Second Sight: Re-Imaging the Optic Regime in Behn's, Southerne's, Smith's, and Mackenzie's Colonial Texts of the Long Eighteenth Century Megan L

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2009 Second Sight: Re-Imaging the Optic Regime in Behn's, Southerne's, Smith's, and Mackenzie's Colonial Texts of the Long Eighteenth Century Megan L. Campbell

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

SECOND SIGHT: RE-IMAGING THE OPTIC REGIME

IN BEHN’S, SOUTHERNE’S, SMITH’S, AND MACKENZIE’S

COLONIAL TEXTS OF THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

MEGAN L. CAMPBELL

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009

The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Megan L. Campbell defended on December 5th, 2008.

______Helen Burke Professor Directing Dissertation

______Eundok Kim Outside Committee Member

______Barry Faulk Committee Member

______Candace Ward Committee Member Approved:

______Ralph Berry Chair, Department of English

______Donald Foss Dean, College of Arts & Sciences

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

INTRODUCTION 1

1. COMPLEXITIES OF THE GAZE IN EIGHTEENTH

-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE 12

2. LOOKING DIFFERENTLY: THE FEMALE SPECTATOR IN

APHRA BEHN’S OROONOKO, OR THE ROYAL SLAVE 23

3. SOUTHERNE’S AFRICAN GAZE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF

AMELIORATION 40

4. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MOTIVES FUELING CHARLOTTE

SMITH’S SENTIMENTAL VISION 56

5. VIEWING THE AFRICAN ROYAL SUBJECT: ANNA MARIA

MACKENZIE’S SLAVERY 81

APPENDIX 99

REFERENCES 110

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 117

iii

ABSTRACT

Since the earliest records of culture, mankind has represented its ocularcentric focus through images of sight. Freud theorizes that these images of viewership represent dynamics of power: those who see, actively control, and those who are seen, passively wait to be acted upon. In the archetypes of Western culture, these visual dynamics follow a gendered binary— active/masculine versus passive/feminine. Freud believes that these visual behaviors are determined during the psychosexual stages of development, and these roles are then reinforced through cultural norms. Freudian theory stood as the accepted model of behavioral analysis until late into the twentieth century when feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Laura Mulvey, and Ann E. Kaplan began examining and deconstructing patriarchal beliefs about visuality. These theorists agree that women can assume the masculine position of visuality and co-opt the active position of sight for themselves. This particular assumption of power can be seen in women’s colonial narratives of the eighteenth century, where European women were vested with power over colonial subjects, native men and women alike. In an interesting duality, European women simultaneously inhabited the object position of passivity vis-à-vis their male colonizer counterpart and the subject position of activity vis-à-vis the colonial Other. This multi- dimensional position allowed for identificatory bonds across gender and racial lines and resulted in contradictory images of spectatorship within women’s colonial narratives. This study examines the spectatorship imagery in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, Charlotte Smith’s Desmond and The Wanderings of Warwick, and Anna Maria Mackenzie’s Slavery, or the Times to account for the shifts in loyalty and explain the situational alliances that women forged both with their countrymen, viewing the Other as inferior and sub-human, and with the colonized, viewing them as subjects in their own right, as their equals.

INTRODUCTION

Pierre Mignard’s late seventeenth-century portrait of Charles II’s mistress Louise Renée de Penancoct de Keroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth (1684), flanked by a black youth and swathed in material opulence (see Appendix A) has garnered much recent attention from postcolonial critics for its vivid, multi-dimensional depiction of imperial exploitation. In the image, the objectified bodies of woman and African are foregrounded and ensconced in extravagant fabrics and exotic jewels. The gaze of the spectator is captivated by the lush canvas of mutually commodified articles from around the globe: Far Eastern silks, Roman columns, South Pacific pearls, Caribbean coral, African slave, and European woman. Each object is akin to the other—an offering to the eye of the beholder of what lies passively waiting for his consumption on the shores of distant seas. Srinivas Aravamudan summarizes what is offered by the Mignard portrait: “all the exoticism of colonial venture and commodity acquisition, identifying a female consumer who is herself an object of display” (37). This portrait is one of many examples from the long eighteenth century imaging this mutual display; there are numerous portraits from the era that exhibit exotic goods enveloping black bodies alongside that of their female mistresses (see Appendices B-E). Critical discussions related to these visual texts appropriately recognize evidence of the period’s global consumerism and specifically of the use of Africans as props; however, this focus minimizes the parallel objectification of the African and the female body, ignoring the inevitable identification between them as they sit passively together in silence and captivity. The Mignard portrait attests to this relationship as the duchess rests an affectionate arm upon the young African’s shoulder, an image of fondness and warmth similarly reproduced in Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Mary Davis who touches an African child under the chin (see Appendix F). These gestures symbolize the bond between woman and African as each is looked upon as an object of display, mutually experiencing the oppression of the spectator’s gaze. Yet, as both white and black bodies become objectified from beyond the portrait, levels of spectatorship simultaneously occur within it, and the European woman clearly controls the vantage point as she looms in stature above her African counterpart, who sits childlike and servile. Numerous layers of spectatorship are evident in these examples of eighteenth- century portraiture, and they are similarly present in the imagery of the literature of the period.

A study of these viewing practices enlightens contemporary discussions about power and control in the colonial world. Most contemporary discussions of sight, knowledge, sex, and power are informed by Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of the gaze. His beliefs about a statically gendered gaze, substantiated by literary examples across time and space and by the portraiture mentioned above, controlled ideas about viewership during his time and throughout much of the twentieth century. In the past thirty years, however, Freud’s principles of vision have been directly challenged by feminist theorists. The purpose of this project is to study the earlier points of contention to Freudian theory that exist in women’s colonial literature from the British Enlightenment. These texts will be used to interrogate Freud’s gaze theory and to illuminate current discussions of female agency in the eighteenth century. Before discussing the primary literature, it is important to track the trajectory of Freudian gaze theory and to survey the feminist theory that challenges its original assumptions. Freud’s theories link the human instinct for knowledge with the scopophilic instinct, his psychoanalytic moniker for the biological instinct toward observation. In fact, Freud theorizes that the instinct for knowledge has its genesis in the scopophilic instinct; curiosity, therefore, is driven by the energy of sight, founded in the developmental need to solve sexual problems. Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality associates the behavior of scopophilia with subjecting others to a controlling and curious gaze through which a voyeur gains pleasure; in his analysis, scopophilia is highly active. This powerful, active behavior, where a voyeur will literally fix his or her stare upon a subject in order to capture the essence of that being, is represented in the verb “to behold,” for as Martin Jay notes, it is the eyes only that can “obey the conscious will of the viewer in a way denied the other more passive senses” (Downcast Eyes 10). Echoing Freud, contemporary visual philosopher Jean Starobinski explains how the gaze “involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery or reconquering what is about to escape” (The Living Eye 2-3); it involves taking people as objects and conquering, controlling, and owning the objects beheld. What interests Starobinski most in this phenomenon is “the fate of the impatient energy that inhabits the gaze and desires something other than what it is given…of all the senses, sight is the one most obviously ruled by impatience. A magical wish, never entirely fulfilled yet never discouraged, accompanies each of our glances: to seize, to

undress, to petrify, to penetrate” (3-4). Here, Starobinski refers to the element of control within the gaze; he describes the power of the viewer over the object beheld “to seize, to undress” (I would add to his list “to capture” and “to own”), but he also concedes that through the gaze, the desire to own the being beheld is “never entirely fulfilled,” so “the pursuit of what lies hidden, being an exorbitant ambition, poses the risk of failure and disappointment” (6). Beyond the risk of disappointment looms a much larger anxiety, that which initiated the vision—the threat of a loss or lack of social control, and it is this threat that motivates the surveillance, a manifestation of the “magical wish” to capture him or her whom is beheld. Largely, it is she who is beheld because scopophilic visual authority is intrinsic to gender relations. “Men look at women,” explains John Berger, noted contemporary art historian who discusses the gendered manifestation of the scopophilic instinct within the patriarchal order in his text Ways of Seeing (1977): “Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relations of women to themselves…She turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (16). In this formulation, the female figure, archetypically embodying hysteria and desire, begs to be controlled, subjected to masculine mastery, and she is controlled as the Object of the immobilizing gaze of a masculine Subject. Therefore, “Woman as an Object successfully possessed by a transcendental regard [gaze] is essential to the plausibility of masculine mastery” (Riggs 125). According to Freud, this visual mastery of men over women is shaped by component sexual instincts, like that of the scopophilic instinct to view, and masculine mastery, in this visual scheme, stems from the male viewing of the female sex organ and the nothingness with which his eyes meet, her lack of a visible organ. In contemporary feminist Luce Irigaray’s terms, “Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no such thing” (her italics; “Another ‘Cause’—Castration” 431). Her work investigates the role of visual mastery in Freud’s theories of human sexual development, and her voice has largely illuminated contemporary discussions of female sexuality and the gaze phenomenon. Specifically, in her text Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray characterizes the discourse of the West, its rhetoric, signs, symbols, and metaphors, as constructed by this paradigm of masculine mastery; she then contends in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) that “woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that

has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks” (25), and visual metaphor is not exempt from this influence. Irigaray’s text, This Sex Which Is Not One, specifically challenges Freud’s assertion that females are put at a disadvantage because they have “nothing” and therefore envy the male phallus. Simultaneously, it discusses the irony of how one man’s nineteenth-century perspective on female sexuality and his theories of masculine visual authority and domination have shaped gendered relationships since their conception. Irigaray reveals, “Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters” (This Sex Which Is Not One 23), and that specifically for Freud, “female sexuality can be graphed along the axes of visibility of (so- called) masculine sexuality” (“Another ‘Cause’—Castration” 433)—that for him, woman stands as a mirror reflecting what man wants to see, and that which he wishes to see is an object, one who lacks the powerful tool that he holds, one who is without and who is therefore beholden to him. Freud insists that visibility is an issue of power, of men’s viewing a woman’s supposed lack, and it is this sexual viewing that arouses a phobia in men, an anxiety aroused by “the uncanny strangeness of the ‘nothing to be seen’…this nothing around which lingers in horror, now and forever, an overcathexis of the eye, of appropriation by the gaze, and of the phallomorphic sexual metaphors, its reassuring accomplices” (Irigaray, “Another ‘Cause’— Castration” 431-433). This fear “arises after [boys] have learnt from the sight of the female genitals that the organ which they value so highly need not necessarily accompany the body. At this the boy recalls to mind the threats he brought on himself by his doings with that organ, he begins to give credence to them and falls under the influence of fear of castration, which will be the most powerful motive force in his subsequent development” (Freud, “On Femininity” par. 6) and of which he will be reminded by the sight of women, a threatening, castrated being. The potency of this complex displaces itself into the paradigm of the gaze, of masculine visual mastery. It is described as gendered visual metaphor, the gaze as male, to describe the recapitulative, appetitive construction of male identity and patriarchal hegemony: power relations in the modern state and in the modern male psyche are played out in a visual drama of desire and fear, authority enacted visually through mastery of the complex nexus of terrors that women represent. (Stanbury 262)

Thus, this anxiety present in the male psyche is facilitated through visual authority and domination over woman, and she becomes “only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies” (Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One 25) while her “entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation” (26). Freud’s initial discussion of this phenomenon explains the establishment of this passivity: “Along with the abandonment of clitoral masturbation a certain amount of activity is renounced. Passivity now has the upper hand, and the girl's turning to her father is accomplished principally with the help of passive instinctual impulses. You can see that a wave of development like this, which clears the phallic activity out of the way, smoothes the ground for femininity” (“On Femininity” par. 10). With the clearing of phallic activity, also goes self- love, that which in Freud’s estimation has been “mortified by the comparison with the boy's far superior equipment” (par. 9); in its void comes envy of the penis, and “she remains forsaken and abandoned in her lack, default, absence, envy, etc. and is led to submit, to follow the dictates issued univocally by the sexual desire, discourse, and law of man” (Irigaray, “Another ‘Cause’— Castration” 432). One may wonder why, Irigaray muses, woman “submits so readily to this make-believe, why she ‘mimics’ so perfectly as to forget she is acting our man’s contraphobic projects, projections and productions of her desire…why does she accept that her desire only amounts to ‘penis envy’?” (435). Irigaray’s questions reveal her contempt for the blatant chauvinism in Freud’s supposition; she continues, “For the ‘penis envy’ alleged against woman is—let us repeat—a remedy for man’s fear of losing one. If she envies it, then he must have it. If she envies what he has, then it must be valuable” (435). Her debate suggests the ludicrous nature of Freud’s anatomical claims for gender inequity and explains that in essence, what he has and she values is actually the privilege of directing the gaze. For Irigaray, “The gaze is at stake from the outset…the gaze has always been involved” (her italics; 431). In sum, Irigaray’s texts challenge Freud’s theory that male visual authority is anatomically founded in the premise that the female figure embodies a lack, envies, and begs to be controlled and subjected to masculine mastery, but she concedes that the resulting behavior is the same: woman is controlled as the object of the immobilizing gaze of a masculine subject, and “Woman as an Object successfully possessed by a transcendental regard [gaze] is essential to the plausibility of masculine mastery” (Riggs 125). Thus, as Irigaray explains, “The contract, the

collusion, between one sex/organ and the victory won by visual dominance leaves woman with her sexual void, with an ‘actual castration’ carried out in actual fact” (“Another ‘Cause’— Castration” 431). The factors, then, are not penis/lack, but instead, they are “envy of the omnipotence of gazing, knowing…envy and jealousy of the eye-penis, of the phallic gaze” (431). Ultimately, their jealousy is directed toward masculine power and domination, toward the control and supremacy wielded by the optic regime, that which relegate woman to function as mirror, reflecting back what man wants to see. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” written by Laura Mulvey in 1975 was one of the first critical texts to examine the gaze paradigm as theorized by Freud and Irigaray in its representational form. Her work specifically explores manifestations of the gaze and representations of women as objects of desire in twentieth-century American film, but her ideas easily transcend beyond that genre and have been universally applied to many literary texts. Mulvey shows how historically within artistic representation women play their traditional role of spectacle, and “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (19). Their display and erotic objectification is twofold: female objects are gazed at by both subjects from within the text and subjects from outside the text. Therefore, women sit still, static and passive, beheld by those who view their image from behind the glass or the camera or even those who conjure her image and control it within their very imaginations. Mulvey argues that this phenomenon of visual domination occurs solely with the female image; conversely, male characters, according to the principles of patriarchal ideology and the psychological structures that support it, “cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (20), that is, castration; therefore, identification occurs: “Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between the spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen” (20). With the active, powerful male protagonist controlling the plot sequence, the identification process transpires and allows the viewer to recognize himself within this masculine role. Thus, “as the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (20). As an

example, “A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego…(This) character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator” (20). In this process of transferring and projecting power, woman is doubly objectified by he who views and controls from within and he who views and controls from without. In this model, women reproduced in art are purely objects of display, yet as the portraiture discussed earlier reveals, multiple levels of viewing exist from both without and within a text. While the Duchess of Portsmouth, for example, became a spectacle of aesthetic pleasure for the gaze of the onlooker, she also gazed upon the black body by her side, gaining her ultimate mastery. But how is that she, a woman, gained the upper hand? Her image creates an interesting paradox that spurs the curiosity driving this study: how is it that the duchess stands in the position of spectatorial dominance that Freud, Irigaray, and Mulvey regard as traditionally and archetypically male? Feminist theoretician E. Ann Kaplan addresses this question in Women and Film (1983), a text that refutes the static nature of the gendered dichotomy of the male gaze discussed in Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Chapter One, Kaplan questions, “Is the gaze male?” She concludes, “The gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the ‘masculine’ position” (30). Her argument echoes that of Irigaray, who denies that physical sex organs establish power positions, and it also invokes the theories of Michel Foucault, who contends that identity is neither fixed nor truly intrinsic but simply a mode of discourse, a way of talking about oneself that is constantly shifting. For Foucault, identity as a construction means that it is temporary and dynamic; similarly, positions of power are also temporary and dynamic—they are not inborn or innate to one particular gender, race, class, etc. (groups with which individuals identify themselves). Related more specifically to gender, Kaplan relies on the work of Judith Butler, who proposes in Gender Trouble (1990) that gendered identities are performed, which makes them flexible, malleable, and temporary. This indeterminacy destabilizes the notion that gender is caused by sex or biology. Butler states, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender;…identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (23). These ideas of gender as a performance

underlie Kaplan’s argument about exercising power from the “masculine” position regardless of sex; like Butler, Kaplan sees gender as acted differently by different people in different situations. Butler further contends, remarking of Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born a woman but becomes one: If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification…Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. (45) This alteration of the static, binary nature of gendered power positions is crucial to the account of female agency. It establishes a “masculine” position of mastery for women where they can activate the gaze and objectify passive/effeminate male characters. It is upon these premises that Kaplan asks, “Is the gaze necessarily male? Could we structure things so that women own the gaze? If this were possible, would women want to own the gaze? Finally, in either case, what does it mean to be a female spectator?” She poses such questions in Women and Film through a psychoanalytic framework because she believes, like Irigaray, that Freudian theories of sexuality act to cement, stabilize, rationalize, and naturalize masculine mastery and that using psychoanalysis “enables us to see clearly the patriarchal myths through which [women] have been positioned as Other (enigma, mystery), and as eternal and unchanging” (25). Kaplan specifically sees this deconstruction useful in the analyses of domestic fiction, or what she terms “family melodrama,” which, “as a genre geared specifically to women, functions both to expose the constraints and limitations that the capitalist nuclear family imposes on women and, at the same time, to ‘educate’ women to accept those constraints as ‘natural,’ inevitable—as ‘given’” (25). “Given” these roles, the question remains: can women subvert patriarchal paradigms and assume the gaze for themselves? Is there the possibility of both genders occupying “masculine” and “feminine” positions, and if so, under what circumstances? This study pushes back the strand of criticism begun by Kaplan to the early imperial era in England, illuminating the complexities of gaze politics with a specific examination of colonial

narratives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century, viewership underwent a sweeping change as perspective centralized vision to the eye of the beholder and the people began to realize that they both saw and were seen. Further, England’s gaze had settled itself on the so-called New World, and colonization became a national initiative. Most colonial writings from the period present traditional scopic relationships between colonizer and colonized, but these representations of the gaze paradigm are complicated when the colonizer is female. In the colonial literature of the era, female authors do not statically portray a traditional gendered binary of spectatorship through male/subject female/object roles; instead, the acting, seeing subjects, those who control, are women who are granted privilege within the colonial dominant order. Under a colonial system, as prominent scholars of postcolonial studies like Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, Anne McClintock, Joseph Lew, and Reina Lewis argue, native men become effeminized and eroticized by the gaze of the white imperialist; therefore, the typical gendered positions enacted by the scopophilic gaze shift as they account for both gendered and racial dynamics. In the eighteenth century, degrees of oppression or marginalization are evident as the characters of colonial narratives who become subjective and objective under the gaze paradigm defy its traditional gender designations. While the spectatorship imagery of women’s colonial texts indicts them in the perpetuation of imperial ideology, it also clearly exhibits identificatory bonds that traverse racial boundaries. Within the patriarchal world of the eighteenth century, women and colonial figures are connected by their mutually marginal status, which enables an empathic emotional cord between the two oppressed groups—and this connection is contingent upon vision. Ann Jessie Van Sant contends that sympathetic feelings “arise through an act of the imagination largely dependent on sight. Contemplation of the fortune of others, with the actual eye or the mind’s eye, allows an imaginative exchange of place that ‘makes real’ and ‘brings near’ experience not one’s own. Pity—and all other feeling that arises from a sympathetic change of place—is evidence that some degree of interiority has been attributed to the person observed” (17). Sentimental viewing practices are specifically evident in colonial women’s literature. The authors present images of the humanity of the Other by depicting them as emotional, suffering beings, establishing a common interiority of feeling between the European readership and the colonized. This identification evoked from eighteenth-century readers sentimental responses of

pity and compassion. “Because sensibility was the basis for an immediate, almost involuntary sympathy, it was easily incorporated into a traditional framework as an explanation for that passional capacity to which rhetoricians, dramatists, or ethical writers appealed. Furthermore, because of the emphasis during this period on the role of the affections in moral life, appeals to emotion for ethical purposes were reinforced” (Van Sant 49). The culture of the era supported the ability of female authors to touch their readers emotionally, and this sentimental strategy is evident in the visual imagery of women’s colonial literature alongside scopic views that reinforce the dominant colonial order. This study will examine the conflicting images of objectification and identification in women’s colonial literature, and it will trace the shift in the eighteenth century from overt, scopic modes of spectatorship to a more interior, sentimentalized vision, transforming the authoritative gaze of the white spectator into one of compassion and understanding. The discussion will explore the complexities of spectatorship particular to Britain’s colonial era through an examination of the fragmentation of the scopic gaze, from one that is biologically male, and the transformation of it from one that is perpetuated by a focus on external markers of difference. Studying spectator roles within women’s colonial narratives will illustrate their challenges to the gaze paradigm and will illuminate the subversive nature of women’s writing from this era. Chapter One will specifically examine points of contention within the culture of eighteenth-century Britain, examining the ocular practices of spectatorship that complicate any straightforward patriarchal model of the gaze. It will evidence how our awareness of eighteenth- century domestic culture and global ideology complicated Freud’s later psychoanalytic gendering of the gaze, and it will account for the fragmentation of the paradigm as an effect of eighteenth-century beliefs about the world. Chapter Two will examine what is arguably one of the most popular texts in the critical field at this time and the pioneer work within modern women’s colonial literature: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). The chapter will explore the tensions in the modes of viewing of the female narrator and will focus on the female figure in Oroonoko as one who plays active, operant, and driven roles within the colonial culture of the eighteenth century while still identifying with other marginalized objects. Chapter Three will focus on modes of viewing in Thomas Southerne’s dramatic interpretation of Oroonoko (1695), discussing how European men and women symbolically negotiate dominance over Other

populations through spectator-spectacle relationships and how that dominant perspective was complicated by the emergence of sentimentalism. Southerne’s adaptation will be examined as a foil to Behn’s narrative with a focused study on the sentimentalization of slavery and its melioristic aims. Chapter Four will be a study of Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792) and The Wanderings of Warwick (1794), and Chapter Five will discuss Anna Maria Mackenzie’s Slavery, or The Times (1792). These chapters will examine both the texts’ adherence to the traditionally gendered scopophilic stare and the challenges that are posed to the paradigm by the marginal figures within them. Particularly, these discussions of late-eighteenth century texts will study changes in the representation of spectatorship that were brought about by the sentimental movement and a century of debate over the institution of slavery and colonialism. Overall, this analysis will demonstrate the role of eighteenth-century women’s literature in the perpetuation of ocularcentrism and the gaze phenomenon while examining its simultaneous subversion and fragmentation of the dominant paradigm.

