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “Colonial and postcolonial Gothic: the Caribbean” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 229-257.

410. Carol Davison, “Anglo-Caribbean Gothic.” The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith. Blackwell Reference Online, 2013. 29 November 2017.

226

a genre that serves as an umbrella term for a number of sub-genres that underscore certain categorical tropes. This chapter provide a critical analysis of the literary conventions that make the Caribbean gothic a form distinct from other branches of the genre. It is a form that did not arise out of a literary vacuum, nor did it simply appropriate tropes from the European and British forms. Rather, I contend that the gothic genre evolved from the material conditions and political climate of the early nineteenth-century

Caribbean. Much like the other genres discussed in this dissertation, I claim that the gothic genre’s multifaceted evolution was contributed to by the historical moment of intense transatlantic debate over the political and economic state of the Caribbean.

At its core, the Caribbean gothic is an artistic manifestation of one major fear that existed within the West Indian colonial setting that will be discussed in this chapter: the fear of slave insurrection. Particularly after the Haitian Revolution in 1791, when Haitian slaves overturned the French colonial powers with military force, British planters feared that the same would happen in Jamaica or their Antillean colonies. The connections between Haiti (Saint-Domingue) and Jamaica were particularly strong. Not only were the two colonies geographically close, but both were considered the economic powerhouses for French (Haiti) and British (Jamaica) sugar production within the colonial Caribbean network. With increased production came an increased demand for slaves by the end of the eighteenth century, and plantation concerns in Haiti and Jamaica mirrored each other, particularly given that both populations had a large number of slaves and, for different

227

reasons, a significant number of free blacks.411 By 1789, slaves and free blacks composed

95% of the Haitian population, and in Jamaica slaves accounted for nearly 98% of the total population.412 Unnerved by an apparently dwindling number of whites, an increasing black population, and ameliorationist strategies established by revised versions of the Code Noir and British abolitionists, French and British planters believed that “the progressive increase of the free coloured people [was] adverse to the public peace and

411. The French Code Noir was more lenient than British slave codes regarding manumission, allowing more slaves to purchase their freedom and freedom for their families. Jamaica, on the other hand, had a large Maroon population. When Spain had initial imperial control of Jamaica in the seventeenth century, large groups of slaves managed to escape into the island’s rocky and densely forested interior. In 1655, when the British took control of the island from Spain, they had negotiated with the Maroon population that there would be peace between the colonial power and the Maroons should the latter agree to returning runaway slaves. Increasing anxiety over runaway slaves joining the Maroon population occurred with the end of the slave trade (i.e. runaway slaves could no longer be replaced with newly imported slaves). For more information on the differences between British slave codes and the French Code Noir, see Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2013), 49-75; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 50-53; 60-67. For more information about the Maroons see Richard B. Sheridan “The Maroons of Jamaica, 1730-1830: Livelihood, Demography and Health,” in Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World, edited by Gad Heuman (London: Frank Cass, 1986).

412. B.W. Higman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147; James Walvin, Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire (Malden: Blackwell Press, 2001), 194; Michael Craton, “Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West Indies,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 356. Maroon populations not included in the Jamaican census.

228

security.”413 Planters also felt that they were economically debilitated on two fronts: by the harsh conditions of the West Indian tropics, and the deprivation of incoming slave cargo, which then directly impacted the number of laborers on a given plantation. In his

Apology for the West Indians, F.G. Smyth laments that the planters, who had suffered the

“degraded conditions” of the West Indies “to promote the trade and welfare of the mother-country,” were having their “prescriptive rights of regulating their own internal concerns invaded” by abolitionists.414 In other words, the planter class, after 1807 but before 1836, feared that their colonial authority would be attacked from both within and outside of the colony.

This chapter examines the fear and anxieties of the planter class as they are represented in the Caribbean gothic, a genre enmeshed with the literary representation of imperial otherness. The root causes of the colonial fears of slave insurrection and

413. Joseph Marryat, Thoughts on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and Civilization of Africa; with Remarks on the African Institution and Examination of the Report of their Committee, recommending a General Registry of Slaves in the British West India Islands (London: J.M Richardson, 1816), 134. Marryat denounces the efforts of the abolitionists by noting that, should colonial legislatures pass certain ameliorationist bills, including the admission of slave testimony in the colonial court system, “witnesses would easily be found, hearty in the cause in which they appear, and looking forward to the establishment of their own freedoms hereafter, by some of their black brethren, in the very same manner. Thus, would a short and effectual process be invented, for the emancipation of all the negroes in the British West India [sic] Colonies; and this appears to be the aim of the labored but insidious position" (168). Marryat insisted that ameliorationist strategies that would empower the slave and free black classes would “violate the decency” (174-5).

414. F.G. Smyth, An Apology for West Indians, and Reflections of the Policy of Great Britain’s Interference in the Internal Concerns of the West India Colonies, (London: James Ridgeway, 1824), 19, 28-29.

229

confiscation of plantocratic power branched into a number of gothic literary tropes that I discuss at length. Three texts represent the earliest manifestations of these tropes, two coming from the British-Atlantic tradition, and one from the French-Atlantic: Charlotte

Smith’s The Story of Henrietta (1800), Cynric Williams’ Hamel the Obeah Man (1827) and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1825). These works best demonstrate the early intersection of Caribbean politics and gothic fiction within the British and French colonial contexts. They also catalyze the tropes that set the foundation for the Caribbean gothic, a genre that generates both horror and excitement for its reader well into the twentieth century.415 By closely reading these works within the historical frame in which they were written, I argue that the Caribbean gothic generated new literary categories of racial discourse that directly contributed to the genre into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.416

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section will briefly discuss the history of the gothic genre in the eighteenth century, beginning with Horace Walpole’s

1764 canonical work The Castle of Otranto as well as contemporary discussions about

415. In her discussion, Paravisini-Gerbert traces the Caribbean gothic in fiction and film to the 1980s, ending with the discussion of the 1996 Puerto Rican work Maldito amor (Sweet Diamond Dust) and Jean Rhys’ portrayal of Bertha in her 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea.

416. To keep within the historical limits of this chapter, the tropes of the zombie and zombification will be excluded. Literary representations of the modern zombie did not feature within the Caribbean gothic until the twentieth century; eighteenth-century accounts of the “undead” existed, but were dismissive. See Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 212. For an example of a dismissive planter account, see: Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1793), II, pp. 62- 65.

230

the literary aesthetics of terror and the sublime. The second section will analyze political pamphlets that historically contextualize the fluid cross perforations between pro-slavery writings condemning slave emancipation and the fictional writings of the Caribbean gothic. Specifically, the representation of Obeah and Vodou, in addition to the fear of violent slave insurrection and conspiring missionaries, will set the stage for the literary analyses of the three works of gothic fiction. The third section will be the discussion of

Smith, Hugo, and Williams, particularly how their transatlantic fiction represents the strongest tenets of the Caribbean gothic.

Section One: Pleasurable Horror: Terror, Sublimity and Gothic Fiction

Modern gothic fiction had its start in Europe with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of

Otranto: A Gothic Story.417 In the preface to the first edition, Walpole claims that the narrative is derived from a sixteenth-century Italian printing, describing the events between “1095, the era of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards.”418 Styled after the European romance, The Castle of Otranto concerns the fate of the family of Prince Manfred, cursed with the prophecy that the true heir of the estate will claim his rightful place whenever he “should be grown too large to inhabit it.”419 The fictional framing device of the story, described as being composed in 1529 and

417. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, edited by Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003).

418. Walpole, Castle of Otranto, 59.

419. Ibid, 73.

231

found “in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England,” establishes the temporal juxtaposition of the gothic novel as a genre.420 “Gothic,” as a term referring to the pan-European architectural style that dates to the middle ages, and the “novel,” as a relatively new form of prose fiction, establish a compounded tension between the “old” and “new” of a reading experience.421 From this temporal tension emerge the composite features of the gothic that situates the reader in both the past and the present: the reader is confined within a gothic narrative, but also safely distanced from the events experienced by the characters.

The Castle of Otranto makes clear that “terror, the author’s principle engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions.”422 The visceral

420. Ibid, 59.

421. Ian Watt notes in his “Time and Family in the Gothic Novel: The Castle of Otranto,” “it is hardly too much to say that etymologically the term ‘Gothic Novel” is an oxymoron for ‘Old New.’” In Eighteenth-Century Life, 10:3 (1986), pp. 159-171, p. 158.

422. Angela Wright convincingly traces the French roots of the gothic novel in her Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820: The Import of Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). She contends that “[British] literary works that are now characterized as ‘gothic’ […] are sprung from French sources, nurtured by French culture, and formative in their veiled, measured, contemplative, independent and often witty responses to Anglo-French hostilities” (10). It is also within this context that the gothic genre can be explored from both within the French and English literary contexts— the genre evolved from cross-cultural literary propagation. Quote from Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 60. In his notes, editor Frederick Frank writes that Walpole recognized a specific definition of “terror.” “Terror indicated and anticipated dread of something fearful, the emotion often mingled with awe or amazement” (74).

232

experience of terror not only drives the plot, but also incites numerous conflicting emotional responses for the reader. Like the temporal disorientation of the gothic novel, so too does the jarring juxtaposition of “pity” and “terror” produce a reading experience that is both frightening and pleasurable. Contemporary readers meditated on the fraught juxtaposition of these emotions elicited from reading gothic fiction, notably Anna Laetitia

Aikin (later, Barbauld) and Edmund Burke. In each of their philosophical assessments, there is an idea that being witness to the tragedy of another produces the affective response of what Burke identifies as the “sublime.”

In her essay, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” Aikin writes that it is human nature to dwell on “objects of true terror,” as long as objective distance and

“moral feelings” do not intervene and lead to action.423 These sociological assessments are derived from daily observation: “The greediness with which the tales of ghosts and goblins, of murders, earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, and all the most terrible disasters attending to human life, are devoured by every ear […].”424 Aikin examines a fundamental quality of human nature, in which a subject would like to know an experience without having to go through the anxiety of living through the experience first-hand. When one hears of a traumatizing event (shipwreck, fire, etc.), “the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity” overwhelms any other sensibility, particularly when there is no immediate threat to the listener’s life. However, should the event be too proximate to a

423. Anna Laetitia Aikin, “On the pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (London: J. Johnson, 1773) Accessed from Penn English < http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/barbauldessays.html>, 2.

424. Aikin, “On the Pleasure,” 3.

233

witnessing subject, or “too near for common nature,” the “overbalance of pain” renders the experience no longer pleasurable, but rather life-threatening and close to absolute terror, which is another passion altogether. The difference rests in objective distance from the experience of terror, as in instances when “our moral feelings are not in the least concerned,” or, as Aikin discusses, in reading. “Artificial terror” can be produced by certain reading experiences, thus rendering the readers enraptured by the excitement of their “sublime and vigorous imagination.”425 She adds that even “children…listen with pale and mute attention to the frightful stories of apparitions, […] chained by the ears and fascinated by curiosity.”426 It is readerly distance, therefore, that allows the pleasure of terror to be experienced in gothic fiction. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto originated this method of readerly distance to evoke the sense of “artificial terror” produced by the supernatural encounters and darkened passages found within the novel and discussed by

Aikin.

Aikin’s theories of the pleasure derived from reading gothic fiction are indebted to Edmund Burke’s extensive discussion of the “sublime” in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful.427 For Burke, the sublime is defined as the affective response in which a “passion similar to terror” is produced, “though it should have no idea of danger connected with it.”428 The operative term for Burke is “similar” to terror,

425. Ibid.

426. Ibid.

427. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757. Edited by James T. Boulton (New York: Routledge Classics, 2008).

428. Ibid, 132.

234

as the actual passion of terror results in the body violently reacting to the possible threat.

While Burke distinguishes “pleasure” and “delight” in degrees of association to pain

(Aikin does not make these distinctions), he also contends that certain objects or states of being can produce feelings of the sublime. The contingency of course is objective distance. Similar to Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments, discussed in the last chapter, affective sympathy once removed from an actual experience produces a sense of pleasure, “and the pleasure which we find in conversing with a man whom we can entirely sympathize with in all his passions, seems to do more than compensate the painfulness of that sorrow with which the view of the situation affects us.”429 For both

Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, the simulation of an experience, mediated by another subject or object is what allows the sublime to be felt without crossing the threshold into despondency or terror. From the sublime, pleasure and a “passion similar to terror” are embraced simultaneously.

Burke elaborates on attitudinal responses that elicit feelings of the sublime: vastness, power, infinity, magnificence, obscurity, and lesser elements like darkness or blackness discussed in subsections of his work. An often-cited discussion of the Burkean sublime is his focus on blackness, as it alludes to larger ontological philosophies of racial

429. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: printed for A. Millar, 1759), 19-20. Accessed via biblio.org. https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_MoralSentiments_p.pdf

235

hierarchies later established by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.430 In this section of A

Philosophical Enquiry, Burke writes:

Blackness and darkness are in some degree painful by their natural operation, independent of any associations whatsoever. I must observe, that the ideas of darkness and blackness are much the same; and they differ only in this, that blackness is a more confined idea. Mr. Cheselden has given us a very curious story of a boy, which had been born blind, and continued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he was then couched for a cataract, by which operation he received his sight. […] Cheselden tells us, that the first time the boy saw a black object, it gave him great uneasiness; and that some time after, upon accidentally seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight.431

Scholars have critiqued the racial politics that infuse this description, interrogating the assumptions Burke makes about the inherent “horror” that is produced by a black woman.432 What is interesting to note is the distinction between the terror of darkness and the represented or “confined” blackness of the woman herself. Total darkness, as represented by the boy’s blindness, is the object that produces absolute terror. The

“confined” blackness of the woman on the street, once removed from the actual

430. In his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes an Enlightenment view of world history as a series of dialectic struggles of “lordship and bondage.” Not only does the unfolding consequence occur at the level of the individual (mediated through experience and memory), but it also can occur at a scale of the world’s telos. History is described in successive stages, with victors claiming global dominance over other “subservient” or lesser nations and regions. Succinctly discussed by Lisa Lowe, Hegel’s narrative “permits the subsumption of Asian, Mediterranean Arab and Muslim, and other non-European world through colonial development, it naturalizes indigenous disappearance and leaves Africa at the threshold of world history itself” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 145-147.

431. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 142.

432. Srivinas Aravamudan’s Tropicopolitans: Colonial and Agency, 1688-1804 makes such a critique when considering the represented “vacancy” of the black body and the literal and political “shock” it provides when being witnessed, physically producing pain for the viewer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 199-201.

236

experience of darkness is what is registered as the Burkean sublime (as opposed to pure terror). Though the unknown black woman is transfigured into a casualty of contemporary politics through Burke’s example, his examination is not directly a critique on matters of racial difference. Consequently, however, his description of the feelings of sublimity arising from represented blackness but not actually experienced darkness, firmly established a connection between terror and blackness that would be explored more fully in the Caribbean gothic.

Toward the end of his life, a more disparaging discussion of blackness comes from Burke’s reading of the Haitian Revolution, particularly as it is contextualized by the

French Jacobinism that he so adamantly condemned. Burke’s position on slavery was a gradualist one. He believed in slavery’s eventual abolition in the West Indies, but also believed that a staggered approach would be more beneficial than total and immediate emancipation espoused by Wilberforce and Ramsey.433 Despite his gradualist outlook, his views toward racial equality appear blurred when discussing the events of 1790s Saint-

Domingue. In a letter dated August 1791, Burke writes:

But let this [French] constitution be examined by is practical effects in the French West India colonies. These, notwithstanding three disastrous wars, were most happy and flourishing till they heard of the rights of man.434

And in another letter dated 1793:

433. Sunil Agnani, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 139.

434. Qtd in Agnani, 133.

237

What a dreadful affair is this of St. Domingo. In horror with regard to the act, and as a cause of indignation against the actors, it exceeds the late massacre of Paris. The systematic plan of extermination the Jacobins have pursued in [sic] that fine island, and which they intended for every other island, seems to me to form the top of climax of their wickedness.435

Sunil Agnani’s close readings of these passages conclude that Burke’s fears of class domination in the French Revolution shifted to a fear of racial inversion in the Haitian

Revolution.436 To have Jacobin logic function as the underpinning of a social-class structure demanded recourse enough for Burke, but a black Jacobin was constructed as a direct threat to England.437 Though his work on the sublime precedes his political views on the terrors of the French and Haitian Revolution by thirty-five years, it is clear that he collapses the actions of both the white and black Jacobins with that of nefarious gothic villains. In the second passage, Burke concludes that Rousseauian philosophy provided the blueprint of malice that would be executed by black revolutionaries—the consequence of such actions worse than that of Paris, implicitly because it was executed by black slaves against white creoles. Though he does not speak specifically of the sublime, he invokes the reactions of disdain and horror over the outcome of the Haitian

Revolution, and how the Jacobin logic of the French Revolution informed the actions of insurgent slaves in the West Indies. For Burke, the black Jacobin was an unnatural

435. Ibid., 140.

436. Ibid., 141.

437. Ibid., 150.

238

creature, a malformed subject along a spectrum of political malfeasance, bent on destroying the creole planter class.438

Burke’s observed triangulated tensions between abolitionists, the West Indian creole planter class, and insurgent slaves, escalated after the abolition of the slave trade in

1807. Since the English had a relative commercial monopoly on the trade itself for most of the eighteenth century, both British and non-British colonies in the West Indies were impacted by the decision to end the trade.439 For many planters, the trade’s end meant the inevitable downfall of the plantation economy in the colonies. Furthermore, the immediate aftermath of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, which was documented and included in the slave trade debates, was implicated as a primary cause of devastation for both the colonies and metropole alike. Ideologically, the black victory over the white creoles in Saint-Domingue upset much of the transatlantic structural racism that not only distinguished white from black, but also placed a socio-economic value system of worth and value based on skin tone. For many planters who clung to the belief that racial hierarchies of white supremacy were imperative to economic progress, the black victory over white planters in Saint-Domingue came as a frightening shock. In terms of the

438. For an extended discussion of Burke’s racial politics in Haiti, particularly as they are contrast with the Indian Rebellions, see Agnani, 133-161.

439. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 167. James Walvin, Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 260-261; Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 170-176.

239

Burkean sublime, the absolute terror planters felt at the end of the slave trade transmuted into feelings of the sublime for a metropolitan reader who could consume these tensions and anxieties from an objective readerly spatial distance. As the genre of the Caribbean gothic evolved to embrace the politics of a post-abolition, post-revolutionary Caribbean, the topics of Vodou and Obeah became the apparatuses in which the sublime could be rendered.440

Section Two: Vodou and Obeah in the French and British Caribbean

At the crossroads of plantocratic anxiety in the West Indies and gothic fiction are the African-creole practices of Vodou441 and Obeah.442 Historically, Obeah and Vodou are two unique religious systems that existed and evolved out of the British (Obeah) and

French (Vodou) plantation slave communities. Both are also still practiced in the

Caribbean to this day. The history of Obeah as a syncretic religious system which

440. The gothic, though not overtly a genre of social critique, can surface and resolve particular social issues. Bridget Marshall’s The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790-1860 details how gothic fiction became a genre “to indict the contemporary political and social situation in a popular and widely read forum” (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 7. Marshall discusses how the social injustices and anxieties surrounding religious otherness, false imprisonment, legal corruption and censorship, gender politics and scientific subversion were all played out in the Gothic. My examination of the Caribbean gothic will add an additional component to Marshall’s initial claim, as planters saw their new-found positions as a kind of social injustice.

441. Also spelled: voodoo, voodu, voudon, voudoo, Voudou, Voudoun, vudu, and vaudoux. Accessed at Oxford English Dictionary Online 16 Feb 2017.

442. Also spelled: obeiah, obear, obia, obea, Obeah, obeeyah, oboe, obiah, obeia. Also written short-hand “obi” or “oby.” Accessed at Oxford English Dictionary Online, 16 Feb 2017.

240

merged medicinal and spiritual practice has a long, complicated history in the

Anglophone Caribbean. 443 Obeah was a catchall term for the planter class, describing the co-evolving African-based shamanistic practices that they hesitantly acknowledged as an important social component to their laboring slave populations. The Obeahman or woman’s knowledge of local herbs, homeopathic treatments for diseases or disorders would occasionally lead them to serve in a slave hospital or under a physician.444 But for the vast majority of planters across the Anglophone Caribbean, the spiritualistic presence of Obeah practitioners within slave communities was registered as a threat to the fragile, post-abolition but pre-emancipation plantation economy. After Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760

443. The creolization of the practice from its West African origins within the Anglophone Caribbean has been well documented; even the term “Obeah” is under consistent etymological scrutiny, further elucidating the complex origins and evolution of both name and practice. Joseph Williams writes in his Vodous and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft that Obeah derives its origins from Ashanti witchcraft from which the god “Aub” or “Obi” is worshipped (New York: Dial Press, 1932), 213. Much of the functioning assumptions supporting his work have been debunked, though Handler and Bilby have noted in Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760-2011 that as recent as 2009, Obeah has been exclusively tied to witchcraft or sorcery (Mona: University of the West Indies, 2012), 9-15. This reductionist approach to Obeah has been most recently redressed in the special issue of Atlantic Studies in which editors Kelly Wisecup and Toni Wall Jauden write that Obeah was “mutually constitutive and interconnected” with medicine, “shaping and partitioning the Atlantic World in its denominational and epistemological contours,” (129). As the Ashanti origins of the practice have been debunked, Obeah is defined as “‘protean institutional structure encompassing ethnic and Pan-African religious cultures’” (Dianne Stewart qtd in Wisecup and Jauden). See “On knowing and not knowing Obeah” Atlantic Studies 12:2 (June 2015), 129-143.

444. Juanita De Barros, “‘Setting things right’: Medicine and magic in British Guiana, 1803-1838. Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slaves Studies, 25:1 (2004), 25-34.

241

Jamaica, in which it was rumored that Obeahmen and women played a major role in the execution of the revolt, Obeah and all affiliated rituals, dances, and fetish objects were banned across the Anglophone Caribbean. 445

Within the Francophone Caribbean, Vodou had undergone its own creolization, incorporating elements of Catholicism into its own African-based system. According to religious historian Joseph Williams, Vodou’s development in the French colonial

Caribbean, and its absence within the British Caribbean, is a matter of inter-tribal African warfare—conquered tribes in the Whydah region of the eighteenth century formed the dominant captured African population that was to be enslaved in Haiti. 446 Additionally,

445. As Diana Paton and Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby discuss, Obeah is still criminalized in many parts of the post-colonial Caribbean. Paton, Cultural Politics, 5; Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, passim.

446. Williams published his work Voodoos and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft in 1932, and recent scholarship has corrected some of his published claims. He quotes the eighteenth-century British factor Colonel Ellis when writing of the geographical facets of Vodou’s existence in the French Caribbean: “‘In 1724 the Dahomies [a snake worshipping tribe] invaded Adra and subjugated it; three years later Whydah was conquered by the same foe. This period is beyond question that in which Haiti first received the vodu of the Africans. Thousands of Negroes from these serpent- worshipping tribes were at the time sold into slavery, and were carried across the Atlantic to the Eastern island. They bore with them the cult of the snake’” (57). Though Williams was incorrect about the tribal groups taken to the French Caribbean and the exact year of Dahomey occupation, his overall claim about British and French importing different regional groups with distinct religious practices is correct. Stephanie Smallwood confirms with elaborate detail the increased African warfare at the start of the eighteenth century, to include King Agaja’s successful expansion into Whydah, (27). The distinction between the religious creolization processes of Obeah, Vodou and Santeria (not discussed in this chapter) is succinctly put by Karen McCarthy-Brown in her essay, “Afro- Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study.” She writes, “in Haiti, there are three clear lines of African influence: those of the Fon peoples, most of whom live in the area we now call Benin; the Yoruba peoples (Nigeria); and the Kongo peoples (Angola and Bas- Zaire). By contrast Cuban traditional religion is dominated by Yoruba influence, while

242

in the eighteenth century, French slave ships were harbored at different sites along the

African coastline from those by their British counterparts, leading to cultural distinctions between slave demographics across the Caribbean.447 In terms of religious practices, among the major differences between Vodou and Obeah is Vodou’s sanctification of the snake. Snake worship was an invaluable component to Vodou, as it connected the Haitian enslaved to the ancient African paternal spirit of Damballa, a “world-creator” figure which took the form of a snake.448 While there may have been Vodou practitioners knowledgeable in local medicinal treatments, French colonial planters deemphasized the seemingly positive characteristics of the religious practice and rather focused on Vodou’s inherent violence, animal (and reported human) sacrifice, “demoralizing scenes” of dance and reckless orgies, spiritual possession, and purported cannibalism. 449

that of Jamaica has its deepest roots among the Akan of Ghana.” In Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, edited by Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde- Smith (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 1.

447. The French were predominantly harbored at Senegambia and Bight of Benin. The English had a relative monopoly along the West African coast, but predominantly purchased slaves from present-day Angola and Bight of Biafra. See The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,

448. Brown, “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality,” 10.

449. Unlike Obeah, Vodou cosmology emphasized an individual’s spiritual and corporeal drives or appetites. McCarthy-Brown writes, “In fact, sexuality is perhaps the central animating force in all of life. Much of Vodou ritualizing suggests that sexual and spiritual energy come from the same source,” (10). Joseph Williams draws much of his evidence for cannibalism from the accounts of Médéric Lous Elie Moreay de Saint-Mery. “His youth in Martinique, his years as a legal practitioner and later as a Magistrate in Haiti, his executive and administrative ability as shown in the most trying days of the outbreak of the Revolution in France, all mark him out as a witness of the utmost

243

The apparent increasing prevalence of Vodou and Obeah in the quotidian slave life of the French and British Caribbean came to a head between the time of the Haitian

Revolution (1791) and the mid 1820’s, when plantocratic fears of the end of slavery evolved into an anticipated inevitability.450 Despite the height of plantocratic anxiety occurring toward the end of Caribbean slavery, both Obeah and Vodou had been criminalized before 1791 as a means for white creole planters to surveil and control the daily lives of the slaves. As mentioned earlier, Obeah had been criminalized in Jamaica in

1760, and laws against the practice were adopted throughout the Anglophone Caribbean colonies shortly thereafter. Though not directly mentioned in Le Code Noir, Vodou was prohibited from being practiced; planters were, by law, to teach Roman Catholicism to all incoming slaves.451 Over the evolution of English colonial slave codes and Le Code Noir,

“deviant” religious practices were progressively regulated and condemned. Increasingly,

reliability” (58). Also see Voodoos and Obeahs, pp. 65-75 for Williams’ descriptions of spiritual possession, child sacrifice and cannibalism.

450. Since the earliest displacement of the enslaved, iterations of Voudou and Obeah have been practiced in some way, however not necessarily acknowledged or recorded by the planter class until 1760. See Olmos and Paravisini-Gerbert, Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah and the Caribbean (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 2; Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 144-152; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 43-44.

451. In the 1788 Le Code Noir, articles II-IV state that all colonial slaves “shall be instructed in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion and baptized,” to be enforced by military officials. All other religious practices that were considered “false, illicit and seditious” (concenticules, illicites & seditieuse) were subject to punishment, including the masters who would knowingly permit the practices to take place, (Paris: Imprimeur de Roi, 1788), 294-295. Accessed via Google Books. 20 Feb 2017.

244

severe punishments for dissidents were administered, and even benign practices, including drum-beating and dancing were strictly prohibited. The material life of Vodou and Obeah were threatening to the social order of the plantations, as many planters saw their own authority over the lives and bodies of slaves losing to the collective strength of an Afrocentric, not Eurocentric, Caribbean.

The Haitian Revolution and its French and British transatlantic aftermath demonstrate how Vodou and Obeah were seen as nefarious components of slave rebellions, consequently leading to the violent deaths of planters and the utter destruction of their plantation property. The pamphlet titled, A Particular Account of the

Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes in St. Domingo […] was written as a translation of the official report made during the French National

Assembly, and submitted as evidence against the slave trade abolition in England.452 The translator emphatically claims that the pamphlet is an accurate translation of the

“disasters of St. Domingo, [which this translator] earnestly recommends their attentive perusal to every thinking, dispassionate Englishman.”453 The account records moment after moment of savage violence and barbaric practice. When entering a planter’s home,

452. A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes in St. Domingo, which began in August 1791: Being a Translation of the Speech made to the National Assembly, the 3rd of November 1791, by the Deputies from the General Assembly of the French Part of St. Domingo, 2nd edition, (London: J. Sewell, 1792). For an assessment of the role of rumor as this document was circulating (thereby complicating its legitimacy) see Laurent Dubois, Avengers, 97-102.

453. Ibid, iii.

245

for example, the pamphlet claims that it was “standard” for the “body of a white infant

[to be] impaled on a stake” while the “savage ringleader of a band” would ravish daughters in front of their fathers.454 All the while, the pamphlet suggests the insurrecting

Haitians would dance, holler, and dramatize each victory claimed against the planter, driven by an inherent carnal savagery and violent barbarism.455 The responsibility of the

Haitian Revolution lay squarely at the feet of the slaves themselves as well as the French emancipationist groups that fought to humanize the slave population:

The slaves who had been most kindly treated by their masters, were the very soul of the Insurrection. It was they who betrayed and delivered those humane masters to the assassin's sword; it was they who seduced and stirred up to revolt the gangs disposed to fidelity; it was they who massacred all who refused to become their accomplices. What a lesson for the Amis de Noirs!456

Though never explicitly connecting Vodou with the insurrection, this account does refer to rituals, cannibalism, rape and all “the refinements of barbarism” derived from “the atrocities of Africa.”457 The translator’s final call to the Parliamentary officials reading the Particular Account, is to be mindful of the rhetoric espoused by English abolitionists, and portends that what occurred in Haiti will happen in English colonies should Africans feel the liberty of emancipation.458

454. Ibid, 4, 7.

455. Ibid, 12.

456. Ibid, 8.

457. Ibid, 12.

458. Ibid, 21.

246

In France, the official report of the Haitian Revolution was complemented by circulating personal accounts, elaborate rumors, and mounting negrophobic attitudes by the end of the eighteenth century. Louis Narcisse Baudry Desloziéres, in his Les

Égaremens du Nigrophilisme, writes that Africans were inherently barbaric. His pamphlet recounts episodes of African torture, and masses of black corpses resulting from savage warfare in the Dahomey region.459 He concludes with examples of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism, derived from travel narratives along the African continent, and asserts that the “negro is a natural enemy to the white,” innately unable to comprehend

European modernity. Further, Desloziéres claims that the slaves of Saint Domingue are well adjusted to conditions of enslavement given their experiences on the African continent: “the slaves always seem more happy than those that are free.”460 For the slavery apologist, resuscitating slavery in Haiti would benefit both the French creole planters and the blacks themselves. Addressing the Haitian Revolution directly, planter J.

Félix Carteau, in his Les soirées bérmudiennes ou entretiens sur les événemens qui ont opéré la ruine de la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue argues that black violence is like a “terrifying force of nature.” Once “unleashed,” it destroys homes and families, like an “insurrectionary fire” cast down on innocent French-Caribbean

459. Louis Narcisse Baudry Desloziéres, Les Égaremens du Nigrophilisme (Paris: Chez Migneret, 1802), 14-18. Accessed online http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5790469j/f4.image.

460. Ibid, 51, 54. Original French: “Le Négre cest naturellement ennemi du Blanc” (51) and “aussi les esclaves m'ont toujour paru plus heureux, au fond, que les affranchises.” Translations my own.

247

citizens.461 For many of the French creole planters, as well as metropolitan readers struck by the horrific accounts of violent slave insurgency that sprung from the Haitian

Revolution, it seemed brutally apparent that slavery needed to return to Haiti.

The language of African barbarity appears uniform in the French and British plantocratic contexts, as is demonstrated by the essay Emancipation in Disguise, Or the

True Crisis of the Colonies, published in England just after the passing of the Slave Trade

Abolition Act.462 In it, the plantation anxiety over slave insurrection, promoted by

African barbarity is vividly expressed:

Hordes of blood-thirsty savages, intimately acquainted with every corner of the Planter's house, every retreat into which his family may be driven, every crevice in the whole country; mad with unnatural rage against all that deviates from the savage hue of their own brethren; pouring over each spot where European life exists; scattering on all sides, not destruction, for that would be mildness, but every exquisite form of ingenious torment; only stopping, in moments of satiety to lay aside the sword for the torch, and, in the intervals of mercy along, exchanging torment for murder; marching against the parent with the transfixed body of his butchered infant as a standard; sacrificing the weaker sex to their brutal lust, amidst the expiring bodies of husbands and kinsmen, and enacting

461. Ibid. Also summarized in Tessie Liu, “The Secret beyond White Patriarchal Power: Race, Gender and Freedom in the Last Days of Colonial Saint-Domingue,” French Historical Studies, 33: 3 (Summer 2010), 388.

462. Emancipation in Disguise, or the True Crisis of the Colonies. To which are Added Considerations upon Measures proposed for their Temporary Relief and Observations upon Colonial Monopoly […], (London: J. Ridgway, 1807). Though it will not be discussed here, an additional economic burden planters faced came from abolitionist groups that admittedly sought slave emancipation as their ultimate goal. Spearheaded by William Wilberforce, abolitionists suggested that England concentrate its efforts of sugar production in the East Indies, which did not practice outright slavery within its economic system. This pamphlet goes into detail on the pressures felt by British West Indian planters by the transition from Caribbean to South Asian sugar production. Also see On Protection to West-India Sugar, (London: J.M. Richardson, 1823).

248

other deeds of such complicated horror, that it is not permitted to the pen of a European to describe or to name them.463

These scenes of terror transport the reader into an environment of gothic literary quality.

It is a fantastic nightmare constructed out of the anticipated consequences of freed slaves in the Anglophone Caribbean. The author is certainly writing an episode of fiction

(though purportedly founded on historical reports), reflective of certain gothic tropes that would show up in the genre’s prose, but are here cemented as the definitive consequences that follow amelioration and emancipation. Slaves appear to be “intimately acquainted” with all possible hiding places in the planter’s home; they are additionally described in animalistic terms, “pouring” and “scattering” like insects, pillaging homes and annihilating their victims. Not unlike the traumatic events experienced from the slaves themselves in the previous chapter, these events are so horrific that English decency prohibits their description. For many who describe it, including Edmund Burke, the devastations of the Haitian Revolution superseded its European predecessor.

Further evidence of plantocratic anxiety and its literary overlap with the gothic genre can be found in the journal entries of Matthew Gregory Lewis, a popular gothic writer of his era. A large portion of Lewis’ wealth was derived from his family’s

Jamaican plantation, which he inherited in 1812, and between 1815 and 1817 Lewis made two voyages to his plantations Westmoreland and Cornwall. His posthumously published Journal of a West India Proprietor chronicles these two visits. Though none of

463. Emancipation in Disguise, 63.

249

the literary texts in Lewis’ extensive gothic oeuvre are set in the Caribbean, his Journal certainly highlights the plantation anxieties shared by his fellow creole planters, particularly in his discussion of Obeah.464 While on his first trip, Lewis’ criticism of

Obeah is from the perspective of anthropological disinterestedness: “There are certainly many excellent qualities in the negro character; their worst faults appear to be, this prejudice respecting Obeah, and the facility with which they are frequently induced to poison to the right hand and to the left [sic].”465 Though he continues to speak of fellow planters poisoned by their slaves and the role that Obeah played in this “vile trick” against the planters, Lewis concedes that it is because slaves have not been taught “white

Obeah” or Christianity, and that is what leads them to subversive action.466

The journal entries from Lewis’ second excursion to Jamaica, however, are infused with more vitriolic and anti-abolitionist rhetoric. His entries consistently attack

464. In his discussion of William Beckford’s writing, Simon Gikandi argues that well-known authors consciously attempted to eschew their plantocratic associations. Beckford’s renowned art collection was catalyzed by the fact that he was the heir to a wealth plantation: “As part of the plantocracy in Jamaica, the Beckfords were on top of their world, but in England, they were wealthy but without pedigree.” Consequently, Beckford consciously never wrote his fiction to be set in the West Indies, and very rarely wrote of his plantation-based wealth. Associations with the West Indies for the affluent and the aristocratic were a detriment to one’s reputation. Therefore, Beckford collected art and wrote Romantic fiction, but rarely discussed his connections to the West Indies. It is quite possible that Lewis, like Beckford, also felt the need to divorce his literary popularity in England from his commercial wealth in Jamaica. See Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 125-139. Quotation on page 134.

