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The Erotics of Mercantile Imperialism: Cross-Cultural Requitedness in the Early Modern Period Carmen Nocentelli

The Erotics of Mercantile Imperialism: Cross-Cultural Requitedness in the Early Modern Period Carmen Nocentelli

University of New Mexico

From the SelectedWorks of Carmen Nocentelli

Spring 2008

The rE otics of Mercantile Imperialism: Cross- Cultural Requitedness in the Early Modern Period Carmen Nocentelli, University of New Mexico

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/nocentelli/3/ The Erotics of Mercantile Imperialism: Cross-Cultural Requitedness in the Early Modern Period Carmen Nocentelli

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This article explores the early modern vogue for intermarriage narratives, arguing that cross-cultural unions served as both a crucial instrument of and a privileged metaphor for European imperialism. Adapting medieval precedents to the exigencies of colonial governance and mercantile penetration, plots of interracial requitedness exorcized the specter of European “degeneration” abroad and legitimized the subordination of countries from which enormous profits could be extracted. At the same time, these popular narratives bolstered a regime of domestic heterosexuality that increasingly confined eroticism within the bounds of marriage. With their exotic backdrops and amorous ex- ploits, they celebrated heteropatriarchy while racializing practices and behaviors that Europe was progressively marginalizing. In this manner, the interracial romances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discriminated not just between Europeans and non- Europeans, but also among members of each group—thereby problematizing facile di- chotomies of difference and identity. X arly in the fall of 1617, an elaborate civic pageant was performed in the EEnglish capital to celebrate the installation of George Bowles as Lord Mayor of the City of London.1 Titled The Tryumphs of Honor and Industry, it had been penned by Thomas Middleton and paid for by the “noble Society of Grocers”—a guild whose business in exotic drugs and “other rich Aromatick Commodities” (Ravenhill 1) was intimately linked to the still-uncertain fortunes of England’s expansion overseas. After an opening show of “dauncing Indians” bagging pepper and harvesting fruits, there followed an emblem-

the journal for early modern cultur al studies Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2008) © 2008 Nocentelli X 135

atic arrangement composed of India, Trafficke, and Industry—the latter holding in her hand a golden globe surmounted by a Cupid. “Behold this Ball of Gold, upon which stands/ A golden Cupid wrought with curious hands” (A4v), urged Industry in her address, lest the significance of her insignia be lost on the audience. She went on to explain, “The mighty power of Industry it showes,/ That gets both wealth, and love” (B1r). Considered by itself, Industry’s “Ball of Gold” recalls the golden pomes of Hesperidian memory, a recurring symbol for the precious spices, food- stuffs, and minerals that early modern Europeans were busily trading and plundering across the globe. In his 1598 translation of Jan Huygen van Lins- choten’s influential travelogue, for instance, the Englishman William Phillip turned Hercules’s theft of the golden apples into a mercantile exemplum, encouraging his countrymen to seek the “importation of those Necessities whereof we stand in Neede: as Hercules did, when hee fetched away the Golden Apples out of the Garden of the Hesperides” (A4r). The little Cupid standing atop Industry’s pome, however, links this insignia to a globus cruciger, the cross-surmounted orb that was a quintessential sign of temporal authority. Conjoining golden apple and royal orb, the “Ball of Gold” aligns the special interests of the merchant classes with those of the monarchy, equating profits with royal concerns. Yet even as Industry’s orb derives its suggestive power from the symbolic valence of the globus cruciger, it also dif- fers from the latter in profound ways: it is not a cross, but an emblem of love, that surmounts it; it is not from God, but rather from Cupid, that Industry derives its authority and legitimacy. At the imbrication of empire and desire, Industry’s “Ball of Gold” sentimentalizes Europe’s geopolitical onslaught, metaphorizing expansion as a quest for erotic as well as material rewards. In hindsight, Middleton’s transmogrification of imperialism into amatory courtship is all too ironically descriptive of England’s early experiences abroad. A belated entry into the expansionist race, the fledgling empire had found itself everywhere beset by rivals and confronted by its own inadequacy. “England may well spare many more people then Spaine, and is as well able to furnish them with all manner of necessaries . . . it is strange we should be so dull, as not maintaine that which wee have, and pursue that wee know” (42), noted John Smith in 1616, contrasting Spanish successes with England’s colonial difficulties in America. “Heere wee found the people very rude, following us . . . and flinging stones at us,” wrote John Saris in his account of the first English voyage to Japan, “the gravest people of the Towne not once re- proving them, but rather animating of them, and setting them on” (142). 136 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 8: 1