CHAPTER 1 COMPLEXITIES OF THE GAZE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE

Spectatorship preoccupied the domestic lives of eighteenth-century Britons. Their modes of viewing, however, did not completely support the later theoretical models put forward by psychoanalysis. Instead, there are aspects of eighteenth-century ocular culture that subvert customary gender designations. Before reviewing those anomalous practices, it is important to review the historical inception of perspective—the component of vision that enabled the eighteenth-century world to see with its own individual viewpoint. The eighteenth century inherited its lineage of ocularcentrism from the culture of the Renaissance. Historian Martin Jay discusses the origin: Not only did Renaissance literature abound in ocular references, not only did its science produce the first silvered glass mirror able to reproduce the world with far greater fidelity than before, not only did some of its greatest figures like Leonardo da Vinci explicitly privilege the eye over the ear, but also the Renaissance saw one of the most fateful innovations in Western culture: the theoretical and practical development of perspective in the visual arts. (Downcast Eyes 44) The materialization of perspectival vision at this time changed the medieval conception that an image could be seen, or known, from multiple vantage points; this notion was replaced by the perspectival beholding of an image by one, omniscient eye, or “I.” This theoretical advancement would later be demonstrated politically by the emphasis on the individual and the sweeping ideals of democracy, where each “aye” would become central. Art historian John Berger describes the implications of this theoretical change: The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centers everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse—only instead of light traveling outward, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges onto the eye as to the vanishing

point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God. (16) The vision of the individual was now perceived as an omniscient and omnipotent gaze, and personal perspective achieved new importance; the traditional communal nature of European culture had changed to one that became self-centered and subjective. This belief in the vision of the individual endowed a viewing subject with a sense of immense power as the world became a spectacle under his visual command. Historian Larry Riggs believes that perspective concerned the artists, scientists, and philosophers of the time because “the mastery of perspective in visual representation was taken by many as proof that man could definitively know, control, and, ultimately, recreate the world” (125). In other words, he believes that the principles underlying perspective provide “the epistemological ground of a manageable universe” (125). This clear, stable, controllable vision of the world spurred scientific advancement and ratified the power of the individual; essentially, its theory predicated the humanist philosophies and political revolutions of the modern world. As eighteenth-century scholar Jean Starobinski remarks in The Invention of Liberty, 1700-1789 (1964), Enlightenment minds “looked at things in the sharp clear light of the reasoning mind whose processes appear to have been closely akin to those of the seeing eye” (210). With the theoretical stronghold of perspectival vision rooted firmly in Enlightenment culture, its citizens began a self-conscious examination of their own spectatorial behaviors. This is first evidenced by the publication of The Spectator, a periodical founded in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, which claimed a readership of sixty-thousand Londoners and advised on acceptable social behaviors and manners. Mr. Spectator, the denizen who watched over the London citizenry of the early eighteenth century studying their habits, voiced his comments and concerns in a tri-weekly report that became a guide for the conduct of public life. The goals of his surreptitious surveillance of the city were stated in the tenth installment: I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my Readers may, if possible, both Ways find their account in the Speculation of the Day. And to the End that their Virtue and Discretion may not be short transient intermitting Starts of Thought, I have resolved to refresh their Memories from Day to Day, till I have

recovered them out of that desperate State of Vice and Folly, into which the Age is fallen. (Addison par.1) Mr. Spectator had a watchful eye and a natural penchant for scrutiny; in his own words, he enjoyed “the high Satisfaction of beholding all Nature with an unprejudiced Eye” (Steele par. 4). In the fourth installment of the first volume, he utilizes the discourse of viewership in order to further explain his keen eye: “I have, methinks, a more than ordinary Penetration in Seeing; and flatter myself that I have looked into the Highest and Lowest of Mankind, and make shrewd Guesses, without being admitted to their Conversation, at the inmost Thoughts and Reflections of all whom I behold” (Steele par.5). The ever-increasing readership and popularity of Mr. Spectator’s paper reveals the consciousness and preoccupation of Enlightenment men and women with their visibility. Mr. Spectator created a self-consciousness in the citizenry of the eighteenth century because they realized that they both saw and were seen; hence, they actively sought instruction as to how to become more pleasing to the eye. Further evidence of the self-conscious reflection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century peoples about their own visibility is seen in the increased popularity of portraiture. This field offers an interesting complication to any view of spectatorship as statically gendered since the images of both men and women were captured for the gaze of onlookers. Objectification through portraiture occurred in the eighteenth century without gender distinction, reflecting the kind of instability that Kaplan theorizes. England’s Royal Academy, established in 1768 and described by art historian Peter de Bolla as “the prime mover in academic art theory and the hierarchy of the genres” (72), was dependent upon the craze for and booming economy in portraiture. In fact, the Royal Academy’s first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, vastly exhibited more portraits throughout his tenure than the art of any other form (72). At the time, having one’s picture “taken” meant sitting for hours as an object beheld then and for all antiquity, consciously placing both men and women under the surveillance of the gaze; interestingly, the popularity of portraiture reveals that few men experienced paralyzing fear or anxiety at being looked upon; instead, the autovoyeuristic act aroused pleasure. One male citizen of the time even remarked of his sitting, “Though I sat five hours, I was not in the least fatigued, for, by placing a large mirror opposite to my face, Sir Joshua Reynolds put it in my power to see every stroke of his pencil; and I was greatly entertained to observe the progress of

the work, and the easy and masterly manner of the artist…” (73). In this specific situation, the object became both seer and seen, viewing his own objectification. De Bolla concludes, “the experience of sitting for a portrait, then, was one in which spectatorial activities infused the scene of representation, and such spectatorship might [have been] autovoyeuristic as well as simply voyeuristic” (73). Portraiture set the images of men and women alike for viewing in both private and public collections. As an extension of this popular trend, portable miniature portraits were also largely produced. This allowed loved ones to behold an image of their beloved at any moment—their gaze adoringly fixed upon a three-inch representational likeness. In this way, “the visual image produce[d] an object outside the self solely there for manipulation” (Jay, “Hermeneutics…” 309), and the viewer held complete control over the object of their gaze. Marcia Pointon, in her writings on British miniature portraiture, calls this “gazing games,” describing the socialization of viewing that emerged in the eighteenth century, specifically in England. “The superiority of the image over its model was part of its extraordinary significance for its owner, who exercised power over the image that went far beyond visible access” (Grootenboer). With miniature portraits, therefore, one “owned” the idealized image of the object of their affection, regardless of gender. A separate fad emerging out of eighteenth-century portraiture also complicated the gender designations of spectatorship. Seen mostly in the latter half of the eighteenth century, eye miniatures, literal representations of an individual’s eye, were exchanged between lovers, friends, and relatives at a rapid rate (see Appendix G). This phenomenon clearly evidences that population’s ocularcentric culture, but more importantly, the existence of the eye miniature offers an interesting reversal of the subject/object positions of those in typical portraiture. While the regular miniature portrait endowed its owner a certain amount of power over the image in that it was now his or hers to behold whenever he or she desired, eye miniatures displaced positions of power and control. Instead of enacting the gaze when viewing the miniature’s image, owners of eye miniatures became objects of the gaze; they were gazed at by an image of their beloved’s eye, reminding them that they were under supervision or surveillance. Eye miniatures “add[ed] a significant aspect to the network of gazing games that remains unaddressed in portrait miniatures: namely, how the beholder could be subjected to someone’s

gaze in the sense that she or he becomes a sight” (Grootenboer). An eye miniature, therefore, created a situation for the traditional object of portraiture to “see” rather than “be seen;” in effect, it “initiate[d] a transformation of the spectator into a spectacle through its fixating stare…eye portraits articulate[d] a specific mode of looking—namely, of being subjected to someone’s painted gaze” (Grootenboer). The courting of Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert by the Prince of Wales in 1784 exemplifies the power of the eye miniature (see Appendix H). The prince had attempted to win the affection of the recently widowed and strictly Catholic woman through a number of acts, including attempting suicide, but she did not relent; it was only when he sent her a miniature painting of his right eye that she gave her consent to his proposal of marriage. Even on the American continent, to where she had escaped the prince’s advances, Maria Fitzherbert could not escape his longing gaze; the image of his eye stared at its viewer, reversing the typical objectification of portraiture. “Under the gaze of the painted eye, it is the beholder who is being watched…the tiny eye creates a situation in which the beholder has no choice but to subject himself or herself to the painted gaze” (Grootenboer). Even after death, eye portraits of the deceased still retained their potency, especially when affixed with small crystals to represent teardrops that actively reminded the viewer of his or her grieving. Portraiture evidenced the preoccupation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with spectatorship and visuality, but more importantly, it created a self-conscious and interesting fragmentation of the gaze by confusing its traditional gender designations. Images of both sexes were captured on canvas and displayed for spectators, objectifying man and woman alike. Eye portraiture skewed the paradigm even further as its power originated from within the portrait and literally placed the power of the gaze in the “eye” of the beholder; a woman’s gaze, then, could literally survey a man with omniscience, haunting him even after her death. This specific interplay of vision, power, and gender, characteristic only of the eighteenth century, confused traditional subject/object roles and disrupted the seemingly static gender designations of the gaze paradigm. While portraiture practices are one site for examining the subversion of the gaze present in the eighteenth century, the colonial text is another. This genre was formed upon the premise of eye-witness testimony of the foreign elements found in the exploration and colonization of

new lands. The colonial text painted vivid and sensational portraits of alien peoples and their ways of life, yet these pictures were certainly not objective—exotic places like East India, The Orient, or The New World were what existed in the eyes of Western people. Historian Rana Kabbani explains that the travelers “were the seeing eye, and the recounting voice. They often had financial backing from officialdom, [sic] since their travelogues ultimately served to forge the imperial representation of the world” (6). The imperial visions of the West beheld a globe replete with objects to consume and control, and the seeing, curious eyes of the early travelers soon became clouded over with greed as their hunger for consumption grew to include human bodies following the Portuguese takeover of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415. According to Folaris Shyllons, this “opened the way for European penetration of black Africa” (qtd. in Ferguson, Moira, Subject to Others 11). Britain, specifically, inaugurated a major slave-trading enterprise throughout the later years of the Renaissance to secure their position as a major force within the international economy of triangular trade that dominated the centuries to come. Britain’s Royal African Company, granted a charter in 1660, sold ninety thousand African slaves in the West Indies by 1690, one-third more having died at sea sailing the Middle Passage (12). In the case of imperial conquest, the perspectival gaze of the West had fallen onto “The Dark Continent” with sinister motives and murderous results. Anne McClintock, prominent post-colonial theorist, estimates that by the end of the nineteenth century, white, European men owned and managed 85 percent of the earth’s surface (5). These colonialists organized and transformed foreign areas into their own Western cultural constructs; V.Y. Mudimbe in his The Invention of Africa (1988) outlines three methods representative of colonial organization: the procedures of acquiring, distributing, and exploiting lands in colonies; the policies of domesticating natives; and the manner of managing ancient organizations and implementing new modes of production. Thus, three complementary hypotheses and actions emerge: the domination of physical space, the reformation on natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective. (2) Gaining control of the colonized land’s physical, economic, and political base established Europe as an imperial stronghold, putting into place the hierarchical relations between Self—white—and Other—non-white. This creation of a binary power structure, those with it—white—and those

without it—non-white—seemed to enable Europeans, both male and female, to stand in superiority over the world and its people. It seemed to place white individuals in the role of “monarch-of-all-I-survey,” a term created for the European imperialist by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes (1992). From this Eurocentric vision of domination and superiority resulted a manner of speaking about those in power and those subjected, an imperialistic discourse rationalizing the placement and roles of the colonizer and the colonized; as postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha adds, “The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false” (qtd. in Andrade 189). David Spurr, author of The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), further explains: “Colonial discourse takes over as it takes cover. It implicitly claims the territory surveyed as the colonizer’s own; the colonizer speaks as an inheritor whose very vision is charged with racial ambition” (28). This self-serving speech takes form as colonial discourse and presents images of an unstable, unruly landscape peopled with uncivilized, childlike savages requiring, even yearning for, subjugation. In this way, colonial discourse does not present the reality of a society and culture dominated and oppressed by an outside force, but it instead offers a scope limited by the restrictive views of the ruling Self. The imperial ideology of the Renaissance and Enlightenment stemmed from and was validated by views of the colonized Other as primitive and inferior. The ruling faction offered this biased and racist characterization of the Other in order to naturalize their own role as savior to the weak. Spurr explains, “for the abjection of the savage has always served as a pretext for imperial conquest and domination” (80). In fact, The value of self-affirmation depends on the constant supply of images of chaos and disintegration, against which the principles of unity and order may be continually invoked…Colonial discourse requires the constant reproduction of these images in various forms—a recurring nomination of the abject—both as a justification for European intervention and as the necessary iteration of a fundamental difference between colonizer and colonized. (78) Through this self-sustaining method, colonial discourse secured the position of European dominance by emphasizing the need for control over a weak and unstable environment, meanwhile enhancing the differences between Self and Other. This imperialist ideology was reinforced by scientific endeavors from the early colonial period. For example, Samuel Thomas

von Soemmerring published his Concerning the physical difference between the Moor and the European in 1784, which stemmed from his dissections of “several Negro bodies of both sexes” and earlier observations in the public baths of Kassel, Germany. His text, which essentialized difference by asserting that racial characteristics were inborn, immutable, and permanent, served as the basis for an anatomical understanding of African men and women until well into the nineteenth century (Schiebinger 387). As an example, responding to the notion of the “royal slave,” Soemmering wrote, “if skin were the only difference, then the Negro might be considered a black European” (qtd. in Shiebinger 396). Like Soemmering, most European anatomists were fascinated with difference, so black men and women were collected and studied “as exotica— along with apes, camels, leopards, and elephants” (388). Interestingly, white women were also collected and studied as specimens of difference, and anatomists of the time who were interested in racial difference were also interested in sexual difference. Soemmering, for example, followed up his text comparing the Negro body to that of the European with a similar study of the European female, using comparable patterns in his system of study. His findings were the same in both instances: he and his colleagues viewed all physical differences as markers of lesser intellectual and moral capabilities. As a result, when he and other anatomists and physical anthropologists of the age classified the races and the sexes, they faced a critical dilemma: “where to rank the black man (the dominant sex of an inferior race) vis-á-vis the white woman (the inferior sex of the dominant race). It was these two groups—and not African woman—who were contenders for power in eighteenth-century Europe” (Schiebinger 389). The threat to imperial power posed by the masculine position of the colonized Other was undermined by the depiction of them and their country as weaker and in need of domination; this mode of colonial discourse established a feminization of the colonial land and its inhabitants. The colonial formation is one that is inherently symbolically gendered, an argument pioneered by Edward Said in his text Orientalism (1978). For example, in imperialism’s earliest Renaissance and Enlightenment forms, unknown lands were termed “virgin” territories destined to have white, male explorers “inseminate [them] with the male seeds of civilization, fructify the wilderness and quell the riotous scenes of [savagery]” (McClintock 26). Women were “the earth that is to be discovered, entered, named, inseminated and, above all, owned. Symbolically reduced, in male eyes, to the space on which male contests are waged…” (McClintock 31).

Spurr accounts for this characteristic of imperial language feminizing colonial lands when he states, “Differences in power are reformulated as gender difference, and colonization is naturalized as the relation between the sexes” (172). Language and images depicting the sexualized, female colony mark colonial discourse: imperial forces penetrate the interior of the virgin lands while the country lays wait to offer herself to the male invasion. This gendered mentality has been concretely captured in the famous drawing by Jan van der Sraet (ca. 1575) where the discovery of America is portrayed as a sexually suggestive encounter between a male and a female (see Appendix I). In addition to this American example, Africa and Asia are also seen as mistresses who lay ripe for the taking. Felicity Nussbaum explains, “Africa is frequently, of course, visually figured as a naked woman, a scorched mother under the heat of the sun, flanked by devil and lion, carrying gifts to Europe, a pharaoh’s head and pyramids in the background, and tropical trees behind” (“Polygamy, Pamela, empire” 219). Africa, about which Nussbaum speaks, is a wood engraving completed in 1700 by Andreas Schulter that clearly exhibits the feminization and sexualization of Africa, depicting the country as a virgin territory desiring settlement and domination. Nussbaum concludes, “Metaphors of seduction, penetration, and conquest permeate the language of colonialism to tame the wild exotic and the imagined unbridled sexuality of the Other” (219)—it was a natural marriage of Western power and dominance to the weaker colonial mistress. This feminizing language, objectifying and subjugating colonial territories, extended to its people as well, regardless of gender. Othered men, posited domestically in roles of patriarchal authority, were displaced to subordinate roles in colonial culture as the female colonist gained the upper hand. This reorganization of the gendered hierarchy raised many questions about women’s roles in the perpetuation of colonial ideology, elevating their subordinate position in the home. Current perspectives on the writing of female Europeans reveal that women were not apolitical in the writing of their travelogues, self-consciously omitting personal comment or analysis; they were immersed in an imperial culture and as Europeans were actively involved in the progress of colonialism, objectifying an inferior colonial Other. McClintock writes of their complicity, “The rationed privileges of race all too often put white women in positions of decided—if borrowed—power, not only over colonized women but also over colonized men. As such, white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but

were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting” (6). In this noted ambiguity lies the paradox for colonial women: they were members of an imperial nation that placed them in superior positions in the colonizer/colonized divide, so within a colonial context, European women became subjects in their own right. However, within a domestic context, women remained objects, designated other and inferior by their male colonizer counterpart. Within this complex system, where the white, male imperialist was “the heir to imperial ‘Progress’ at the head of the ‘Family of Man’” (McClintock 4), how did the female European engage in colonial discourse, forming a mythology of the colonized, when the male was at the head of a “family that admits no mother?” (McClintock 4). If subversion were possible, how did the female gaze undermine the paradigmatically male colonial ideal? McClintock summarizes this gendered conflict within the colonial era: Linked symbolically to the land, women are relegated to a realm beyond history and thus bear a particularly vexed relation to narratives of historical change and political effect. Even more importantly, women are figured as property belonging to men and hence as lying, by definition, outside the male contests over land, money and political power. (31) Understanding female roles in the culture of colonialism is clearly complicated by this paradox, and numerous questions arise: to what extent were white females in collusion with their male, dominant, colonizing counterpart? In what ways did their race allow them to assume a position of masculine mastery when viewing subjugated peoples? Paradoxically, in what other ways did European women identify with the objectified, gazed upon men and women of the colonies, endowing them with subjectivity through mutual empathy and respect? Further, how did women’s writing throughout the eighteenth century change who readers gazed upon and how the colonized was viewed? An analysis of spectatorship imagery in British women’s colonial writings from its early years in the Restoration to the final decade of the century will provide answers to these questions. The chapter that follows will examine the first modern colonial text written by a woman: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). This text, which has become popular in contemporary critical circles, is an early example complicating the unified colonial vision of imperial England. Its ambiguities reveal that some British women offered resistance to the national agenda and were not wholly complicit in furthering colonial ideology; this is evidenced in Behn by examples

of empowered marginal figures in spectatorship imagery. Through fragmenting the gaze and granting subjectivity to both women and the colonized, Behn’s narrative increases our understanding of the function of the female figure within the colonial world.