465. Lewis, Journal, 148-149.

466. Ibid, 148-150.

250

the abolitionist and Methodist agendas advancing slave emancipation while also demonstrating progressive paranoia against his slaves, animosity toward free blacks, and bitter descriptions of Obeah.

From entry taken on 25 February 1817:

A negro, named Adam, has long been the terror of my whole estate. He was accused of being an Obeah-man, and persons notorious for the practice of Obeah had been found concealed from justice in his house, who were [sic] afterwards convicted and transported. He was strongly suspected of having poisoned more than twelve negroes, men and women; having been displaced by my former trustee from being principle governor, in revenge he put poison into his water jar. […] On searching his house, a musket with a plentiful accompaniment of powder and ball found [sic] concealed, as also a considerable quantity of materials for the practice of Obeah: the possession of either of the above articles authorizes the magistrates to pronounce a sentence of transportation. […] He is a fine-looking man between thirty and forty, square built, and of great bodily strength, and his countenance equally expresses intelligence and malignity. The sum allowed me for him is one hundred pounds currency, which is scarcely a third of his worth as a labourer, but which is the highest value which a jury is permitted to mention.467

From entry taken on 4 March 1817:

The whole advantages to be derived by negroes from becoming Christians, seemed to consist with them in two points; being a superior species of magic itself, it [Christianity] preserved them from black Obeah; and by enabling them to take an oath upon the bible to the truth of any lie which it might suit them to tell, they believed that it would give them power of humbugging the white people with perfect ease and convenience.468

From entry taken on 8 April 1817:

This is the sixth death in the course of the first three months of the year, and we have not as yet a single birth for a set-off. Say what one will to the negroes, and treat them as well as one can, obstinate devils, they will die!469

467. Ibid, 350-357.

468. Ibid, 374.

469. Ibid, 388.

251

In conjunction with the third chapter’s discussion of Lewis’ racist views of inherent black inferiority, the language in these entries is cynical and riddled with anxiety.470 Obeah had a social power over Lewis’ slave population, so much so that he believed that slaves only considered Christianity a viable religious option as it was understood as the “white

Obeah,” seemingly more powerful than its “black” religious counterpart. In other words, from Lewis’ plantocratic vantage point, Christian conversion was a waste of time given the power that Obeah had over the slave community. That power would consequently lead to poisoning, theft, and conscious manipulation of a specious Christian conversion.

The last excerpted entry may be the most indicative of the overall anxiety that Lewis had felt as his second trip to Jamaica was concluding. With the end of the slave trade, planters desperately valued the “natural increase” of their slaves; the six deaths and no consolatory births on Lewis’ plantation signal the beginning of the end for his enterprise.

Lewis’ later journal entries represent a microcosm of the aggregate plantation concerns over Obeah and death. Planters feared for their own lives (as an absentee planter, Lewis likely did not share this additional anxiety), but also recognized that slave laborers were sick or dying. The death of each slave meant a financial loss for a plantation; the value of each black body was quantified and measured, only increasing with a now depleted supply of replacements. Within the Anglophone Caribbean, Obeah became the ideological scapegoat with which planters could isolate and condemn rebellious and miscreant slaves and maintain the status quo.

470. See Chapter Three, “Listening to Silence in the Autobiographical Slave Narrative,” fn. 312. 252

Section Three: Black Magic and White Fear: Exploring the Caribbean Gothic

The gothic literary imagination took hold of the horror felt by both French and

British West Indian colonists, and with it, produced a genre that would intersect the politics of the era with a popular literary mode. This section, which comprises the bulk of this chapter’s discussion, will consider three works of fiction that exemplify the force that

Caribbean history exerted on literary development. Charlotte Smith’s The Story of

Henrietta (1800), Cynric William’s Hamel the Obeah Man (1827), and Victor Hugo’s

Bug-Jargal (1826) each contribute to the development of the Caribbean gothic as a genre, adding new and integral motifs that have circulated in fiction well into the twentieth century.471 This section will explore the motifs and tropes of the Caribbean gothic at the

471. According Alan Richardson, within the British colonial context, “Obeah or Obi, a religion practiced by black slaves in the British West Indies had indeed become notorious toward the end of the eighteenth century when it held the British reading public under its spell for a decade.” “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797-1807” found in Sacred Possessions, 171-194. Quote on page 171. Also see Paravisini-Gerbert, “Colonial and postcolonial Gothic,” 229. Though this project does not include theatrical performances, in the same year that The Story of Henrietta was published, “Three- Fingered Jack” was performed in London. The play, unlike the novel form of a similar narrative, published in the same year under the same title, perpetuated negative racial stereotypes of rebel slaves in Jamaica, particularly as they are represented in the 1830 revised melodrama. As will be discussed at length later, the trope of the abducted female white creole is also found in both the 1800 pantomime and the 1830 melodrama. For more about the history of the play see Diana Paton’s discussion and links to primary materials at: For an extended analysis of the texts, see her ‘The Afterlives of Three-Fingered Jack’ published in Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter Kitson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 42-63.

253

point of its inception and early development, at a moment when the peak of plantation anxiety was met with the experimentation and popularization of the gothic as a genre. A major thread that spans across each of the works as it relates to the gothic is that of contagion or contamination. As slavery apologists proponed strict color lines of categorical racial difference, Obeah and Vodou and their represented threat of contagion becomes of tool of gothic measure. When contagion occurs, these strict racial boundaries blur, and Obeah’s and Vodou’s power influence are displayed as a plantocratic metaphor for instigating the social sickness across the Atlantic.

Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta is the second volume of the five-volume series Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800).472 In the five-volume collection, a lone wanderer assembles narratives of people that he meets, chronicling those that either take place in different countries or undergo exceptional circumstances. The Story of Henrietta has been proposed as the most unique of the volumes published as it “leaves the ruins and castles of Europe behind to make a significant foray into another, yet so far little explored field of gothic terror and brutality”—namely, the volatile space of the colonial frontier. 473

As the inaugural work of the Caribbean gothic genre, Smith’s novella provides a complex negotiation between plantation economics surrounding Obeah, and the tropes already cemented in the gothic form. Additionally, Smith’s focus on the heroine Henrietta initiates a new literary component not considered in the historical accounts: the politically

472. Charlotte Smith, The Story of Henrietta, edited by Janina Nordius (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2012).

473. Janina Nordius, “Introduction” to The Story of Henrietta, vii. 254

racialized gothic motif of the “vulnerable white woman” succumbing to the “black magic” of the Obeah practitioner.

As will be discussed in further detail, over the course of the novel Henrietta is captured by the Jamaican Maroon population twice, rescued twice, and returned to

Anglo-Atlantic civilization. During her moments of capture, the trope of the vulnerable white woman is enacted; so too are the generic conventions of the captivity narrative evoked. The Story of Henrietta inserts itself in a long history of narratives in which a

“civilized” woman is captured, survives her capture to present pseudo-ethnographic information about the “native” or “savage” captors, and return to civilization. Linda

Colley has written that captivity narratives, while explicitly ethnographic in nature, implicitly condemn the failings of European colonial power. In effect, they render a call for more colonial reinforcement on the imperial frontier.474 Gordon Sayre contends that captivity narratives, heralded by Mary Rowlandson’s foundational and wildly popular

1682 A Narrative of Captivity, were equivalent to “intelligence reports” and wartime propaganda.475 Khalid Bekkaoui notes of North African captivity narratives that the capture of a Christian white woman in a foreign land is appealing due to the

“dramatization of feminine entrapment and beleaguered virtue and the transformation of

474. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850, (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 350-356.

475. Gordon M. Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 260-261.

255

the captured body into a panoply of contentious desires, a voyeuristic spectacle.”476 The

Story of Henrietta, as well as the generic captivity narratives that have preceded it, arguably embody all these composite elements. In invoking the captivity narrative genre for multiple sections of the novella, Smith is also making a political gesture about the

Jamaican Maroon population that threatened white colonial life on the island. The representation of a helpless Christian female captive, held to the sexual caprice of a black

Maroon, activates the gothic spectacle in the colonial imagination, as well as politically aligns with proslavery testimonies on the barbarity of the free blacks, mixed-race creoles and slaves.

The novel circulates a new iteration of the captivity narrative even as it possesses motifs and tropes that were easily recognizable to contemporary readers of gothic fiction.

The most apparent is the tyranny of an uncaring patriarch, figured in Henrietta’s plantation father Mr. Maynard. Following a legacy of metropolitan gothic fiction beginning with The Castle of Otranto, the young heroine’s arrival in Jamaica is orchestrated by Mr. Maynard in an effort to marry her off to a Mr. Sawkins, whose character is both salacious and cloying.477 In her description of his character, Smith

476. Khalid Bekkaoui, White Women Captives in North Africa: Narratives of Enslavement, 1735-1830, (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 29.

477. Oppressive paternalism is a common motif in gothic fiction, illustrated in the character of Isabella in The Castle of Otranto, who is pressured to marry Manfred. Other gothic novels that include this motif are Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or The Moor and earlier works from Charlotte Smith, including her Emmeline; or The Orphan in the Castle. In Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës, Diane Hoeveler convincingly argues that gothic fiction provided an avenue of “victim feminism” in

256

writes Maynard as a tyrannical planter with a stunted sense of sympathy for others:

“From being a despot on his own estate [in Jamaica], he imagined he might exercise unbounded authority over every being that belonged to him.”478 Maynard considers his own daughter one of his possessions, collapsing his position as a slave owner (and therefore an owner of human property) with that of a father. His character is introduced as “naturally violent and irascible,” “tyrannic and intolerable” and capable of the most

“brutal caprices.”479 The relationship between Henrietta and her father is a volatile one, in which she consistently fears violent repercussions for demonstrating resistance. Realizing

Maynard’s purpose in summoning her from England to Jamaica, Henrietta’s reaction is that of repressed trauma and aggrieved hopelessness:

I seemed unable to breathe, and compelled to lie down for half an hour to recover and argue myself into a state of more rational composure. […] How [my father] may sacrifice his daughter, and ruin her peace for ever, appears to be no part of his consideration. Always accustomed to command, and to look on those about him rather as machines who were to move only at his nod, than as beings who had wills and inclinations of their own, […].480

Henrietta’s reflections on her father’s character at the end of this excerpt initiate the gothic trope of her position as the “vulnerable white woman.” She recognizes the

which heroines-as-victims of an oppressive patriarchy formulated new strategies for surviving a new “bourgeois order” and developed a sense of agency and “professionalization” (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007). Discussions of female biopolitics in the gothic genre and the political positioning of the “female gothic” began with Ellen Moers’ first coining the term “Female Gothic” in Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

478. Smith, Henrietta, 8.

479. Ibid, 9.

480. Ibid, 32-33.

257

multiple injustices that her father commits against herself and the slaves laboring under him, yet she is powerless to enact change. In the fatalistic rendering of her condition,

Henrietta sees herself as a slave to her father, a “machine” deprived of sense or will similar to the enslaved Jamaicans who have equally lost their freedom in the white- and male-dominated colonial setting. Though she passively attempts suicide by putting herself in the least secure area of the house during a hurricane, Henrietta can only conclude that she will stab herself in the heart before marrying the unctuous Mr. Sawkins.

Less mobile than her metropolitan counterparts, the colonial creole Henrietta considers death the only alternative to a life of domestic enslavement.

Days before her intended marriage to Mr. Sawkins, Henrietta is removed to a more isolated part of the island. Here, she is closer to the Maroon population that resides in island’s center. Henrietta’s isolation not only further distances her from the safety of the port towns, but brings her closer to the danger of “attacks of savages driven to desperation, and thirsting for the blood of any who resembled even in colour their hereditary oppressors.”481 The sense of alienation produced as Henrietta must choose between being imprisoned by her father or facing the elements of an untamed Jamaican landscape escalates, and Henrietta decides to escape from the house during a midnight

Maroon attack.482 She is quickly captured by the Maroons, and once in their hands, is

481. Ibid, 35.

482. Henrietta’s love interest, Denbeigh, learns this information while he himself is captured by Maroons, 54-55.

258

subject to the threat of miscegenation. The topic of mixed-race coupling, especially between a European woman and a non-European man has been of special interest to many eighteenth-century literary scholars of the Caribbean.483 In speaking of its representation in The Story of Henrietta, George Boulukos argues that the Maroon male population presents a threat of Jamaican infection upon Henrietta’s body. When Henrietta is captured by the Maroons, she fears that she will “degrade,” and the “possibility of her virtuous and rational white womanhood” will be destroyed.484 This is a recurring trope in much of the long-eighteenth century Caribbean literature, as my reading of Hamel the

Obeah Man will corroborate.

Throughout the course of The Story of Henrietta, the narrative motif of biological contagion through miscegenation haunts our heroine. Not only is she trapped by the corrupted Mr. Sawkins and her father, she is, on multiple occasions, imprisoned by black

Jamaicans and kept as a future “bride.”485 She is twice abducted by the Maroons to “be

483. See: Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). For a historical view of the issue of mixed couplings and North American law and history as a comparative sample see: Inequality in Early America, edited by Carla Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999).

484. George Boulukos, “The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-Slavery and Racial Disgust in Charlotte Smith’s Story of Henrietta (1800)” in Slavery and Cultures of Abolition: Essays marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807. Editors Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 87-109. Quote on page 106.

485. The threat of corrupted miscegenation is first presented to the reader when Henrietta meets her half-sisters, products of her father and his slave mistresses. Henrietta

259

added to the number of wives”486 and she is also betrayed by a former household servant who, with a visage of one demonically possessed, professes his love and attempts to sexually violate her.487 Though Denbeigh, the hero of the narrative, will still love her in spite of her being “disgraced, undone, as perhaps she is,” he is grateful that her virginal purity is intact upon their reunion in the midst of the novella’s adventures.488 The whirling forces of an unstable environment and black savagery are consistently employed to harness the anxiety and fear infused in Henrietta’s narrative. Fear of black violence and the sexual violation of white creole women in the novella regurgitates some of the historical anxieties that were felt by planters in the early nineteenth century, as the discussion in section two indicates.489 In conjunction with the motifs of black male sexual

describes the scene as one of disgust and horror: “They speak an odd sort of dialect, more resembling that of the negroes than the English spoken in England…the youngest of them…is nearly as fair as I am; but she has the small eye, the prominent brow, and something particular in the form of the cheek…perhaps I have the same cast of countenance without being conscious of it, and I will be woman enough to acknowledge that the supposition is not flattering,” Smith, Henrietta, 29. In her description of her sisters, Henrietta expresses disgust at being tainted by her association with the Jamaican environment and the biological contagion it brings in subtle, yet distinct physical manifestations of undesired otherness (cheek, brow, skin color). Even white creoles, “who have not any of the negro blood in their veins,” are seemingly just as susceptible to these physical markers of corruption (Ibid).

486. Ibid, 143.

487. Ibid, 140-142.

488. Ibid, 77.

489. Examples of slave uprisings can be found on pages 49 and 132.

260

violence and isolating tropical locations, the novella also integrates the gothic trope of

Obeah and the possessive power it has on believers of its practice.

Obeah is first introduced in the work by Henrietta in an early letter to Denbeigh.

Her tone is initially dismissive, brushing off the religious practice as one of trickery or

“persuasion” as she describes it to him. At its start, her description of Obeah is like that of Edward Long or Bryan Edwards, who both frequently scoffed at Obeah’s legitimacy as a religion.490 Henrietta’s rhetorical approach is much the same; she draws parallels between Obeah and the “witches in Macbeth round the magic cauldron,” decontextualizing Obeah from its Jamaican affiliation and displacing it in both place and time. Yet, as she continues to dwell upon the shamanistic rituals and the secrecy in which they are performed, Henrietta becomes more viscerally engrossed:

…if their being Obi men or women is known, they carefully conceal any outward appearance of their profession. […] These Obi men and women are, as I have been informed, more numerous here than in the other plantations: and I shudder involuntarily when I fancy, from the mysterious looks and odd gestures of some of them, that they are deeply initiated in these wild rites of superstition.491

In a short pivot of thought from her initial position of casual disregard, Henrietta brings

Obeah to the present moment, held in the gazes of men and women whom she has seen on her father’s plantation. Since all markers of Obeah were prohibited by colonial law,

Obeahmen and women “concealed” any “outward” association with its rituals. Though

Obeah’s invisibility was designed to elicit a sense of security among the planter class, it also cast a shadow of fear as indicated by Henrietta’s involuntary shudder.

490. See fn. 395.

491. Smith, Henrietta, 47-48.

261

Her visceral response in this moment of reflection is meant to be shared by metropolitan readers. Paravisini-Gebert argues that the novella’s descriptions of Obeah, registered through the body of a young and vulnerable transatlantic heroine, incorporates a language of “invasion” or “a new sort of darkness,” where eroticism and terror enmesh and tempt a metropolitan reader into fictional sublimity.492 Alan Richardson further contends that Obeah’s evocative power stemmed from both plantocratic and metropolitan assumptions and associations “not only with the supernatural or with (in a double sense) ‘black’ magic, but with political power as well, specifically with slave rebellions and the incursions and revolts of West Indian Maroons.”493 As Henrietta shudders at the thought of her father’s slaves being privy to the “black” magic on the plantation, she is also shuddering at the possibility of revolt, spiritualistic malediction, and even her own violent death. Employing her European rational womanhood, she delegitimizes Obeah’s religious authority in her own mind. Yet, Henrietta does not remain benighted to its enacting power over the black Jamaicans. Her sentiments are reflected in the consensus of the metropolitan readership who read as she does when intellectually lingering on a topic that has historically had real and fatal consequences for white planters.494

492. Paravisini-Gerbert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic,” 229.

493. Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo,” 173.