Letters to the East India Company, in particular, brimmed with tales of un- requitedness: “[T]he Governor and chief brokers with all the rest of the people . . . are much addicted to the Portingalles and slightly esteem of our Eng- lish,” complained an English merchant in India; unless the Portuguese were rooted out, he concluded despairingly, there would be “no hope of any good to be done there for us” (Foster 38). “[A]s yet our condition and usadge is so bad . . . that [it] will require much patience to suffer, much Industry to sett upright,” echoed Thomas Roe in a 1616 letter from the Mughal court (120). One would be hard-pressed, however, to find the same despondence in the plays, poems, and travelogues produced in England during the same years. John Donne’s elegy “To His Mistress Going to Bed” (c. 1595), for example, ex- udes a disconcerting confidence in the seductive powers of empire; Samuel Purchas’s oft-reprinted Purchas his Pilgrimage (first published in 1613) and en- cyclopedic Hakluytus Posthumus (1625) are both underwritten by optimistic expectations of requitedness. Buoyant anticipations of mutuality and reciprocity also shape many Continental works: Lope de Vega’s play Los Guanches de Tenerife (1604-06), for one, revolves around the love of a Spanish captain and a native princess; André Thevet’s La cosmographie universelle (1575) alleges great Amerindian affection for the French; and Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572) quite literally climaxes in the union between Vasco da Gama’s men and native Asian women “in a thin mythological disguise” (Quint 119). Within this discourse of requitedness, interracial desire became a crucial ideologeme that drove both conceptual and narrative developments.2 Perhaps the most conspicuous of these developments centered on intermarriage plots that enjoyed great vogue throughout the early modern period. Dispersed across a transnational corpus, these interracial narratives adapted well-worn topoi of medieval romance to the exigencies and values of a rising mercantile bourgeoisie, supplying with precious cultural capital those “idyllic proceedings” that characterized the process of primitive accumulation.3 Often set in colonial locales and unfailingly ending in connubium, interracial romances exorcized the specter of European degeneracy abroad while legitimiz- ing the subordination of countries from which enormous profits could be extracted in the form of labor, commodities, and consumer markets. At the same time, these much-circulated narratives also responded to, and participated in, the establishment of an erotic regime that increasingly confined desire within the bounds of marriage. Although scholars rarely place this reorganization of eroticism in the context of early modern globalization, the interracial plots of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries evince an intimate connection be- Nocentelli X 137

tween the emergence of mercantile imperialism and the rise of new socio-sexual ideals that placed erōs at the very center of conjugal life.4 By underscoring the imperial dimension of the period’s investment in domestic heterosexuality (and its attendant gender constructions), interracial romances suggest that just as sugar, tobacco, and other colonial crops revolutionized European taste, the practices and arrangements of the imperial periphery inflected and trans- formed the aspirations and values of the metropole.

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The first thing to be said about interracial romances is that a profoundly evocative power resides in the border crossings they depict. Happily resolv- ing social tensions, religious conflicts, and cultural differences, they articu- late a compelling “ideal of cultural harmony through romance” (Hulme 141). This ideal, however, is severely limited by the fact that such border crossings are both unidirectional and gender-specific. As in the well-known case of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, it is always the native woman who enters the world of the European man—never the other way round. While seem- ingly expressing a vision of cross-cultural reciprocity, then, early modern plots of interracial desire naturalize native subordination while authorizing European presumptions of moral and cultural superiority. The heroine’s at- traction for the “Christian” hero becomes in these narratives a neoplatonic medium for spiritual ascent, thereby guaranteeing native acquiescence and even complicity in foreign domination; European manners and values are embraced wholeheartedly, while native mores and beliefs are rejected as infe- rior and absurd. Thus, in Melchor Fernández de León’s La Conquista de las Malucas (first published in 1679), a Spanish adaptation of the plot already deployed by John Fletcher in The Island Princess (1621), the East Indian heroine has nothing positive to say about her people, whom she describes as irra- tional and cannibalistic barbarians. Insofar as the teleological thrust of the narrative climaxes in the heroine’s conversion to Christianity, interracial romance echoes medieval motifs and reiterates millenarian fantasies of global Christianization. Insofar as the heroine’s conversion is achieved via her conformance to European cultural norms, however, interracial romance also bespeaks an increasing dissatisfaction with religion as a way of bounding and ascribing identity. Until the sixteenth century, discourses of difference had generally employed a theocentric framework: an abysmal chasm divided Christians from “pagans” and “infidels,” yet this 138 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 8: 1

