Willing Slaves: the Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery

Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery Lucy Sheehan Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Lucy Sheehan All rights reserved ABSTRACT Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery Lucy Sheehan The commencement of the Victorian period in the 1830s coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery in the British colonies. Consequently, modern readers have tended to focus on how the Victorians identified themselves with slavery’s abolition and either denied their past involvement with slavery or imagined that slave past as insurmountably distant. “Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery” argues, however, that colonial slavery survived in the Victorian novel in a paradoxical form that I term “willing slavery.” A wide range of Victorian novelists grappled with memories of Britain’s slave past in ways difficult for modern readers to recognize because their fiction represented slaves as figures whose bondage might seem, counterintuitively, self-willed. Nineteenth-century Britons produced fictions of “willing slavery” to work through the contradictions inherent to nineteenth-century individualism. As a fictional subject imagined to take pleasure in her own subjection, the willing slave represented a paradoxical figure whose most willful act was to give up her individuality in order to maintain cherished emotional bonds. This figure should strike modern readers as a contradiction in terms, at odds with the violence and dehumanization of chattel slavery. But for many significant Victorian writers, willing slavery was a way of bypassing contradictions still familiar to us today: the Victorian individualist was meant to be atomistic yet sympathetic, possessive yet sheltered from market exchange, a monad most at home within the collective unit of the family. By contrast, writers as diverse as John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot located willing slavery in a pre-Victorian history where social life revolved, they imagined, around obligation and familial attachments rather than individual freedom. Rooted in this fictive past, the willing slave had no individual autonomy or self-possession, but was defined instead by a different set of contradictions: a radical dependency and helpless emotional bondage that could nonetheless appear willing and willful, turning this fictional enslavement itself into an expression of the will. For Dickens, willing slavery provided an image of social interdependency that might heal the ills of the modern world by offering what one All the Year Round author described as “a better slavery than loveless freedom.” For novelists such as Brontë and Eliot who were no less critical of Victorian individualism, however, fantasies of willing slavery became the very fiction that their work aimed to dissolve. Chapter One argues that Frances Trollope’s groundbreaking antislavery fiction mirrors West Indian slave narratives in describing the slave plantation as coldly mechanical, and then extends this vision to portray early industrial England as an emotionally deprived social world similarly in need of repair. In the second chapter, I argue that Dickens responds to that emotional deprivation, and the replacement of traditional family bonds with what he describes as the “social contract of matrimony,” by producing a nostalgic account of willing slavery’s dependencies that draws on discourses of slavery found in British case law, where attorneys could exhort the slaveholder to “attach [slaves] to himself by the ties of affection.” The last two chapters argue that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda ironize this earlier nostalgia through female characters who grapple with the archetype of the willing slave. As their characters adopt and then discard the theatrical pose of willing subjection embodied by melodramatic heroines such as Dion Boucicault’s “octoroon” Zoe, Brontë and Eliot draw attention to the contradictions inherent to willing slavery, reframing it as a fantasy enjoyed exclusively by white Britons intent on shoring up the familial intimacies that helped preserve their social and economic dominance. These ironic reframings reveal a final paradox: though willing slavery helped create an analogy between African chattel slaves and British family members in fiction, this trope ultimately highlights the differences between the chattel slavery of Africans abroad, where the disruption of kinship bonds was a crucial method for exploitation and domination, and the imagined household subjection of English characters, rooted in the putatively binding qualities of family feeling. Contents List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgements iii Dedication iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Mother Machine: Slavery, Maternal Alienation, and Mechanical Reproduction in the Early Nineteenth Century 23 Chapter Two: “If Love Be Slavery, What Is Marriage?”: Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son and the Afterlife of Willing Slavery 88 Chapter Three: Captivity and Captivation in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette 173 Chapter Four: “Dancing on the Dead”: Performances of Slavery on the Victorian Stage and in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 228 Bibliography 328 i List of Illustrations 1. “Edward Williams Clay Illustration, 1841” 23 Source: Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 48-9. 2. “Scene from a Jamaica House of Correction” 45 Source: Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000.), 240. 3. “Kalalu (Ndugu M’Hali), London Stereoscope Company, 8 August 1872” 299 Source: Black Chronicles II,” CNN.com, October 6, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/06/world/gallery/black- chronicles-ii/index.html. 4. “Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 2012” 326 Source: “An Economy of Grace,” Kehinde Wiley Studio, http://kehindewiley.com/works/an-economy-of-grace/. ii Acknowledgments This dissertation could not have been written without the support of mentors, friends, and family, to whom I owe many more thanks than this brief acknowledgment will allow. I have had the incredible good fortune to be able to write this dissertation under the direction of Sharon Marcus, Nicholas Dames, and James Eli Adams, each of whom has provided unfailing intellectual guidance from the very beginning of my time in graduate school, and whose model scholarship and teaching have impacted this dissertation and its author in innumerable ways. Sharon Marcus has been an inspiring mentor. So many of the discoveries I made along the way in writing this project were spurred on by her incisive questions, and were able to come to fruition thanks to her insights and encouragement. Jim Adams’s sharp eye and meticulous feedback have allowed me to think and to write more clearly, and I am especially grateful to him for offering so much of his knowledge and good cheer. Nick Dames has been unstinting in his kindness and honesty, and his keen observations have continually helped me understand my own work better. It would be difficult to overstate their generosity or my gratitude. I am also thankful to a number of professors at Columbia and elsewhere who have helped along the way. Early on in my time at Columbia, Bruce Robbins, Eileen Gillooly, and Patricia Dailey offered guidance that has impacted this dissertation in significant ways. Saidiya Hartman’s 2012 seminar on “Slavery and Its Afterlife” provided a great deal of inspiration for this project. I’m thankful to Erik Gray for his mentorship and advice. Amanda Claybaugh and Elsie Michie provided crucial insight about this project at key moments as I was writing it, and Daniel Hack, along with Amanda Claybaugh, as readers for my defense. My thanks to Andrew Parker, who introduced me as an undergraduate to the Victorian period and to many of the ideas that have influenced this dissertation. John Kuhn and Emily Hainze have been constant comrades and lifelines in graduate school. They have also influenced my thinking in all sorts of ways, not least as shrewd readers of my work. They have both made me much smarter, and made our time in graduate school much more fun, and for that I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Thanks to Lindsay Gibson and Jessica Simon for their friendship and for many hours of talk about novels and the nineteenth century. And thanks to the Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows program at Columbia for providing such wonderful support for my work in the late stages of writing this dissertation. This work would not have been possible without the love and support of friends and family. Heather Wilson has been my closest friend and loyal supporter for over a decade. I’m thankful to her for her humor, her love, and for taking care of me through much more than just graduate school. I was lucky that much of my time in New York overlapped with Ben Read; I couldn’t ask for a more reliable friend. Thanks to Sara Roan, Meg Ray, and Katie Nagrotsky for their friendship, especially during our time together in New York, and to my brother, Brendan, for his support and his sense of humor. Anderson Heston has been by my side since my very first day of graduate school, which also happens to have been the day we first met. He has made every day since brighter. I am so thankful for his love and tireless support. I can’t imagine doing all of this any other way. Finally, to my parents, whose support has meant more to me than I could possibly say, and to whom I owe so much of the intellectual curiosity that drove me to write this dissertation. It is dedicated to them. Thanks to my father, Jim Sheehan, for your constant love and encouragement. And to my mother, Vicky Ludwig, my most enthusiastic cheerleader, and the most voracious reader of Victorian novels I know.

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