494. Metropolitan readers would have been fully aware of the events surrounding Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760, as well as the Haitian Revolution in 1791-2.

262

Projections of “fancy” shift to a physical reality for Henrietta when, during her second abduction, she encounters an Obeahwoman within the Maroon camp. Dehydrated and shaken, Henrietta awakens from a swoon to find the body of the unknown

“sorceress” hovering over her, insisting that Henrietta have something to drink:

The menacing attitude and countenance assumed by the sorceress terrified me into immediate submission; and while she stood chattering over me, I forced myself to take what she held; which was, I believe, rum mixed with goat’s milk. I prayed, as well as the confused and stunned state of my mind would permit me to pray, that it might be something which should speedily end my wretched existence.495

The Obeahwoman continues to gently but insistently care for Henrietta, ensuring that the other Maroon women around her will not harass or steal from their white captive. Once

Henrietta’s safety is secured, the old woman retires into a nearby cave. This episode of uncanny maternal care is set in direct contrast to a scene of Obeah ritual: the

Obeahwoman’s protective measures are mediated through muttered incantations and subtle force. In its depiction, the episode also elicits a few diametric contrasts—white against dark, young against old, Christian against non-Christian—and in this state of encountered colonial difference, Henrietta eagerly prays that the goat’s milk and rum elixir is poisoned. Fearful of the circumstances of her abduction, most importantly the fact that she has been taken on as a “bride” to be ravished, Henrietta willingly accepts death over her presumed life in the Maroon community. She maintains this position throughout the entire course of the narrative.

495. Smith, Henrietta, 146.

263

However, as the goat milk mixture was meant to satiate, not destroy, Henrietta’s ingestion of it bonds her to the Obeahwoman in the rare occurrence of a maternal relationship.496 Coupled with incantations and prayers, a seeming “unholy” union is made between the Obeah practitioner and the white creole Henrietta. This moment generates uneasiness for the other Maroon women watching this episode of bondage, and a sequence in which a white woman passively submits to the pressures of an old and ugly

Obeahwoman would also likely create discomfort for Smith’s metropolitan readers.

Though the episode itself is relatively benign (the elixir was not poisoned), it does overtly condemn Obeah practices in general. It evokes the sensationalist spectacle and propagandist agenda of a white woman conquered by a dominant racial and religious other, commonly found in captivity narratives. The typical power dialectic of white supremacies reinforced by European Enlightenment thinking shatters when Henrietta obligingly drinks from the Obeahwoman’s enchanted beverage. The inversion of naturalized racial hierarchies in conjunction with Henrietta’s vulnerable condition elicits similar tropes of religious deviance, stripped power, and imprisonment found in other gothic fiction typically set in Catholic dungeons.497 On the colonial frontier, dealings with

496. In the novella, there is not much that is said about Henrietta’s mother, except implicitly that she died in Jamaica while Henrietta was living overseas in England. While abroad for most of her youth, Henrietta was cared for by an unmarried and fiercely independent aunt, who educated her to abhor “female accomplishments.” At “hardly twenty,” Henrietta lost her aunt, “her only friend and protectress” and inherited a great deal of wealth (Ibid, 7-9; quote on p. 9).

497. Anti-Catholic sentiment in eighteenth-century England created many literary avenues in which Protestant nationalism could be played and enforced—the gothic genre was no exception. Convents and monasteries were classic sites of gothic fiction,

264

“black magic,” appear to be a daily threat to the English tenets of Enlightenment thought and Protestant belief. This work strategically employs the commonly-held plantocratic belief of racial contamination, and in this scene Obeah rituals serve as narrative site in which contagion can be spread.

In The Story of Henrietta, Obeah is represented as a threat to the heroine’s body and moral virtue, as well as a threat to the larger abstract racial order that she symbolizes.

Janina Nordius has claimed that the novella is abolitionist in nature, despite the alienating depictions of race and violence interwoven in Smith’s narrative. Nordius continues that the exploration of the Maroon communities, Maynard’s cruel conduct, and the retaliatory treatment towards Henrietta are all pointed critiques of the institution of slavery:

For whether it is the rebellious Maroons and runaway slaves that set her [Henrietta’s] nerves on edge as they seek to revenge themselves on their oppressors, or whether it is her shock at seeing the way her father treats his slaves, these horrors are all ultimately shown to derive from the inhumanity of slavery. […] In choosing the West Indian scene for exploring tensions like these between past and present, Smith knew how to reconcile her liberalist convictions with the writing of a spine-chilling story of suspense.498

Certainly, the novella critiques the corruptive nature of positions of absolute power, figured in the representation of Maynard and his relationship to his daughter and his slaves. As an author, Smith dwelled on the conditions of women under a forceful and demanding patriarchy in much of her fiction. Indeed, the gothic as a genre proved a

including Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), Charles Melmoth’s The Wanderer (1820), and Mathew Lewis’ The Monk (1796). See Raymond Tumbleson’s Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660-1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and David Punter’s The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Volume 1 (New York: Routledge, 1996).

498. Nordius, “Introduction,” xxviii-xxix.

265

powerful instrument to illustrate these conditions; Smith’s novella creates an incisive proto-feminist claim against gender inequality. However, Nordius’ argument that Smith successfully reconciled her generally abolitionist sentiments with the gothic genre dismisses a great deal of how blacks and Obeah are represented. I contend, rather, that

The Story of Henrietta is more ambiguous than Nordius describes. Jamaican blacks are seen as a threat to the racialized social order that Henrietta represents within the work: slaves secretly practice Obeah and threaten rebellion; Maroons openly practice Obeah and threaten miscegenation; and mixed-raced subjects draw an uncanny proximity to

Europeans or white creoles in a subject position of “almost but not quite.”499 If Smith’s position was strictly liberationist, then the relationship between Henrietta and the subjects of colonial difference whom she encounters would be constructed with a more overtly abolitionist tone of racial equality.

I claim that Smith’s gothic narrative demonstrates the unwieldiness of the West

Indian islands: the environment, and the representation of inherent savagery of the black subjects degrade the purity of the metropolitan English man and woman. Though Smith’s conceptual narrative motif of violence begetting violence may conceivably justify the enslaved to seek vengeance against the planter class, abolitionist voices in the metropole consistently espoused African and African-creole humanity. This is something that Smith

499. Quote derived from Homi Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” where he contends that a colonial subject that mirrors, duplicates, or appropriates the white colonizer’s mannerisms, belief systems, etc., is a “subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” Found in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1984), 122.

266

fails to do in the novella. Boulukos succinctly argues the point that “the mood of

Henrietta’s story, and its vision of the future of plantation slavery is pessimistic, even gloomy. [Smith] suggests that the political climate in Jamaica has become so reactionary that even planters attempting to reform their own plantations would become social outcasts, finding their lives and liberty endangered.”500 My analysis of the narrative aligns with Boulukos’ reading, and this section further adds to his claim by also considering Smith’s gothic treatment of how her representations of race and Obeah orchestrate relations of otherness. While her representation is somewhat ambiguous, condemning evil slave masters and Maroon leaders alike, Smith’s channeling of captivity narratives and gothic tropes imply a political alignment with the proslavery logic of the late eighteenth century.

In moving from the discussion of Charlotte Smith to the Jamaican planter and staunch anti-abolitionist Cynric Williams, the narrative thread of contamination and contagion continues. In The Story of Henrietta, contagion occurs through the threat of miscegenation, or as illustrated in the Obeah sequence, from the complicit ingestion of

Obeah’s ritualistic exercises. What is found in Williams’ Hamel, in addition to the threats of miscegenation and fomenting slave rebellion, is a contamination from within. The metropolitan subject himself becomes a source of contagion, as represented in the figure of the Methodist missionary. The use of the Methodist character to incite the gothic motif of contagion in Williams’ novel was inspired by the author’s travels in his home island of

Jamaica in the year 1823. In his A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, Williams attempts to prove that conditions for the slaves were not nearly as horrific as claimed by

500. Boulukos, “The Horror of Hybridity,” 87. 267

metropolitan abolitionists. Between his treatise A Tour and the novel Hamel, there are two primary thematic foci. The first is the apologist condemnation of the Methodist missionary projects that were ongoing on the island.501 The second and interrelated focus of the publications is the social power of Obeah within the black slave populations. In an intricate weaving of these two narrative frames (mistrust of missionaries and Obeah),

Williams contributes one of the most definitive works of the Caribbean gothic, Hamel.

Williams’ views on Methodism in the Caribbean are complicated. They also provide context for understanding the plot of Hamel. In his A Tour, Williams articulates two contradictory claims when speaking of the relationship between the missionaries and the black community with whom they interact. First, he contends that the “reformers” from the metropole are self-serving meddlers, instructed by abolitionist groups to incite rebellion among the slave populations. In his mind, Methodists are selfish thieves and manipulative bullies, operating against the planter class and the economic well-being of the colonies.502 Like Williams, others voiced their suspicions over the role that metropolitan missionaries played in the ameliorationist endeavors established by the anti-

501. Cynric Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, From the Western to the Eastern End, in the year 1823 (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826).

502. In chapter VIII of his A Tour, Williams writes that anti-slavery radicals, performing the roles of Methodist missionaries, are as “cunning, intriguing, meddling, fanatical, hypocritical, canting knaves, cajoling the poor negroes (who listen to them in fear and trembling) of all their little savings and every species of property they can amass, under the pretence of saving them from the Devil and everlasting damnation. Such influence have their preposterous doctrines on the minds of some of the poor creatures in the towns, that they have been actually driven into a madness by brooding over the terrors with which the preachers have inspired them…” (36).

268

slavery movement. Joseph Marryat writes in his Thoughts on the Abolition of the Slave

Trade that missionaries were easily perverted by their exposure to the “sensual temptations” of African religious practices.503 In his early discussion of the topic, Dr.

Collins writes that missionaries contend with the “prejudices of the masters, as with the ignorance of the slaves; for it has been generally held that their purpose is to disseminate rebellion among the negroes. This has been often asserted, and with confidence too great to be supported to require [sic] any other evidence.”504 Both Collins and Marryat assert that Methodist missions are a threat to the plantocratic social order, the equivalent to religious Jacobinism in the Caribbean colonies.505 The final consensus among the

Jamaican planter class at the time of amelioration was that missionaries’ Christian teachings, inadvertently or not, ignited the flames of rebellion. This was felt so strongly in Jamaica that in 1828 (a year after Hamel’s publication), Jamaican slave code clause lxxxiv did not allow missionaries, particularly Methodists, to hold worship with slaves

503. Marryat, Thoughts, quote on 63; discussion of the incendiary Methodist missionary Mr. Tallboys and his “dangerous doctrines,” 142-143.

504. Dr. Collins, Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies. By a Professional Planter (London: Printed by J. Barfield, Wardour Street, 1803), 218.

505. Many slavery apologists were also anti-Jacobins and fervently denounced the French Revolution and its marked shift in the social climate in France and abroad. Edmund Burke, who criticized the Haitian Revolution in the early nineteenth century, also reproved the French Revolution in its entirety. See: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (New York: Oxford World Classics), 1999.

269

after eight o’clock in the evening.506 In the code’s justification of the law, the Jamaican

Assembly found the Methodists to be “dissenters…[who] have been found extremely dangerous, and great facilities are thereby given to the formation of plots and conspiracies.”507 Planters could not deny the missionaries access to slaves as stipulated by metropolitan law, but the planter colonial assembly employed all administrative rights possible to hinder Methodist missionary work. While there were many in the metropole who valorized the efforts of the missionaries in the Caribbean, citing that the missionaries were just as much the victims of insurrections as the planters, slavery apologists worked forcefully against the missionary presence in the British colonial West Indies.508

The second conclusion Williams makes in both A Tour and implicitly in Hamel, as it relates to the relationship between Methodists and the slave communities is that regardless of missionary efforts, slaves will perform Christianity publicly, but secretly

506. Slave Law of Jamaica: with Proceedings and Documents Relative thereto (London: James Ridgway, 1828), 109-110.

507. Ibid, 109.

508. Wilberforce was an obvious advocate of missionary work and Christian conversion in the West Indies. See Christopher Brown’s Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism for a further discussion on Wilberforce’s views, especially chapter 6 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 333-389. Another example of pro-missionary writing includes Thomas Abbott’s Narrative of Certain Events connected with The Late Disturbances in Jamaica, and the Charges Preferred against the Baptist Missionaries in that Island (London, 1832). The pamphlet, which also includes an essay by John Joseph Gurney, attempts to discredit apologist writings against slaves, arguing that the “vengeance of the West Indians have even been wrecked on the Ministers of Religion; and the gentlemen of Barbadoes have united their forces in demolishing the meetinghouse of a Methodist Missionary, and in forcing him to fly from the island for his life […] " (quoting Guerney, 1824), 4-5.

270

practice their African religions behind closed doors. Within this context, Obeah is described as an elusive force that is innate to the slaves who practice its beliefs. 509 The

“spells, charms, and fetishes” of the Obeah practitioner are represented as protection against the corruptive or destructive forces of white supremacy within the slave communities, particularly as these forces are wielded through Christian religious practices such as Methodism. In other words, followers of Obeah see Christianity as a threat to the slave social order, and actively attempt to protect their fellow slaves from it.510 Though slaves remain “astonished” that the “white magic” of Methodism is associated with emancipation and wondrous advances in technology, they (according to

Williams) only ostensibly practice the Christian faith in public to garner favor with the

Methodists. Consequently, Obeah’s religious hold over the slave population is too strong for any kind of conversion effort. Considering these two claims together, Williams paints a dangerous image of the Methodist instruction of the slave population. He contends that

Methodists, who actively incite rebellion are also totally inept at their efforts of Christian conversion. Slaves, manipulated by Methodist rhetoric of racial equality, employ that rhetoric to justify rebellion and remain unconverted. This results in a rebellious slave population that denounces Christian values, and instead embraces their own religious cosmologies as a militarist tool against the island whites. Obeah is then represented as a secretive countermeasure against Methodist teachings as well as a subversive tactic

509. Ibid, 37.

510. Ibid, 40-41.

271

employed against planters. Williams’ historical, social and political account of life in

Jamaica provided the blueprint for his literary intervention into the contemporary transatlantic slavery debate. In many portions of his treatise, Williams actively collapses the insurrectionary practices of Obeah with that of Methodist missionaries.511 His novel,

Hamel, the Obeah Man, renders into fiction the very real complaints planters had against

Methodist missionaries and rebel slaves reiterated in his A Tour. It also flags that the metropolitan subject, in collusion with Jamaican slaves, can be a source of contagion.

Hamel, the Obeah Man is set in the Jamaican town of Port Antonio.512 Distinctly apologist, the novel centers on four characters: the villainous Methodist missionary

Roland, the white creole couple Oliver Fairfax and Joanna Guthrie, and the Obeahman

Hamel. As the novel progresses, the reader finds that Roland has become more psychologically disturbed due to his repeated exposure to Obeah. Sent to Jamaica to convert the slaves to Christianity and therefore give them their freedom, Roland is the first character introduced to the reader. He arrives in Jamaica at the height of a storm’s violence and seeks shelter in a cave, coincidently occupied by the eponymous Hamel and his collection of assorted Obeah religious paraphernalia. Instead of taking the opportunity to share Christianity with Hamel, Roland finds himself drawn deeper into the world of

Obeah. Over the course of the novel, Roland eventually convinces the slaves that he will

511. See pages 39-40 of A Tour, in which Williams describes a group of slaves who appear to worship the figure of Wilberforce on a cross, and “smoke their jonkas” until the end of the evening. Another example can be found on page 89 of The Tour, in which Williams writes that Methodist missionaries perform “incantations (if I may so call them)” to woo the slaves into running away. In both examples, there is a construction of hybridized religious practices that is both African and Christian.

512. Cynric Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man edited by Candace Ward and Tim Watson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010). 272

facilitate a slave revolt and kill all the plantation owners on the island. His actions lead

Combah, the slave leader of a rebelling community of slaves, to kidnap the virginal and pure Joanna Guthrie. Through a series of plot twists, disguises, covert doubling and double-crossings, she is returned to the novel’s hero Oliver Fairfax. The fomenting rebellion led by Combah is quashed partially through the efforts of a redeemed Hamel, and the Guthrie plantation is saved from immediate danger. The evil machinations of

Roland and Combah are revealed and both men suffer a fateful demise. Roland starves to death while chained in Hamel’s cave, and Combah is shot in the chest just before falling over a steep cliff. Hamel, the Obeahman whose eventual obedience and mysticism lead to the happy consequences of the novel, is granted his freedom and sails in the general direction of his homeland. Much like the beginning, the ending of the novel is mysterious. The reader is uncertain as to what happens to Hamel, nor does the reader witness any resolution of the conflict between the violent rebelling slaves and the Guthrie family. All that is known is that a once-feared Obeahman extinguishes the rebellion he had apparently organized at the novel’s beginning, exposes the villainy of the missionary

Roland, acknowledges again that enslaved black people are not capable of freedom, and decides to leave the island. Joanna and Oliver, naturalizing the plantocratic narrative of maintaining white supremacy, are engaged to be married by the novel’s close.

There are two sub-plots that continue contemporaneously throughout the work: the first is the plot of the slave revolt and slow disintegration of the Methodist Missionary

Roland. The second is the sub-plot of the Guthrie plantation, the love interest in Joanna, and the anxieties of the planter class as figured in the political tensions between metropolitan law and colonial obedience to that law. At the center of the intersecting plots is Obeah and its important role in the novel’s narrative unfolding. My discussion of

273

this novel will focus on two key points: the anxiety produced by the hybridized character of Roland, who eventually becomes the novel’s most gothic figure due to his exposure to

Obeah, and the incorporation of several gothic tropes of doubling and disguise as they are orchestrated by Hamel the Obeahman. Much like the novella The Story of Henrietta,

Hamel also demonstrates anxiety over miscegenation between white women and black

Africans (Joanna is kidnapped by the rebel slave Combah, who threatens to “marry her”).