chasm could be easily bridged through conversion. 5 Overseas expansion placed this framework under strain: as native Asians, Africans, and Americans began to embrace Christianity, religion became less and less persuasive as a marker of identity; by the mid-sixteenth century, European missionaries abroad already complained that faith could hardly discriminate between Christians and non- Christians when they all behaved in the same way.6 In the far-flung outposts of empire, sexual sanctions and gender prescrip- tions soon emerged as crucial criteria of distinction, supplementing religion as tokens of difference and identity. “I say this of the Portuguese [in India],” complained a Jesuit friar in 1550, “who have adopted the vices and customs of the land without reserve. . . . There are innumerable married settlers who have four, eight, or ten female slaves and sleep with all of them. . . . This is carried to such excess that there was one man in Malacca who had twenty-four women of various races, all of whom were his slaves, and all of whom he enjoyed” (qtd. in Boxer, Race Relations 61). In the early seventeenth century, Dutch settlers in the East Indies were accused of taking up polygamy, concubinage, and other “un-Christian” socio-sexual practices; similarly, the English colonists of Merry Mount in Massachusetts were charged with “inviting the Indean women for their consorts, dancing and frisking togither . . . and worse practices” (Bradford 303). In the face of such evident fluidity, European authorities latched onto morality as a chief instrument of differentiation: in 1620, the Dutch East India Company prohibited concubinage throughout its jurisdic- tion; eight years later, a hostile expedition was sent from Plymouth against the Merry Mount colony; and in 1667, the English East India Company passed a directive “for the Christian and sober Comportment” of its servants abroad.7 Ostensibly designed to protect Europeans from the ill effects of cross-cultural contact, these initiatives effectively index the investment of imperialism in matters of gender and sexuality. Read in this context, interracial romances did more than naturalize and legitimize European encroachment overseas: they also worked to allay the constant fear that settlers overseas might take up the customs of the country and “degenerate” into natives. Narrative closure, in fact, comes at the end of a dialectical process that offers the European hero at least the possibility of “going native” or “turning Turk.” When this happens, as it does in Robert Daborne’s cautionary play A Christian Turn’d Turke (1612), the romance plot collapses, and the narrative veers toward tragedy: in the throes of desire for a Muslim woman, John Ward apostatizes, betrays his friends, and eventually dies a pitiful death.8 Erōs, it seems, has the uncanny ability to look either like Nocentelli X 139

legitimate affection or illegitimate appetite, depending on the direction of the cultural border-crossing. Identified as love when it brings about native submission and conversion to Christianity, erōs becomes lust when it threat- ens to reverse the situation. Thus, when the title character of Fletcher’s The Island Princess asks the hero to renounce Christianity and embrace her religion, he is so horrified at the prospect that he begins to reconsider his feelings, chiding himself for “wandring the way of lust” (4.5.57).9 More often than not, however, the hero refuses to cross the divide, the threat is contained, and the plot propelled toward its final fantasy of native assimilation. “A whole county of English is there, man, bred of those that were left there in ’79,” declares Captain Seagull in the collaborative comedy Eastward Ho (1605), describing an imaginary English settlement in Virginia. “They have married with the Indians, and make ‘em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England; and therefore the Indians are so in love with ‘em, that all the treasure they have they lay at their feet” (3.3.18-23).10 More than a process of racial mixing, Captain Seagull’s description of Anglo-In- dian coupling suggests a male autogenesis that involves native women only as vessels for European seed. As fantastic as it may seem, such a view of reproduction found precedent in a long tradition that assigned males special re- sponsibility in procreation. For Aristotle, men alone could endow embryos with form and soul; for Galen, both men and women participated in deter- mining the features of the offspring, but women’s seed was less perfected and therefore less determinative than men’s. During the early modern period, experimental anatomy failed to modify medical theory in matters of reproduction, thereby consolidating women’s secondary and ancillary position. Coupled with the popular belief that “civilized” seed was stronger than its uncivilized counterpart, medical discourse enabled a construction of inter- racialism that implied the eventual obliteration of non-European stock.11 The purported marginality of women in matters of reproduction went hand in hand with assimilationist tactics based on racial mingling. During the sixteenth century, Portuguese authorities in India not only condoned, but actively encouraged the formation of interracial unions: female emigration from Europe was severely restricted—there would seldom be more than a dozen women aboard a vessel bound for the East—and financial incentives were provided to mixed couples willing to tie the knot (Boxer, Race Relations 62). By the mid-seventeenth century, racial and cultural mixing was the rule across much of Portuguese Asia as well as Spanish America; in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the Dutch East India Company was faithfully following the Iberian example, dis- 140 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 8: 1