CHAPTER 2 LOOKING DIFFERENTLY: THE FEMALE SPECTATOR IN APHRA BEHN’S OROONOKO, OR THE ROYAL SLAVE

In the summer months of 1688, Aphra Behn’s supposed eye-witness account of the life of a royal slave was written and published. Deemed “A True History,” she asserts that she was spectator “to a great part of what you will find here set down; and what I could not be witness of, I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history” (75). An assertion such as this that precedes the narrative of Oroonoko serves to situate the text in the realm of realism. Additionally, and more importantly in relation to the purposes of this discussion, Behn’s introduction not only contends real truth, but it also emphasizes her position as narrator and storyteller, a position of agency and power that is clearly evident in her statement, “I give you the story of this gallant slave” (75). By invoking the first-person subjective position, Behn asserts that she will control the information given to the readers, that they will see Oroonoko and his history through her eyes. In Behn’s text, motifs of vision abound. She explicitly directs her reader to this trope in the initial narration by stating, “I was myself an eye-witness” (75). In addition to this opening line, there are nearly thirty other direct uses of the word “eye” and numerous references to sight, surveillance, and inspection. The frequency of the presence of these motifs in the text provoke further study and call attention to the fact that the concept of the gaze is central to a discussion of seeing, surveying, or witnessing. The gaze paradigm, with its privilege empowering a seeing subject whose view controls an object beheld, is constructed by an archetypically gendered dichotomous relationship: men behold women within their active, oppressive stare. However, in Behn’s Oroonoko, it is evident that the subject of the gaze has shifted from one that is strictly male; instead, the acting, seeing subject, the one who controls, is a woman given privilege within the colonial dominant order. The traditional gendered positions enacted by the scopophilic gaze shift in Oroonoko because they account for both gendered and racial dynamics. Upon the imperial landscape of the late seventeenth century, Behn’s subordinate gender is complicated by her superior race, and ultimately, what results are degrees of oppression or marginalization as the

characters who become subjective and objective under the gaze defy its traditional gender designations. Detailed examinations of the relationship between Oroonoko’s women and its racially marginalized figures completed by noted scholars Margaret Ferguson, Laura Brown, and Moira Ferguson has uncovered its conflicts. Each comments on the disparate roles of Aphra Behn as Restoration author, an ailing forty-eight-year-old in conflict with the emerging values of her era, and Aphra Behn as purported autobiographical narrator, twenty-three at the time and viewing the world through a romantic haze. Each literary scholar ultimately designates Behn’s position within the colonial system as tenuous, conflicting, and ambivalent. For example, Margaret Ferguson’s argument in “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender” (1991) traces “some of the contradictions in the narrator’s social identity, with its multiple ‘subject positions’ created in part by competing allegiances according to race, class, and gender” (165). She specifically discusses the various meanings taken on by personal pronouns in Behn’s narrative: “the ‘I’ aligns itself sometimes with a ‘we’ composed of women; in these cases the ‘I’ is definitely a ‘she.’ At other times, however, the ‘I’ aligns—or in political terms, allies—itself with a ‘we’ composed of property-owning English colonialists defending themselves against an Other (a ‘them’) composed of African slaves or of native Indians, and sometimes of both” (165). Ferguson’s article explores the tenuous position of the colonial woman, citing her sentimental alignment with Oroonoko and her political alliance with his owners; she views Behn as “the literate white woman who spoke for some oppressed black slaves but who did so with extreme partiality, discriminating among them according to status” (173). Brown’s examination of Oroonoko in “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves” (1987) also accounts for the ambivalent figure of woman within the colonial system; specifically, her text examines the role of woman as a facilitator of both romanticism and imperialism. For Brown, the colonial woman is characterized simultaneously as recounting female sensibility (50-51), as a patriarchal prize within a heroic romance (49-50 and 54), and as a two-dimensional figure upon which imperialism is catalogued through material goods (52). She states that these women hold “no objective status” and only hold a “mediatory role” in mercantile imperialism. Her text argues that female figures lack practical power and agency at all possible levels of involvement: they do not act independently, overtly rebelling against and

attacking colonialism; they do not operate secretly, subversively undermining imperial cultural norms; nor do they drive dominant ideology, financially benefiting from colonial enterprise (54- 55). Finally, Moira Ferguson lends a discussion of the discursive roles played by European women writers during the imperial era in her text Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (1992). She believes that their roles within the colonial order were much more actively agent as their texts concurrently “misrepresented the very African-Caribbean slaves whose freedom they advocated” while they “displaced anxieties about their own assumed powerlessness and inferiority onto their representations of slaves” (3). These misrepresentations, both limited by Eurocentrism and distorted by fear, combined to form a discourse Ferguson terms “Anglo-Africanism”, which “came to be accepted by a majority of the white population as an authentic expression of slavery’s ‘reality’; what these writers said about slaves came to be what was generally thought” (5). Moreover, in their texts, colonial women writers decried their own slave-like subjugation to man and bemoaned their bondage to the cross-class patriarchal order that governed European culture; these “women either labeled themselves slaves or labeled their situation as slavery, yet failed to accompany these incriminations with an explicit condemnation of colonial slavery itself” (25). Ferguson shows how women writers clearly communicated their contempt for the forcible confinement and subjugation of their likenesses, other white Christians, yet their sympathy did not extend beyond their own continent; in fact, “their discourse embedded entrenched national policy” by perpetuating the mythology that validated and naturalized colonial slavery. Ferguson reads Behn’s Oroonoko through these ideas, evidencing the fact that “the only slaveries British people cared enough to protest were ones that involved white citizenry” (26). In sum, these critical discussions examine the ambivalence of Behn’s narrative position to varying degrees. Though adopting different opinions of the author’s degree of collusion, each critic sees her as maintaining both a position of racial privilege and a position of gender inferiority. This ambivalence manifests itself through narrative situations of both domination of the Other and empathy for him; these conflicting impulses correspond to the contradictory movements between the two elements of the gaze paradigm, objectification and identification, caused by Behn’s position simultaneously privileged in and marginal to European colonialist

culture. In the chapter that follows, I will explore the scopophilic paradigm of the male gaze as a means of further probing Behn’s politics and the politics of the gaze in eighteenth-century British culture. Further, I will examine how and why both elements of the paradigm, objectification and identification, are evident in Behn’s relationship with her text and her characters when traditionally, females neither assume subjective roles of authority and control that reduce others to objects nor identify with a powerful, masterful textual surrogate. My examination of the scopophilic paradigm in Oroonoko will demonstrate Behn’s fragmented loyalties, and it will show how ultimately, as a victim of patriarchal objectification herself, she does in fact identify with her African protagonist, allowing her vision of Oroonoko to move beyond ideology secured by the dominant colonial order. Through an examination of the visual motifs prevalent in Oroonoko, I will show how Behn, at once indicted in the oppressive actions of her culture, also attempts to subvert them as she and her characters appropriate the power of white male hegemony, claiming subjectivity under the scopophilic gaze. Within the colonial landscape of the late 1700s, what enables the narrator’s subversive position as female spectator, in defiance of a traditionally gendered gaze, is her whiteness. Eurocentrism allows her to seat herself in a position dominant to the Other characters of the narrative, regardless of her gender. During this inaugural phase of Western imperial expansion in the late seventeenth century, “Britain produced a growing mass of travel literature in a frenzied attempt to know the world it was conquering. The travelers…were the seeing eyes and the recounting voice” (Kabbani 6); consequently, it was the traveler’s subjective view, that of both white men and white women, that portrayed the Other in literary modes of representation. Western imperial ideology led these European travelers to place themselves in the dominant position of “monarch-of-all-I-survey,” whether king or queen, a term created for the European colonist by Mary Louise Pratt in her text Imperial Eyes. This subjective, dominant position of monarch placed the European in the role of spectator and arrested the colonial people as objects of their immobilizing, penetrating gaze. As a result, colonial women like Behn did not sketch travelogues devoid of Eurocentric bias or racism; in fact, as Margaret Ferguson comments, “Through her pen flow at least some of the prerogatives of the English empire and its language, a language she has shown herself using…as a potent instrument of sexual and political domination” (171). Moira Ferguson speaks even more specifically about Behn’s invocation of

the language of empire, believing that she “constructs West African reality Eurocentrically in a discourse…[termed] Anglo-African…a colonialist discourse about slavery that unwittingly intensified negative attitudes toward Africans in general and slaves in particular” (“Oroonoko” 340). Behn’s language, ideas, and vision along with that of her counterparts were actively involved in the progress and persistence of colonialism, allowing her to assume a powerful gaze of visual dominance over native peoples. This idea is succinctly summarized by Anne McClintock in her text Imperial Leather: “The rationed privileges of race all too often put white women in positions of decided—if borrowed—power, not only over colonized women but also over colonized men” (6). This description of the colonial relationship, placing native men in a typically female position of submission, passivity, and objectification, challenges Freud’s static designation of gender roles within the scopophilic gaze. Upon the imperial landscape of the English empire, the native man becomes the object beheld while the masculine, powerful, active spectator may be male or female since race is a more determinate factor of the social hierarchy than gender. Initially, it is the Native Americans who become the objects of female vision. Following the introduction of the text in which Behn asserts her visual control over the telling of Oroonoko’s story, she delivers a lengthy description of the natives of Surinam that produces an image of those objectified for the readership: We dealt with them with beads of all colours, knives, axes, pins and needles; which they used only as tools to drill holes with in their ears, noses and lips…The beads they weave into aprons about a quarter length of an ell long, and of the same breadth; which apron they wear just before them, as Adam and Eve did the fig leaves…with their long black hair, and the face painted in little specks or flowers here and there, makes them a wonderful figure to behold. (76) Behn literally “beholds” them for an entire page of text, speaking about their shape, hair, skin, jewelry, and adornments. As Laura Brown notes, her “enumeration of these goods is typical of the age’s economic and literary language, where the mere act of listing, the evocation of brilliant colors, and the sense of an incalculable numerousness express the period’s fascination with imperialist accumulation” (52). Behn enumerates for her mercantilist readers what her eyes behold, what is available for the European imperialist to consume in the lands abroad, and this

list of products combines both synthetic and organic commoditized goods. The list specifically includes “glorious wreaths” of feathers, about which Behn relates, “I had a set of these presented to me, and I gave them to the King’s Theatre, and it was the dress of the Indian Queen, infinitely admired by persons of quality, and were inimitable” (76). These native adornments of the Surinamese imported into London were worn by the leading character in Dryden’s drama and became a spectacle center-stage, drawing all eyes upon them and fueling a covetous drive toward possession. Laura Brown informs us that Behn’s gift to the King’s Theatre became “an artifact of imperialism displayed in the most spectacular manner possible—adorning the female figure of a contemporary actress on the real stage of the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street” (52). There, the spectacle of the female figure for a viewing audience became magnified by the equation of her figure with foreign objects of desire, both displayed to the Restoration theater-goers for the small price of admission. The inclusion of this list reminds the reader of Behn’s role as an active participant within colonial exchange as she positions herself as “a member of an English ‘family’ of slave owners (as it were) and as such, one who directly and ‘naturally’ profited from others’ labor” (Ferguson, Margaret 164), as one who objectifies the native form and perpetuates the enslavement of Othered peoples by naturalizing their subservient role in the colonial world. Following Behn’s listing of specific Surinamese ornaments and characteristics in the first few pages of her novella, she concludes, And though they are all thus naked, if one lives for ever among them, there is not to be seen an indecent action, or glance; and being continually used to see one another so unadorned, so like our first parents before the Fall, it seems as if they had no wishes; there being nothing to heighten curiosity, but all you can see, you see at once, and every moment see; and where there is no novelty, there can be no curiosity. (76) Her communication reveals that the native men and women do not make spectacles of each other’s nude form—there is not to be seen a leer, an ogle, “or glance”; in fact, it is only the narrator who maintains viewership in this community, utilizing eight references in this quotation alone from the discourse of the optic regime. This summation lays bare the spectacle that was made of the native men and women; they were wholly exposed to the curious, desirous gazes of the European colonists.

Another example where Behn demonstrates her active role as spectator by objectifiying the Native Americans, regardless of their gender, occurs later in the narrative. When Behn and her brother approach an Indian village, they imagine that they “should have a half diversion in gazing only” (122); then, when welcomed in for supper, they “beheld several of the great captains, who had been at council. But so frightful a vision it was to see them no fancy can create; no such dreams can represent so dreadful a spectacle” (123). In this situation, even these powerful war captains become spectacles, objects of Behn’s controlling, imperialist gaze. Her authoritative perspective remains as she fixedly stares at the powerful men; their visages evoke anxiety, yet she continues to behold them as her colonialist perspective grants her a position of superiority over these native male figures despite her gender. Upon Surinam’s imperial landscape, the native man becomes the object beheld while the European female stares as the masculine, powerful, active spectator since race is a more determinate factor within the social hierarchy than gender. Although this scene clearly reveals Behn’s ethnocentric perspective, acting as a powerful agent of imperial conquest alongside her male colonizer counterpart, it also provides the first example of tensions that exist within her text when she relates that just as she and her brother view the Others from their privileged position of whiteness, the natives in turn view them through their own perspectival vision. Upon first entering the village, Behn depicts a scene in which she and her brother are also on display, objects beheld by the curious, wondering eyes of the natives. She reveals their change in status from the position of subject to object when she communicates, They had no sooner spied us, but they set up a loud cry, that frighted us at first. We thought it had been for those that should kill, but it seems it was of wonder and amazement…we took heart and advanced, came up to them, and offered them our hands, which they took, and looked on us round about, calling still for more company; who came swarming out, all wondering…and from gazing upon us round, they touched us…In fine, we suffered them to survey us as they pleased, and we thought they would never have done admiring us. (121-122) Though Behn describes the natives as unsophisticated and childlike in their wonderment and awe, she also communicates her sense of powerlessness, standing as spectacle under the scrutiny

of their gazes. By presenting this reversal of power positions and acknowledging the spectator role of the native Suranimese, Behn’s narrative frustrates the fixed hold of ideas of Eurocentric superiority. The scene reduces the Europeans to the object-position within the framework of the gaze because they now stand as Other to the Native Americans; this speaks to the Foucauldian argument of the fluidity of power positions, how they change in different situations. It also speaks to the importance of perspective, undermining the validity of an ethnocentric, colonial vision of the world by revealing its one-dimensional slant. When Behn and her brother become objects of the gaze of the Native Americans, the gaze that polarizes gender and racial designations is fragmented. These instances in which Behn exposes the racism and error of ethnocentric vision reveal contradictions within her narrative; this particular scene illustrates both personal modes of viewing from a dominant, masculine subject-position and spectacle-positioning as the passive, silent, observed object. Her ambivalent position is clear as she both colludes with a collective racist vision of the colonized yet breaks with colonialist ideology in acknowledging the power-positions of the Surinamese. Tensions within the narrative appear again and more frequently once Oroonoko is introduced. As with the Native Americans, Behn’s Eurocentric, privileged modes of viewing largely taint her re-telling of Oroonoko’s tale; however, her identification with him and the revelation that he can be a subject in his own right is an acknowledgment of his humanity and an indirect attack on slavery and imperial ways of viewing the world. Behn’s conflicting loyalties are present when she first introduces Oroonoko as the central character in her text and her “friend” during her supposed time in the colony. Initially, he, like the others, becomes an object under Behn’s controlling gaze—a gaze that she holds as author, subjectively depicting the African prince and his drama for her readership, and as narrator and character within, player upon the imperial stage. Regardless of Oroonoko’s overwhelming masculinity and physical power, within an imperial context, he is deemed passive though objectification. This characterization defies Freud’s designation of scopophilia as sexually shaped, where pleasure in looking is regulated by the dichotomy of active/male and passive/female. This defiance of his theory is explained by the imperialist culture that stages Behn’s novel; though Oroonoko is her central masculine figure, he is also the Other, controlled by the colonizer, and therefore, the object overseen by his or her gaze. Because Behn is a

member of this controlling culture, that of white European, her private gaze colludes with that of the Western collective, turning Oroonoko (and his story) into a public spectacle. Behn actively participated in England’s early colonial economy—her perspectival visions, which reinforced images of a passive, objectified Other, were sold in the marketplace, and she was well aware of the market for her product, her visions of the New World. Through the sales of these visions, she became agent in the slave trade, “profiting from a ‘system’ of circulation which includes not only words, among them the lies characteristic of male Christian slave traders, but bodies as well” (Ferguson, Margaret 167). For example, in her initial description of the prince, Behn places Oroonoko on wondrous display, framed for her readers in grand spectacle: But though I had heard so much of him, I was as greatly surprised when I saw him as if I had heard nothing of him…He was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancied; the most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot…His eyes were the most awful that could be seen, and very piercing; the white of them being like snow, as were his teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turned lips…The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble, and exactly formed, that, bating his color, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. There was no one grace wanting, that bears the standard of true beauty. (81) Thus, Prince Oroonoko was immortalized, narrated through and defined by Behn’s active, perspectival gaze—“the prince” she states, “such as I have described him” (81). Their positions as subject and object are clear, as is the subversion of traditional gendered designations. The male body becomes objectified for the reader, a mighty African ruler reduced to an aesthetic spectacle, much like a woman described superficially by her lover. An interesting parallel follows as Oroonoko’s physical characterization precedes Imoinda’s; however, she is not given substance in any form—no such detail attends Imoinda’s characterization. Instead, she is cast only in the shadow of Oroonoko: “she was female to the noble male” (81). Behn speaks solely of the object of her adoration, the vision that she takes and reveals for her readership to be immortalized by her hand.

In addition to Behn herself as the narrator, Oroonoko becomes the spectacle for her other characters as well; specifically, the colonists in America are fascinated, almost entranced, by his regal stature. Trefry particularly, “beholding the richness of [Oroonoko’s] vest, no sooner came into the boat, but he fixed his eyes on him” (106). Later, during their passage up the river, “when they landed numbers of people would flock to behold this man; not but their eyes were daily entertained with the sight of slaves, but the fame of Oroonoko was gone before him, and all people were in admiration of his beauty” (107). Like the spectacle he becomes for the author and the narrator, he entertains the eyes of her countrymen as well. Behn’s diction in this statement, “their eyes were daily entertained with the sight of slaves,” evidences an argument made by Srinivas Aravamudan in his text Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999) that “Africans seized for the slave trade were also transported to England and sold as pets” (34). Aravamudan cites the portraiture of the period, where regal Europeans were captured on canvas adorned by African men, women, and children, often in dog collars, to validate his claim. He further explains of the relationship between pet-keeping and Oroonoko, “The novella participates vigorously in the process of making the eponymous character an exotic pet for the entertainment of the colonists” (39). In the previous examples, the narrator and many others participate in this active viewing of Oroonoko as an exotic, dehumanized object, a pet by which their eyes are entertained. Behn’s presentation of Oroonoko as an object of display occurs at first glance, but an understanding of her African prince as simply a spectacular sight is destabilized by the successive flashbacks of him as a dominant subject in Africa. The archetype of gendered roles of viewership, with men in control and women passively controlled, is presented in the text through a series of flashbacks to Coramantien that are also narrated by Behn. These flashbacks show how simultaneously, as racial oppression objectifies the native male Other under a colonial regime, in Coramantien within the African culture, those who are objects under the gaze of the Europeans become controlling subjects as they behold their women. This flashback provides a striking contrast because it reveals that those who are now enslaved, African men, once held positions of mastery. The juxtaposition illustrates the strength of the colonial regime to shift the scopophilic paradigm as it presents itself in Surinam. In Coramantien, the active, dominant roles of the African men are particularly apparent in the harem scene, when the women of the otan

dance for them: “the whole company was taken up in beholding the dancing and antic postures the women royal made” (Behn 91). The women of the harem are objectified, eroticized, and made into spectacles by the male gaze of the African warriors, who to their surprise will soon fall under the controlling, powerful vision of the Europeans. While colonial ideology reconstructs the gaze paradigm, Behn’s novella recreates for her readers the colonial hierarchy symbolized by modes of viewing: white surveys black first and foremost, then male surveys female. In this equation, Imoinda, Behn’s Black Venus, being the most beautiful of the women so “that no man, of any nation, ever beheld her, that did not fall in love with her” (110), becomes the text’s other main object. Her objectification, like that of the other African women, follows the traditional model: as a black female, she lay at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and the gazes of all men and women in the text, both European and African, capture her image. Most important to Behn’s romance though, Imoinda is first arrested by Oroonoko’s gaze when he sees her in the otan, where “he told her with his eyes that he was not insensible of her charms” (82). From this moment forward in the text, Imoinda becomes the sole object of Oroonoko’s gaze: “she alone gave his eyes and soul their motions. Nor did Imoinda employ her eyes to any other use, than in beholding with infinite pleasure the joy she produced in those of the prince” (92). Even during her enslavement when allowing herself to become a sexual object of a white landowner would have been incredibly beneficial, it was “as if she had resolved never to raise her eyes to the face of a man again” (111). She was Oroonoko’s object, and when her image was restored to him in America, “he soon saw Imoinda all over her; in a minute he saw her face, her shape, her air, her modesty, and all that called forth his soul with joy at his eyes” (111). His overwhelming joy in that moment was expressed by his eyes, as was the subsequent growth of their love and its symbolic fruition, Imoinda’s pregnancy. During this period of growth, Oroonoko’s friendship with Behn’s narrator also bloomed, and she witnessed the adoration communicated by the pair while also listening to Oroonoko’s stories and accompanying him on different voyages throughout the territory. This phase of the novella tracks the female narrator’s progress from a position at the helm of the colonial regime to one that is more sympathetic to Oroonoko’s reduction to the object-position. Her initial description of the prince and her actions toward him indict her in the oppressive inhumanity inflicted by her culture; however, her ability to preserve the detached, subjective stance of the colonized gives