However, since the gothic sentiments of the racialized fear of miscegenation are nearly identical to that of Henrietta, it does not require a repeated discussion. Williams’ Hamel continues this, and other gothic tropes, inaugurated by Smith. The missionary Roland and his slow contamination over the course of the novel, in addition to the developed representation of Obeah, will be discussed in further detail.

The gothic effects of Obeah are wielded early in the novel. The first episode finds

Roland in Hamel’s cave having escaped a violent storm. The tingling sensations evoked from preternatural otherness appear as Roland scans his new environment:

In a recess stood a couple of spears, one solely of hard wood, whose point was rendered still harder by fire; the other was shod with iron and rusted apparently with blood […] In another angle of the vault was a calabash filled with various sorts of hair, among which it was easy to discriminate that of white men, horses, and dogs. These were huddled together, and crowded with feathers of various birds, especially those of domestic poultry and wild parrots, with one of two of the spoils a macaw. A human skull was placed beside this calabash, from which the teeth were missing; but on turning it up the traveller [Roland] found them with a quantity of broken glass crammed into the cerebellum, and covered up with a wad of silk cotton, to prevent them from falling out.513

513. Williams, Hamel, 67.

274

As Roland surveys his haunting surroundings, trapped by a raging storm outside, he continues to find objects of both shamanistic practice and war.514 Fetish objects, such as the ones described in the above scene, were prohibited by English colonial law, and possession of these items would result in either transportation or death.515 In this cave of sorcery, colonial law appears to have lost its reach, and Roland must come to terms with the awesome artifacts that surround him from a position of religious scrutiny. Yet, once

Hamel mysteriously arrives in the cave and wakes Roland from a deep slumber, it is

Roland who begins to undergo a kind of conversion. The objects themselves are inert until joined with Hamel, who continuously interrogates Roland and his purpose for being on the island. Roland’s interaction with the “necromancer” “sorcerer” and “demon”516

514. These include muskets, gunpowder, bullet, nails, a black snake, hollowed stones, amulets and charms, and “rude figures” made of clay (67-68).

515. The first act against Obeah and affiliated fetish objects, as indicated earlier in this chapter, was in 1760 with the fall of Tacky’s Rebellion. Listed among the prohibited objects: “‘Blood, feathers, parrots beaks, dogs teeth, alligators teeth, broken bottles, grave dirt, rum, and eggshells'" (Act 24, Sect. 10 passed 1760). See Joseph Williams, Voodoos and Obeahs, 112-113. On December 31, 1784, Another Act of Assembly, Clause XLIX states: “‘And in order to prevent the many mischiefs that may hereafter arise from the wicked art of Negroes going under the appellation of Obeah men and women, pretending to have communication with the devil and other evil spirits” the following objects were prohibited: “blood, feathers, parrots-beaks, dogs-teeth, alligators-teeth, broken bottles, grave-dirt, rum, eggshells, or any other materials relative to the practice of Obeah or witchcraft, in order to delude and impose on the minds of theirs, shall upon conviction before two magistrates and three freeholders, suffer death or transportation; anything in this or any other act to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding” (qtd in Voodoos and Obeahs 164). For a contemporary critical discussion of these laws, see Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, 20-21.

516. Williams, Hamel, 74, 78, and 79.

275

proves too overwhelming and drives Roland out of the cave and back into terrors of a darkened Jamaican night.517

During their exchange, Roland is represented as a man who is weakened by his passions, and lacks the religious fortitude to combat the power of Obeah. While the overall tone of the narrative dismisses the fetish objects as that of African superstition,

Roland misreads the cave, its objects, and Hamel as representative of demonic power.

Psychically debilitated by his desire for Joanna, Roland begins his unnatural rites of passage, susceptible to the uncanny power of Obeah within the black Jamaican community. Hamel, a fluid character who embodies tricksterism, also appears more grounded in the realities of the Jamaican landscape than the uninitiated Roland.518 It is in this power dynamic, in in which an Obeahman can manipulate a missionary, that the narrative illustrates spiritual and racial contamination similar to the episode between

Henrietta and the Obeahwoman. Inverted positions of racial control are a source of terror in the genre.

The continuing interaction between Hamel and Roland lead the latter to become the subject of conversion, instating Roland into a kind of Obeah fraternity. After a crowning ceremony in which Combah is named the king of Jamaica once the planned

517. Though the storm had passed by this point in the narrative, it is still a few hours from dawn.

518. For more detail about Hamel’s fluidity of character, including his ability to manipulate people and situations, see Janelle Rodrigues, “Obeah(Man) as Trickster in Cynric Williams’ Hamel the Obeah Man,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives 12:2 (2015), 219-234.

276

rebellion is executed, both Combah and Roland are taken into an underground tunnel to complete a binding ritual:

The skull [of a child] was then deposited again on the table; and Hamel, taking the calabash, containing, as was related, a filthy-looking mixture, held it close to the Missionary’s face, and bid him see that it was blood---blood drawn from their own veins, and mixed with gunpowder and with the grave-dirt of the skull. He dipped his finger in the mess, and crossed the face and the breast of Roland; finally holding it to his lips and commanding him to taste and swallow a portion and then to say after him as follows:—‘If I lie, if I am treacherous, if I mean to deceive in any way those whose blood I have tasted, may the grave-dirt make my heart rot, till it bursts and tumbles out before my face! May I die, and never awake in the grave, or awake to everlasting pain and torment, and become the slave of the white man’s devil for ever and ever!’”519

Roland ingests the blood mixture and takes the oath to support the slave rebellion and the destruction of the white planter class on the island. The binding ritual, which makes

Roland submissive to the Obeah slave order, has little historical basis in Jamaica.520

Rather, this evocative sequence introduces a new conceptual formation of the gothic in a transatlantic context. Demonic rituals, witchcraft, supernatural possession, blood oaths,

519. Williams, Hamel, 130-131.

520. There are dozens of planter accounts of Obeah rituals and practices, but none go into the level of detail described above. As noted in Hesketh Bell’s late-nineteenth century anthropological examination of Obeah, a “veil of mystery is cast over their incantations, which generally take place at the midnight hour, and every precaution is taken to conceal these ceremonies from the knowledge of the whites.” He further goes into detail about the medicinal and relatively benign practices and rituals of Obeah over the course of his book, only emphasizing that the “darker and more dangerous side” of Obeah is the practitioner’s knowledge of different poisons. A helpful contemporary account of planter recordings can be found in Dianne Stewart’s Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 36-40. Blood rituals and cannibalism are typically affiliated with Haitian Voudou as discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

277

and transformative potions all have European ancestral legacies, and in this instance, this ritual is transfigured into a demonic parody of a Catholic communion. More frightening than the ritualistic maternal bond between Henrietta and the Obeahwoman, this scene also harnesses the plantation fears of Obeah and embodies them in a ritual of spine- chilling proportion. Roland’s bond with the slave Combah, mediated through an Obeah ritual, echoes the planters’ belief that arriving missionaries in Jamaica are uniting with the slaves and free blacks to foment rebellion and corrupt the stability of the plantocracy.

Over the remainder of the novel, Roland becomes increasingly more paranoid, obsessive over Joanna Guthrie,521 and diabolic in his scheming to overturn the Jamaican planters.

Roland’s cryptic identity as both Methodist missionary and Obeah convert is just one example of the novel’s gothic play with duality, disguises, and cloak-and-dagger plot twists. A final discussion point for this novel will focus on this play as it is manifest in

Hamel’s final climax. In this scene, Joanna Guthrie and her servant Michal are kidnapped by a group of rebel slaves intent on making Joanna Combah’s wife.522 When taken into a rebel compound, “nothing could exceed the horror and agony of the young lady at finding herself in the power of a set of ruffian Negroes,” and while the men solemnly swear that

Combah would marry Joanna according to Christian custom (not raped until after the

521. It is mentioned in the novel that Roland initially agreed to assist Hamel and Combah in the insurrection in exchange for Joanna as a “prize” once the slaves successfully take over the island (Williams, Hamel, 87).

522. Williams, Hamel, 353-354.

278

wedding ceremony), she finds no solace in their consolation.523 On a caravan from one part of the island to another, the rebel group comes across a handful of enemy Maroons.

One Maroon, who fights more valiantly than the others, is revealed to be none other than

Oliver Fairfax, the novel’s hero whose blackened disguise is ruined during a tropical storm.524 Fairfax is consequently taken prisoner as a white spy. During his capture, he informs two sympathetic female attendants (those attending Joanna and Michal) of a band of armed white soldiers and Maroons seeking Joanna and Michal not too far from the rebels’ camp. They inform Hamel, who then guides the white soldiers and assists in the prisoners’ rescue. During the final scrimmage, Combah is shot, Fairfax is released, and

Joanna is returned to her father.525 Mr. Guthrie passionately exclaims that it was Hamel who ensured the safe return of his daughter: “‘The Obeah man has saved her honour and her life! See, see how the rebellious cutthroats cringe before him! […] He treats them like the dirt that they are. And ah! He kneels to Fairfax, and lays his master’s hand on his own head!’”526 Fairfax grants Hamel his freedom and a boat, and Hamel then sails away into the horizon.

The happy conclusion of the novel is contingent on a series of disguises and double-crossings. Fairfax spends most of the novel incognito, either in the habit and make-up of the Mulatto “Sebastian,” or, in the final sequences of the novel, as a Maroon.

523. Ibid, 368.

524. Ibid, 390.

525. Ibid, 396.

526. Ibid.

279

The two female attendants, Wowski and Patch, who betray the rebel group to inform

Hamel of their location, even consider dressing in Joanna’s clothing to act as a decoy should Joanna need to escape. Hamel is seemingly the most illustrious double-crosser, first fomenting the slave rebellion and converting the missionary Roland to Obeah.

However, upon Fairfax’s return to the island, Hamel reneges his supposed position of key rebel figure and wields his Obeah power against those he initially supported. He leads the white soldiers and Maroons straight to Combah’s camp and abandons Roland in his cave to die. For his efforts in betraying the rebels, “treating them like the dirt that they are,”

Hamel is granted his freedom. Characters are not what they appear in this novel, infusing the narrative with the familiar gothic trope of disguise and trickery. Within the valence of the Caribbean gothic, there is the attributive component of race. Fairfax fluidly enters and exits both plantation homes and Maroon camps alike with his ability to “blend” his racial identity with a few appropriative manners and skin staining. Furthermore, most exemplified by Hamel, the black Jamaicans are also capable of switching their subject positions within the Jamaican plantocracy. Though no black Jamaican “whitened” him or herself in the novel, within the social stratification of the African communities (slaves, rebels, Maroons), switching allegiances appears common practice within the genre.

Hamel the Obeah Man uses the conventions of the gothic, but is also constructed to meet the politically apologist needs of a plot set in pre-emancipation Jamaica.

Ceremonies of witchcraft are collapsed with Methodist missionary work, invoking the politically-charged trope of the spiritual infection of the metropolitan subject. Instead of the enclosed convent used in European settings, the site of psychological and emotional torture for Christianity occurs in an Obeah cave. The gothic tropes of the metropolitan novel of the era in this work are mapped onto to the experience of the Caribbean,

280

expanding on the conventions of biological contagion found in Henrietta. The narrative use of the villainous missionary can also be found in earlier works, though not to the level of psychological terror found in Williams’ riveting portrayal of Roland.527 Hamel the Obeah Man best demonstrates the height of the British Caribbean gothic in the early nineteenth century. The final work considered in this chapter, Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, will reflect how Vodou was represented within a French-Atlantic context.

As will be seen in my reading of Bug-Jargal, the thematic struggle of political agency as well as plantocratic anxiety over “contamination” can be registered in the work.528 Bug-Jargal is not immediately conceived as a gothic novel, but as Chris Bongie notes, it is a work in which its historical moment produced “no end of conspiracy theories” and revolutionary subjects, generating the novel’s overall tone of distrust.529 A final contextual element to consider when reading Bug-Jargal is Hugo’s own political views towards the Haitian Revolution and gothic portrayals of black and mixed-raced subjects as they are represented. Much like Charlotte Smith and her views towards slavery in The Story of Henrietta, Hugo’s position seems rather ambiguous. Bongie

527. The transatlantic novels Slavery; Or the Times (1793) and Obi; or The Adventures of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) both feature a manipulative missionary figure. In Mackenzie’s Slavery, Berisford uses his religious position to manipulate the hero Adolphus into a life of gambling and corruption. In Earle’s Three-Fingered Jack, Captain Harrop also manipulates Christian doctrine to convince Jack’s African parents Amri and Makro onto a slave ship.

528. Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal, edited and translated by Chris Bongie (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004).

529. Chris Bongie, “Introduction” to Bug-Jargal, 18.

281

writes that it is difficult to determine whether Bug-Jargal is a “novel with essentially

‘benevolent’ intentions when it comes to its portrayal of blacks and their revolution [or if it is] a novel that inspires ‘hatred,’ reviving racial antagonisms that ought to have been laid to rest by the 1825 Franco-Haitian accord.”530 Instrumental to this discussion will be a critique of Hugo’s representation of Haitian Vodou and its role within French-Atlantic anxiety over black autonomy in the early nineteenth century.

Bug-Jargal begins with a scene of soldiers, huddled in a tent in an undisclosed location in Haiti, waiting for the evening to pass. The novel’s protagonist, Captain d’Auverney, who is described as a figure of brooding solemnity, divulges his narrative of living on the island in the early 1790s on his uncle’s plantation, engaged to be married to a young creole woman.531 The couple is married on the first day of the Haitian

Revolution, and during the ensuing battle, his new wife Marie is abducted by one of the rebel leaders, Bug-Jargal, and is ostensibly taken to a rebel camp.532 Collapsing from

530. Bongie, “Introduction,” 33.

531. Hugo, Bug-Jargal, 66. Like the character of Maynard in The Story of Henrietta, uncle d’Auverney, the planter is described as one “whose heart had been hardened by the longstanding habit of absolute despotism. Accustomed to seeing himself obeyed at the first blink of an eye, he would punish the slightest hesitation on a slaves’ part with the greatest severity, and often the intercession of his children served only to heighten his anger” (66).

532. As in both Hamel and The Story of Henrietta, the trope of the abducted of the white woman in the black colonial space reinforces race-based anxieties about miscegenation, tainting, and contagion. D’Auverney laments that Bug-Jargal was “an ingrate, a monster, a rival! The abduction of my wife, on the very night of our union, proved to me what I had initially suspected; I finally came to a clear recognition that [Bug Jargal] was none other than the loathsome ravisher of Marie” (101).

282

exhaustion after failed attempts to reclaim his beloved, d’Auverney wakes to find that the rebels had destroyed his uncle’s plantation and viciously murdered his uncle while the planter was sleeping. Once recovered, d’Auverney returns to his mission of finding his new wife, to then be captured by Biassou’s rebel group and taken prisoner. While at the camp, he witnesses the bizarre ritualistic practices and militaristic plans of continued attacks on the white population. D’Auverney is then rescued by Bug-Jargal on the evening of the former’s planned execution and taken to a cave where Marie and the remaining d’Auverney family members have been secluded and safe from the encroachment of the rebels. Bug-Jargal had saved the family members, not imprisoned them, as d’Auverney initially thought.533 During this scene, the white and black heroes of the novel are considered “brothers,” with one willing to sacrifice his life for the other in spite of the race-based warfare encircling them. In describing his own backstory, Bug-

Jargal is revealed to be a well-known prince of his former country in Africa, and the most powerful person in the Haitian black community. Forced to return to Biassou’s camp after giving his word that he would, d’Auverney is taken into the possession of Habibrah, who is bent on having the white hero tormented and executed. Rescued by Bug-Jargal a second time, d’Auverney escapes a violent death at the edge of a waterfall. The climax of the novel is the suspenseful fight between Habibrah and d’Auverney, which leads to the villain’s death. Bug-Jargal returns to the “white camp” to take the place of ten of his men who had been captured. In a final act of selflessness, he sacrifices himself for his men and

533. Caves play a significant role in the plots of all three Caribbean gothic narratives. The cave is a site of colonial otherness, where whites are taken. In Henrietta and Hamel, the cave is affiliated with fear, anxiety, and isolation from the white colonial sphere. In Bug-Jargal, since the cave is unknown to all but Bug-Jargal, it becomes a haven to those he rescues. 283

is shot. The narrative ends with Bug-Jargal’s death and Captain d’Auverney, returned to the present moment with his men, reflective and remorseful.

While Bug-Jargal’s primary discussion circulates around the anxiety of black political autonomy during the Haitian Revolution, there are significant characters and plot devices that underpin Hugo’s curious stance on Haitian Vodou. Much like Cynric

Williams, Hugo employs these characters and tropes of the syncretic religious practice that would support a politically anti-Haitian position, interweaving his depictions of

Vodou into the larger narrative. The character who best exemplifies the manifest anxieties about Haitian religious practices is uncle d’Auverney’s mixed-race domestic slave Habibrah, the novel’s villainous Vodou practitioner. At the start of d’Auverney’s narrative, Habibrah is selected out of the black slave collective on the plantation to be physically described:

The hideous dwarf was thick-set, short, paunchy, and moved about with exceptional rapidity on two thin, spindly legs which, when he sat down, folded up under him like the limbs of a spider. His enormous head, awkwardly squashed between his soldiers and bristling with crinkly reddish wool, was accompanied by two ears so large that his fellow slaves like to say that Habibrah used them to dry his eyes whenever he cried. His face was one long grimace, and it never stayed the same; this bizarre mobility of his features at least gave his ugliness the benefit of variety.534

The descriptions of Habibrah's trickster-like behavior are also a point of disgust for d’Auverney, who notes that behind Habibrah’s unctuousness towards uncle d’Auverney

534. Ibid, 68.

284

there was something malicious and “too groveling about his servility.”535 It is only discovered later that Habibrah is an “obi,” within the slave community, a man who is feared and “worshipped” by his fellow slaves.536 The descriptions of Habibrah’s physical features and dissembling mannerisms characteristically locate him as a villain within

Bug-Jargal, clinging to archaic affiliations between the deformity of one’s body with that of one’s character.537 Briefly, d’Auverney believes that Habibrah was murdered at the same time as his uncle, picking up a blood-stained waistcoat that belonged to the slave at the scene of his uncle’s death. However, in an exchange between d’Auverney and

Habibrah at the novel’s climax, the latter reveals that he was his master’s murderer, claiming that he “‘drove the knife so deep into his heart that he barely had time to open his eyes before he was dead. He let out a feeble scream: “Help me, Habibrah!” I helped him all right.’”538 Not only does this scene reveal Habibrah’s brutal opportunism, but it

535. Ibid.

536. Ibid, 69. In Hugo’s 1825 note, “obi” is simply defined as “a sorcerer” once again collapsing syncretic religious practices with witchcraft. It is important to note that the English “obi” is used to described a Haitian Vodou priest, which then also signals Hugo’s ignorance of distinguishing between the two. According to a footnote supplied by Bongie, Hugo derived this term from a glossary of terms found in Pamphile Lacroix’s Memoires pour sevir á l’histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Chez Pillet Ainé, 1819). Lacroix defines “Obi” as “a synonyme de socier, et quelquefois de sortilége [fortune-telling]”(vii). There is no definition for “Vodou” in the glossary. Digital copy of the Memoires can be found at:

537. Marlene Daut, in her Tropics of Haiti, posits that these grotesque physical descriptions of Habibrah are tied to Hugo’s taxonomical associations between mixed-race Haitians and “monstrous hybridity,” represented in contemporary French racist thought (Liverpool: Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 2015), 170-172.