bursing bonuses to employees who took Asian brides. In 1687, the directors of the English East India Company decreed: “The marriage of our soldiers to the native women of Fort St. George [Madras] is a matter of such consequence to posterity that we shall be content to encourage it with some expense, and are thinking for the future to appoint a Pagoda [the equivalent of 8 shillings] to be paid to the mother of any child that shall hereafter be born of any such future marriage upon the day the child is Christened” (qtd. in Wiesner-Hanks 204).12 Even in Virginia, where racial mixing was allegedly rare, the union of John Rolfe and Pocahontas might have been less than unique—at least if we lend credence to a 1612 Spanish report estimating at “forty or fifty” the number of unions between English colonists and Algonquian women (Smits 171-72). This does not mean, of course, that interracial unions elicited no concern. Rolfe, for one, went to the altar with some uncertainty; even the Portuguese conqueror Alfonso de Albuquerque, who constantly encouraged his men to take Indian brides, thought that these marriages should be limited to “white and beautiful” women to the exclusion of darker-skinned ones (Boxer, Race Relations 64-65). At least for a while, however, concerns of racial purity remained subordinated to pragmatic goals of imperial stability and mercantile growth. Intermarriage, in fact, was held to consolidate European penetration, bolster native acculturation, and promote proselytization. By encouraging the formation of families patterned after European models, moreover, colonial authorities could hope to replicate in unfamiliar terrains the social and economic dynamics of their societies of origin. Sexual arrangements and domestic pre- scriptions hence participated in the establishment and maintenance of power structures upon which the European presence overseas vitally depended. From this perspective, the intimate interface of the cross-cultural encounter should not be construed as a mere trope for European expansion tout court, or as an epistemological tool unmoored from the pragmatics of empire. Rather than simply “stand[ing] for the pattern of relative strength” between imperial core and colonial periphery (Said 6; emphasis added), relations between European men and native women were an integral part of such a pattern.13 The close imbrication of sex, race, and gender can illuminate yet another characteristic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intermarriage plots: namely, these narratives’ insistence on the exceptional “fairness”—meaning both whiteness and beauty—of the heroine. Linschoten’s “queen of Ormus” is described as a “faire white woman” (149); in The Merchant of Venice, Jessica’s hand is “whiter than the paper it writ on” (2.4.12); and in La Conquista de las Malucas, the East Indian princess is as white as “a snowflake” (173). As their Nocentelli X 141

hyperbolical character and formulaic tenor suggest, these similes and com- parisons hardly function as mere descriptors: more than to skin pigmentation, they refer to the changing criteria by which color was perceived and assigned. Even though it may be presented as a given, the heroine’s fairness denotes in these narratives the dynamic convergence of gender performance, socio-economic status, normative sexuality, and proximity to Christian men; in short, it is essentially produced by an assimilationist discourse enabled by early modern ideologies of gender. During the early phase of European expansion, these ideologies distorted and partially suppressed emerging constructs of racial difference. As a result, non-European women—especially those of high rank—enjoyed opportunities for assimilation that were generally not offered to their male counterparts. In Spanish America, native wives absorbed the racial de- nomination of their husbands; in Portuguese Asia and the Netherlands Indies, Asian and Eurasian brides had the same legal status as European ones; and the marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas seems to have been frowned upon only insofar as it was thought to demean Pocahontas’s royalty.14