way as she comes to empathize with Oroonoko’s humanity. Symbols of his vision evidence this identification. As Behn befriends Oroonoko, she learns of his past as the prince of Coramantien, of his present as the husband of Imoinda, and of his future as the father of their child. While initially, she saw Oroonoko from a spectator position, throughout their time together in Surinam, she comes to realize the humanity of the royal slave and begins to view his enslavement as a cruel incivility inflicted upon him by mercantilist speculators. As a woman hampered within the patriarchal society of the Restoration, where gendered oppression was stifling for women as it reduced them to aesthetic objects of the gaze, Behn had felt the bonds imposed upon marginalized groups. In addition, her political philosophies were largely royalist, fueling her hostility toward those with capitalistic motivations and increasing her sympathy for those with aristocratic blood. These emotions within her wash over pre-conceived notions of European superiority, and though they are never entirely abandoned, she is able to identify with Oroonoko’s plight. This identification further complicates a static reading of the racially- influenced shift of gender positions within the scopophilic gaze paradigm in Oroonoko. Though clear evidence of Behn’s complicity in the objectification and subjugation of Othered peoples is present through an initial study of her viewing practices, the relationship between the author and Oroonoko read strictly as colonialist is read in error because there is also evidence of a sense of identification between Behn and Oroonoko that must be accounted for. Identification is the second element present in Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic discussion of the scopophilic gaze as manifested in artistic representation. To cite Mulvey, As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look…A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego…(This) character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator. (Mulvey 20) This illustration can be extended to a discussion of Behn and her male protagonist, taking care to remember that Behn, a female, still sits powerfully within the masculine, dominant position of spectator as she identifies with her male protagonist, her “screen surrogate.” Both at times in the

novella claim power and control, at others are subjugated and disenfranchised by the dominant order; therefore, Behn and Oroonoko can identify with each other. One oppressed due to gender and the other due to race, these figures both seek agency within the dominant cultural structure: white male hegemony. The novella acts as Behn’s stage, and as the spectator, she projects her gaze onto that of her textual like whose “eyes insensibly commanded respect” (Behn 108), identifying with her male protagonist. This enables Oroonoko’s power in the text as he controls events to coincide with Behn’s active vision. With reference to Mulvey’s cinematic example of identification, Behn creates a relationship with her character where he is granted privilege and agency that she is not allowed. Like Mulvey’s film protagonist, Behn views her main character as a more perfect, more complete, and more powerful ideal ego that can make things happen within the story and that can control events better than the spectator outside the narrative. Identification can first be seen when she explains the history of how Oroonoko became a mighty general: “He had scarce arrived at his seventeenth year, when fighting by his side, the general was killed with an arrow in his eye, which the Prince Oroonoko (for so this gallant Moor was called) very narrowly avoided” (79). This fatal injury that raised and empowered Oroonoko is quite symbolic: the general’s sight, his ability to control with the gaze, was taken; therefore, he lost his power to sustain. The general’s power over his men and the enemy was lost in this moment and was assumed by Oroonoko; interestingly, we also learn that this man was Imoinda’s father, so Oroonoko gains not only the general’s powers of surveillance over his men but also over his daughter— Oroonoko assumes the gaze over Imoinda, replacing her father. In this scene, Behn’s choice of the agent of death relays the importance of vision and of the subject/spectator position; holding the subject-position within the gaze phenomenon enables these men power and control, and Behn’s protagonist avoids a destructive blow to that power. In this way, he avoids disempowerment and continues to represent a textual surrogate as Behn’s more powerful ideal ego. Another example of the element of identification in Behn’s gaze on Oroonoko is present when Imoinda has been taken to the otan. Oroonoko encounters her being prepared for his grandfather; yet, rather than succumbing to patriarchal order and admitting defeat to the cultural hierarchy, Oroonoko is determined to retain his control over his love. Because verbal interaction

would unveil his defiance, Oroonoko maintains his power through verbal expression: his eyes “answered hers again, as much as eyes could do, instructed by the most tender, and most passionate heart that ever loved. And they spoke so well, and so effectually…twas this powerful language alone that in an instant conveyed all the thoughts of their souls to each other” (88). This powerful visual relationship persists throughout Imoinda’s confinement—Oroonoko refuses to relent to the king’s rule. In this way, once again it is apparent that Oroonoko’s persistent heroism, his refusal to allow himself to be removed from the subjective position of the gaze or “monarch-of-all-I-survey”, is a place of identification for Behn. Her protagonist refuses to yield his spectator position, just as she refuses to yield hers through authorship. Though confronted with oppression and adversity, Behn’s subjective power, like Oroonoko’s, persists. Oroonoko, Behn’s more perfect, more complete, more powerful ego ideal, exerts his visual control in defiance of the dominant order once again when the ship captain enslaves him. Upon leaving the vessel, “he only beheld the captain with a look all fierce and disdainful, upbraiding him with eyes, that forced blushes on his guilty cheeks, he only cried in passing over the side of the ship, ‘Farewell, Sir! ‘Tis worth my suffering to gain so true a knowledge both of you and of your gods by whom you swear” (106). It is evident here that even in slavery Oroonoko has not been silenced; his powerful gaze rebukes the colonialist enterprises of the European. Though enslaved, Oroonoko openly rejects, defies, and chastises racial oppression; his tenacity in the face of adversity, his ability to belittle and disempower the white enslaver, is highly noble. His resistance continues in Surinam once he has aroused a slave rebellion then succumbed to the weakness of his fellow slaves; while being whipped “in a most deplorable and inhumane manner,” (131) he “was not perceived to make any moan, or to alter his face, only to roll his eyes on the faithless governor, and those he believed guilty, with fierceness and indignation…he pronounced a woe and revenge from his eyes, that darted fire, that ‘twas at once both awful and terrible to behold” (131). In this scene of immense physical torture, Oroonoko remains in the dominant masculine position of spectator by surveying the crowd of onlookers and beholding them as spectacle, judging and belittling them as they violently attempt to remove the threat he poses. Oroonoko silently maintains his power over these white men through visual mastery; language is subordinated to ocularcentric power as his eyes “pronounce” his resistance. Behn’s identification with this position is clearly one of aspiration; she has defied patriarchal

opposition through female authorship and strives to enhance and continue in this subversion of the dominant order. To conclude this analysis of identification within the scopophilic paradigm, it is beneficial to read symbolically the scene where Oroonoko kills the tigress that has been threatening the colonial village. After hearing of her tyranny over all other men in the village, Oroonoko “fancied he should overcome her, by giving her another sort of a wound than any had yet done…going softly to one side of her, and hiding his person behind certain herbage that grew high and thick, he took so good aim, that, as he intended, he shot her just into the eye” (119). At the literal level, Oroonoko knows that fatality for the beast lay in the destruction of her eye, of her ability to survey the landscape and lay claim to her prey; symbolically read, Oroonoko destroys the beasts who watch, those who oversee him, Imoinda, and their black brethren— namely, their white oppressors. This reading might explain the bizarre shift in gender pronoun when describing the tigress: …and the arrow was sent with so good a will, and so sure a hand, that it stuck in her brain, and made her caper, and become mad for a moment or two, but being seconded by another arrow, he fell dead upon the prey. Caesar cut him open with a knife, to see where those wounds were that had been reported to him, and why he did not die of them…but when the heart of this courageous animal was taken out, there were seven bullets of lead in it, and the wounds seamed up with great scars, and she lived with the bullets a great while, for it was long since they were shot. (119) The shift in gender pronoun from female to male and back to female implies some subconscious mission playing out in Behn’s text. Whereas her hero symbolically destroys the powerful and controlling subjective stance of his white oppressor, she brings down the beast who watches her, him, the patriarchy, thereby enabling both her own and Oroonoko’s objectification to dissolve. Though in the previous examples when Behn stands within the masculine position and objectifies the Other, she advocates the appropriation of the powerful subjective position, this scene seemingly invokes a utopia where the power of the gaze has been completely defused and there is a complete end, a death, to the objectification of both racial Other and sexual Other. By directing her textual surrogate to strike the fatal blow to the scopophilic stare, traditionally gendered to objectify women, Behn acts herself, empowered by the pen; this signifies that she is

hopeful for a future shift in power that brings dramatic changes within the dominant patriarchal culture. This example, viewed through the lens of identification, illustrates Mulvey’s designation of the male protagonist as authorial surrogate; Oroonoko, standing in place of Behn, symbolically eliminates the beast that watches over him and her. However, this symbolic beast, that which fixes the subjective power of whiteness over Oroonoko and his countrymen through vision and surveillance, includes Behn and other white women. As Laura J. Rosenthal notes, “Consciously or not, Behn expresses some distress in her own inevitable participation in the commodification of Oroonoko” (90). Therefore, Oroonoko’s killing of the tigress may also provide evidence of his objectification within the colonial paradigm and his subsequent rebellion against the gaze that Behn invokes as both author and narrator through her position as white European. By killing the tigress, Oroonoko also symbolically kills Behn, who all but apologizes for her part in his commodification when she states, “Thus died this great Man, worthy of a better Fate, and a more sublime Wit than mine to write his Praise” (78). Behn’s disclaimers “express the uneasiness with which an English woman inhabits the position of ownership” (Rosenthal 90). This might offer a rationale for the author’s initial choice of sex for the tiger as Oroonoko destroys the agent of extreme emasculation, the white female who controls him with and makes him spectacle of her penetrating vision. Behn’s narrative of the royal slave Oroonoko clearly problematizes a reading of the scopophilic paradigm of the male gaze as one that is statically gendered. Both elements of the paradigm, objectification and identification, are evident in her relationship with Oroonoko, corresponding to Behn’s position simultaneously privileged in and marginal to European colonialist culture. The examples of objectification in the text, where Oroonoko, Imoinda, and the Native Americans are held as objects of the white male and white female gaze, speak of Behn’s race and her superior and subjective position to all Othered peoples regardless of gender. On the other hand, the examples of identification between Behn and her protagonist display the empowering of Oroonoko (in Mulvey’s terms, Behn’s textual “like” or “surrogate”) that parallels her own empowerment as an author and as a European within a colonial landscape. These scenes of identification relay subversion and speak about the author’s dissatisfaction with her marginalization by the patriarchy. Through an examination of the visual motifs prevalent in

Oroonoko, it is clear that Behn, at once indicted in the oppressive actions of her culture, also attempts to subvert them as she and her characters both see and are seen. As women and racial Others appropriate the power of white male hegemony in her text, Behn’s characters defy traditional spectator/spectacle designations, becoming both subjects and objects under the scopophilic gaze.

CHAPTER 3 SOUTHERNE’S AFRICAN GAZE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF AMELIORATION

Seven years after the publication of Aphra Behn’s novella, playwright Thomas Southerne adapted Oroonoko for the stage. He acknowledges his indebtedness to her in the play’s dedicatory epistle written for statesman William Cavendish: “I stand engaged to Mrs. Behn for the occasion of a most passionate distress in my last play; and in a conscience that I had not made her a sufficient acknowledgment, I have run further into her debt for Oroonoko” (3). Southerne’s homage to Behn intends to offer his gratitude for the use of her storyline, which has drawn many to look specifically at the similarities between their texts. In fact, his remarks of gratitude mislead a reader away from a study of the differences in the texts, of the material that Southerne edits, amends, and reshapes. For example, the playwright removes the foundational narrative structure through which Oroonoko is deemed a subject in his own right—but does this mean that Oroonoko is without any instances of identification between the playwright and his characters? Does Southerne, like Behn before him, endow any of those who were deemed Other by Restoration society with masterful viewing practices? Or, does his position at the helm of the social hierarchy deny him the ability to identify with those who have been relegated to an objectified status? The answer is that regardless of his position, Southerne does in fact invest his marginal characters with subjectivity; his play posits the African prince and the Welldon sisters, Charlotte and Lucy, in masterful sites of viewership. However, the investment of subjectivity in these characters occurs by various degrees, with qualifications, and at the expense of the remainder of the African cast, those who felt the force of oppression most stiflingly. Southerne’s choice of the pathetic form of drama is at the root of this qualification, as is his comic subplot: each elevates a socially marginalized figure to a subjective role while it simultaneously diverts the attention of the audience away from epistemic issues of inequality. This chapter evaluates Southerne’s ambiguous aims, how he showcases Oroonoko’s tragedy, evoking compassion and pity for his royal slave through sentimental techniques, while endorsing the naturalized subjugation of the African race through its objectification.

Throughout the 1670s and 1680s in England, a gradual shift occurred in drama from heroic tragedy to pathetic tragedy. With the re-opening of the theaters in 1660, when English drama was reborn following the interregnum, heroic tragedy became the leading tragic style; it was male-dominated and celebrated powerful, aggressively masculine heroes and their pursuit of glory both as rulers and lovers. Southerne’s first play, The Loyal Brother, or the Persian Prince (1682), is a heroic tragedy whose protagonist represented the future James II. He chose to write in the pathetic style following this initial production; in fact, his reputation was made by his production of pathetic tragedy, sentimental drama whose subject is love and domestic concerns depicting the sorrowful lives of the protagonists. Janet Todd characterizes sentimental figures in Sensibility: An Introduction (1986) as “natural victims,” namely, those “whose misery is demanded by their predicament as defenceless women, aged men, helpless infants or melancholic youths” (3). Her list of the defenseless and disenfranchised does not include those whose misery is determined by their maligned race, but Markman Ellis later characterizes African slavery and the slave trade in The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (1996) as “the most scandalous and impassioned example of inequality available to the emergent discourse of sentimentalism” (49). Southerne’s drama was produced at the forefront of these trends in sentimental literature, and his play was among the first in which a slave would masterfully capture the gaze of the audience. Southerne’s protagonist in Oroonoko is one who sentimentally evokes pity and pathos because his race is determinate of his miserable circumstance, regardless of his majesty, nobility, or virtue. Southerne grants Oroonoko subjectivity, and he becomes a source of pity and sorrow for audience members, initiating a sentimental movement whose reformatory aims sought to advance ameliorative ideals—not the abolition but rather the mitigation of slavery. The analysis that follows reveals how Southerne constructed his African prince as a feeling subject, allowing his audience to empathize with Oroonoko as a fellow human being and weep over his miserable fate. The archetypal victims of the sentimental literature that swept through the eighteenth century include “the sensitive, benevolent man whose feelings are too exquisite for the acquisitiveness, vulgarity and selfishness of his world” (Todd 4). Southerne’s Oroonoko is their predecessor as he personifies these characteristics and falls victim to a merciless, mercenary scheme, which horrifies the supporting cast who views the royal slave as a heroic man of virtue

regardless of his race. Before Oroonoko ever takes the stage, the audience learns of his nobility and is instructed to align themselves with characters like Blanford, Stanmore, and Charlotte and Lucy Welldon who oppose the trickery and deceit utilized in his capture. These men and women view Oroonoko as the slave ship captain describes him: “a prince every inch of him” (1.2.136); they are men and women of honor, and they respect Oroonoko as such, viewing him as a powerful masculine subject victimized by the vice and corruption of commerce. When Oroonoko enters, standing out for the audience as the last slave paraded across the stage and alone while the others walk in pairs, he takes the spotlight, beginning an indignant speech about his capture. He is clearly positioned in the role of subject as he rebukes Christian hypocrisy and calls out to his men, embracing them as his loyal, dutiful followers. Oroonoko’s image arrests the attention of the Europeans, who have gathered to claim their respective lots; however, the spectacle in this scene is not of Oroonoko himself as their racial Other, but it is the tragic circumstances of his enslavement that draws their eyes—the royal prince in chains. As this scene continues, the slaves are led away, but Oroonoko remains, maintaining his strong visual presence on the stage and capturing the gaze of the viewers. The slave ship captain then addresses the governor, but it is Oroonoko who replies, keeping himself in the subject position and strengthening his ownership of it with a lengthy apostrophe to justice that magnifies his majestic nature and virtuous character: Live still in fear; it is the villain’s curse And will revenge my chains. Fear even me Who have no pow’r to hurt thee. Nature abhors And drives thee out from the society And commerce of mankind for breach of faith. Men live and prosper but in mutual trust, A confidence of one another’s truth. That thou hast violated. I have done. I know my fortune and submit to it. (1.2.212-220) Oroonoko’s monologue places him in the spotlight like any male lead would take. With this placement, Southerne mitigates Oroonoko’s racial difference because it becomes secondary to his noble birth and virtuous disposition: “Honest black,” Oroonoko reveals, “disdains to change

its color” (1.2.243-244). In this example, Oroonoko emphasizes the importance of honesty and honor regardless of skin color, asking the audience to gaze not at external markers but at his nobility and moral character—that which posits him as a superior subject above the rest, white or black. Ellis elaborates on the noble characterization of sentimental heroes like Oroonoko in the following remark: “The sentimentalist discussion of slavery is particularly eloquent because of the priority and privilege it accords to the feelings and to the heart, rather than the scopic typologies of complexion and race. Sentimentalism wants to believe that all humanity is equally capable of feeling and that this equality of feeling is not determined or prejudiced by appearance or skin colour” (86). The focus of the audience, therefore, is on the interiority of the African prince; their gaze is diverted from racial difference marked by skin color, and they see Oroonoko as a once-powerful monarch who has fallen victim to corrupt modes of commerce. As a result of Southerne’s characterization of Oroonoko, the honorable characters who watch the prince do so not from a position of mastery but in deference, pity, and regret. Blanford’s character is cast as the spokesperson for honor and virtue, and Southerne’s audience is instructed by his compassionate response to Oroonoko to respect and honor the royal slave. Todd explains that the aim of sentimental literature is to reproduce in the viewer the emotional spectacle on stage: “It is a kind of pedagogy of seeing and of the physical reaction that this seeing should produce, clarifying when uncontrolled sobs or a single tear should be the rule, or when the inexpressible nature of the feeling should be stressed” (4). Blanford’s behavior, therefore, guides the audience as a type of conduct lesson, so when he applies to Oroonoko as a friend, viewing him as a subject in his own right, the audience follows with respect, compassion, and pity. Blanford first indignantly calls for the removal of the prince’s chains and assures him, “you are fallen into honorable hands” (1.2.224). Blanford also reinforces Oroonoko’s masterful position when he states, “it shall be my care to serve you” (1.2.226). Subsequently, when the planters stare at Oroonoko, Blanford confronts them and denies their status as viewing subjects, “What would you have there? You stare as if you never saw a man before. Stand further off” (1.2.238-239). By invoking Oroonoko’s manhood, he is establishing his right to govern himself and to view from the subject position. Later, Blanford will again undermine the dominant viewing position of the planters when he reveals their surveillance as a caution to Oroonoko: “They watch your looks” (3.2.48). This warning is an acknowledgment of the power of the gaze

and Oroonoko’s ability to capture it. By recognizing Oroonoko’s visual power, Blanford acknowledges his manhood and his subjectivity. Southerne’s honorable English men and women not only symbolically recognize Oroonoko’s nobility and virtue by granting him subjective viewing status, but they also acknowledge that he deserves the love of a white woman. For example, Blanford listens dumbstruck, his gaze fixed upon the sorrowful prince, as Oroonoko relates the tale of his courtship of Imoinda, stopping him only to regretfully exclaim, “Alas! I pity you” (2.2.57). The prince’s is a sentimental account that would move any sensitive heart, regardless of its bi-racial basis, and Blanford insists at its conclusion, “I dare promise you to bear a part in your distress, if not assist you” (2.2.57-64). Blanford is not only emotionally touched by Oroonoko’s tragedy, but he is even moved to action, to assist the African prince as his ally and confidante, eventually taking up arms for him against his fellow Englishman. The other virtuous Europeans also intervene in the reunion of Oroonoko and Imoinda, and they posit themselves against the likes of the governor when they thwart his rapacious plan to kidnap Imoinda. By accepting the prince’s marriage and honoring its sanctity, the cast confirms Oroonoko’s dominant masculine status as husband and subject. Those of Southerne’s characters who oppose Blanford, Stanmore, Charlotte, and Lucy and view Oroonoko objectively are represented as villainous and ignoble. It is through this dichotomy that Southerne instructs his audience: Blanford, Stanmore, and the Welldon sisters view Oroonoko as a feeling subject in his own right, and they are role models of honor and goodness. Conversely, the unnamed planters and the slave ship captain view Oroonoko as a high-priced commodity, and the audience recognizes them as treacherous and mercenary. The captain calls attention to his self-serving visual practices when Oroonoko first appears. He remarks, “I did design to carry him to England to have him showed there” (1.2.184-185). His comment not only vilifies him, but it reminds the audience that the mercantilist ideology spurring colonial trade is not absent from their continent; the objectification of the African form is characteristic of the home country as well and not endemic to the Caribbean or the waters upon which the slave ship captain sails. In the markets of Europe, Oroonoko would similarly be objectified and looked upon as a spectacle, much like an animal on display in a zoo. In fact, Srinivas Aravamuden explains in Chapter One of his Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999)