538. Hugo, Bug-Jargal, 183.

285

also signals his malicious hatred and violent ruthlessness against all whites. Habibrah meets his own death in an attempt to kill d’Auverney, falling into a chasm not unlike the symbolic gesture of a demon returning to the pits of hell.539

Consistently referred to as the “obi dwarf” in the novel, Habibrah is an iconic figure in the work, aggregating several representative tropes that are found in pro-slavery literature. He is described as deformed in some way, though his dwarfism is a unique feature that is not typically found in Caribbean gothic works representing Obeah or

Voudou. Predominantly, Obeahmen are represented as thin and unkempt, at times tattooed. Though not characteristically “Obeah-like” in appearance, the physical descriptions render him nonetheless a vile, disgusting creature. Further, Habibrah consistently embodies the significant features of the trickster or charlatan, much like how

Hamel is described. However, while Hamel employs his trickery to benefit his white masters, Habibrah uses it to his own malicious purposes. What sets Habibrah apart as a distinctly Vodou trickster “sorcerer,” as it is represented in the novel, is his association with fortune telling. Obeah does not typically incorporate the art of divination, but rather depends upon the spiritual world to cure or condemn an individual. Vodou, on the other hand, with its syncretic complex systems of symbology and derivations from Catholic

539. Ibid, 188. The same racialized argument can be made about Combah’s death in Williams’ Hamel.

286

rituals, has associations with divination and palmistry.540 In a telling scene, Habibrah reads Biassou’s hand, informing the rebel leader of his great rise to power. Later,

Habibrah also reads d’Auverney’s hand, indicating that the stars have prepared the white captive to meet a “violent death.”541 In each instance, Habibrah performs elaborate rituals of palmistry solely to appeal to Biassou’s political narcissism. In another scene of charlatanism, a former slave with a dislocated eyeball approaches Habibrah for healing, and Habibrah simply asks for the man’s hand, saying that it was written in his “line of life” that he was to be blind in one eye.542 In each of these instances, the novel makes clear that Habibrah is a charlatan, performing his spiritual power among the slaves for personal gain.

Habibrah is also a significant figure in the rituals and ceremonies conducted during d’Auverney’s imprisonment in Biassou’s rebel camp. The first ritual, held around a blazing fire in the middle of the night is both sexual and violent. D’Auverney describes scenes in which naked women would perform the highly sexualized la chica with their male counterparts, slaughtering animals, and assaulting d’Auverney as he was tied to the trunk of a tree.543 D’Auverney details his encounter with the women as out of a

540. Joan Dayan, “Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods,” in Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gerbert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 28-29.

541. Ibid, 132.

542. Ibid, 127.

543. In his account, Moreau de Saint-Méry describes la chica as a dance of African origin in which the “female dancer is to move her hips and the lower part of her

287

nightmare: “I’ve never seen a collection of more diversely horrible faces than all those infuriated black mugs with their white teeth and the whites of their eyes streaked with large bloodshot veins. They were set on tearing me to pieces.”544 The ceremony ended with la chica’s climax and the intended death of d’Auverney until intercepted by

Habibrah, who tells the ritual participants that the white man was to remain alive, as

Biassou was demanding to see him.545 The dance itself employs a tantric ritual of colonial otherness, a gothicized ceremony of animalistic bodies moving in hypersexualized positions, designed to lead to the white witness’ brutal death.

The portrayal of the interrupted dancing ritual leads into the second gothic representation of a Vodou ceremony. D’Auverney is led to an inner chamber of Biassou’s tent, where he meets the rebel captain being fanned by “two children dressed in slaves’ breeches, each carrying a broad fan made of peacock feathers. These two slave children were white.”546 The Vodou ceremony is described in elaborate detail as sacred vessels were placed on a cloth table, “the obi [Habibrah] noticed that a cross was lacking; he

loins […] and a male dancer comes up to her, springs forward all of a sudden, and drops down in time to the music also touching her…” The dance is meant to mimic a sexual encounter. The sexualization of rituals, particularly as they are described here is most associated with Vodou; Obeah does not typically include accounts of hypersexualized encounter (qtd in Bongie’s footnote 57, pg 206).

544. Ibid, 112-113.

545. Ibid, 113-114.

546. Ibid, 117. Daut claims that the scene of white child enslavement “was one of the principle nightmares of the post-Haitian Revolution European society” (184).

288

pulled out his dagger, which had a cross-shaped hilt, and drove it upright between the chalice and the monstrance in front of the tabernacle.”547 The ceremony is performed as

Habibrah chants in a “creole jargon” to the “bon Giu” that since the white planters have killed blacks, so it is just that the blacks are to destroy the whites.548 A mass of prostrated slaves powerfully let out a “roar” of impassioned agreement at the end of the obi’s declarations of sovereign justification for rebellion. Internalizing the Vodou ceremony that he witnesses, d’Auverney conveys his gothic terror: “I understood what excesses of courage and atrocity could be committed by men for whom a dagger was a cross, and for whom every impression is immediate and deep.”549 At the ceremony’s conclusion,

Biassou turns to d’Auverney and claims, “‘They accuse us of having not religion. You see that it’s a slander, and that we’re good Catholics.’”550

Vodou’s syncretic evolution, combining elements of French Catholicism and

African religious practices, creates a belief system of potential gothic proportions. In conjunction with historical plantocratic fear, the novel duplicates the descriptions found in the Particular Account of the French National Assembly, which claim that black autonomy is directly associated with the violent deaths of planters and the destruction of

547. Ibid, 119-120.

548. Ibid, 120. “Bon Giu” is translated as “good Lord.”

549. Ibid, 120.

550. Ibid, 121.

289

the colonial regime.551 The Vodou ceremony, heavily laden with the imagery of contaminated religious practices and political threat to French colonial power, significantly locates the gothic colonial otherness of the Haitian rebels within the context of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to the episodes of miscegenation and politically polluted missionaries discussed in The Story of Henrietta and Hamel, Hugo’s Bug-jargal represents the underlined threat of religious and cultural contamination that planters felt would occur should black slaves come into power.

Hugo, in the gothic mode, plays with the uncannily raced doubleness that occurs in the colonial frontier. The narrative’s focus on Vodou and the dual religious histories that it hybridizes is only one component to the gothicized identity politics found within

Bug-Jargal. At the macroscopic level, the Haitian Revolution is represented as a racialized doppelgänger of the French Revolution. Hugo consistently and critically collapses the revolutionary language of 1789 France with that of 1791 Haiti, indirectly pointing to the inherent flaws of each.552 Revolution leading to tyranny, as it did in both

551. Hugo also briefly describes the scenes of horror in the aftermath of the first night of the Haitian Revolution, where the blacks “set fire to all settlements and slaughtered colonists, engaging in unheard-of acts of cruelty. Once single detail should give you a sense of horror of it all: their standard is the body of a child set on the end of a pike” (93).

552. Hugo overtly criticizes the correlation between France and Haiti, channeled through one of the white colonial generals: “These supposedly liberal ideas that people in France find so intoxicating are poison in the tropics. What the negroes required was kind treatment, not all this talk about their immediate enfranchisement. All the horrors you’re now witnessing in Saint Domingue were hatched in the Massiac Club; the slave insurrection is nothing more than an upshot of the fall of the Bastille” (98).

290

the historical Georges Biassou and Robespierre’s Reign of Terror (1793-4), is represented in the manners and actions of Biassou who claimed to be the new sovereign of Haiti once all colonial planters were eliminated.553 Working from historical depictions of Biassou,

Hugo deliberately represents the rebel figure as uncomfortably hybrid. Biassou is described as sartorially “ridiculous,” dressed in an ill-fitting French military uniform seated on a mahogany trunk “that was half covered by a carpet of parrot feathers.”554 His outfit, a seeming collection of clothing acquired from the French dead of military rank, is further complemented by his manner of speaking, which is neither creole nor French. The initial tableau in which the reader is introduced to Biassou dressed in his military outfit, fanned by his two white slave children, produces a frightening image of colonial inversion for a French planter.

Biassou’s represented uncanny doubleness, the political collapse of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the recurring moments of both narrative division and duality, figure within a larger discussion of the Caribbean gothic. Bongie writes that the doubling in Bug-Jargal “cannot be overestimated. Doubling is vital not only to novel’s use of language but to its presentation of character: doubles proliferate in Bug-Jargal, nowhere more obviously than in the (un)likely pairing of its equally notable white and black protagonists […] Captain d’Auverney and the African slave-king Bug-Jargal.”555

553. As recorded by J.R. Beards, the historical Biassou was described as “fiery, rash, wrathful and vindictive, given to women and drink,” A Biography and Autobiography (Boston: 1863), 53. Though ambitious, Biassou did not rise to power in Haiti and instead served the Spanish military in Florida in 1796.

554. Ibid, 117.

555. Bongie, “Introduction,” 11. 291

The deaths of both characters by the novel’s end (d’Auverney is killed in a later battle), cements the heroes’ doubling impact, especially since both men died protecting French

Royalist ideologies. Hugo’s early politics intersect with French experimentations with the gothic genre, feeding on the history of the French and Haitian Revolutions to generate scenes of terror, political anarchy, and adulterated French identity through the contagion of African contact. Gothic associations with the Haitian Revolution were creatively incorporated within the heated political transatlantic milieu, Vodou creatively infused to enrich the narrative of a colonial crisis.

Conclusion

Plantocratic anxieties over the white colonial loss of power in the wake of the

Haitian Revolution and the end of the transatlantic slave trade manifest in several forms.

Political pamphlets attempting to deflect metropolitan concerns over slavery to the domestic concerns of poverty and crime was one method. Other apologists for slavery focused on the economic necessity of slavery as an institution, claiming that the metropole would suffer beyond financial recovery should the profit provided by slavery be immediately removed from the nation’s income. This chapter discussed the most illustrative and potent artillery in the apologist arsenal: the representation of racialized violence and physical destruction of creole planters and property in the Atlantic. Endless numbers of terror-inducing accounts of uprisings and rebellions meant to invoke political gestures towards slavery’s institutional continuation. Slaves were represented as a collective mass of rapaciousness and incivility, inherently unable to grasp western intellectual and religious modernity.

292

The three novels examined in this chapter, The Story of Henrietta, Hamel the

Obeah Man, and Bug-Jargal, each explore the myriad ways that the plantocratic horror of black Caribbean autonomy can be represented in the gothic genre. Distinct from the

European iterations of the gothic form, the politics of the Caribbean gothic are contingent upon the race-based plantocratic systems developed out of Caribbean slavery. Smith’s

Henrietta, a literary consequence of the pamphlet wars of the 1790s, catalyzed some of the first critical tropes of the Caribbean gothic that would later evolve into the works of

Williams and Hugo. Representing Vodou and Obeah within the gothic form was an instrumental political tool, founded on the historical anxieties that were generated by the idea that slaves were creating rituals and belief systems independent of the colonial enterprise. This chapter reads through the power of racial contagion, the politically contaminated ambitions of Methodist missionaries, and the terror of syncretic religious ceremonies. These tropes still maintain a powerful hold on the western social imagination, particularly when contextualized within contemporary representations of

Vodou and Obeah.556 What this chapter illustrated is that the legacies of racial discrimination, mediated through the representation of Caribbean religious practices, were created at a critical historical moment in early nineteenth-century transatlantic history, and continue to inform the evolution of the gothic form to this day.

556. In March 2017, CNN released an hour-long special of Vodou in Haiti on the show “Believer with Reza Aslan.” Though an attempt was made to be politically neutral in its representation, critics have indicated that the exposé fell short, only regurgitating the tropes of Vodou affiliations with the demonic. Link to the video: A news article from the The Lens (focused on New Orleans News), criticizing the special is here: 293

294

Conclusion: Memory, History, and Reading the West Indies

“I don’t know much about my ancestors except that they toiled, suffered and died on this plantation where I myself am toiling, suffering and where I shall die when the Good Lord calls me to Him. For my generation the end of slavery means nothing. It’s the same sadness, the same wretchedness we’ve been chewing on for as long as we can remember.” -- Maryse Condé, Windward Heights 557

Representing the past in fiction is an exercise in meaning-making. For many

Caribbean writers, it requires an immersion into a violent historical narrative of oppression, hatred, and racism. It is a history that still etches its presence in Atlantic culture today, while it is also a history that tries to be forgotten by those that live day-today in its reverberations. By means of a conclusion, I want to consider the ways in which the literary history I have discussed in this project can be found in twentieth and twenty- first century Caribbean writing and film. I also want to highlight that drawing these connections is a slippery exercise, consistently embattled by a history filled with silences and erasures. In taking up the task of being a representative storyteller of the eighteenth- century Caribbean, writers and filmmakers navigate the waters of past oppression and silence, as well as achingly search for ways to create a narrative space for those whose voices have been lost. In other words, film and literary writers and directors attempt to breathe life into ideologies, concepts, and peoples generally absent from the historical record, but are no less critical to its development. Over these last remaining pages, I will

557. Maryse Condé, Windward Heights, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Soho Press, 1995), 75.

295

follow the arguments established in the previous chapters and read through their future iterations into the present moment, worked, reworked, and revitalized for an ever- evolving audience.

Collectively, in the previous chapters I have argued that the rise of the novel was directly shaped by the historical events of the long-eighteenth century Caribbean. The novel, as it is known today, was not simply a form that evolved out of a strictly English or even European tradition. Rather, much of the fiction that is recognizable today can be traced to the transatlantic eighteenth century. Some of the earliest contended “novels,”

Oroonoko (1688) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) themselves should not be considered solely British.558 Rather, they are inherently transatlantic, informed by the imperial desire to claim the Caribbean as a commercial enterprise of consumable goods as well as informed by the victims that were consumed by that desire manifest in chattel slavery.

To begin with the literary history of the Caribbean, one must start with the sea. As famously penned by Derek Walcott, the “sea is History,” and it is with the sea that the narrative tracing of this project began.559 Isolating and swiftly capricious, the sea simultaneously imprisoned objective truths and released narratives of both subjective horror and illustrious victory. Maritime fiction on the imperial frontier is founded on the sea’s ability to present both the best and worst of the human condition. Very few other subjects demonstrate this quality of the early eighteenth century than the representation of the pirates of the Caribbean, historically contextualized by the Golden Age of Piracy. Not

558. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko ( New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

559. Derek Walcott, “The Sea is History,” in The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948- 2013 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 253-256. 296

only does the pirate become one of metropolitan social interest in the 1720s, British romanticized narratives of commercial piracy also generated a kind of economy of enlightened nationalism circulated in printed works. The pirate was (and still is) represented as both a libinal figure of unending rapaciousness and bloodlust, as well as a romantic anti-hero of the maritime frontier. The seeming contradiction of his character and the enlightened masculinity with which he is endowed, has been repeated time and again since the works of Alonzo Ramírez and Daniel Defoe. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the romanticizations of the complex pirate have been distilled into the beloved anti-heroes of children’s fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island feasted upon the historical tropes of eighteenth-century piracy, including Long John

Silver’s silver tongue and affable demeanor.560 James Barrie’s Peter Pan gave the world the mutineer Captain Hook, dressed in his British military accoutrement.561

Since 1908, the pirate has been the subject of film as well as the countless works of fiction. Twentieth-century admiration of his representative recklessness and anti- authoritarianism, first established in the eighteenth century, made the pirate of the

Caribbean a rich resource from which storytellers could draw. Most recently, Disney

Films has cleverly capitalized on the archetype of the maritime picaro, imbuing him (and occasionally her), the very anti-institutional ideologies that permeated the historical pirate

560. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York: The Modern Library, 2001).

561. J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004).

297

three hundred years earlier. The Pirates of the Caribbean series (of which there are five films in total thus far), though designed for children, includes a macabre fascination with death, a level of viscerality to its characters, and positions governmental institutions

(particularly the East India Company) as the works’ villains.562 At its very core, with stories of maritime spectacle and fraternity, the films successfully bridge twenty-first century audiences with the deeply engrained narrative of past Anglo-Atlantic piracy. Yet, these stories slip from actual history, increasingly fantasized from the already embellished tales of capture and escape proudly shared in eighteenth-century seaside taverns. The sea elides memory with fantasy, and as a source of history, legend, and commercial capitalization, the pirate can never be truly known. What can be known, I argue, is how his representation in the eighteenth century generated an icon of enlightenment masculinity, modernity, romantic anti-heroism and catalyzed the genre of maritime fiction that would be “remembered” to this day.