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If travelers, poets, and playwrights could assimilate mercantile expansion to romance, marriage manuals and conduct books routinely troped courtship and marriage as mercantile ventures: “The wise man maye not be contented onely with his Spouses virginitie, but . . . must gently procure that he maye also steale away hir private will, and appetite” (B6r), recommended Edmund Tilney in his Flower of Friendship (1568), in a formulation endorsing the systematic plunder of the bride. “[W]ho so ever marries a wife may well be called a Mer- chant venturer”—commented Barnabe Rich in The Excellency of Good Women (1613), prosaically extending Petrarch’s conceit of the lover as a storm-tossed ship—“for he makes a great adventure that adventures his credit, his reputa- tion, his estate, his quiet, his libertye, yea many men by marriage do not onely adventure there bodyes but many times their soules” (9). Love and empire thus gave rise to a “reciprocal protocol of representation” that invested each of the two areas with the force and import of the other (Greene 9). Both discourses found their condition of possibility in the emergence of capitalism; both celebrated individual performance, thereby serving as crucial instruments of in- terpellation and regulation; both posited reciprocity and exchange but presup- posed radically asymmetrical power relations. Far from being just a semantic spillover, the assimilation of early modern conjugality to the realm of mercantile enterprise should best be regarded as an index of common origin. 142 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 8: 1

Kathleen Brown has noted how the Virginia colony was “claimed at the same historical moment in which the English state, merchants, and adven- turers had intensified their commitment to patriarchal households and female domesticity.” As Brown sees it, discourses of gender and sexuality grad- ually filtered from the imperial metropole to the colonial periphery, “permeating English efforts to distinguish themselves from such non-Eng- lish peoples as the Gaelic Irish and West Africans” (15). I seek to enrich and complicate Brown’s model by placing mercantile imperialism at the very heart of these European discourses, thereby proposing that the colonial periphery played an active role in the formulation of alternative social hierar- chies predicated on sexual practices and gender behaviors. Reflecting and reformulating the experience of the colonial contact zone for metropolitan consumption, interracial romances participated in a larger pedagogical project that targeted the imperial metropole as much as the colonial periphery. To say that interracial romance somehow taught European men and women what and how to desire—that is, how to perform and distribute af- fect in ways that were both gender-specific and ethnoracially appropriate— does not mean, of course, that Europeans consciously learned these lessons or that it became impossible for them to ignore or reject the message. Al- though they certainly provided models and templates for action, plots of cross-cultural requitedness sought primarily to delimit and determine the range of ideas, responses, and affects that could legitimately be available in society. In doing so, they helped to establish a set of licit behaviors that could be seen as both natural and universal. From this perspective, intermarriage narratives bespoke a European fantasy of global refashioning, an imperial poetics that sought not only to manage peoples and territories, but also to create anew the very world it had come to inhabit. At the most basic level, interracial romances participated in the restriction of erotic desire to the marital and heterosexual. Despite their doctrinal differences, Catholics and Protestants agreed that proper family values betokened God’s favor and that marriage—intended as a monogamous, patriarchal, and procreative heterosexual union based on marital fidelity and mutual desire— served as the very cornerstone of the state. Matrimony was everywhere extolled as a “most sacred partnership” or a “communion of bodies in one soul” whereas practices such as polygamy, sodomy, and fornication came to be increasingly criminalized.15 New institutions for the control of language and behavior were established and supported; above all, authorities tried their best to regulate desire—to create, in other words, normative subjectivities that would discover Nocentelli X 143

anew the meaning of authority in their immanent freedom. The printing press was of great assistance in this effort: an enormous number of conduct manuals, sermons, and literary exempla that could instill both men and women with the “right” feelings and desires were produced and circulated. The criminalization of non-monogamous, non-marital, and non-repro- ductive practices went hand in hand with their progressive racialization. Po- lygamy, for instance, was routinely associated with the barbarous manners of faraway countries, conveniently ignoring both the precedents set by Biblical patriarchs and the recent historical experience of Anabaptist Münster, where po- lygyny had been fleetingly embraced as an ideal form of socio-sexual organiza- tion (Cairncross 1-30). The Turks, the Chinese, the Native Americans, and others were stereotyped as beastly fornicators; the Burmese and the Japanese were held to be incorrigible sodomites. Indeed, during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sodomy became so intertwined with “for- eignness” that European travelers abroad felt more compelled to explain its ab- sence than its presence.16 “Deviant” gender behaviors were also racialized: as reports had it, South American women urinated standing up; Indian men wore their hair long “like women” (Feynes 15); Siamese women scorned virginity; and Turkish men were so luxurious and effeminate that the very term “Turk” could function as a byword for exceedingly amorous males.17 “[T]his is to turne Turk,” wrote playwright John Cooke in this regard, “[to go] from a most abso- lute compleate Gentleman, to a most absurd ridiculous and fond lover” (F1r). With their exotic backdrops, interracial romances played a substantive role in the racialization of “deviant” practices and behaviors. The intersecting trajectories that hero and heroine described, in particular, provided important templates for both European men and women. For men, interracial romance depicted an ideal of entrepreneurial masculinity that glorified industry and self-control. Imperial projects overseas were presented as open spaces where men of “virtue” might advance socially without disrupting accepted rules of order, decorum, or propriety. In Eastward Ho, for example, Captain Seagull describes colonial Virginia as a veritable American dream where one’s “means for advancement” could be “simple, and not preposterously mixed. You might be an alderman there, and never be a scavenger; you may be a nobleman, and never be a slave; you may come to preferment enough, and never be a pander; to riches and fortune enough, and never have more villainy, nor the less wit” (3.3.53-59). In critiquing the social and economic limitations of Europe, Seagull’s contraposition between Virginian “simplicity” and English “prepos- terousness” naturalizes the new opportunities created by merchant capital; at 144 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 8: 1

