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Female Body and Revolution: Creole Writing of Caribbean and North American Literature in the Eighteenth Century Lindsey Nicole Phillips

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Female Body and Revolution: Creole Writing of Caribbean and North American Literature in the Eighteenth Century Lindsey Nicole Phillips Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2007 Female Body and Revolution: Creole Writing of Caribbean and North American Literature in the Eighteenth Century Lindsey Nicole Phillips Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES FEMALE BODY AND REVOLUTION: CREOLE WRITING OF CARIBBEAN AND NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BY LINDSEY NICOLE PHILLIPS A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Lindsey Nicole Phillips defended on June 4, 2007. _________________________________ Candace Ward Professor Directing Thesis _________________________________ Dennis Moore Committee Member _________________________________ Amit Rai Committee Member Approved: ___________________________ Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English ___________________________ Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii To my female ancestors whose histories have gone unrecorded and whose stories I still carry with me iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I first and foremost want to thank Dr. Candace Ward for all of her time, patience and support. Without her guidance, criticism, and dedication, I could not have completed this project. As a mentor, she shapes me as a scholar and provides me with a template for the scholar I want to become. I would also like to thank Dr. Dennis Moore for his willingness to work with me and his influence in the direction of this project. Dr. Amit Rai has made himself available to me in ways that I greatly appreciate. I would like to thank my parents for their continual encouragement and love and for always allowing my curious nature the freedom to explore. I appreciate the conversations, friendship, and encouragement that Katrina Smith and Tao Valentine provided throughout this process. Also, I want to thank Samantha Levy and Danielle McKean for reminding me of the importance of taking a break. These people have provided me with a community of support that the women, in the preceding pages, insisted on creating and preserving. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT …………… ...................................................................................….…......vi INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………….…....1 CHAPTER ONE: EVOKING NANNY‟S GHOST: THE DOMESTIC AND REBELLIOUS SPIRIT OF WOMEN IN APHRA BEHN‟S OROONOKO AND WILLIAM EARLE‟S OBI …………………..……………….…...13 CHAPTER TWO: RECREATING SOCIAL STRUCTURES IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES: FAILED MATERNITY AND COMMUNITY IN HANNAH FOSTER‟S THE COQUETTE ……………………………..……………………….…..35 CHAPTER THREE: SECRET COMMUNITIES: REBEL WOMEN IN LEONORA SANSAY‟S SECRET HISTORY …………………..………………….…..55 EPILOGUE …………………………………………………………………………….74 NOTES …………………………………………………………………………….……82 WORKS CITED .……………………………………………………………….............83 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………..86 v ABSTRACT In the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century, Britain‟s transatlantic colonies resisted political, social, and religious control in order to establish a government controlled by the people, which allowed freedom and equality for all citizens. However, this ideal form of freedom did not extend to women and slaves within the newly formed American colonies. Until the middle of the twentieth century, critics often have overlooked, or ignored, the erasure of female history and the crucial position women, regardless of race, occupy within the colonial and republican societies. This project aims to (re)examine race and gender within the Caribbean and early American context, reinstating the role and struggle of women. Aphra Behn, in Oroonoko, and William Earle, in Obi, reveal the potential threat and rebellious spirit of female slaves within the Caribbean. In The Coquette, Hannah Foster questions the freedom and equality of women in the republican society, and she draws a comparison between the republican marriage contract and the institution of slavery. Leonora Sansay‟s Secret History places two American women in the Caribbean to illustrate the importance of female community and collectivity in removing women from patriarchal control. Using the Haitian Revolution as her backdrop, Sansay uses the slaves‟ success to provide an example for women to follow. Americans, as former inhabitants of England, become Creoles in the American colonies, undergoing a process of creolization that resembles that experienced by Caribbean colonists. However, as the early United States formed its own independent nation, its citizens adopted British colonial ideology and, at the same time, distanced themselves from the perceived limitations of Creole subjectivity. This project attempts to illustrate this contradiction between the ideals of freedom and equality and the reality of the colonial and republican societies in the transatlantic colonies and to illustrate the influence and interconnection between Europe, America, and the Caribbean. vi INTRODUCTION “„Postcolonial theory‟ describes a body of work which attempts to break with the colonialist assumptions that have marked many of the projects of political and cultural criticism launched from Europe and the United States, at the same time as it learns from and frequently refigures those projects in its analyses of the networks of imperial power that contribute to control much of the world.” --Peter Hulme Peter Hulme‟s description of postcolonial theory coincides with my own reading of race within the Caribbean and early United States. He regards the relevance of postcolonial theory to America as underdeveloped; since Hulme‟s acknowledgement of this problem, critics have not only begun to reassess the eighteenth century in terms of postcolonial theory, but also to include the formation of the early United States within the context of the racial revolutions occurring within the transatlantic. With my thesis, I will contribute to this reassessment and also address the problem of overlooking the early United States in regards to race. Given the complexities attending the formation of the early United States, particularly those grounded in ambivalent and often contradictory ideas about race, I examine the literature produced during the eighteenth century in order to tease out the implications of race within the transatlantic. The concept of America as a colony of the European nations resembles the European Caribbean colonies; we can identify the inhabitants of America, like those in the Caribbean, as Creoles. The term Creole denotes various definitions in different contexts, and for my thesis, I will use Sean Goudie‟s understanding of this term. Goudie sees “Creole” as more than the birth of a colonial subject outside of his or her national origins. In addition, he uses this term “to account for admixtures, or syncretisms, between Old and New World „races‟ and cultures” (8). Using Goudie‟s understanding of “Creole,” I will expose the cultural influences of the revolutionary Atlantic and argue that this Creole position allowed certain subjects to form a collective community and distance themselves from the political control of England. In this thesis, I will explore how ideas about women and slaves in early transatlantic writings informed and were shaped by notions of Creole identity at once contributing to the “collective community” described above and challenging its hegemonic status. Texts like Aphra Behn‟s Oroonoko, William Earle‟s Obi, Hannah Foster‟s The Coquette, and Leonora Sansay‟s 1 Secret History demonstrate the significance of the transatlantic traffic not only in relation to the colonies and slaves but also in relation to the cultures attendant on such commerce. The transatlantic routes did more than transport slaves and Europeans to the American colonies; these routes brought along various cultures as well as various assumptions about race and gender. For example, the British, the group of Europeans I will focus on in my study, had pre-inscribed notions concerning the role of women in their country. And while the early American colonists laid claim to notions of equality, a defining characteristic of their “new world,” these gender biases remained intact. Also, the master-slave relationship, established in Britain‟s Caribbean colonies, infiltrated the minds of American colonists and shaped their opinions on slavery. The ideas and people that both crossed over on various routes in the Atlantic Ocean left the American colonies in a contradictory state. On one hand, “America” promoted equality and freedom to all; however, women and the enslaved, stood outside of this equality. Neither group could participate in the political realm even though they both contributed to and were affected by the political decisions occurring within the colonies. Within the eighteenth-century, revolutionary Atlantic, the term nationalism and nation emerged as people with common language and cultures fought against each other in hopes of finding freedom and creating their own national identity. This concept of national identity formed a strong connection between the recognized members of the nation, who were willing to die fighting for their sense of nation identity. Benedict Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political community,” one that is both limited
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