Representations of masculinity and its confluence of enlightenment thought, empire, and the rise of the novel consequently leads me to a discussion about the representation of women and the fiction generated around them during the long eighteenth-century. I argued in my second chapter that Atlantic women of color, tied to imperial forces in the Caribbean, were subjects of novelistic experimentation in the long- eighteenth century. Fictional avatars of the consequences of imperial contact, these mixed-race heroines defied misogynistic and racist stereotypes of hyper-reproductivity, animality, and savagery. These figures made it possible for the public readership to see a

562. Pirates of the Caribbean (film series), directed by Gore Verbinski, et al. (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Motion Pictures, 2003-2017). 298

woman of color embrace Republican virtues and assume the model of transatlantic feminine modernity. Unfortunately, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the novelistic experimentation of the mixed-race heroine faded in transatlantic literature, but was never snuffed out entirely.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there has been a resurgence of literature and films featuring women of color as critical participants in the transatlantic eighteenth century. These works also consciously critique the systemic historical social injustices that have been placed upon these women, redressing the very social order that barred them from participating in the Bildungsroman novels of the nineteenth century.

Published in 2003, Évelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie L’Infâme (translated as The Infamous

Rosalie) is set in the year 1750 and follows the young slave Lisette of a Haitian plantation in the years leading up to the 1791 revolution. The impetus for this narrative was based on a factual story Trouillot had discovered while conducting research for the work: an enslaved midwife killed slave newborn infants by sticking a long needle into one of the fontanelles. A few days later, the infant died of trismus (lockjaw). For each infant killed, the woman would tie a knot in a rope and wear the rope around her waist, carrying the memories of those whose lives she saved from slavery. Once her actions had been discovered by colonial officials, the rope had seventy knots. In Rosalie L’Infâme, the historical memory of this woman is portrayed as Lisette’s deceased great-Aunt Brigette.

A part of Lisette’s journey is to discover what her aunt had done, and the emotional and spiritual motivations for her actions.

At the novel’s start, Lisette’s youth and relative privilege as a domestic servant keeps her relatively ignorant of the freedom from which she has been deprived; creole and slave born, she did not consider any life outside of her social and gendered status. As

299

the novel progresses, however, Lisette becomes increasingly more aware of the systems of oppression and racism that have shaped her identity. By the novel’s end, she decides to run away from the plantation and join the Maroon community where the father of her unborn child resides. Told through a series of interpolated slave narratives centralized on the slave ship Rosalie, the novel creatively portrays an enslaved woman’s coming-of-age- narrative.

Ten years later, the film Belle was released by Fox Searchlight Productions based on the historical figure of Dido Elizabeth Belle.563 The narrative portrayed in the critically acclaimed-film is littered with historical inaccuracies: the real Dido Elizabeth remained a servant during her time at Lord Mansfield’s estate, although she was on friendly, familiar terms with the household and with guests. In the film, Dido Elizabeth is granted a more privileged social position, albeit in a liminal one that is neither servant nor aristocrat. The modern adaptation of the historical woman reinvents her to be a subject of personal growth and developing gentility during the rise of the slave trade debates in

London. She is frequently confronted with walls of racialized and gendered prejudice, which as the movie points out, must be consistently overcome. Moderately faithful to the historical record, Dido Elizabeth marries Frenchman John Davinier, in the film represented as a Republican and fervent abolitionist. Like the long eighteenth-century works of The Woman of Colour and Ourika, the 2003 Rosalie L’Infâme and the 2013

Belle have their heroines confront gendered and racial oppression head-on, and it is with this confrontation that the characters can succeed in assimilating into their desired

563. Belle, directed by Amma Asante (Los Angeles, CA: Fox Searchlight Productions, 2013). 300

community. In the modern retellings of historical events and peoples, each heroine, more aware of the systemic sexism and racism that exists as they age into maturity, seeks out justice through either law or rebellion. Ultimately, both Belle and Rosalie L’Infâme actively reinstate the eighteenth-century transatlantic woman of color at the forefront of modern femininity and the Bildungsroman genre.

The political overlap of issues relating to race and gender as they are presented in the discussion of the second chapter, inevitably leads to a more in-depth examination of slavery and the slave narrative in the third chapter. A genre borne out of the transatlantic slave trade, the slave narrative has been argued as foundational to the African-American literary canon. Chapter three’s focus was on a specific component to the genre: the literary and rhetorical role of silence. The slave narrative, generically founded on the orality of storytelling, has had much theoretical concentration on an enslaved subject’s narrative voice. Indeed, voicing one’s identity in a vacuum of prejudicial silence was a critical constituent in the fight for abolition of the slave trade and eventual emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean. Yet, what I contend as worthy of further study is the inclusion of silence in the autobiographical slave narrative. I argued that the inclusion of traumatic moments of silence performs a number of different literary functions: it rhetorically coordinates a shared relationship between the Atlantic enslaved and metropolitan readership through the human experience of trauma; it gives a sense of narrative authenticity to the slave experience; and thirdly, it historically provides a counterdiscourse to apologist reasoning that enslaved silence implied enslaved complicity.

Much contemporary theoretical work has been done on the important constituency of slave narratives and voice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as they

301

relate to the narratives of Equiano and Prince. There have also been a number of twentieth-century works of fiction and film that have rigorously attended to the representation of eighteenth-century slave subjects, focusing on both their “voice” within the works as well as their silences. One exemplary testament to this exploration of slave silence is J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, a literary revision of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.564

In the novel, the character of Friday is physically mute. His tongue had been cut out by an act of Friday’s former slave owners, or so Cruso claims. It is Friday’s silence that haunts the protagonist Susan Barton, signaling an ontological gap between her experience as a metropolitan British woman and Friday’s experience as a former slave dragged across the Atlantic to England. For Susan, Friday’s silence is a burden; she finds herself consistently frustrated by it, and with each attempt at strengthening his ability to communicate, the gap between the two characters only widens. Though open to multiple interpretations, I contend that this exploration of slave silence is a critique of Eurocentric visions of modernity which consequently lead to a universalizing logic about personal and nation teleology.

The mesmeric narrative of slave silence in Foe can be complemented by other twentieth-century works of fiction that explore slave silence in more concrete ways, including Caryl Phillips’ 1991 novel Cambridge.565 Divided into three sections, the novel begins with the first-person narrative of Emily Cartwright, an absentee planter’s daughter who arrives to Jamaica and eventually oversees (though ineptly) her father’s plantation.

The second, much smaller section, follows the first-person narrative of Cambridge, who

564. J.M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).

565. Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (New York: Vintage International, 1993). 302

narrates his story of imprisonment, redemption, education and forced return to slavery.

The third, briefest section of the work is represented as a journalistic account of

Cambridge’s execution, as he was held responsible for the death of the plantation overseer (and Emily’s lover) Mr. Brown. The epilogue pivots back to Emily’s voice as she loses her mind over the loss of her love child born prematurely. The interwoven lives of Cambridge and Emily are told through three unique perspectives, though in the end,

Cambridge’s voice appears to only be heard by the reader. He is otherwise silenced within the work’s larger narrative frame. The reading experience in the novel’s second section becomes deeply intimate, rendering Cambridge’s violent hanging and gibbeting all the more painful for the reader to encounter. Unlike Foe’s Susan Barton, who desperately wants Friday to communicate with her on her terms, the figure of Cambridge is forcibly silenced by the systemic racism inherent to Jamaican slavery, and physically silenced by his death.

In both twentieth-century novels, slave silence plays a critical role, and multiple unique readings of their representations can be drawn. A common thematic thread shared by the works is that the integration of silence demonstrates that enacted systems of oppression were placed upon the black figures. Another is that the white female characters, who play leading roles in each novel, remain (either willingly or not) uninformed of the slave experience in the circumatlantic eighteenth century. Considered together conceptually, these works reiterate that the slave experience is not one that can be mediated or ventriloquized through the mouthpieces of white characters, but must be recounted by those who have undergone the cruel experiences of race-based economic and social objectification. However, accessing the oppressed subject through representative silence is a difficult, if not impossible, task. In Foe, there is the notion that

303

the history of the transatlantic slave trade can never truly be known, and the voices of the enslaved are as lost as ephemeral bubbles trying to rise through the depths of the Atlantic.

Or as Cambridge indicates, the “truth” of the slave experience can only be found if one knows where and how to look; most archival materials, including the journalistic report of the third section, only provide the “half-truths” of white colonial accounts. In either instance, silence serves as an important signal. In each novel, silence connects the reader to the trauma of the trade, and establishes a frame in which oppression, true oppression, can be understood.

The discussion of slave narratives and their rhetorical power in shaping the novel as a form in the third chapter pivoted to one that focuses on the contributory role of transatlantic slavery apologists in the fourth chapter. Supporters of slavery developed their own rhetorical and narrative formations of slavery advocacy through a new re- working of the gothic genre, amongst other avenues. In the chapter, I argued that the representations of Vodou and Obeah in the French and British Caribbean take on an intentionally sinister form, invoking plantocratic fears of racial, religious and cultural contamination should the enslaved be freed. The Caribbean gothic, a genre set apart from its European antecedents, generated new tropes, types, and figures of terror not yet explored until employed by slavery advocates to serve their own narrative purpose of persuasion. Inherently a political genre, the gothic experiments with shared cultural fears embodied in a spectral other. In the instance of the Caribbean gothic, the spectral other takes the form of the Vodou or Obeah practitioner, threatening the stability of the plantocratic order and the lives of the white planters. With the novels that I examine, I triangulated narrative fiction, plantocratic fear, and the syncretic religious practices of

Obeah and Vodou as they coalesced into a new mode of novelistic terror.

304

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Obeah and Vodou have been fetishized in popular culture. Though not discussed in the chapter, the zombie figure, which evolved from accounts taken in eighteenth-century Haiti and Jamaica, is the most iconic gothic figure that resonates most frequently. Zombie fiction aside, contemporary writers of gothic fiction use the genre to combat the structural racism that initially motivated the eighteenth-century texts. Examples can be found in the Caribbean narrative revisionist stories of Wide Sargasso Sea and Windward Heights.566 The well-known works both relocate the idea of the “metropolis” entirely, challenging imperial givens of central and marginal geo-political spacing and markers of otherness that were assumed in Charlotte

Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso

Sea fixates on the creole heiress Antoinette Cosway through the eyes of the disenchanted unnamed Englishman who comes to Jamaica to marry her for her dwindling wealth. Set in 1830’s Jamaica, the novel textually discloses the contours of Jamaican racial politics, particularly the white former-slave-owning creole families that lost their wealth in the aftermath of slavery’s abolition. Obeah is infused in the political climate, as Antoinette depends on the characters of Tia and Christophine to maintain her creole cultural continuity in the face of the patriarchal imperialism, configured in her English husband.

Arguably, Obeah is set in opposition to frigid rationalism of the Rochester figure. Once

Christophine is sent away and her protective powers equally absented, the English husband initiates his malicious strategy to claim that Antoinette is mad and take her to

England. Flipping the script on the cultural composition of Obeah from its eighteenth-

566. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Penguin Books, 1966). 305

century representations, it is the imperial rationalism of the English other that threatens the lead female character of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights is written in the same vein as Jean Rhys’ mid-century novel, revising the class-based narrative of Emily Brontë’s classic fiction into a race-based postcolonial work that takes place in French-speaking nineteenth- century Guadeloupe. The novel traverses three generations of social unrest in a post- emancipation Caribbean, where the hierarchies of racial difference combat class-based mobility for a new generation of free people. Much like Obeah in Wide Sargasso Sea,

Vodou is written as a critical blockade against white imperialist forces. Yet, in Windward

Heights, white oppression takes the face of Christian religious doctrine. Razyé, the

Heathcliff figure of Condé’s revisionist narrative, is taken into the l’Engoulvent plantation and instructed to appear and behave “like a Christian.”567 The performance of religious conversion upended what Razyé believed was his true creole identity, and he developed a deep loathing for the white-oriented faith. After the death of his beloved

Cathy Gagneur, his anti-Christian sentiments became relentless, and he actively villainized Christianity throughout the course of the work. His desperate hatred of it is juxtaposed against his spiritual need to reach beyond the known world and unite with

Cathy. In every town and city he visits, Razyé seeks out a Vodou practitioner to help him find spiritual closure. Though each practitioner fails in his or her efforts of spiritual contact, Razyé believes that Cathy and he will eventually be reunited. In an overall dark and dismal novel, filled with death, revenge, and hatred, Vodou appears a singular source of hope. Like Wide Sargasso Sea, Windward Heights intentionally channels a

567. Condé, Windward Heights, 23. 306

counternarrative of the colonial configurations of the contaminated Caribbean subject. It is Christianity in the work that prohibits black progress, and perverts the ideological formations of an “independent” Caribbean. The gothic mode in which both novels are written is a crucial contributor to the strength of the revisionist historical narratives that they share. Yet, there is a deliberate inversion of religious and cultural constructions of

Vodou and Obeah in the contemporary renditions of the Brontë sisters’ nineteenth- century novels.

Discussions of the contemporary fiction that perpetuates or revises the different generic conventions of the Caribbean novel are not entirely categorically exclusive. For example, both Rosalie L’Infâme and Windward Heights are works that gives voice to silent servants and the impoverished. Foe is a work that integrates the gothic trope of slavery’s spectral haunting. Even Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest sheepishly addresses the legacies of slavery and the syncretic practice of Vodou in its portrayal of the sea goddess Calypso. Other threads between the works can also be made, including the fact that Foe, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Windward Heights, are all revisionist works of historical fiction that reclaim popular works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The concept of revisionist historical fiction alone alludes to the fact that History (capital

H) is composed of multitudinous perspectives and narratives, but is typically only granted one major story that persists through the ages.

Retelling the history of the Caribbean is a slippery undertaking. For many, all that can be known is represented by this conclusion’s epigraph: racism and slavery dismantled and destroyed millions of lives and its history still reverberates transnationally today.

Saidiya Hartman, in Lose Your Mother, argues that the forced African diaspora permanently destabilized African American historical knowledge: attempts to trace

307

oneself through history is a romantic exercise that will bring only absences and disillusionment. Hartman found that she was unable to track the narrative of her own historical past, and therefore finds the archives of African enslavement an empty museum or a sterilized and unused prison in which the diasporic subject is trapped. “If the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it is because we are still looking for an exit from the prison.”568 Out of the works discussed in this conclusion, Foe best represents the narrative inaccessibility of a definitive truth behind the fact and fiction of the long- eighteenth century Caribbean.

Yet, it is a messy and obfuscating history that requires further digging. What can never be uncovered is an absolute truth by reading about the West Indies. Rather, what this project assessed was that, in the words of Eve Tavor Bannet, the fiction of the long eighteenth-century Caribbean “explored the endless bounds of possibility emerging from historical situations.”569 This project offered a limited view into the unfolding multiplicities that emerge out of the history of the eighteenth-century West Indies and how that history is a critical component to the rise of the novel.

568. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 133.

569. Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720- 1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 230. 308

Bibliography

A General History of the Pyrates. 1724. Ed. Manuel Schonhorn. Mineola: Dover, 1999. A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes in St. Domingo, which began in August 1791: Being a Translation […] 2nd edition. London: J. Sewell, 1792. Abbott, Thomas. Narrative of Certain Events connected with The Late Disturbances in Jamaica, and the Charges Preferred against the Baptist Missionaries in that Island (London: Holdsworth and Ball,1832. Acheraïou, Amar. Questioning Cultural Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization. NewYork: Macmillan, 2011. Adams-Campbell, Melissa. New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015. Agnani, Sunil. Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Ahern, Stephen. Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770-1830. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Aikin, Anna Laetitia. “On the pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.” Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. London: J. Johnson, 1773. Accessed February 17, 2017. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/barbauldessays.html. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso Press, 1983, 2006. Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1810. Chicago: University of Illinois, Press, 1986. Anonymous. The Woman of Colour. Ed. Lyndon Dominique. Toronto: Broadview, 2008 (1808). Aravamudan Srivinas. Tropicopolitans: Colonial and Agency, 1688-1804. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. ---. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Ardilla, J.A. Garido, “Introduction.” In A History of the Spanish Novel, edited by J.A. Garido Ardilla, 1-41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

309

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Baker Jr., Houston A. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Bannet, Eve Tavor. Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” In The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory: 1900-2000, edited by Dorothy J. Hale, 229-234. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Bauer, Ralph and José Antonio Mazzotti, editors. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas:Empire, Texts, Identities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Beard, J.R. Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography. Boston: James Redpath, 1863. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/beard63/beard63.html Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Edited by Joanna Lipking. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Bekkaoui, Khalid. White Women Captives in North Africa: Narratives of Enslavement, 1735-1830. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Believer with Reza Aslan. “Voudou in Haiti.” 1x3. Directed by Ben Selkow. CNN, 19 March, 2017. Bell, Hesketh. Obeah; Witchcraft in the West Indies. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1889. Belle. Directed by Amma Asante. Los Angeles, CA: Fox Searchlight Productions, 2013. Berman, Carolyn Vellenga. Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Bhabha, Homi “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1984. Blackburn, Robin. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. New York: Verso Press, 2013. Boulukos, George. “The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-Slavery and Racial Disgust in Charlotte Smith’s Story of Henrietta (1800).” In Slavery and Cultures of Abolition: Essays marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of

310

1807, edited by Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson. New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2007. Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. ---. “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves.” In The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics and English Literature, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, 23-63. New York: Methuen, 1987. Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009. Burgess, Douglas. “Piracy in the Public Sphere: The Henry Every Trials and the Battle for Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Print Culture” NACBS 48 (Oct 2009), 887- 913. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by James T. Boulton. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2008. Originally published in London: R & J. Dodsley, 1757. ---. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New York: Oxford World Classics, 1999. Burnham, Michelle. “Introduction.” The Female American. Unca Eliza Eliza Winkfield (pseud.). Ed. Michelle Burnham. Toronto: Broadview, 2001. 9-28. Burton, Gera C. Ambivalence and the Postcolonial Subject: The Strategic Alliance of Juan Francisco Manzano and Richard Robert Madden. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Burwick, Frederick and Manushag Powell. British Pirates in Print and Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Buscaglia-Salgado, José F. Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ---. “The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690) and the Duplicitous Complicity between the Narrator, the Writer, and the Censor,” Dissidences 1:3 (2005): 1-42. Cardona-Bonet, Walter A. El Marinero, Bandolero, Pirata y Contrabandista Roberto Cofresí. Bayamón: Marine and Archaelogical Publications, 1991.