the same time, the erotic nuances of his formulation—alighting on nouns and modifiers such as “pander” and “preposterously”—tether sexuality to expansion, uniting both under the aegis of propriety and decorum.18 In intermarriage plots, the opportunities newly created by merchant capital mesh seamlessly with the subjectivism and individualism of romance. In The Island Princess, amatory courtship and mercantile entrepreneurship are so strictly superimposed as to be virtually indistinguishable. Not only does the play provide Rich’s metaphor of the husband as venturer with a literal equivalent—the hero’s disguise “as a trading merchant” (2.2.30)—it also relies heav- ily on the lexicon of commercial enterprise. In act 2, successful courtship is referred to as having “tyed the bargaine” (2.6.65) and alacrity in love is com- pared to that of a merchant “that has ended his market” before rivals get out of bed (2.6.62-63). In the same scene, an unsuccessful suitor is chided for losing his “fortune” (2.6.45) instead of going “about his business sweating” (2.6.51). In addition to this emphasis on initiative, competitiveness, and hard work, Fletcher’s mercantile courtship is contradistinguished by a voluntaristic eroticism positively requiring native participation. When friends suggest that rape may be a good equivalent to connubium, the European hero firmly rejects such a “boisterous” (3.2.43) proposal, declaring his affections “as faire and gentle,/ As her they serve” (3.2.44-45). By itself, consummation will not do; for the narrative to be successful, the heroine will have to subordinate her desires to those of the hero, thus producing an effect of requitedness and reciprocity. In other plays, the overlap of mercantile expansion with marital sexuality produces crude innuendos in the service of European masculinity. In John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins’s The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607), for example, Robert and Anthony Sherley are described as “venturers” who “will finish one of their voyages in forty weeks and within a month after hoist sail and to ‘t again for another” (3.15-17). The bawdy word- play—forty weeks being the average time of human gestation—activates Rich’s metaphor of the husband as merchant venturer to anticipate, proleptically, the procreative consummation of Robert’s marriage to his Persian wife. Capital- izing on the early modern interchangeability of “travel” and “travail,” the dou- ble entendre turns the brothers’ “travailes” into travel experiences that will result in the travail of childbirth. In this manner, the play enshrines and en- trenches the relation between imperial expansion and marital sexuality. It is worth noting, in this context, that the heroine’s connubial conscription always runs parallel to a process of acquisition inscribing the economy of distant lands within the framework of capitalist exchange. Intermarriage hence becomes the Nocentelli X 145

