DOCSLIB.ORG

UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO of Bonds

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO of Bonds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Of Bonds and Bondage: Gender, Slavery, and Transatlantic Intimacies in the Eighteenth Century A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Jamie Ellen Rosenthal Committee in charge: Professor Rosemary George, Co-Chair Professor Kathryn Shevelow, Co-Chair Professor Rachel Klein Professor Lisa Lowe Professor Winifred Woodhull 2012 The Dissertation of Jamie Ellen Rosenthal is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair _____________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii For Neel, my best friend and partner. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page………………………………………………………………….…… iii Dedication.….………………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………… v Acknowledgements.………………………………………………………………… vi Vita...………………………………………………………………………….…..… ix Abstract…………………………………………………………………….……….. x Introduction…………………………………………………………….…………… 1 Chapter One The Contradictions of Sensibility: Race, Slavery, and the Colonial ‘Lady’...……… 44 Chapter Two Slavery, Radicalism, and the Fates of Working Women….….………..………….… 108 Chapter Three Religion, Morality, and the Poetics of Resistance in Colored and Black Women’s Narratives...………………………………………………………………. 156 Conclusion.………………………………………………………………………….. 228 Bibliography….…………….……………………………………………………….. 235 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am extremely grateful to the many people who have helped me to complete this project. I am indebted to my co-advisors, Kathryn Shevelow and Rosemary George, for their generous guidance and support during the various stages of my graduate studies. I have benefitted greatly from Kathryn’s expertise in eighteenth- century British literature and culture and from Rosemary’s expertise in postcolonial studies. Their encouragement, constructive feedback, and patience during the long process of completing this project have been invaluable. I admire them both as scholars and teachers, and I am grateful for everything I have learned from them. Winnie Woodhull has provided friendly encouragement and helpful feedback on my work. Her comments on an early draft of my first chapter raised important questions that helped shape the chapter and the project as a whole. I have enjoyed our conversations over the years, and I appreciate the support and advice she has given me as I have learned to navigate the world of academia. Lisa Lowe has deepened my appreciation for the importance of transnational approaches to literature. I admire her work as a scholar and a teacher, and I am thankful for her interest in and support of my project. I am grateful to Rachel Klein for providing helpful comments during the early stage of this project and for her continued support of my work. As this project progressed, I received several generous fellowships and grants that helped make it possible. The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided me with a 9-month fellowship that enabled me to conduct research in California, New York, England, and vi Antigua. The Huntington Library and the John Carter Brown Library each provided me with short-term research fellowships that enabled me to use their excellent collections. The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies provided me with a travel grant that helped fund my research in London. I am grateful to these institutions, and to the staff at CLIR, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, the British Library, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies Library, the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda Library, and the Antigua and Barbuda National Archives. I have been fortunate to have the support of many friends in California, North Carolina, and elsewhere during the process of completing this project. The friends I made while at UCSD—including Paige Prindle, Amie Filkow, Leslie Hammer, Emily Kugler, Gloria Gandara, Lillian Atteridge Dunning, Anne Wullschlager, and Angie Chau—have provided invaluable encouragement, support, and assistance over the years. I am also lucky to have forged a wonderful community of friends and colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill—including Laura Halperin, Nina Martin, Erika Wise, Elizabeth Havice, Sara Smith, Jean Dennison, Jocelyn Chua, Jennifer Ho, Ruth Salvaggio, and Minrose Gwin—who have supported me during the final stages of this work. I am also very grateful for the love and support of my family. My parents, Teresa Rosenthal and Steven Rosenthal, fostered my love of learning and literature from an early age and encouraged me to pursue my goals and dreams, however vii unconventional, over the years. My father, Steven, has always shown a strong interest in my academic work, which I truly appreciate. My brother, Josh, has been a wonderful friend on whom I can always rely. His talent, maturity, and wisdom never cease to amaze me. My step-mother, Ailsa Steckel, and my younger sisters, Eliana and Shoshana, have also been important sources of friendship and support. Finally, I thank my partner, Neel Ahuja, for his unwavering enthusiasm, encouragement, and support during this long journey. I have benefited enormously from his intelligent and insightful feedback, which has encouraged me to take my work in new and exciting directions. I am truly grateful for his constant willingness to listen and respond to my ideas and for the countless ways that he has helped me get through the last few years of researching, writing, and teaching. I enjoy spending every day with Neel and our pets, Keiki and Chef. I dedicate this work to Neel. viii VITA DEGREES 2012 Doctor of Philosophy, Literature, University of California, San Diego 2007 Master of Arts, Literature, University of California, San Diego 2000 Bachelor of Arts, Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz FIELDS OF STUDY Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture Transatlantic Studies Caribbean Studies Critical Theories of Race, Gender, and Sexuality PUBLICATIONS “The Contradictions of Racialized Sensibility: Gender, Slavery, and the Limits of Sympathy.” Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770-1830: The Bonds of Sentiment. Ed. Stephen Ahern. Farnham: Ashgate Press, Forthcoming 2013. FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS 2009-2010 Mellon Foundation/Council on Library and Information Resources Dissertation Fellowship for Research in Original Sources 2009 Ruth and Lincoln Ekstrom Short-term Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI 2009 W.M. Keck Foundation Short-term Fellowship at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA 2009 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Aubrey Williams Research Travel Award 2008-2009 UC San Diego Literature Department Dissertation Fellowship ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Of Bonds and Bondage: Gender, Slavery, and Transatlantic Intimacies in the Eighteenth Century by Jamie Ellen Rosenthal Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2012 Professor Rosemary George, Co-Chair Professor Kathryn Shevelow, Co-Chair This dissertation examines women’s autobiographical texts as key sites for understanding the variety of intimate, everyday practices through which the transatlantic slave system was constituted and challenged. I analyze journals, letters, slave narratives, and religious writings by women of different social and racial x backgrounds who traveled or lived in the Anglophone Caribbean during the long eighteenth century. I focus on the writings of Janet Schaw, Maria Nugent, Eliza Fenwick, Elizabeth Hart Thwaites, Anne Hart Gilbert, and Mary Prince. These women’s writings demonstrate that colonial control was exercised not only through formal state institutions, but also through the intimate interactions, alliances, and social norms produced by individuals in everyday life. At the same time, they show that colonial power was not only challenged through organized, collective action, but also by individuals who rejected or reinterpreted social norms regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. Arguing against traditions of scholarship that minimize the centrality of intimate spheres in the constitution of the political, the complex positions of female colonists, and the theoretical and material contributions of slaves to the overthrow of the colonial slave system, I argue that intimacies produced within and across lines of social difference in the Caribbean were both productive of colonial power and the basis for unique forms of everyday resistance to the ideologies and material structures of the slave plantation economy. By reading women’s narratives in relation to unpublished archival sources, historical records, and other literary texts, I trace the ways that everyday practices within spaces such as homes, plantations, schools, and churches were implicated in transatlantic circulations of power, violence, and ideas concerning the form and future of the slave system. My project demonstrates that an appraisal of the intimate in colonial relations helps
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic
    Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-01668-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period Edited by Devoney Looser Frontmatter More information The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period The Romantic period saw the fi rst generations of professional women writers fl ourish in Great Britain. Literary history is only now giving them the attention they deserve, for the quality of their writings and for their popularity in their own time. This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores the challenges and achievements of a fascinating set of women writers, including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley, alongside many lesser-known female authors writing and publishing during this period. Chapters consider major literary genres, including poetry, fi ction, drama, travel writing, histories, essays, and political writing, as well as topics such as globalization, colonialism, feminism, economics, families, sexualities, aging, and war. The volume shows how gender intersected with other aspects of identity and with cultural concerns that then shaped the work of authors, critics, and readers. Devoney Looser is Professor of English in the Department of English, Arizona State University. She is the author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (2000), co-editor of Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (1997), and editor of Jane Austen and Discourses
    [Show full text]
  • MO Grenby. Writing Revolution: British Literature
    The definitive version of this article is published by Blackwell as: M. O. Grenby. Writing Revolution: British Literature and the French Revolution Crisis, a Review of Recent Scholarship. Literature Compass 2006, 3 (6), 1351-1385 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118578169/abstract Writing Revolution: British Literature and the French Revolution Crisis, a Review of Recent Scholarship 1 M. O. Grenby Abstract The French Revolution had a profound effect on almost all aspects of British culture. French events and ideas were avidly discussed and disputed in Britain. Long-standing British political and cultural debates were given new life; new socio-political ideologies rapidly emerged. The sense of political, religious and cultural crisis that developed in the 1790s was only slowly to dissipate. Generations afterwards, many British thinkers and writers were still considering and renegotiating their responses. The effect of the Revolution Crisis on British literature was particularly marked, something that was widely recognised at the time and has been the focus of much scholarship since. It has become something of a cliché that British literary Romanticism was born out of the Revolution. The last few decades have produced new waves of powerful criticism which has re-examined the relationship between the Revolution Crisis and the works it shaped. Different strands of radical writing have now received detailed investigation, as have equally complex conservative responses. Writing by and for women is now receiving as much attention as writing by men, and previously neglected forms, such as the popular novel, pamphlets and children's literature, are now the subject of an increasing number of studies.