that the obsessive pet-keeping of the eighteenth century extended to enslaved Africans, and the slave ship captain’s comment evidences this practice, possibly indicting a number of Southerne’s audience members who wish to distance themselves from him and his villainy as far as possible. As the conversation of the slave ship captain continues, he reiterates to Blanford that Oroonoko must be held to and contained within the object-position. He warns Blanford to keep Oroonoko under constant surveillance: “You had best have an eye upon him” (1.2.141). This statement reveals the underlying anxiety of the dominant, controlling faction fueling the gaze phenomenon; their fear is caused by the threat that Oroonoko poses to their authoritative positions. To the slave ship captain, Oroonoko is Other, lesser, and of a race that offers high value in the marketplace. Due to the predominance of his greed, the captain does not value Oroonoko’s nobility or gentility, and he is therefore unable to view him as anything besides a highly commodified object. Later, in Act III, Aboan recognizes the objectifying perspective of the captain and the planters when he questions Oroonoko, “What looks can you put on to please these men who are before resolved to read ‘em their own way?” (3.2.181-184). Aboan understands that those white men view all Africans from the position of master; from there, they can keep them within their control and maintain their power. There is no flexibility within this paradigm—unlike Blanford and Stanmore, the Creole characters will always look upon Oroonoko as a threat to their mercenary goals, so they will never relinquish their dominant perch nor view him as their equal regardless of his nobility or virtue. Oroonoko is Southerne’s pathetic hero, upon whom the audience emotes their pity and compassion. He is drawn as a noble, powerful subject and is respected by honorable men and women as a fellow human being. However, Southerne’s African prince is the sole black face upon his stage that receives empathy from the audience, and as Ellis contends, this individuation is the reason for the ideological success of sentimentalism: “Sentimental scenarios work by being personalised, unique and discrete, so as to place the maximum pressure on the relation between the subject and the viewer, yet manage or mystify that pressure so as not to threaten the position of the viewer” (72). By focusing the attention of the viewer onto one particular distressing circumstance, in this case, Oroonoko’s and Imoinda’s false imprisonment, sentimental scenarios deflect attention away from the larger issues: here, colonial slavery and the slave trade. In this way, Southerne’s sentimental drama both advocates racial equality and perpetuates colonial

beliefs about the world; it allows audience members to connect with, relate to, and invest in an African character, but through that narrow focus, it mystifies larger abolitionist questions. The play is a success in that it endows an African man with virtue and intellect parallel to that of his English friends, but it also draws him as distinct from the undifferentiated mass of black slaves who move silently around him. These Africans exist in Southerne’s play purely in the object- position of the gaze: they are objectified by all characters surrounding them, regardless of their gender, and their subjugated positions are even reaffirmed by Oroonoko himself. The viewership of all white characters, those deemed honorable and those deemed villainous, collude to form one colonial totalitizing gaze when they view all Africans besides Oroonoko; indeed, neither the white characters nor Oroonoko views with a look that identifies his fellow Africans as subjects or individuals. Instead, their looks coalesce the Africans into an undifferentiated mass—one that even includes Native Americans who were titled in literature of the subsequent century “Black Natives” (Sypher 106). For example, prior to the raid of the Surinamese settlement by Native Americans, the stage directions state: “The scene drawn shows the slaves, men, women, and children upon the ground; some rise and dance, others sing” (49). This scene, labeled in a subsequent stage direction as “entertainment,” positions a homogenous black mass of bodies in a bouncing, quivering mob. As the raid begins, the mass is further collectivized when the governor cautions, “Some of you stay here to look after the black slaves” (2.3.124). This random assignment of surveillance to the assemblage signifies the European tendency to gaze at all Africans as one anonymous, unindividuating mass; the individual men, women, and children are without gender, age, or identity. This collective identification occurs again when Oroonoko talks to the slaves of possible rebellion. As before, the stage directions reaffirm the totality of the colonial gaze by repeating that Oroonoko speaks “To the Slaves” (72) and reveal that he is “Addressing the Slaves” (74). In this scene, the Africans are undifferentiated and all appear to be cloned from one black model of Otherness, consistent with unindividuating elements of a colonialist vision where “they” are denied personal identity and are viewed objectively as the common Other. In the earlier scene at the slave market, where Oroonoko is ultimately introduced, a mass of African bodies enters the scene, paraded across the stage as spectacle for the looks of the planters and land-owners. The Welldon sisters are present for this spectacle because Stanmore

had invited them along with him to view the slave trade: “That’s the commodity we deal in, you know,” he told Charlotte. “If you have a curiosity to see our manner of marketing, I’ll wait upon you” (1.1.280-282). His choice of language in this statement emphasizes the visual nature of colonial commercial exchange: the sisters will proceed to “see” the colonists’ manner of marketing. The group’s ensuing inspection of the Africans exemplifies the interesting fragment of traditional gender designations within the gaze paradigm under colonialism as Stanmore invites Lucy and Charlotte (in disguise) to join in the spectator sport of the English colonists. In this scene, both white men and white women gaze upon the Africans displayed for their value alongside Widow Lackitt, a wealthy, powerful, slave-owning planter, involved even in the physical exchange of money for human bodies of every age. She is aligned with Southerne’s villains because she views with a mercenary perspective, objectifying the bodies before her, and she complains upon inspection of her merchandise, “Here have I six Slaves in my Lot and not a man among ’em, all women and children; what can I do with ‘em, Captain?” (1.2.10-11). She further declares of her position as buyer: “I am always ready money to you, Captain.” This remark communicates the powerful position from which Widow Lackitt speaks to the slave trader; despite her gender, she is fully complicit in the marketing and commodification of African bodies in the colonies whereas her inclusion in the male-dominated markets of London would not have been accepted as freely. The widow extends her power over other human bodies while assuming the masculine subject position even to the objectification of her son, Daniel, whom she essentially sells to Charlotte (in disguise) in exchange for her own sexual pleasure. The objectification of Daniel, Laura J. Rosenthal points out, while it does not actually turn him into a woman, does emasculate him: “he cannot perform his conjugal duties” (97). Reducing Daniel to object of the female gaze diminishes his capacity to then reclaim masculine mastery. The widow declaring her son’s saleable status in Act II mimics that of her attempt in the subsequent scene to buy Oroonoko—clearly, the widow allies herself with the likes of the slave ship captain and the other planters as she has embraced her appropriation of the masculine position and views all human bodies as items of exchange. Throughout the scene at the slave market, prior to the arrival of Oroonoko, the Europeans collectively view the slaves as racial Other, and the racial dichotomy is visually posited on the stage: white hands holding money and black hands held by chains. Unabashed acceptance of this

colonial ideal is finally shattered by Lucy’s empathic lament: “Are all these wretched slaves?...O miserable fortune!” (1.2.188-190). Blanford responds, “Most of ‘em know no better; they were born so and only change their masters. But a prince, born only to command, betrayed and sold! My heart drops blood for him” (1.2.191-193). His sentimental mourning expresses Southerne’s aim: to induce from the audience an emotional response by focusing their views on the indignant capture of a noble African prince through deceit and treachery. Such a narrow focus obscures any consideration of the larger issues of slavery itself, particularly when the bodies of the other Africans are posited together without individuation and when the noble prince defends their exclusion from subjectivity. For example, during the scene of the slave’s revolt, Oroonoko reveals his disillusionment with the lack of loyalty and honor from his fellow Africans: To think I could design to make those free Who were by nature slaves—wretches designed To be their masters’ dogs and lick their feet. Whip, whip ‘em to the knowledge of your gods, Your Christian gods, who suffer you to be Unjust, dishonest, cowardly, and base, And give ‘em your excuse for being so. I would not live on the same earth with creatures That only have the faces of their kind. Why should they look like men who are not so? When they put off their noble natures for The groveling qualities of downcast beasts, I wish they had their tails. ( 4.2.60-72) This characterization of African slaves by an African himself perpetuates the ideology of the colonizer that removes from the Other their humanity, likens them to animals, denies their manhood, and reduces them to objects. Sentiments such as this in Southerne’s drama work to accentuate the nobility of Oroonoko’s character and elevate his status with the audience, but they also further subordinate the common African and damage any abolitionist sensitivities aroused.

Although progressive, ameliorative aims may be met by this technique, Southerne’s movement in the humanitarian direction is only a partial one. The inclusion of Southerne’s comic subplot further decreases the pressure that the drama places on the viewer to confront the injustices of colonial slavery. The plight of the Welldon sisters, comically presented as farce, deflects attention from that of the African slaves, managing the pressure on the audience so that their position is not threatened. This deflection away from the institution of colonial slavery allows viewers to avoid the discomfort of directly facing its horrors. Instead, the attention of the play rests on Charlotte and Lucy’s symbolic enslavement and the injustices of the patriarchy coded in farce. There is a clear thematic parallel between Southerne’s colonial plotline and his feminist, comic plotline, but the audience views the latter directly and its issues are not mitigated for the palate of the theater. Through the Welldon sisters, as through Oroonoko, Southerne addresses the injustices within a system of inequality. He endows the sisters with a sight that sees the systemic problems of patriarchal governance and subverts the system toward their own gains. Southerne’s play opens with its lighter plotline, shrouding the drama’s colonial subject matter in domestic concerns. Charlotte and Lucy Welldon are introduced in dialogue about their objectified status and distressing marital situations. Their plotline provides ample evidence of traditional viewing behaviors that follow a patriarchal scheme, reinforcing the gendered dichotomy of the active, viewing subject controlling the passive, submissive object. The sisters criticize their status as object and malign those who mock their declining aesthetic appeal. Recognizing that their admirers on the continent have waned, Charlotte and Lucy relocated to a new market, where they would encounter far less of the surmounting obstacles associated with age and a lack of position in London society. Lucy succinctly names their tragedy: “poor women be thought decaying and unfit for the town at one or two and twenty” (1.1.49). Her lament speaks to the purely aesthetic appeal of young women in Restoration society, who were forsaken shortly after the tenure of their teens. In a similar statement recognizing that women are viewed as saleable goods, Charlotte quips, “Women in London are like the rich silks; they are out fashion a great while before they wear out” (1.1.23-25). Her remarks hint at the denigration of aging women in English society as they lose their “looks,” but more importantly, the specific simile likens women to silk, a luxurious, exotic commodity, the finest ranging from two to four

ounces of gold per ell (a unit of measurement in eighteenth-century Europe similar to one yard) (Payne, Winakor, and Farrell-Beck). Charlotte continues, “You may tumble ‘em over and over at their first coming up and never disparage their price; but they fall upon wearing immediately, lower and lower in their value, till they come to the broker at last;” Lucy agrees, “Ay, ay, that’s the merchant they deal with” (1.1.27-31). This scene utilizes the language of aesthetic commercial appeal to illustrate the objectification of the Welldon sisters and their discontent with their commodified status. Because the women understand that their wares only hold value in the market for a short amount of time before they fall out of fashion, they know that they must quickly make spectacles of themselves to increase their exposure to buyers in order to secure a high-priced sale. This exchange between Southerne’s sisters begins to establish the parallel between their own objectified status and that of the Africans to come; however, it is only through this subplot that viewers will directly face a conversation about systemic issues of inequality. Charlotte continues to criticize her relegation to the object position with her analogy of women to saleable goods viewed by fickle buyers: “They [men] would have a woman give the town a pattern of her person and beauty and not stay in it so long to have the whole piece worn out” (1.1.36-39). Her comparison of women to commodified luxury items is reinforced by the portraiture of the period in which women’s bodies and faces were lost within the luscious fabrics surrounding them. They were depicted as simply another visually stimulating object in a lush room and often, so much so that the clothing in which they decorated themselves unified the furniture and art that surrounded them. This loss of human identity amongst textiles and other goods can be seen in the portrait Madame de Pompadour by Francois Boucher in 1750 (see Appendix J). The curves and flow of the couch blend naturally into the flow of her dress, and her body and dress mimic the heavy velvet drapes hanging behind her head; if it were not for her visible face and other limited body parts, it would be an image entirely comprised of lavish fabrics in an ornately decorated and designed room (Payne et. al.). The luxury and ornate detail present on women’s costumes in the eighteenth century accentuated their objectification as sumptuous goods. Elaborate costumes camouflaged the women within them as they accented the furniture of the room and worked in cohesion with the art adorning the walls. These customs validate Charlotte’s complaints that eighteenth-century women were viewed as objects.

The scene continues to provide further evidence of the female spectacle with a frank, direct analysis of its disadvantages and injustices for women. As Charlotte continues to bewail the association of women with the aesthetic, she discusses how men viewed women as works of art and respected static, ageless beauty: They would have the good face only discovered and not the folly that commonly goes along with it. They say there is a vast stock of beauty in the nation, but a great part of it lies in unprofitable hands; therefore for the good of the public they would have a draft made once a quarter, send the decaying beauties for breeders into the country to make room for new faces to appear, to countenance the pleasures of the town. (1.1.39-46) Her contention relates specifically to women as purely objectified beings who must be hidden from sight once their aesthetic pleasure wanes; she rebukes men for their insistence that women resemble non-organic art works, living only to be gazed at by others. Her comment hearkens to yet another image from the eighteenth century, Les deux cousines (see Appendix K), painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau in 1716, which depicts a woman with her back to the viewer standing motionless, straight and erect, mimicking the statues that flank the other side of the lake. There is little discrepancy between the living woman and the leaden statues: the bottom part of her gown is the same as the statue’s base, and they are both of similar color and stance with little ornamentation (Payne et. al.). This painting evidences Charlotte’s disparagement of the manner in which women are likened to fine textiles and works of art, and her malaise is ironically magnified by Southerne in a later scene when her own portrait is used to captivate a would-be suitor. Stanmore confesses, “I long to see this handsome cousin of yours. The picture you gave me of her has charmed me” (1.1.270-271). Charlotte’s “cousin” responds, “I know she will come with the first opportunity. We shall see her, or hear of her death” (1.1.275-276). This interplay illustrates how Charlotte has lost her humanity and identity, displayed as a work of art and reduced to a one-dimensional object. Moreover, her cousin’s specific language highlights the visual elements of objectification and masculine mastery when he says, “We shall see her, or hear of her death.”—he communicates the choice for women in this schema: to be seen or to die, an interesting dilemma. Charlotte’s “cousin” assures Stanmore in a later scene that he will see her: “If you like her when you see her, I wish nothing so much as to have you marry her yourself” to which he swears, “If she be as handsome as her picture, I can promise her a

husband” (4.1.255-256). Their discussion emphasizes the predominance of visuality in gendered relationships, which elevates men to mastery and subordinates women to objects, while Charlotte’s sole representation in portraiture illustrates the objectified, commoditized, and silenced nature of women in the eighteenth century. The irony of Charlotte’s reduction to one-dimensional objectification through portraiture is of course the fact that she herself, disguised as her male cousin, places the painting in the hands of her future husband, assertively manipulating his position as spectator for her own gains. Southerne’s women are well aware of the systemic problems of patriarchal governance, so they subvert the system toward their own gains. Charlotte analyzes her status as object and realizes that by remaining in this passive position, she and Lucy may languish into poverty and spinsterhood. She comments bitterly about her passive state: “We must keep our stocks dead by us at home to be ready for a purchase when it comes, a husband, let him be never so dear, and be glad of him; or venture our fortunes abroad on such rotten security that the principal and interest, nay, very often our persons, are in danger” (4.1.60-65). To resolve the uncertainty of her and Lucy’s futures, Charlotte actively assumes the spectator position to scope the landscape for a suitable match: cross-dressing allows Charlotte to assume the masculine subject-position of viewership and to see for herself those subjects viable for matrimony. She easily dupes the other players while acting as a man, an interesting testimonial to the performative nuances of gender. As she performs brilliantly, victory is ultimately hers: in Scene One of Act II, she assures Lucy of her power within this masterful position: “I have a man in my eye, be satisfied” (2.1.102). Charlotte resorted to this successful ruse upon the realization that the only recourse to marrying her and her sister was to occupy the masculine position because within it, she could influence the vision of would-be suitors and increase their exposure to the sight of the Welldon sisters. Rosenthal views Charlotte’s cross-dressing as allowing her an authoritative position of ownership, a parallel power to that of subjective viewer: “Charlotte’s drag role teases the audience with the possibility that women could sympathetically occupy the position of owner…Charlotte’s disguise playfully mocks patriarchal control of women and allows her briefly to inhabit the position of owner and sexual subject” (97-98). Rosenthal points out that like the subject-position of gazer, the owner position can also be co-opted by women, particularly by white women within a colonial theater. Still, within the dominant ideology of the

patriarchy governing Western culture, “that position itself remains gendered as masculine” (Rosenthal 97)—this is made clear by the necessity of Charlotte’s male uniform. Her remarks of her prior despair in London, wearing her female face, reveal her objective position there: “Our faces began to be as familiar to the men of intrigue as their duns, and as much avoided” (1.1.54- 56). In order to rectify her own and Lucy’s deteriorating state in England, Charlotte books them passage to Surinam, where husbands grow “as thick as oranges, ripening one under another” (1.1.6-7) and where they might maximize their visual exposure. This motive for Southerne’s characters’ South American travel is similar to Aphra Behn’s supposed real-life journey to Surinam; of this tendency, Margaret Ferguson comments, An emerging cultural discourse about women who went to the colonies—often, allegedly, to acquire the husbands they’d not found in England, or worse, to satisfy their ‘natural’ lusts with men of color—also lurks behind Behn’s self-portrait. This cultural subtext, made into an explicit subplot of Thomas Southerne’s 1696 stage version of Oroonoko, seems particularly germane to Behn since, as Angeline Goreau has argued, her (adoptive?) father left her without a dowry when he died en route to Surinam. (164-165) In each instance, Behn’s biography and Southerne’s comic plot, the mercantile status of women as an object of trade becomes a focal point for the audience, particularly in that its backdrop is a colonial contest. Charlotte voices the predicament for Restoration women, whose security and comfort relies entirely on their ability to market themselves: She would have a husband, and if all be as he says, she has no reason to complain; but there’s no relying on what the men say upon these occasions…Theirs is a trading estate that lives upon credit and increases by removing it out of one bank into another. Now poor women have not these opportunities. We must keep our stocks dead by us at home to be ready for a purchase when it comes, a husband, let him be never so dear, and be glad of him. (4.1.53-62) The language of commerce embeds Charlotte’s indignant soliloquy, with such blatant economic terminology alluding also to those other characters who are bought and sold in the market: the enslaved Africans. “The parallel with Oroonoko’s situation is not merely that the Welldons are victims of a type of social injustice, but that women, like slaves, are treated as commodities, without regard for their humanity, their needs, or desires” (Novak and Rodes xxiii). The

difference, of course, is that Southerne remarks on patriarchal injustices directly while addressing inequities of race only through Oroonoko’s sentimental narrative. Southerne draws an explicit comparison between the objectification and spectacles made of women and Africans in Scene Two of Act I. The slave market setting, within which both Lucy’s and Oroonoko’s lot are being discussed, situates their saleable status’ side-by-side; the stage allows for a visual equation of woman and African, particularly as the dialogue unfolds between the slave ship captain and Charlotte in disguise. “I don’t know whether your sister will like me or not,” the captain begins. “I can’t say much to her. But I have money enough; and if you are her brother, as you seem to be akin to her, I know that will recommend me to you.” Charlotte then reminds him, “This is your market for slaves; my sister is a free woman and must not be disposed of in public.” The irony of this statement is that Southerne has addressed gender inequity directly, analytically, and publicly for his audience, but his discussion of colonial slavery is private, indirect, and limited to ameliorative aims. Put off momentarily by Charlotte’s remonstance, the captain responds, “Very well, sir, I’ll come and see her” (1.2.122-131). The captain utilizes the diction of viewership and inspection to discuss his courtship of Lucy, much like he would “come and see” what is being offered at the local slave auction. The editors of this edition of Southerne’s Oroonoko remind their readers at this point of an anonymous pamphlet, The Levellers, published in 1703, protesting that “Matrimony is indeed become a meer Trade[.] They carry their Daughters to Smithfield as they do Horses, and sell to the highest bidder” (qtd. in Novak and Rodes xxiv). Decades earlier, in 1657, Richard Ligon similarly had reported how slave ship captains sold slaves brought to Barbados “as they do Horses in a Market” (qtd. in Novak and Rodes xxx). Southerne might have been influenced by these and other connections established in print journalism between the status of women, Africans, and animals. However, his text’s exchange in Act I, set upon the stage of the slave market, emphasizes the commoditized condition of women and Africans within the Western world, and it also reinforces Lucy’s role as passive object beheld—for she will wait at her cousin’s house to be “seen” by her suitor. Southerne’s text parallels the objectification of the Welldon sisters and the African slaves; however, only the sisters are endowed with the authority to act in their own interests. Southerne allows his women to become agent in their own success, but this is an authority that

he does not extend to his slaves. This is illustrated through the viewing practices of each marginal group: the sisters not only subvert the system that maintains their inequity, appropriating the masculine position of subjectivity, but they also have frank discussions about its injustices while the slaves remain voiceless, sightless, and nameless. Only Oroonoko is vested with subjectivity, but even with it, he meets a tragic end. The women, on the other hand, succeed in furthering their agendas—the playwright grants them this success, but there are no successes for the Africans in Southerne’s drama, for the playwright cannot foresee their victory. Even his women, who succeed so decisively in their own situations, fail in the end to aid the African prince and, together with the audience, mourn the sentimentalized death of the fallen hero. It is through Oroonoko’s sentimental narrative that Southerne achieves his ameliorative aims; however, the treatment of the other Africans and their consistent reduction to commodified objects casts a shadow over the playwright’s abolitionist sentiments. This visual evidence validates Wylie Sypher’s contention that strictly speaking, “there is no drama of anti-slavery; there are only a number of plays in which the Negro plays his part” (231). And the part played by Oroonoko is that of the sentimental hero while the other African characters are eclipsed in Oroonoko’s shadow and homogenized by his degrading speeches. This static portrayal evidences the fact that Southerne was unable to see the racial Other achieving a subject role in the colonial world. Conversely, the playwright grants the appropriation of the position to his females, particularly as Charlotte wittily assumes a masculine role. She assumes subjective dominion, but a world in which African men share the playwright’s empowered position of viewership is unimaginable and limited only to those individuals of the highest rank and the most genteel breeding. Oroonoko, therefore, becomes the sentimentalized figure onto which the audience transfers feelings of empathy and compassion as they watch him struggle with the injustices of colonialism; however, their feelings extend only to the royal subject. Southerne attends to his goals of amelioration through Oroonoko’s drama, but his sights are decidedly never set on abolition.