311

Caretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. ---. “Olaudah Equiano: African or American?” 1650-1850 Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 17 (2008). Pp 229-246. Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760-1807. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Carretta, Vincent. “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?: New Light on an Eighteenth- century Question of Identity.” Slavery & Abolition 20:3 (1999), 96-105. Caruth, Cathy ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4-5. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Challis B.C. “The Substance of a Speech on Negro Slavery, delivered at the Rev Mr. Barker’s Chapel.” The Baptist Magazine Vol. XXIII. London: George Wightman, 1831. Pp 3-28. Clarkson, Thomas. An Essay on the Slavery of the Human Species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation […] London; Printed in Philadelphia, 1787). Accessed via Google Books Cobley, Alan Gregor. “Changing Metropolitan Attitudes to the Atlantic Slave Trade.” The Journal of Caribbean History 42:1(2008): 91-110. Project Muse. Web. 14 Jun 2015. Coetzee, J.M. Foe. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Cohen-Vrignaud, Gerard. “Becoming Corsairs: Byron, British Property Rights an Orientalist Economics,” Studies in Romanticism, 50:4 (Winter 2011): 685-688. Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and The Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Collins, David. Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies. By a Professional Planter. London: Printed by J. Barfield, Wardour Street, 1803.

Condé, Maryse. Windward Heights. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Soho Press, 1995.

312

Cordingly, David. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and The Reality of Life Among Pirates. New York: Random House, 1995. “Court of Common Pleas: Wood v. Pringle.” Morning Post. 22 Feb. 1833. Cowling, Camillia. Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Craton, Michael. “Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West Indies.” In Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, 314-362. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991. "Creole n. and adj.". OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed March 2016. Cuguano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. Ed. Vincent Caretta. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999. Curran, Stuart. “Women Readers, Women Writers.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, edited by Stuart Curran,169-186. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Dampier, William. Memoirs of a Buccaneer: Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World, 1697. Mineola: Dover, 2007. Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865. Liverpool: Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 2015. Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origin of the English Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Davis, William C. The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Davison, Carol. “Anglo-Caribbean Gothic.” The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith. Blackwell Reference Online, 2013. 29 November 2017.

313

Dayan, Joan. “Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods.” In Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gerbert. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. De Barros, Juanita. “‘Setting things right’: Medicine and magic in British Guiana, 1803- 1838.” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slaves Studies, 25:1 (2004), 25-34. Accessed March 8, 2017. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Edited by Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2007. --. Captain Singleton. 1720. Edited by Shiv K. Kumar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Desloziéres, Louise Narcisse Baudry. Les Égaremens du Nigrophilisme (Paris: Chez Migneret, 1802), 14-18. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5790469j/f4.image. Didier, Béatrice. Écrire la Révolution. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1989. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Dumas, Paula. Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition. New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Duras, Claire de. Ourika, trans. John Fowles. New York: Modern Language Association Press, 1994. Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Vol. II. London: John Stockdale, 1793. Elliott, J.H. Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. New York: Penguin, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Emancipation in Disguise, or the True Crisis of the Colonies. To which are Added Considerations upon Measures proposed for their Temporary Relief and Observations upon Colonial Monopoly […]. London: J. Ridgway, 1807. Ennis, Daniel. Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself. Ed. Vincent Caretta. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

314

Esquemeling, Alexander. The Buccaneers of America. 1685. Edited by William Swan Stallybrass. London: Routledge and Sons, 1924. Feagin, Susan L. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Ferguson, Moira. “Introduction” The History of Mary Prince. Edited by Moira Ferguson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Fernández-Olmos, Margarite and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, editors. Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah and the Caribbean. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Foot, Jesse. A Defence of the Planters in the West Indies; Comprised in Four Arguments. London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1792. Francklyn, Gilbert. An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African; in a series of Letter, from a Gentleman in Jamaica, to his Friend in London: wherein Many of the Mistakes and Misrepresentations of Mr. Clarkson are pointed out […] London: Logographic Press, 1789. Accessed via Bodleian Libraries Gates, Henry Louis. Signifying Money: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Geddes, Alex. An Apology for Slavery; or, Six Cogent Arguments against the Immediate Abolition of the Slave-Trade, 1792. Gee, Sophie. Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. General Magazine and Impartial Review. London: Bellamy and Roberts, Jan. 1789. Gerassi-Navarro, Nina. Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gilroy, Paul The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glassman, Sallie Ann. “CNN’s Reza Aslan tries to understand Vodou — and falls short.” The Lens, April 2, 2017. Accessed April 28, 2017.

315

http://thelensnola.org/2017/04/02/cnns-reza-aslan-tries-to-make-sense-of-Vodou- and-falls-short/. Glissant, Éduoard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga, Gertrudis. Sab and Autobiography. Ed. Nina Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Goodwin, Jonathan and John Holbo, eds., Reading Graphs, Maps and Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2011. Goudie, Sean. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Grasso, Joshua. “The Providence of Pirates: Defoe and the ‘True-Bred Merchant.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, 2:1 (Fall 2010), 21-40.

Greenfield, Susan. “‘Abroad and at Home”: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda. PMLA 12.2 (Mar. 1997), 214-228. Grenby, M.O. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, 1995. Hall, Daniel. French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Handler, Jerome and Kenneth Bilby. Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760-2011. Mona: University of the West Indies, 2012. Hanna, Mark G. Pirates Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Hargrave, Francis. “An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett…to demonstrate the Present Unlawfulness of Domestic Slavery in England.” London: W. Otridge, 1772. Haring, C.H. The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century. Hamden: Archon Books, 1966. Harper, William. Memoir of Slavery (qtd in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1981.

316

Harris, Raymund Rev. Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave-Trade, shewing its conformity with the principles of natural and revealed religion, delineated in the Sacred Writings of the Word of God. London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1788. Hartman, Saidya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ---. Lose Your Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. ---. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small axe 26 (June 2008). Pp 1-14.

Harvey, Allison. “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” New Essays on Maria Edgeworth. Edited by Julie Nash, (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 1-29. Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations. New York: Zone Books, 2009. Henry, William. Substance of the Speech of His Royal Highness The Duke of Clarence, in the House of Lords, on the motion for The Commitment of the Slave Trade Limitation Bill, on the fifth day of July, 1799. London: Whittingham, Dean Street, Fetter Lane, 1799. Heuman, Gad J. and David V. Trotman, editors. Contesting Freedom: Control and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean. Warwick: Macmillan Caribbean, 2005. Higman, B.W. A Concise History of the Caribbean. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Hoeveler, Diane. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007. Holland, William. Johnny New-Come in the Island of Jamaica, 1800, etching colored, 30.3cm x 48.2 cm., John Carter Brown Library Collection, Providence. Accessed February 10, 2017. Hugo, Victor. Bug-Jargal, edited and translated by Chris Bongie. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. Originally published in Paris: Urbain Canel Libraire, 1826.

317

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl Edited by Joslyn T. Pine. Mineola: Dover, 2001. Jáuregui, Carlos. “Cannibalism, the Eucharist, and the Criollos Subjects.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 61-100. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Kadish, Doris Y., and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, editors. Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783-1823. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1994. Kaye, Anthony E. “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World.” The Journal of Southern History 75:3(Aug 2009). Pp. 627- 650. Knox, William. Farther Reasons of a Country Gentleman for Opposing Mr. Wilberforce’s Motion […], 1792. London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1792. Labat, Jean Baptiste. Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de L’Amerique. Paris: Chex Theodore Le Gras, 1713. Lacroix, Pamphile. Memoires pour sevir á l’histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Chez Pillet Ainé, 1819. Accessed April 25, 2017. . Landes, Joan B. Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Latimer, Jon. Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Laub, Dori and Nanette Aurerhahn, “Knowing and no Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory.” International Journal of Psycho- Analysis, 74 (1993), pp 287-302. Lázaro, Fabio López. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th-Century Pirates. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Le Code Noir, ou Recueil des Réflemens redus jusqu’a present […]. Paris: Imprimeur de Roi, 1788. Accessed April 2, 2017 via Google Books. Lévy, Maurice. Le roman gothic anglais, 1764-1824. Toulouse: Publication de Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de Toulouse, 1995. Lewis, Matthey Gregory. Journal of a West India Proprietor. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008. Originally published in London: John Murray, 1834.

318

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailor, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000, 2013. Liu, Tessie. “The Secret beyond White Patriarchal Power: Race, Gender and Freedom in the Last Days of Colonial Saint-Domingue,” French Historical Studies, 33: 3 (Summer 2010), 387-416. Accessed May 1, 2017. Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. London: printed for Awnsham Churchill, 1689. Accessed via EEBO, December 2015. ---. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book I: Innate Notions.1690. Editor Jonathan Bennett, 2004. ---. Two Treatises of Government: In the former, the false Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer… Second Edition Corrected. London: printed for Awnsham Churchill, 1694. Accessed via EEBO, December 2015. ---. Political Aphorisms: or The True Maxims of the Government Displayed. Third Edition. London: printed for Tho. Harrison, 1691. Accessed via EEBO, December 2015. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of The Antient and Modern Stateof that Island, Vol. II. London: T. Lowndes, 1774. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Madden, Richard Robert. A Twelvemonths’ Residence in the West Indies, Vol. 2. London: James Cochrane and Waterloo Place, 1835. Manzano, Juan Francisco. Autobiografía de un escalvo: A Bilingual Edition. Trans. Ivan A. Shulman and Eveylyn Picon Garfield. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Marryat, Joseph. Thoughts on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and Civilization of Africa; with Remarks on the African Institution and Examination of the Report of their Committee, recommending a General Registry of Slaves in the British West India Islands. London: J.M Richardson, 1816. Marshall, Bridget. The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790-1860. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. McBride, Dwight. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York University Press, 2001. McCarthy-Brown, Karen. “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study.” In Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, edited by Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

319

Michel, Gerardo Gómez. “Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez y el discurso imperial español en el siglo XVII” Estudios Hispánicos, 65 (2012), 159-172. Mintz, Sidney. “The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area.” Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean. Edited by Michael M. Horowitz (New York: Natural History Press, 1971). Pp. 17-46. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. More, Hannah. “Slavery, a poem,” London: T Cadwell, 1788. Accessed via ECCO TCP Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso Press, 1987, 2000. ---. Graphs, Maps, Trees. London: Verso, 2005. Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2004. Mullen, Edward. “Introduction.” Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba, recently Translated from the Spanish by R.R. Madden. 1840.Hamden, Archon Book, 1981. Pp. 4-27. Nordius, Janina. “Introduction.” In The Story of Henrietta, edited by Janina Nordius. Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2012. Novak, Maximillian. “Daniel Defoe in the Footsteps of the Goddess of Reason.” In Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe, edited by Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade and Holly Faith Nelson, 51-68. New York: AMS Press, 2014. Nussbaum, Felicity. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Obeah. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. Accessed February 16, 2017. . Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Colonial and postcolonial Gothic: the Caribbean.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 229-257. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Paton, Diana. “Histories of Three-Fingered Jack: A Bibliography.” Last modified June 27, 2008. < http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/tfj/index.htm. Accessed January 29, 2017>.

320

---. “The Afterlives of Three-Fingered Jack.” In Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, edited by Brycchan Carey and Peter Kitson. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007. ---. The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Payton, Jason. “Alexander Oliver Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America and the Disenchantment of Imperial History.” In Early American Literature 48:2 (2013), 337-365. Pestana, Carla and Sharon V. Salinger, editors. Inequality in Early America. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. Philip, Maxwell. Emmanuel Appadocca; Or, Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers. 1854. Edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain. Amherst: University of Amherst Press, 1997. Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Pirates of the Caribbean (film series). Directed by Gore Verbinski, et al. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Motion Pictures, 2003-2017. Poser, Norman S. Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason. Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge Press, 1992, 2008. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Narrated by Herself. Ed. Sara Salih. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004. Pringle, Thomas “Preface.” The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave related by Herself London: F. Westley and A.H. Davis, 1831. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Volume 1. New York: Routledge, 1996. Ramsay, Jack. Jean Lafitte: The Prince of Pirates. Austin: Eakin Press, 1996. Ramsay, James. An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves, in the British Sugar Colonies. London: James Phillips, 1784. Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Reid, Roddey. Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

321

Renny, Robert. A History of Jamaica. With Observations on the climate, scenery, trade, […] London: J. Cawthorn, 1807. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Penguin Books, 1966. Richardson, Alan. “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797-1807.” In Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah and the Caribbean, edited by Margarite Fernández-Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Rodrigues, Janelle. “Obeah(Man) as Trickster in Cynric Williams’ Hamel the Obeah Man.” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives 12:2 (2015), 219-234. Accessed March 25, 2017. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile: or A Treatise on Education, Selections. Edited by Catherine Elgin. . ---. The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, 1762. Editor Jonathan Bennet, 2010. < http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf> ---. Emile: or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Rugemer, Edward Bartlett. The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009. Sayre, Gordon M. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 1985. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Seymour, Francis. “The Story of Inkle and Yarico and An Epistle from Yarico to Inkle, After he had left her in Slavery.” In Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies 1657-1777, edited by Thomas W. Krise, 141-146. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Shaw, Jenny. Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans and the Construction of Difference. Athens: University of Georgia, 2013. Sheridan, Richard. “The Maroons of Jamaica, 1730-1830: Livelihood, Demography and Health.” In Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World, edited by Gad Heuman, 152-172. London: Frank Cass, 1986.

322

Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos. Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez. Edited by J.S. Cummins and Alan Soons. London: Tamesis Texts, 1984. Simmons, K. Merinda. “Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Migration and the Epistemology of ‘Voice’ in Mary Prince’s ‘History of Mary Prince’ and Maryse Condé’s ‘I, Tituba.” College Literature, 36:4 (Fall 2009), 75-99. Slave Law of Jamaica: with Proceedings and Documents Relative thereto. London: James Ridgway, 1828. Accessed April 3, 2017. . Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: printed for A. Millar, 1759. Accessed March 15, 2017. . Smith, Charlotte. The Story of Henrietta, edited by Janina Nordius. Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2012. Originally published in Volume II of The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. London: Sampson Low, 1800. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Roderick Random. 1748. Edited by Paul-Gabriel Boucé. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008. Smyth, F.G. An Apology for West Indians, and Reflections of the Policy of Great Britain’s Interference in the Internal Concerns of the West India Colonies. London: James Ridgeway, 1824. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. pp 271-316. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Stedman, John Gabriel. Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. London: J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1796. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Stewart, Dianne. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

323

Stewart, John. A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica […]. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1823. Swenson, James. On Jean-Jacque Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Swingen, Abigail. Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro. Cofresí. 1876. Rió Piedras: Editorial Edil Inc, 1975. The Baptist Magazine Vol. XXIII. London: George Wightman, 1831. The Monthly Review; Or, Literary Journal from January to June 1789. Vol. 80. Edited by R. Griffiths, London: R. Griffiths, 1789. < https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006061853>. The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal from June 1773 to January 1774, vol. 49. London: T. Becket and Co., 1774. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, accessed February 19th, 2017. http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/intro-maps. Thomas, Helen. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Thomas, Sue. “Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Cases over The History of Mary Prince.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40:1 (Mar 2005) 113-135. Thompson Alvin O. Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice, Guyana 1803- 1831. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002. Thompson, Helen. Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth- Century Domestic Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Todorova, Kremena. “‘I will Say the Truth to the English People’: The History of Mary Prince and the Meaning of English History.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43:3 (2001), 285-302. “The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the Murder of Two Female Negro Slaves, on Board the Recovery, African Slave Ship.” London: C. Stalker, 1792. Trouillot, Évelyne. The Infamous Rosalie. Translated by M.A. Salvodon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Tryon, Thomas. Friendly Advice to Gentlemen Planters of the East and West Indies. London: Printed by Andrew Sowle,1684. Accessed via EEBO, December 2015.

324

Tumbleson, Raymond. Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660-1745. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Voodoo. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. Accessed February 16, 2017, . Walcott, Derek “The Sea is History.” In The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013, edited by Glyn Maxwell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, edited by Frederick S. Frank. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003. Originally published in London: Thomas Lownds, 1765. Walvin, James. Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire. Malden: Blackwell Press, 2001. Watt, Ian. “Time and Family in the Gothic Novel: The Castle of Otranto.” Eighteenth- Century Life, 10:3 (1986): 159-171. Accessed March 1, 2017. ---. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Wedderburn, Robert. The Horrors of Slavery. Edited by Ian McCalman. Kingston: Jamaica, 1991. West, Jane. The Advantages of Education; Or, the History of Maria Williams, a Tale for Misses and their Mammas. 1793. Edited by Gina Luria. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974. Wheatley, Phillis. “An Address to the Deist.” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online. . Accessed 29 Oct. 2015. Williams, Cynric. A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, From the Western to the Eastern End, in the year 1823. London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826. ---. Hamel, the Obeah Man, edited by Candace Ward and Tim Watson. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010. Originally published in London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827. Williams, Joseph. Vodous and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft. New York: Dial Press, 1932. Winkfield, Unca Eliza (pseud). The Female American; Or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield. Ed. Michelle Burnham. Toronto: Broadview, 2001 (1767). Print. Wisecup, Kelly and Toni Wall Jauden. “On knowing and not knowing Obeah.” Atlantic Studies 12:2 (June 2015): 129-143. Accessed March 5, 2017.

325

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792. E-text, Accessed by The University of Virginia Library, February 2016. Woodard, Colin. The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Woodard, Helena. African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race and Reason. Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999. Wright, Angela. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820: The Import of Terror. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Young, Sir William. The Speech of Sir William Young, delivered in Parliament on the Subject of the Slave Trade, 1791. London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1791.

326

Appendix A

Villany Rewarded University of California Santa Barbara English Broadside Ballad Archive http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20813/image

327

Appendix B

Johnny New-Come in the Island of Jamaica. Originally published by William No. 50 Oxford Street, ca 1800. Etching, colored. http://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~2~2~600~100495:Johnny- NEW-COME-in-the-ISLAND-of-JA

328