pivotal point in a complex fantasy where connubium both mimics and sup- ports the economic and political order of mercantile imperialism. The range of templates and potential identifications that interracial romance offered women differed substantially from those that it offered men. European men could easily identify with the hero; for women, identifying with the heroine was not as straightforward. As Europeans, women participated in the imperial project of white supremacy and colonial disposses- sion—that is, in the hero’s task. As women, however, they were also called upon to empathize with the heroine’s quest for love and fulfillment in marriage. In this sense, European women found themselves in a liminal position between Self and Other. On the one hand, interracial romances allowed them to reclaim and perhaps even savor the forbidden passions and unacceptable mores of milieus that were as exotic as they were aristocratic. On the other hand, the heroine’s eventual assimilation confirmed them in their subjection and prescribed their containment within a restricted domestic sphere. The insistence on a stereotyped construction of femininity characterized by passivity and dependence represents perhaps the major difference between early modern intermarriage plots and the literary archetype from which they partially derived—that is, the story of the “Moslem princess” who converts to Christianity out of love.19 In medieval romance, the native heroine generally demonstrates great initiative, sensuality, and even cruelty. In the Sowdone of Babylone, for instance, the Saracen Floripas is hardly a figure of exemplary womanhood: abusive and sometimes perfidious, she commits murder and treachery, actively pursues a recalcitrant Christian knight, and perversely squanders her father’s treasure. Only traces of this original characterization remain in the interracial plots of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—most notably in Jessica’s theft and squander of Shy- lock’s jewels in The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597). In most cases, however, the heroines embody idealized standards of passivity, docility, and selflessness. Upon her marriage to a Portuguese man, Linschoten’s “queen of Ormus” promptly removes herself from the public sphere, dying of a broken heart when he departs on business. Even the title character of The Island Princess, who at first displays the same fierce sensuousness, political ambition, and murderous inclinations of the fifteenth-century Floripas, eventually adopts an appropriate posture of feminine submission, declaring herself both “won” by the hero and “glorying” in this subjected condition (5.3.51). With their suggestions of pleasurable abjection, works like The Island Princess provided women not just with sexual lessons, but also with an op- 146 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 8: 1

portunity for solace and confirmation. The increased importance of mutual affection in connubium had not elevated women’s position in society, nor had it expanded the range of options licitly available to them. The many advice books and conduct manuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries uni- vocally recommended that wives be obedient and deferent to their husbands. Pamphlets, proverbs, and ballads often endorsed cudgeling as a means of curbing unruly women. Even treatises that disallowed wife-beating, such as William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622), insisted on female subjection, comparing a man’s position over his wife to that of Christ over the Church: “A wife must submit her selfe to an husband, because he is her head: and she must doe it as to the Lord, because her husband is to her, as Christ is to the Church” (29). That foreign princesses, ladies, and queens would willingly renounce all they had—political ambitions, economic independence, the culture they knew, and the religion in which they had been brought up—to become bourgeois Christian wives could only confirm the uniquely blessed status of the latter. The heroine of interracial romance, it should be noted, is always a woman derived from the upper echelons of society: she is royalty or, at the very least, an aristocrat. In Thomas Randolph’s Aristippus (1630), as well as in The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, Robert Sherley’s wife is presented as a close relative of the Persian emperor, even though seventeenth- century sources suggest that she might have been a “bought slave” (qtd. in Andrea 286). The portrait of Pocahontas now conserved at the National Por- trait Gallery in Washington, D.C., identifies Rolfe’s wife as the daughter of the “mighty Prince Powhatan Emperour of Virginia.” The heroine of John Dryden’s Amboyna (1673) is a “lady”; the female leads of The Island Princess and La Conquista de las Malucas are princesses who stand to inherit the throne; and the protagonist of Linschoten’s miniature romance is a political ruler who chooses “rather to die a Christian, and married with a meane Gen- tleman, then to live like a Queene under the lawe of Mahomet.”20 By featuring ladies, princesses, and queens who withdraw into the se- questered space of the domestic, interracial romances upheld the cherished belief that European women truly lived in the best of all possible worlds. By celebrating unions that contravened widely held rules of matchmaking, however, interracial romances also proposed themselves as fantasies of aristocratic subjection and bourgeois ascendancy. Early modern marriage manuals often recommended that brides and grooms be of equal social status. Prospective husbands were explicitly advised to avoid women of higher station, since these were likely to be proud, extravagant, and unwilling to assume an appropriate Nocentelli X 147

posture of humility and submission.21 In the case of interracial romance, however, the higher rank of the heroine never appears as an impediment. While this peculiarity can certainly be read as a response to the social mobility enabled by mercantile imperialism, the overall effect is a feminization of the aris- tocracy, possibly in the attempt to reconcile residual notions of honor as lin- eage with emerging notions of nobility as “virtue.” The period during which these narratives enjoyed the greatest vogue, in fact, was also a period in which honor ceased to be automatically associated with the landed elites. While lin- eage remained relevant, popular opinion had it that nobility could also be ac- quired through “virtuous” action—as Francis Drake, the son of a glove-maker, clearly demonstrated by being dubbed knight. In The Island Princess, the East Indian heroine makes abundantly clear that bourgeois entrepreneurship, rather than wealth or rank, is the surest way to a princess’ heart:

‘Tis not the person, nor the royall title, Nor wealth, nor glory that I looke upon, That inward man I love that’s lin’d with vertue, That well deserving soule workes out a favour; I have many Princes suiters, many great ones, Yet above these I love you; you are valiant, An active man, able to build a fortune. . . . (1.2.61-67)

Although these words are directed to the wrong suitor, the mercantile spirit of the panegyric is not lost on the hero; indeed, he takes the princess’ lesson so much to heart, that he soon dons a merchant’s disguise. Thus, while interracial romances certainly legitimized Europe’s expansion overseas, whitewashed the cross-cultural encounter, and romanticized the process of primitive accumulation, the reverberations they produced went well beyond the colonial context. By celebrating certain socio-sexual arrangements and gender behaviors instead of others, they participated in the construction of a normative discourse that would distinguish not only between Europeans and non-Europeans, but also among them—for behind the figure of the thoroughly assimilated native always lurked that of the “degenerate” European who had “gone native” or “turned Turk.” The racialization of “deviant” practices and behaviors, in turn, consolidated this normative discourse, naturalizing comportments that would become synonymous with white privilege. In the process, Cupid found himself conscripted in the service of the mercantile classes, underwriting their social and economic ambitions both at home and abroad. 148 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 8: 1

NOTES 1. The same George Bowles was also an adventurer in the East India voyage of 1599 and an incorporator of the East India Company in 1600 and 1609. 2. I borrow this term from Jameson, who defines ideologemes as “minimal units” of class discourse (87). 3. The formulation is Marx’s: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capital production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation” (823). 4. Traub argues for “domestic heterosexuality” as a “new marital regime in which erotic desire became the sine qua non of conjugal life” (268). In turn, the increased emphasis on marital desire precipitated a wholesale debasement of alternative practices and socio-sexual arrangements. 5. This theocentric view of human difference is discussed in Appiah 11-13. 6. In a 1551 report about the status of the mission at Hormuz, the Jesuit Gaspar Barzeu complained that there was no difference between Christians and Moors, “as much in their eating and drinking as in their daily and nightly intercourses.” See Rêgo 74. 7. For a compilation of laws and edicts promulgated in the Dutch East Indies during the first half of the seventeenth century, see Chijs. No copy of the 1667 directive “for the Christian and sober comportment” of English East India Company employees seems to have survived. See Temple 274. 8. On A Christian Turn’d Turke see Burton, especially 130-38; Fuchs 124-25; Matar 492-95; and Vitkus 240-44. 9. For critical assessments locating The Island Princess within the historical context of English expansion, see Loomba; McMullan 224-35; Neill; and Raman 155-88. 10. Seagull’s account of Virginia, of course, is altogether fanciful: Humphrey Gilbert’s colonizing expedition of 1578 was a complete failure, and Richard Gren- ville’s 1585 settlement at Roanoke Island had literally vanished by 1590. 11. On the role of women in early modern ideologies of sexual reproduction, see Finucci; Laqueur 38-43; and Maclean 28-46. 12. Tactics of racial mixing are also discussed in Blussé 156-71; Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire 215-40; Menchaca 53-57; Stark 11-18; and Taylor 15-17. 13. In a cogent critique of Said’s model, Stoler notes, “sexual control was more than a convenient metaphor for colonial domination. It was a fundamental class and racial marker implicated in a wider set of relations of power.” (45) 14. See Kuznesof 164; Jones 92-93; Tilton 18. 15. These formulations can be found in Vives 177 and Guevara 355. For his part, Tilney defined marriage as “two bodies . . . made one onelye heart” (B6r). 16. This aspect of early modern ethnology is discussed in Lach 553-54 and Spence 225-26. 17. For examples of these reports, see Ajofrín 84 and Bulwer 393. Nocentelli X 149

18. On the multifarious valences of the “preposterous” in early modern Eng- land, see Parker, especially 20-56. 19. Warren 346. For a useful overview of this medieval archetype, see Metlitzki 136-87, as well as de Weever and Kahf. 20. Linschoten 149. I discuss this episode at some length in “Discipline and Love: Linschoten and the Estado da Índia.” 21. In her extensive study of Renaissance conduct manuals, Kelso summarizes as follows: “Superiority in rank, with the wealth and powerful connections implied, might make a wife independent, proud, scornful, exacting, and extravagant. The balance of power would almost surely shift from husband to wife with all the incon- veniences and dangers involved in such an unnatural relation” (80).

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