CHAPTER 4 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MOTIVES FUELING CHARLOTTE SMITH’S SENTIMENTAL VISION

The movement from Aphra Behn’s largely objective gaze at Oroonoko to Thomas Southerne’s sentimentalized vision illustrates how sentimentalism altered the early colonial gaze. Whereas the colonial scopic eye fixated on external markers of difference, sentimentalism shifted the gaze to interior components of feeling common to all humanity, uniting white and black into one feeling community. Southerne’s Oroonoko marks the initiation of this shift at the close of the seventeenth century, and the movement gains strength and prominence throughout the eighteenth century as British culture turned its eyes inward. As G.J. Barker-Benfield notes in The Culture of Sensibility, “During the eighteenth century, this psychoperceptual scheme [the phenomenon that was sensibility] became a paradigm, meaning not only consciousness in general but a particular kind of consciousness, one that could be further sensitized in order to be more acutely responsive to signals from the outside environment and from inside the body” (xvii). Barker-Benfield founds the emergence of this new scheme of sensitivity in the Lockean theories of identity construction and sensational psychology from the seventeenth century, which became “truisms of the next century” (3). Locke believed, like his mentor anatomist Thomas Willis, that the body’s nerves, in conveying sensory information to the brain, were responsible for knowledge; therefore, humans were continually shaped and impressed by sensory perceptions. Locke’s psychology, based on Sir Isaac Newton’s physics, popularized the theory that humans were molded by their senses, which fixed impressions and called forth emotions, allowing for continuous education and refinement. The sensitivity of mankind, newly understood by the masses at the turn of the eighteenth century, became the fascination of print culture, manifesting itself in essays, conduct books, poetry, drama, and fiction. In fact, “Sentimental fiction, next to the religion with which it overlapped, was to become the most powerful medium for the spread of popular knowledge of sensational psychology” (Barker-Benfield 6). With its centrality of feeling, affection, and sensitivity, sentimental fiction represented the ethical philosophy of the age focused on moral refinement and humanitarian reform. Images within sentimental fiction, those that “jangled the

nerves of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century,” were “devoted to tear-demanding exhibitions of pathos and unqualified virtue” (Todd 8). No longer were traditionally objectified figures simply mechanisms of what Freud would later discuss as scopophilic visual authority; instead, the once- masterful gaze upon them became sentimentalized, and those characters were now viewed as objects of pity. Southerne demonstrates this spectacle of suffering with his early dramatic example of the pathetic hero evoking emotional responses of pity, indignation, and moral outrage from honorable men and women both on stage and in the audience. His Oroonoko, and Behn’s before him in less direct ways, becomes a symbol of injustice and inhumanity, a source of pity for those sensitive to the suffering of fellow man. Traditionally, colonialism perpetuated itself by maintaining a distinct philosophical divide between Self and Other—a vision of the Other as separate and alien—but the movement from a dichotomous division of subject and object toward a sentimental vision allowed writers of the period to represent African men and women as objects of pity, equally deserving of humanitarian appeal. Their images of suffering, largely emotional, created sympathetic viewers who saw through exterior markers of difference to a similar sensibility—an interiority of feeling. Sentimentalism, therefore, systematically shifted the gaze of onlookers from the scopic, external and overwhelmingly subjective to the empathic, allowing for a more egalitarian view of humanity. This sentimental vision, encompassing all human beings into the realm of feeling and pioneered by Southerne in its earliest representation, became larger throughout the eighteenth century. It particularly gained precedence in the final decades of the century as the debate about the slave trade and its abolition became a central political issue for Britons. In an interesting study of scientific racialist writing through the period 1780-1815, Peter Kitson concludes in his piece “‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century” that arguments reinforcing racism by pointing out external markers of difference were rare, even within the pro-slavery faction. His study points out that voices like Edward Long’s arguing that Africans constituted a separate species nearer to orangutans than humans were eclipsed by those like James Ramsay’s, whose fourth chapter of Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves (1784) rebuts Long’s opinions. Ramsay’s arguments minimize the importance of physical markers of difference, citing that black skin is a physiological response to climactic change akin to a freckle (Kitson

20). Kitson’s study of these biologically-based arguments evidences the shift in eighteenth- century culture away from an exterior gaze at the colonial Other while the fiction of the period reveals that the gaze upon peripheral figures was refocused upon their interiority. This trend can specifically be seen in the publications of Charlotte Smith, a prolific writer of the era who largely contributed to this re-vision. Smith’s fiction is consumed with tales of suffering, where her readers face scenes of pitiful sorrow through a variety of victims. The author advocates for these individuals through pathetic illustrations of their powerlessness, where her audience connects with each mournful case through feelings of empathy. Janet Todd explains how the aim of sentimental literature is to reproduce in the reader the fictive emotional spectacle: “It is a kind of pedagogy of seeing and of the physical reaction that this seeing should produce, clarifying when uncontrolled sobs or a single tear should be the rule, or when the inexpressible nature of the feeling should be stressed” (4). As Todd theorizes, Smith’s sentimental depictions of colonized characters, her images of their suffering, teach her readers that all humanity is equally capable of feeling, and these images therefore minimize differences in appearance between her English readership and her characters. Yet, while Smith draws elaborate displays of the distress of marginalized figures to evoke pathos, she does not go so far as to invest them with a visual capacity of their own. Smith and her readers identify with her victims through associated emotions, viewing them as feeling beings who have experienced great injustice and tragedy; simultaneously, she denies them subjectivity and empowerment by relegating them to marginal roles in her fiction and refusing them the position of spectator. Much like the texts of her predecessors, the authors of the Restoration discussed in previous chapters, Smith’s also exhibit dueling allegiances, resulting in instances of both complicity in the perpetuation of colonial ideology and resistance to its ideas, naturalizing imperial domination. These inconsistencies characterize the contentious criticism of her fiction: for example, on the one hand, Antje Blank and Janet Todd characterize Smith as radically egalitarian: “Espousing the libertarian ideals of a radical sensibility, she continued to publish fiction of a decidedly subversive nature that promoted principles of universal benevolence and condemned institutionally authorized oppression, be it in social, racial, or gender relations” (17). On the other hand, Wylie Sypher concludes, “Charlotte Smith found it necessary to qualify her liberal opinions” (290). The ambivalence detected by these critics is

similar to that present in Behn’s and Southerne’s Oroonoko regardless of the progressive egalitarian sweep that occurred throughout the late eighteenth century. The chapter to follow will examine how Smith’s spectatorship imagery manifests the points of contention evident in her vision of late-era colonialism. The discussion will account for the movement between those points with detailed biographical data as it characterizes the author as a sentimental figure herself and explains her motives for fragmenting moments of objectification of and identification with the colonial Other. Much of what is known about Smith’s life stems from a memoir written by her sister Catherine Dorset for Sir Walter Scott’s Lives of the Novelists (1821) and an earlier biographical excerpt written by Mary Hays in the 1800-1801 issue of British Public Characters. These secondary documents are important to understanding Smith’s fiction because they provide insight into the author’s social and political motives and illuminate the areas of tension within her writing. Smith’s fictional works share much of her inner life because they are extraordinarily autobiographical, so much so that her most recent and comprehensive biography, authored by Loraine Fletcher, actually pieces together events devoid of factual bases from autobiographical representations in her primary material. Fletcher calls this restoration “a necessary tentative reconstruction” (3) since little public record remains of Smith’s childhood, adolescence, and early marriage to educate scholars of her fiction. Only throughout the decade of her prolific publication, 1780 through 1790, were her public acts, letters, receipts, and other printed materials catalogued. Fortunately, the autobiographical likenesses in her fiction were only thinly disguised, so contemporary researchers (like Smith’s contemporary audience) are able to rely on the verity of her characters’ resemblances to family, friends, and even her young self. Blank and Todd contend that Smith “deliberately blurred all boundaries between the private and the public” (13) while Fletcher believes without reservation that Smith’s novels “fill out what cannot not be known with certainty about Charlotte’s thoughts and feelings” (3). Her pseudo-autobiographical novels, then, construct a sentimental self-image, communicating her own position of objectification and suffering and her deep-seated opinions and emotions about the late eighteenth-century world through displays of distress. Smith’s origins did not anticipate her later professional status as a politically active woman writer. It was a financial and marital catastrophe in mid-life that necessitated prolific

publication and inspired her independent spirit, liberal attitudes, and free speech. Out of domestic desperation, her writing career was born. Ultimately, Smith would produce ten novels, a collection of novellas, poetry, and children’s books, allowing her to become the most popular English novelist of her time (Fletcher 1). Her works center on the legally, morally, and religiously sanctioned restrictions of freedom for peripheral populations and sentimentalize these victims—a victimization from which she suffered firsthand. Blank and Todd summarize her focus: “frequently, she includes tales of female discontent and male despotism which deconstruct the redemptive values of the foregrounded romance and question the legitimacy of male authority in public and domestic life” (13). These themes of financial and social illegitimacy entrenched in her fiction mirror that which plagued Smith until her death in 1806. Her fiction extends her personal struggles with the patriarchy to encompass those of all of Britain’s oppressed, and her images of their suffering wrench from readers an empathy that she herself likewise deserved. Her own personal objectification in the late-eighteenth century world, specifically through her marriage, allowed her to identify with victims of social injustice and depict them in sentimental ways. Thus, in order to come to a complete understanding of Smith’s visions of the world, a short biographical summary is necessary to account for her imagery of objectification, entrapment, and imprisonment. Smith’s beginnings do not speak to her later financial and social distresses though they do account for her free spirit and independent nature. She was born in 1749 to a prosperous, landed couple. Her mother died in childbirth three years later, and her father subsequently relegated the care of his three young children to his wife’s unmarried sister, who raised them at their Sussex estate. In later writings, Smith recalls the freedom and independence available to her as a child upon the Sussex landscapes, tracing to those years “the growth of her individuality and impulse to write” (Fletcher 12). It is this formative independence that characterizes the outspokenness and political edginess of her later novels. Her aunt, antithetically, did not nurture her youthful free spirit, nor did she support female authorship or reading; she believed that “learning was unattractive in a woman. Her aim was to bring up her nieces to be socially accomplished, to have the widest choice of marriage partners and to marry ‘well’” (Fletcher 13). Although Smith disregarded her aunt’s “teachings,” learning about nature and science from a local landscape artist and reading on her own until she was old enough to attend school in Kensington full time

(Fletcher 13), she ultimately catered to the patriarchal demands of her time when in 1761, due to her father’s increasing financial woes, she was taken out of school and introduced to society.1 Shortly thereafter, two months short of her sixteenth birthday, she was married to Benjamin Smith, son of a wealthy London merchant, “sold” as she put it in later correspondence, “a legal prostitute…made over an early & unconscious victim to this half Ideot [sic], half Madman” (Collected Letters 625 & 654). Smith’s rural upbringing had neither prepared her for domestic life in London nor anticipated her involvement in colonial mercantilist ventures, but she would remain silent as she was forced to exchange the serenity and freedom of the English countryside for the confinement and corruption of the city. This early migration set in motion the chain of unfortunate events that would force her into public and political life. At the time of her marriage, Smith knew that a harsh change of setting was at hand, but she did not know that she had accepted the hand of a man of vice. Benjamin, twenty-three, had acquired a villainous reputation as a bachelor, and his father, a West Indian merchant and Director in the East India Company, was anxious to see his son married. He hoped that Benjamin’s prior indiscretions with gambling and women would cease with marriage, so Smith was chosen as a suitable domesticating influence. Initially, it was not her husband who brought her unhappiness but his relations, many of whom had profited from colonial ventures in the West Indies or mercantilism in London. Smith had previously been sheltered within a genteel setting and was ignorant of London life, its economics, and its exotic extravagances; now, she was surrounded by voices speaking of money and trade, a language that was foreign to her. Her father-in-law was specifically involved in the trade of West Indian sugar and cotton, cultivated by African slaves; his ventures, and specifically the two thriving Barbados plantations under his ownership, later became the fodder for her novels. During these initial years of her marriage, Smith learned more and more about the cruelties of colonial commerce and the generation of mercantilist wealth; this was a period of learning that would influence her future writings and shape her humanist ideals of equality. However disgusted with the Smith-family enterprise at the time, the young bride did not then voice her contempt for colonial trade. She repressed her resentment and disguised her

1 Smith and her sister, Catherine, would later criticize their formal schooling in a number of children’s works and books on girls’ education published at the beginning of the nineteenth century; however, biographer Loraine Fletcher suggests, “The only thing seriously wrong with her formal education was its brevity” (18). 61

disapproval until it could be unleashed through fictive representation in her later novels. Her sister shares Smith’s increasing resentment for her husband and his family at this time in the following biographical excerpt: [She] began to trace that indefatigueable restlessness and impatience, of which she had long been conscious without comprehending, to its source, to discriminate characters, to detect ignorance, to compare her own mind with those of the persons by whom she was surrounded. The consciousness of her own superiority, the mortifying conviction that she was subjected to one so infinitely her inferior, presented itself every day more forcibly to her mind, and she justly considered herself ‘as a pearl that been basely thrown away.’ (qtd. in Fletcher 22) Catherine’s commentary about her sister’s state of mind during the early years of her marriage is corroborated by an excerpt from Smith’s own personal undated correspondence to a friend (the date has been estimated by Judith Phillips Stanton as circa 1768-1770): No disadvantage could equal those I sustained; the more my mind expanded, the more I became sensible of personal slavery; the more I improved and cultivated my understanding, the farther I was removed from those with whom I was condemned to spend my life, and the more clearly I saw by these newly acquired lights the horror of the abyss into which I had unconsciously plunged. (Collected Letters 2) The excerpt from Smith’s letter communicates her frustration with the exploitative nature of marriage in the eighteenth century. She speaks of her isolated position as wife as her own personal slavery, an analogy that would become literal in December 1783 when Benjamin was imprisoned for debt and embezzlement. In fact, Smith spent much of the seven months in the prison with her husband performing her duty as wife while she fantasized about leaving him (Fletcher 6). Her sister recalls, “Mrs. Smith never deserted her husband for a moment during the melancholy period of his misfortunes and perhaps her conduct never was so deserving of admiration as at this time” (qtd. in Fletcher 63). Smith dutifully bore the disgrace of her marital confinement literally imprisoned with her husband while she shamefully begged his creditors to release him. Years later, as she continued to battle with her husband’s creditors, in one letter to them she likens her domestic role to that of a legal indenture: “Little as I was calculated to be the slave and martyr of a man contemptible in understanding, but detestable for the corruption of his

selfish heart, I have borne my fate honourably” (Collected Letters 654). Smith ascribes the oppressive conditions of the colonial slave to her own marital situation with the allusion to slavery while her later poetry and fictional works represent the specific conditions of both victims by illustrating their similar objectification and captivity. The association between Smith’s marital oppression and that suffered by African slaves was intensified by Benjamin’s family’s role in the perpetuation of the slave trade. The author not only suffered firsthand the injustices of marital servitude, but she also experienced victimization from a slaver himself, a man whose family was personally responsible for the forced enslavement of hundreds of African men, women, and children. This connection allows Smith to identify with her fellow slaves, writing with a sentimental, humanitarian mission throughout her works. As biographer Fletcher describes, “Hers are poems and novels of Sensibility, a word that implied sympathy with suffering, a tendency to impulse and rashness, a contempt for traditional forms, love of nature and a state for literature, painting and music” (2). The characteristic sensibility of Smith’s works manifests itself in visions of human suffering viewed by heroes and heroines who see African men and women sentimentally as feeling beings with emotional interiority and challenge colonial ideals that subordinate racial Others to a sub- human level. As a victim of patriarchal objectification herself, Smith identifies with racially marginalized groups, allowing her images of African peoples to move beyond the racist ideology secured by the dominant colonial order. Smith’s personal bitterness toward her own subjugation and powerlessness is the source of her identification with the racial Other. Her later novels specifically evidence this identification through their spectatorship imagery; in them, Smith envisions colonial slaves with humanity and understanding. Her initial authorial endeavor sets the basis for this identification as it envisions a woman who has freed herself from the chains of an oppressive marriage. Smith’s first image of female martyrdom and thematic condemnation of the abuses committed to women under the shield of marital relations is characterized by the heroine of her first successful prose collection, The Romance of Real Life (1787). Charlotte, Smith’s heroine and namesake, refuses her family’s insistence upon marriage to a violent man and asks, “indeed, who can help shrinking from the view of wretchedness for which there is no remedy, from sufferings which can only terminate in the grave?” (qtd. in Fletcher 85). The spectatorship imagery in Charlotte’s

plea for understanding highlights her position as an object or victim who is viewed in this moment and will be until her death. Smith’s heroine ultimately escapes the threatening suitor by dressing as a man then adopting a new masculine identity for the rest of her life. Clearly, Charlotte’s fictional plight represents the imprisonment that her authorial namesake experienced firsthand while the subsequent freedom granted to Charlotte in drag asserts the author’s longing for the independence afforded a man; the costume grants her physical and financial liberty much like that of Charlott Welldon masquerading as her brother in Southerne’s Oroonoko. Although this novel met with only limited success, it gave Smith the confidence necessary to free herself from her husband and allowed her the self-assurance to explore more global themes of oppression in subsequent projects. Two months after the publication of The Romance of Real Life, Smith separated from her husband, recognizing that under his authority, she would continue to forfeit a life free from physical, sexual, and financial confinement. She would write to sustain herself and her children, becoming a model of sacrifice and virtue, a spectacle of the sacrificial mother—to be certain, “she was venturing into the literary marketplace only because her husband and his relatives had robbed her children of their fortune” (Blank and Todd 14). Within this role, spurred by her identification with other marginalized subjects, Smith would become an advocate for increased human rights by creating virtuous characters who view with sensitivity and compassion. With the publication of Desmond in 1792, Smith’s aim to sentimentally image human injustice and oppression came to fruition as she used the piece as a vessel for universal societal critique, identifying not only with the objectification of women but with other marginal groups in England, France, and America. Inspired by encouragement from popular literary figures as well as by the success of her earlier publications, Smith created an epistolary novel that imbues readers with a revolutionary sense of humanitarianism. The atmosphere of the 1790s was excited by the social reforms of the French Revolution, and Smith’s biographer places her amongst an elite group of English intellectuals who sensed that the explosions of egalitarianism in France would create progressive opportunities in England. “Corrupt old institutions and economies, it seemed, might at last be swept aside for a New Jerusalem built by ordinary, not especially privileged people” (Fletcher 1), so Smith posited herself on the side of the