    [Show full text]
  • Mary Hays (1760-1824) by Elma Scott
    Mary Hays (1760-1824) by Elma Scott In the 1790s Mary Hays made her name as a novelist and essayist, but became notorious on account of her radical feminist writings. In the present day her work, like that of her contemporary and friend < link to Mary Wollstonecraft biography >Mary Wollstonecraft, is now receiving new critical evaluation. Little is known about Mary Hays’s childhood. She was born in 1760 into a family of Rational Dissenters, and spent her youth in the family home in the London suburb of Southwark. At the age of seventeen she fell in love with John Eccles, who was from a similar Dissenting background, although possibly slightly socially inferior to the Hays family. In 1779, when they hoped to marry, both families opposed the match, and the two were forbidden to see one other. John Eccles had no employment and Hays no fortune, but these drawbacks did not cause them to part. Since Eccles lived near to Hays’s home in Gainsford Street, it was not difficult for the two to meet secretly for walks. They also exchanged letters (over a hundred of which survive) which earnestly profess their devotion to each other. The letters also reveal that although Hays was spirited and bold and ready to make secret assignations with Eccles, she was also greatly concerned to appear decorous: ‘Be the guard of my honour and character, and attempt not liberties, which I must blush at the recollection of’.[1] Parental opposition was at last overcome and the two became engaged. However, tragedy struck, and shortly before their proposed marriage in August 1780, John Eccles died of a fever.
    [Show full text]
  • Charlotte Smith's Letters: a History, with Lessons.” Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism
    A LADY NOVELIST AND THE LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BOOK TRADE: CHARLOTTE SMITH’S LETTERS TO PUBLISHER THOMAS CADELL, SR., 1786-94 Emily Marie Brewer A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Jeanne Moskal Lloyd Kramer John McGowan Tom ReinerT Ruth Salvaggio ABSTRACT EMILY MARIE BREWER: A Lady Novelist and the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade: Charlotte Smith’s Letters to Publisher Thomas Cadell, Sr., 1786-94 (Under the direction of Jeanne Moskal) As a struggling single mother separated from her dissolute husband, the poet Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) began writing novels as a way to make money for her family. The exploding book market of late eighteenth-century Britain teemed with booksellers and publishers—some anxious to hustle works to press, some seeking quality works to build their reputation—and Smith entered this male-centric realm with naïveté, shaky confidence, and growing desperation. Guided by a literary mentor to the reputable London publishing firm of Thomas Cadell, Sr., Smith entered a business relationship that would see her through the publication and later editions of two translated novels, three original novels, the two-volume poem The Emigrants, and a subscription and an expanded edition of her celebrated poetry and essay collection, Elegiac Sonnets. Most of the letters Smith wrote to Cadell have never been published; the majority of them were discovered just as Judith Phillips Stanton was taking her Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (2003) to press.
    [Show full text]
  • UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Of bonds and bondage : gender, slavery, and transatlantic intimacies in the eighteenth century Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/652486x7 Author Rosenthal, Jamie Ellen Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Of Bonds and Bondage: Gender, Slavery, and Transatlantic Intimacies in the Eighteenth Century A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Jamie Ellen Rosenthal Committee in charge: Professor Rosemary George, Co-Chair Professor Kathryn Shevelow, Co-Chair Professor Rachel Klein Professor Lisa Lowe Professor Winifred Woodhull 2012 The Dissertation of Jamie Ellen Rosenthal is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair _____________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii For Neel, my best friend and partner. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page………………………………………………………………….…… iii Dedication.….………………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………
    [Show full text]
  • Thesis Introduction
    1 ‘White Lies’: Amelia Opie, Fiction, and the Quakers Submitted by Isabelle Marie Cosgrave to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in November 2014. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (Signature) ……………………………………………………………………………… 2 Abstract This thesis offers a reconsideration of Amelia Opie’s career as a novelist in the light of her developing religious allegiances over the period 1814-1825 in particular. In twentieth-century scholarship, Opie (1769-1853) was often treated primarily as the author of Adeline Mowbray (1805) and discussed in terms of that novel’s relationship with the ideas of Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Recent scholarship (Clive Jones, Roxanne Eberle, Shelley King and John B. Pierce) has begun a fuller assessment of her significance, but there is still a need for a thorough discussion of the relationship between her long journey towards the Quakers and her commitment to the novel as a moral and entertaining medium. Many scholars (Gary Kelly, Patricia Michaelson, Anne McWhir and others), following Opie’s first biographer Cecilia Lucy Brightwell (1854), have represented Opie as giving up her glittering literary career and relinquishing fiction-writing completely: this relinquishment has been linked to Quaker prohibitions of fiction as lying.
    [Show full text]