revolutionaries opposite to figures like Edward Burke, whose subjective, first-person attack on Jacobin ideals, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Desmond counters. Smith’s novel was created out of this explosive atmosphere, allowing her to communicate her liberal opinions about the oppressive nature of marriage and colonial slavery drawn from her firsthand experiences by coding them within sentimental images of a sexually exploited wife, of the French peasantry, and of enslaved Africans. The novel’s epistolary form suited these goals by suggesting an eyewitness account and making it “an ideal medium for polemicists wishing to stage themselves as driven by sincere exasperation and absolute conviction” (Blank and Todd 21). The passionate tone of Desmond inspires benevolence and embraces change as its compassionate hero, Desmond, follows what Janet Todd terms in sentimentalist literature “a journey of the heart” across England and France. In parallel, the novel’s female lead, Geraldine, submissively follows her rakish, abusive husband across the continent, female behavior that characterizes her as a sentimental heroine. As Todd explains, “The plot of most fiction with women protagonists tells of female innocence and passivity endangered by aggressive male libertinage or parental power” (115). As an exemplar, Smith’s plot centers upon Desmond’s travels, a man of feeling hopelessly in love, but it also stars Geraldine, cast as the object of his affection and the character of the sacrificial, unhappy wife imprisoned within an oppressive marriage. She uses the sentimental viewership practices of both of these characters to model compassion and benevolence, highlighting their own emotional interiority and comparing it to that of the colonial Other. First, Smith uses Geraldine’s representation as the wifely ideal, characterized as an icon of fidelity and virtue, to denounce the abuses of global oppression by drawing a specific correlation between the image of Geraldine indentured within marital confinement and that of the colonial slave. The author joins a chorus of other women writers from the period who invoke images of slavery as a plea for women’s rights. As shown in both her fiction and her own personal correspondence, Smith routinely co-opts the rhetoric of slavery to dramatize marital suffering; this connection between slavery in marriage and colonial slavery was usually made by European women writers for dramatic purposes without any specific charges of physical or sexual abuse. However, in Smith’s particular situation, the physicality of her subjugation, evidenced by her multiple children (twelve birthed in all), may have linked her confinement in

her mind more closely to that practiced in the West Indies. For example, when the Smith family was forced to flee to France to escape creditors, Charlotte was again pregnant, and prior to the birth of her tenth child, she expressed her fears that at her advanced age, the labor would kill her. She proposed to her husband that she and the children return to England, but her idea was furiously negated. Her biographer relates, Benjamin “refused to take her coming labour seriously, and in any decision about the children law and custom gave him absolute authority. A respectable woman’s children belonged to her husband” (Fletcher 11). Benjamin was not only the source of her physical harm but also its perpetuator as he continued to sustain himself sexually with both his wife and numerous servants within their service. Smith frequently felt physically endangered by her position as Benjamin’s wife, specifically fearing both a lethal labor and the contraction of gonorrhea from her husband’s extramarital exploits (Fletcher 38). Unfortunately, she could not escape societal perspectives, reinforced by the justice system, which viewed her body as his property. Like the author herself, Desmond’s Geraldine attempts to remain virtuous and dutiful while she is reduced to sexual objectification by her tyrannical husband. The autobiographical tie is made even clearer by the fact that Geraldine’s children share the names of Smith’s own— clearly, Geraldine is the author’s fictional self, but her suffering represents not only the author’s but that of all individuals viewed as objects. The rhetoric of slavery points to this global concern. For example, in the text Geraldine’s husband sends her to France in order to sell her to Monsieur le Duc de Romagnecourt as a sexual slave. She responds, “There is no humiliation to which I had not rather submit, than that of considering myself as his slave” (331). Smith’s heroine denies such objectification, refusing to “become an inmate in the house of Monsieur de Romagnecourt” (333), so she waits for her husband “till I heard again from the unfortunate man whose property I am” (333). Geraldine bewails her objectified status, criticizing her husband for overtly commodifying her body by selling her to another man. His villainy and lack of virtue are manifested by his scopic viewership practices while Geraldine’s use of colonial rhetoric draws a parallel between her husband’s authoritative position to that of the slaveholder over his slave; both viewed their respective property as human chattel utilized for the mercenary purposes of the dominant male regime.

Further spectacles of predatory behavior and sexual violence are presented in Desmond, and they clearly condemn man’s oppressive modes of viewing. In one instance, Desmond visits England’s Parliament and is instructed by an unnamed West Indian plantation owner that Africans “are not to be called men—they are monkies” (342). This animalistic image, denying the humanity of the slaves, was central to the scopic nature of colonialism reinforcing a binary of difference, but Desmond refutes this contention as he images Africans as his fellow man. He dryly questions the man why then planters and slavers prefer “monkey ladies” and haughtily remarks, “If I recollect aright, Sir, I have formerly, in moments of unguarded conviviality, heard you say, that when you were a young man, and in the sea service you had yourself indulged this partiality for these monkey ladies…I have even heard that captains of our ships of war, have often professed that they prefer the sable nymphs of Africa to the fairer dames of Europe” (342- 343). The narrator of Smith’s later novel The Wanderings of Warwick (1794) echoes this sentiment when he wonders about “[t]he strange attachment of some Europeans to these ebon beauties, but more particularly the preference given to mulatto women, [which] feeds this excessive vanity at the expence indeed of every thing that resembles morals or decency” (62). Desmond’s sarcasm in the first example and Warwick’s sentimental indictment in the second illustrate Smith’s scorn for the immoral and indecent sexual practices common on the West Indian plantations; she condemns the abuse of African women and rebukes their designation as animalistic, sexualized spectacle. The Creole man’s depravity and the supposed preference of white men for black and brown women was by Smith’s time a stock characterization in abolitionist and proslavery writings.2 However, Smith has experienced sexual commodification and physical suffering herself, endangered by her husband through the misuse of her body; therefore, her representations reflect intimate knowledge and emotion as she identifies with the female slave who is reduced to her body for the purposes of male sexual gratification. As the scene continues, Smith’s hero overtly denounces the perspective of racial superiority when he “talks warmly” to this same member of Parliament, calling attention to the mercenary motivation for the slave trade hiding beneath ideals of Eurocentrism. The planter’s attitudes resemble those to which Smith was exposed in the early years of her marriage, so

2 There is a body of literature that deals with this stereotype and the idea of concubinage: see for example, Kamau Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: An Archeaology of Black Women’s Lives, and Sara Salih, “Filling Up the Space Between Mankind and Ape: Racism, Speciesism, and the Androphilic Ape” in ARIEL 38.1 (Winter 2007): 95-112. 67

Desmond voices not only his disgust for the inhumane actions of Caribbean slavers but also the author’s for her husband and his family. He remarks, “How few do we meet with who can feel for miseries they cannot imagine, and are sure they can never experience!—How many, who have hearts so indurated by their own success of fortune, that they are insensible to generosity, and even to justice!” (208). Desmond’s statement draws a direct correlation between increases in wealth and decreases in empathy, and with it, he not only alludes to the unscrupulous motives of the colonial merchant in the hunt for increasing wealth but also calls attention to the insensible actions of Smith’s husband, for whom money was no object and prudence was no virtue. Desmond continues sentimentally, “pleading” with the mercenary planter to see beyond the skin of African slaves to their common emotional interiority, to their heart (342). “Give me leave to tell you,” replies the slave-owner, “that you know nothing of the condition of the Negroes neither, nor of their nature—They are not to be treated otherwise than as slaves, for they have not the same senses and feelings as we have—A Negro fellow minds a flogging so little, that he will go to a dance at night, or at least the next day, after a hearty application of the cat.—They have no understanding to qualify them for any rank in society above slaves” (342). Smith’s unnamed planter clearly views Africans as objects and is depicted in a sinister, insensible light; he sees only the market value of his property rather than the common humanity of his fellow being. Desmond rebukes the ludicrous assumption that Africans are a sub-human species without physical or emotional feeling; in fact, Desmond’s “adversary” is clearly the one with neither sense nor feeling, and Smith’s hero probably relates less to him than he would to an African slave. The irony of this exchange is that it subordinates the planter for his lack of virtue and sense while raising his slaves, who have superior moral sensibility and enjoy a dance with each other, to Desmond’s, Smith’s, and the reader’s human status. Another example of Smith granting equal subjective status to African slaves comes with Desmond’s overt call for “the abolition of the detestable slave trade” (342). He had been reading the reports of the Abolition Committee and spoke quite heatedly against the continued trafficking of human commodities. His adversary, “well hackneyed in the ways of men,” responds, “You are young, Mr. Desmond…very young, and have but little considered the importance of this trade to the prosperity of the British nation” (342). Desmond rebukes the corrupt economy that the Englishman describes that reduces Africans to marketable goods, showing himself to be

sensitive and sympathetic to the plight of his fellow man. His scorn for this vile method of increasing wealth is evident and hearkens back to Smith’s early marriage when she found herself involuntarily colluding with her father-in-law to perpetuate the enslavement of Africans on his Barbados plantations. Desmond is an example of how Smith’s narratives “acknowledge that sensitive feelings are incompatible with success” (Fletcher 92). Like Desmond and Geraldine, all of her heroes and heroines are motivated by emotion and empathy; they have humanitarian goals and view with compassion whereas “sense and reason untempered by strong emotion are the qualities of contrasted characters who have outlived their feelings, who are self-interested, unimaginative and materially successful” (Fletcher 93). These villains, who resemble her husband and the members of his family, are motivated purely by self-serving intentions, and to that aim, they ignore and, more often, cause spectacles of suffering. Smith’s textual likenesses oppose these insensitive characters, distancing themselves from an imperial, scopic perspective and identifying with universal suffering by acknowledging the humanity of all suffering beings. Following Desmond’s publication, a number of political changes occurred in Europe that limited Smith’s subsequent writing options. It is at this point in her career that her works no longer create a distinct separation between those who see beyond external markers of difference to one common heart, like Geraldine and Desmond, and those who subjectively view from a vantage point of superiority. Smith’s works post-1794 no longer divide positive models of sentimental viewing behaviors and negative models of scopic viewing behaviors; instead, subsequent works present contradictory elements of identification with the African slave as a human brother alongside the objectification of his form. Heroes in these works simultaneously view sentimentally and scopically. Blank and Todd attribute this tension to the more conservative turn in England’s political atmosphere and Smith’s reliance on social acceptance for the financial success of her writing: “threatened with indigence and wary of the conservative mood among her audience, Smith did tone down the radicalism that had characterized the authorial voice in Desmond and adopted more oblique techniques to express her views” (17). Smith heeded the temperance of the market and the warnings of her publishers because she knew that a dip in sales would jeopardize her family’s survival and her children’s futures. As a result, projects subsequent to 1794 present much more moderate political goals with much more subversive messages of reform. Specifically, Smith’s novel The Wanderings of Warwick (1794)

softens its indictment of colonial slavery and evidences both sympathy toward colonial peoples and a naturalized objectification of their forms. The Wanderings of Warwick serves as the ultimate example of Smith’s temperance; it presents contradictory images of empowered and disempowered Africans, illustrating Warwick’s severe ambiguity as the hero jumps from compassionate soliloquies of universal humanitarianism to reasonable justifications of colonial trade. The novel is set in a number of different colonial territories, tracing the wanderings of Warwick, an older commissioned officer in the British army, and his young, beautiful wife, Isabella. The narrative chronicles their journey from Portugal, where they are originally set for America but are shipwrecked in Barbados, to America, where Warwick fights in several revolutionary battles, to Spain, where Warwick’s benevolent uncle financially adopts the couple. Smith’s representations of the diverse settings are taken from her vast reading knowledge and the experiences of her early marriage. For example, she had never traveled to the West Indies, so her knowledge of the colonies and its culture stemmed from her husband’s stories and those of contemporary authors. In particular, Wylie Sypher contends that Smith’s account of Barbados for The Wanderings of Warwick was most likely taken from Bryan Edwards’ History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) (291). Edwards was one of the more liberal and humanitarian supporters of the slave trade; he believed it essential to the economic prosperity of Britain and her colonies (Kitson 18). As Smith’s model, the scenes of slavery that she reproduces in The Wanderings of Warwick are affected by Edwards’ prejudice and partiality. This helps to explain why the visions of Smith’s hero seem driven by conflicting allegiances, especially in contrast to the virtuous Desmond of her previous novel. Overall, Warwick is much older than Desmond and much less certain of his views; he slips in and out of support for slaves then slavers so quickly that it frequently occurs in the same sentence. His ambiguity probably resembles a more typical constitution of an eighteenth-century Englishman than does his predecessor’s heroic virtue, and he is much less radical, political, and confrontational. Smith creates a more cautious, hesitant, and indecisive freedom fighter, who often forgets or forgoes his beliefs depending upon who is present in the room. In this way, Warwick’s ambiguity resembles that of the characters of Behn and Southerne who view Oroonoko and his African countrymen from shifting perspectives. Like the female narrator of the novella and Blanford of

the drama, Warwick’s allegiance to a global humanitarian vision is qualified. Essentially, he is a more controlled, more judicious Desmond; while one wholly advocates equality and abolition, evidenced by his absolute rejection of the colonial vision, the other exhibits slippery sentiment, both advocating temperance within slavery and mitigating its dehumanization. In The Wanderings of Warwick, the tension in Smith’s representation of colonialism is clear, specifically in a study of the novel’s spectatorship imagery: her protagonist slips between scopic and sentimental spectatorship, at times gazing with dominance and superiority, at other times with sentimental feeling and understanding. The novel opens on board a ship as Warwick and Isabella travel to the West Indies, and the first ethnic foreigner to fall under Warwick’s scopic, objectifying gaze is his and Isabella’s Portuguese shipmate, whom he calls “Don Juan.” The objectification begins with this title: the nickname reduces the man to one of an unindividuated mass of overly-sexualized Mediterranean men; it denies both his individual identity and his specific country of origin: Portugal, not Spain. Warwick’s physical description of their shipmate follows, but it stops short of explaining any other physical marker except Don Juan’s skin and his eyes, external markers of difference: “His yellow skin might have qualified him to enact Jachimo, though he had none of the presumption of that character: but it was his black eyes, so expressive of hopeless love; his deep sighs, and his silent adoration” (23). This image further eroticizes the man and also classifies him as foreign and exotic with his “yellow skin” and “black eyes.” The objectifying motives of Warwick’s controlling stare are fear and jealousy; his scrutiny of Don Juan’s actions reveals the threat and anxiety that motivates the scopophilic gaze. Warwick cannot control the man who eyes his wife, Isabella, so he keeps the likeness of the legendary libertine under his constant surveillance. He concedes his envy and anxiety when he calls attention to “the very marked attention of one person [namely, “Don Juan”], which was visible enough to eyes less quick-sighted than mine” (30). Ironically, Warwick’s Portuguese foe never voices his adoration for his wife; like Oroonoko, Smith’s racial Other speaks only with his eyes as the two men vie for control of Isabella. Throughout the journey to the West Indies, Warwick remains watchful and suspicious, reducing his shipmate to an image of primitive sexuality. Warwick’s vision changes once he and Isabella are shipwrecked in Barbados and his racial adversary departs. Warwick’s eyes, no longer watchful of his sexual rival, are cast over

the colonial landscape and come to rest upon the enslaved Africans. At first glance, he provides sentimental images of their inhuman treatment: “I had an opportunity of observing the state of the Negro slaves, whom I had often considered as being in a condition which reflected disgrace on humanity” (44). His statement “of observation” reveals that unlike his hostile view of his Portuguese shipmate, he sympathizes with the Africans as his fellow human beings and deplores their inhumane captivity. He then informs the reader that some time earlier he had freed his servant, Perseus, “to whom I had given his liberty as soon as he became my property,” and he subsequently muses, “perhaps the fidelity and intelligence of my Negro servant Perseus…made me feel for these poor people particular commiseration—painful indeed to myself, and for the most part unavailing to them” (46). Warwick’s sympathetic lament exhibits his sentimentalized humanitarian vision: due to his close interaction with Perseus, where he was able to view the interiority of the servant and to experience his humanity, he now extends that understanding and empathy to all Africans, feeling for their particular commiseration. But this sentimentalized vision becomes splintered with increased exposure. For example, Warwick qualifies his seeming egalitarianism as he details a lengthy account of West Indian slavery, minimizing its horrors: “I will own to you, however, that the subject seen nearer loses some of its horrors; though too many remain, and ever must remain, while slavery exists” (45). Similarly, he later remarks of the enslaved, “Gradually, I became habituated to the sight, yet it still disgusted and distressed me” (45-46). As Warwick gazes upon the spectacle of slavery, his reactions to it are paradoxical: each clause of his compound sentences presents a contradictory opinion supporting colonial slavery and opposing it. His contradictory nature climaxes when he purchases another slave, a mulatto woman bought for his wife (40)—apparently, his sentimental image of African men and women does not grant them rights to self-ownership. Warwick’s views are largely contradictory, at once regarding African slavery as horrific and softening his initial opinions that slavery “reflected disgrace on humanity” once the subject was “seen nearer.” Another qualification of Warwick’s abolitionist vision comes when he compares images of colonial slavery to English peasantry: The condition of the Negroes is certainly in some respects even preferable to that of the English poor.—An Englishman, born to no other inheritance than the labour of his hands, can with difficulty earn enough to support even himself.—As soon as he is strong

enough, he goes to a master as a ploughman or a carter…and falls in love with a fellow- servant, whom, before the end of his year’s service, he is frequently compelled to marry.—The parish officers reluctantly find him a hovel, or a room;--and with less furniture than is seen even in a Negro hut, he commences house-keeper…but any remission in the labour of either, and an increasing family, expose him to the extremes of poverty…and he, all freeman as he is, is driven to labour—not indeed with stripes, but by the terrors of a gaol…Let any one who has ever inspected a work-house compare his then situation with that of the Negro, who it is true is a slave; but for whom all the necessities of life are provided in his old age, and who is then established in a little hut of his own— possibly with a woman of nearly his own age, whom long habit has attached to him…and, if he has been a good servant, and has a master only of common humanity, he has many little indulgences to sweeten this last period of existence…I do not, however, mean to say, that the sole consciousness that he is free—or rather the notion that he is so, is not to the Englishman more than adequate to every advantage which the slave under the kindest master can enjoy. I intend from this comparison only to infer, that, dreadful as the condition of slavery is, the picture of its horrors is often overcharged. (65) Warwick’s argument extremely mitigates the cruelties inflicted upon enslaved Africans as the property of European masters, and it undermines the humanitarian philosophy that all men of equal creation have God’s authority to govern themselves. His vision of colonial slavery reveals a picture of its horrors that are “often overcharged,” particularly, one might assume, by sentimentalized representation; in effect, this statement and the analogy that precedes it attempts to assert a hyperbolic foundation to sentimentalized images of slavery. Warwick’s analogy, minimizing the violence of African enslavement and redirecting the eyes of the reader toward home, draws upon a lineage of imagery ranking the squalid situation of England’s poor beneath that of colonial slaves and the widespread use of this comparison in eighteenth-century publications. In fact, Ann Jessie Van Sant devotes one chapter of her text Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel to a discussion of sentimentalized images of England’s poor, “the largest distressed group” (17). Both marginal groups were represented sentimentally in the fiction of the era, and frequently, the contest for pity was hedged in favor of poor Britons or Irishmen, elevating the status of colonial slave to one of tolerance if not comfort. For example,

James Grainger makes a similar comparison in Book IV of his popular eighteenth-century poem “The Sugar-Cane” (1764). Following a long apostrophe to the product itself, the poet asks the Negroe, How far more pleasant is thy rural task, Than theirs who sweat, sequester'd from the day, In dark tartarean caves, sunk far beneath The earth's dark surface; where sulphureous flames, Oft from their vapoury prisons bursting wild, To dire explosion give the cavern'd deep, And in dread ruin all its inmates whelm?– Grainger’s “precept,” like Warwick’s, contends that Caribbean slavery has benefits far superior to the enslavement under which other populations languish. This perspective, while it does draw a parallel between white and black images, clearly diminishes the brutalization of the African slave trade and eclipses the colonial ideology behind it. Therefore, Warwick’s analogy evidences his half-hearted loyalty to abolition as he waffles between humanitarian sentiment and inadvertent support for the trade through the temperance of his visions. In Smith’s novel, it is clear that her protagonist views with an uneven, conflicted vision of abolition and opposition to the slave trade. As a man of feeling, he reflects upon his own liberty and expresses his sorrow for those enslaved; however, Warwick’s ultimate acceptance of Britain’s colonial vision is communicated through his spectator-like stance as an outsider to the West Indies, gazing upon the atrocities of the slave trade inflicted by a population separate from his own. Warwick’s condemnation of one West Indian plantation owner provides these images of a separate race of unfeeling men: I used to listen with wonders to orders I frequently heard given by a man I was often with, who was in every other instance reasonable and humane, for the punishment of his slaves for faults, which were in my apprehension so trifling that I should hardly have reprimanded a servant in England for committing them. I have on these occasions remonstrated with my friend, who has only laughed at my simplicity, and assured me, that without such wholesome severity masters would not be able to keep their slaves in

subjection; and when I have replied that I would then have no slaves, he has pitied my youthful ignorance. (46) Since he offers no overt opposition to the slaver, Warwick seems content to remain youthfully ignorant if he can continue to separate himself from the inhabitants of the islands and in principle honor his humanitarian ideals. As a man of feeling, he gazes upon the planters as a race apart from his own, one with inherent cruelty and maliciousness. He again communicates these beliefs when he characterizes the slaves sentimentally, highlighting their suffering, and draws a striking contrast between the West Indians and Englishman and other Europeans who advocate freedom and egalitarianism: “A number of beings condemned to perpetual slavery, beings who seem called into existence only to suffer, is an idea revolting not only to the mind of every Englishman, but to every European in whom habit does not blunt the power of reflection…I considered that these were creatures endued with a portion, and, as some have contended, an equal portion, of that reason on which we so highly value ourselves” (44-45). Here, Warwick presents an image of one human community and identifies with the enslaved Africans by calling attention to their humanity and reason. As Smith’s hero, he creates sympathy for those without a voice and also expresses her consternation with a system of government that formally voices the tenets of democracy but views with inequity and legally withholds equal rights from portions of its citizenry whether on the basis of gender or race. Warwick’s disgust with the planter in this instance also alludes to the omnipresent fear of violence and torture that enabled English control over West Indian slaves. Smith conjures images of torture when her protagonist mentions the “punishment” inflicted on Africans for trifling faults. The diction conjures sentimentalized images of inhuman lashings and brutalized bodies, establishing bonds of empathy and pity between reader and subject. Like Warwick, a man of feeling, Smith’s sensible readers would also look into the heart of the oppressed, violated African and cringe at the mere mention of torture. This scene alludes to Smith’s own suffering at the hands of her husband, and while sensitive readers wince at the horrors of the inhuman behavior in the colonies, they also glimpse at images of Smith’s own suffering within her marriage due to the ever-present threat of physical violence. Specifically, during the process of the Smith’s impending financial ruin, the author’s husband’s temperament grew more volatile and frequently turned violent. She recalls occasions in which he struck or kicked her and others

when he threw objects at her, like a quartern loaf at her head and a large ring of keys that marked her breast (Collected Letters 607). The physical nature of his abuse, her “punishment,” specifically in its marking of her body, conjures images of legally sanctioned brutality inflicted upon Africans. The physical violence committed within the plantations of the West Indies parallels that suffered by women like Smith on the continent in domestic partnerships, and through the construction of images of colonial torture, she also constructs a sentimental self- image. The similar victimization of women and Africans, both visually scarred by their aggressors, allows for identification between the oppressed and fuels Smith’s sentimental depiction of the colonized. Warwick’s outward condemnation of Creole slave-owning culture continues as he presents images of them as a disparate group. Through a demonized drawing of West Indian planters, he removes enlightened Europeans from his censure. He distinctly images his fellow Englishmen as separate from “persons born in the West Indies” who “find nothing extraordinary in being surrounded by another race of men destined to be their slaves, and are only amazed that the European should suppose these men liable to the same sensations as himself, and should feel interested for the happiness of beings so inferior” (59). His categorization of characters actually allies the English to the African, both having “the same sensations” and the ability to feel, and distances the Creole as a separate race of men who are uncaring and unfeeling. Interestingly, by viewing planters and slavers as separate from continental Englishmen, he frees those at home from any responsibility in the slave trade regardless of the fact that it is essentially driven by British markets. This separation is further evidenced by Warwick’s indignant observation of the Creole planters: “Perhaps in no part of the Christian world are appearances of morality so little attended to as in the West India islands” (62). He is referring specifically to the sexual abuse of African women and the rapacious appetites of Creole men and boys. His indictment conjures memories of the immoral, lascivious behavior of Benjamin Smith, who eroticized women and often shared stories of rape in the colonial setting with his wife. Echoing the revulsion of the author, Warwick ultimately wonders about “[t]he strange attachment of some Europeans to these ebon beauties, but more particularly the preference given to mulatto women, [which] feeds this excessive vanity at the expence indeed of every thing that resembles morals or decency” (62).

In addition to images of violence and immorality, Warwick also depicts colonial merchants as soulless and void of feeling by characterizing them as inherently greed-driven and wholly mercenary. “The slave merchant” he says, “studies nothing but his profit and loss” (59); yet, the continental European remains separate and guiltless. Here again, Warwick exhibits contradictory impulses, at once condemning colonial slavery, he simultaneously releases his countrymen from blame by imagining their races, and motives, as separate. Warwick depicts West Indian colonialists as insensitive, cruel, and mercenary, and even Creole women are indicted as he continues to characterize them as a race all their own. Smith’s interaction with West Indian women in the early years of her marriage most likely influenced her depiction of them in The Wanderings of Warwick. Specifically, in 1766, Smith began to experience the culture and economics of colonial enterprise from a firsthand view as she and Benjamin moved into an apartment above one of the family’s warehouses in Cheapside. Of this period, Smith’s biographer remarks, “At great City dinners of turtle, among great City wives with the loot of Empire on their backs, she felt herself a different species” (Fletcher 29). The author’s views of these women as a population separate from her own could only have been reinforced by her indentured role as caretaker for her mother-in-law, a Creole woman of “languid air and sallow complexion [as well as] four or five wild ungovernable West Indian boys” (Sypher 290). The character of West Indian women is captured in the Warwick’s image of a heartless Creole mistress who mercilessly violates her mulatto slave of only ten or eleven years. Warwick’s friend, a young lieutenant, remembers the scene: “I saw her back almost flayed; and Miss Shaftesbury seemed to me to enjoy the spectacle—a spectacle which I was so little able to bear, that I ran back to the apartment I had left, where the cries of the suffering child still rang in my ears. I recovered my breath and recollection only to determine never to expose myself to see such a scene again” (54). The spectacle of the whipping, which took place in the entry of the great house, calls attention to the commodification of African bodies as it shows how they can be utilized to whatever end, here jealous wrath, under a legally sanctioned system of ownership. This scene also presents a violent, vicious image of the plantation’s mistress and enlarges the novel’s indictment of West Indian inhumanity to include women and to further divide the insensitive Creole slave owners from genteel English women like Isabella. Warwick’s friend presides over this image of the whipping, watching astonished from the periphery and

sentimentally eulogizing the suffering African as he distantly gazes upon her victimized status and laments the heartless violence inflicted upon her by the mistress of the plantation. Smith’s sinister display of West Indian inhumanity indicting plantation women alongside their male planter counterparts has both the autobiographical foundation aforementioned and a lengthy tradition in the colonial imagery of the literature of the eighteenth century. Her readers gaze upon the callous acts of the Creole mistress judgmentally as readers of Sara Scott’s novel The History of Sir George Ellison (1766) had looked upon the protagonist’s wife, a Creole widow whose attitudes were similarly insensitive and whose actions were similarly sinister. Smith’s image also draws upon that of Anna Barbauld in her “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” (1791), in which the plantation’s mistresses “With arm recumbent wield the household scourge; / And with unruffled mien, and placid sounds, / Contriving torture, and inflicting wounds” (Barbauld). The recurring image of the callous plantation mistress included in Smith’s Warwick draws upon a rich tradition of distinctly identifying the women as separate from those virtuous maidens of the continent. “Those” Creoles became the scapegoats for the perpetuation of colonial slavery while the European sat in judgment of them and remained motionless toward furthering the cause of abolition. Warwick’s character is an image of this ambivalence—as he feels for the young mulatto slave girl, he also removes himself from complicity by displacing blame for the perpetuation of slavery onto the West Indians. His competing allegiances in the narrative mirror Smith’s in 1794: he sympathizes with the suffering of enslaved Africans under the chains of mercenary Creole masters, much like Smith’s own suffering under the ownership of her husband; however, Warwick does not wish to alienate his reader, his fellow Englishman, so his accusations are qualified and rest solely upon West Indian planters and slavers. The spectacle of the whipping, on display in the front hall of the great house, offers a multitude of layers for analysis. Limiting the discussion to the images of the unfeeling Creole mistress and the guiltless Englishman ignores the central figure on display for the sentimental regard of the reader. The young Mulatto girl is gazed upon not with scopic subjectivity but with pity and compassion. The reader is sensitive to the girl’s victimization and looks on in horror

and disgust as the rage of her mistress stains her naked back.3 The reaction humanizes the African child and dehumanizes her white mistress, for the child is a crimeless victim of the slave trade while the mistress is an integral element to the perpetuation of her commodification. Smith’s image of a mulatto girl is particularly relevant as it speaks not only to the sexual abuse inflicted upon African women and the resulting jealousy of plantation wives, but it also symbolizes the continual, cyclical nature of West Indian enslavement. The work force is being regenerated by the slavers themselves, ensuring future productivity. Smith’s image here was most likely informed by stories about her father-in-law’s slaving enterprise related to her by her indiscreet husband. In particular, Benjamin told her how slave ship crew members were encouraged to repeatedly rape the African women on the voyage to the West Indies so that they would be pregnant with mulatto children, and worth more, when they were auctioned in the Americas (Fletcher 36). Smith’s image of the mulatto child is a multi-dimensional reminder of the numerous indignities inflicted upon African men and women—rape, adultery, commodification, and dehumanization—and her reader responds accordingly with abhorrence and heartfelt pity and sorrow. Charlotte Smith was a mere child when she entered into a dangerous marriage with a West Indian planter’s son, but this union and the suffering that it brought propelled the author into the role of sentimental advocate for the rights of those marginalized by dominant patriarchal and colonial institutions. The early years of her marriage became her education in colonial slavery and mercantilist wealth, shaping her vision of Caribbean slave holders that would later appear in her novels as heartless and mercenary. Prior to her writing career, Smith bore poverty, violence, and incarceration with determination and martyrdom, the spectacle of sacrificial motherhood; these trying times would shape her views of those oppressed by patriarchal and colonial rule and affect the representation of both Revolutionary France and colonial enterprises in the Caribbean in Desmond and The Wanderings of Warwick. As she reminds her doctor in a personal letter in 1789, “there is a time when the soul rebels against fetters so unjustly imposed and when, if they are not a little lighten’d, they must be wholly thrown off” (Collected Letters 23). Charlotte Smith shortly thereafter removed the burden of her marriage, but she was forced

3 Marcus Wood provides a discussion of the eroticism associated with images of colonial violence in Slavery, Empathy and Pornography; he specifically analyzes Blake’s illustrations of punished slaves (including a woman) for John Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes in Surinam, 1795. 79

to publish with ferocity to sustain herself and her children, “compelled to live only to write & write only to live” (23). She became in her own words “the slave of the Booksellers as long as my health or fancy hold out” (80). The rhetoric of colonial slavery is utilized here to describe her relationship with the marketplace and also in other personal letters to describe her marital relationship. Clearly, Smith felt enslaved throughout her life and associated her plight with that of those who lived under the whip of a white male master in the West Indies. Her empathy for and identification with enslaved Africans are evident in her sentimental images of them in her fictional works, particularly those written in the early 1790s like Desmond. The visions in these texts evoke empathy and compassion and heatedly call for emancipation and equality, freeing those who suffer from gender, class, and racial oppression. Smith’s works written after 1793, like The Wanderings of Warwick, reflect her altered vision when she was forced to temper her radical ideals of equality in order to sell books and repel an association with the revolutionaries in France. The changing attitudes of her readership mandated that Smith sentimentalize her original call to arms, so her later novels present images of tolerable conditions within slavery, reinforce a colonial, Eurocentric vision, and classify Caribbean slaveholders as a race separate from that of the author. Unlike that of Desmond, the spectatorship imagery of The Wanderings of Warwick qualifies its egalitarian representations, naturalizes imperial ideology, and objectifies the racial Other. The distinct change in vision and racist masking evidence the author’s enslavement to the whims of the marketplace—as Charlotte Smith’s early visions of colonial slavery reveal her unfettered beliefs about the state of the enslaved, her later writings mask this perspective because she herself felt the unending pressure of the master’s dominating hand.

CHAPTER 5 VIEWING THE AFRICAN ROYAL SUBJECT: ANNA MARIA MACKENZIE’S SLAVERY

The works of the writers included in this study reveal their ambiguous attitudes toward colonial slavery and trace the shift from overt, scopic objectification to a more sentimentalized, interior vision of the colonial Other. The sentimentalized texts, while mourning the indignities of a colonial system that denies Africans the ability to feel, also evidence an inconsistent portrayal of these evils: while the author may acknowledge the humanity of one individual African man, deeming him a subject in his own right, he or she also displays him and his countrymen as objectified commodities. Ann Jessie Van Sant discusses how philanthropic objects of the time simultaneously become figures of pathos and demonstration in Eighteenth- Century Sensibility and the Novel. She explains that “because a suffering sensibility is an invitation to investigative observation as well as to sympathetic engagement, it often creates a tension between curiosity and pity” (xii). A similar tension relating to the representation of African peoples is present in the texts of Anna Maria Mackenzie. This chapter evidences Mackenzie’s motion in the direction of the Other by endowing her African protagonists with sight, feeling, and sensitivity, but it also highlights the qualifications included in the discursive route taken to reach that point of humanization. Although Mackenzie’s writings were quite popular at the turn of the nineteenth century, it seems that her personal life was not as well publicized as Smith’s since very little biographical information has been catalogued. Born Anna Maria Wight, she was the daughter of an Essex coal merchant and married a Mr. Cox who died after losing his fortune, leaving Anna Maria to provide for their four children (Nordius ix). The author was then born out of this domestic misfortune, and Mackenzie became, like Smith, the image of the determined mother, working professionally for the sustenance of her children. Between 1783 and 1809, she published at least fifteen novels, possibly more.4 Most of Mackenzie’s narratives rely on historical accounts of

4 A number of MacKenzie’s novels were published anonymously or under a pseudonym, so the exact number of publications remains unsubstantiated. Her pennames were numerous and varied (Mrs. Cox, Mrs. Johnson, and Mrs. Mackenzie) and also seemingly random; The Neapolitan (1796), for instance, was published under the name Ellen of Exeter. 81

mystery and intrigue, thereby exhibiting characteristically Gothic elements. Her tales, alongside Ann Radcliff’s, likely served as precursors to the development of the Gothic tradition in the Romantic literature of the nineteenth century. Early Gothic narratives were used to represent the horrors that existed in the old social and political orders—the evils of an unequal, intolerant society. Through Gothic narratives, writers were able to both express the anxiety generated by this upheaval and increase society's appetite and desire for change and progress. This subversive element of the Gothic style is present in Mackenzie’s historical fiction, which is largely comprised of medieval mysteries and stories of intrigue. In 1792, however, the author turned her attention to a more pressing political debate and penned a narrative of slavery, which lacks the mysterious or supernatural characteristics of the Gothic but does communicate deep-seated fears about the social order and does suggest change and reform. In The History of Gothic Fiction, Markman Ellis discusses how the institution of slavery directly shaped and influenced the genre, so Mackenzie’s detour into the slave narrative seems a natural course. He believes that slave societies and the slave plantation system appeared to late eighteenth-century inhabitants as gothic institutions in that they were governed by terror and fear reinforced by images of violence and torture (208). Bryan Edwards confirms this cultural perspective in An History of the Island of Saint Domingo (1801) when he states, “In countries where slavery is established, the leading principle on which government is supported is fear” (qtd. in Ellis 208). Fear, in fact, overwhelmingly characterized feelings about colonial slavery on both sides of the issue: it was not only used by planters as a means of control to compel African submission, but it also dominated their every-day lives as rebellion became more prominent and more terrifying.5 By the end of the century, frightening images of slavery’s enforcement and effects were widely circulated in Europe; therefore, Mackenzie’s audience was primed for the new direction of her Gothic fiction. Slavery, or the Times purportedly presents images of the slave trade from an African himself. Reflecting the abolitionist movement of the late century, which hoped an end to the slave trade would bring about the ultimate demise of the institution, Mackenzie focuses her narrative on Africa, the Middle Passage, and the marketing of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean

5 Tim Watson suggests in Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 178-1870 proslavery writers may have magnified fears of rebellion in order to promote their anti-abolitionist agenda; if white abolitionists had to choose, was their cynical assumption, they would choose to avoid the massacring of whites. 82

rather than on the culture of plantation life. The narrative utilizes the history of Prince Naimbana of Sierra Leone as its biographical source,6 a biography which was re-presented in later years by other noted women writers of abolitionist sympathies Hannah More and Anna Maria Falconbridge. The Black Prince, as he became known, was used by abolitionist groups in London such as the Clapham Sect as a spectacular source of propaganda: the image of a representative African man molded into European gentility by a French tutor and therefore proven capable of intellectual pursuits and refined manners. Regardless of the abolitionist motives of the sect, their exploitation of Prince Naimbana as the subject of a sociological experiment made a spectacle of him and constantly placed him on public display to sate the curious gazes of the Londoners. (Interestingly, despite all of the eyes constantly upon him, he probably felt “invisible” as the on-lookers were interested not in his true character or history but only in how he had become so much like them.) Similarly, Mackenzie also objectifies the prince as she romanticizes and sensationalizes his story to further her own agenda: selling novels to provide financial security for herself and her family. Mackenzie’s narrative of slavery presents the prince’s story through a sentimentalized veil that is in many ways just as disingenuous as the abolitionist’s costume of European finery. Moira Ferguson heatedly attacks the author’s sentimental slant in Subject to Others: “Anna Maria Mackenzie used the story of Prince Naimbana as the basis of her racist, anti-semitic novel, Slavery, or the Times (1794), that caricatures the prince and his father” (221). Although Ferguson’s indictment of Mackenzie correctly recognizes her maudlin, romanticized representation of the prince’s story, her assessment is harsh, excessive, and dismissive of the novel’s ameliorative efforts. I contend that further study of the text is useful in that it illuminates the necessity for professional women writers (especially those relying on its income to feed their children) to occupy a sentimental middle ground in the fight over abolition, resisting outright calls for emancipation and characterizing their efforts as ameliorative to maintain an alliance to humanitarianism and honor the parallel enslavement that plagued those who suffered from the injustices of social inequality. Mackenzie’s gesture toward slavery’s reform is conveyed through sentimentalism, much like Southerne’s and Smith’s in The Wanderings of Warwick. The novel follows Prince

6 John Frederick Nemgbana (circa 1768-June 1793), the son of Nemgbana, regent of the Koya Temne, was sent to England in the summer of 1791 under the care of Alexander Falconbridge to be educated at the expense of the Sierra Leone Company. 83

Adolphus from his departure from Tonouwah, West Africa, the geographic area that would become the colony of Sierra Leone in 1794. Under the Sierra Leone Project, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, led largely by the efforts of philanthropist Granville Sharp, a Member of Parliament, established the African colony for the resettlement of the freed black population of London. Their first attempt in 1787 was an economic and demographic failure; however, four years later, the group tried again with a group of freed blacks from America, this time establishing a corporation—the Sierra Leone Company—but in the following years, the re- colonization effort also struggled due to conflicts within the company’s leadership and with agricultural constraints caused by the unfamiliar land and climate. Shortly after its inception and failure to prosper, the colony became a symbol of the inability of Africans to govern themselves, perpetuating prejudices about an inherent lack of civilization and sloth.7 Ironically, in Mackenzie’s novel, it is from this constructed haven that Adolphus, the regal prince, must flee to avoid possible capture and enslavement. The prince seeks refuge in the colonies, traveling under the guise of captivity to Port-Royal, Jamaica; his “escape” from slavery to the colonies was a well-established fictional convention at this point in the literary era. In Jamaica, the prince meets his father’s friend and confidante and his namesake, an Englishman, Mr. Adolphus Hamilton, with whom he then travels to London to receive schooling and direction. The novel chronicles this transatlantic journey through a series of emotion-filled letters between Zimza, Adolphus’ father and the King of Tonouwah, and Mr. Hamilton. Through this royal family, Slavery is related, and it is Mackenzie’s choice of characterization that speaks to her sentimentalist aim. As Markman Ellis reports, “A sentimentalised scene has difficulty in invoking or felicitously representing anything vast, unnumbered, terrible or threatening—such as a crowd or mob, or the millions enslaved in the British Caribbean colonies. Sentimental scenarios work by being personalised, unique and discrete, so as to place the maximum pressure on the relation between the subject and the viewer” (Politics 72). In choosing one representational African family, therefore, Mackenzie allows her audience to view the interior humanity of Zimza and Adolphus and to invest in a personalized relationship with father and son, especially in that the two are written to share numerous similarities with an English audience. Readers imagine them as their equals, and their common humanity is

7 For a contemporary discussion of the physical and sociological difficulties of black resettlement in Sierra Leone, see the special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History: Volume 9, Number 3 (Winter 2008). 84

symbolized by the investment of sight and sentiment to both Zimza and Adolphus—each views and commands from a position of power and is looked upon as a human being and a subject in his own right. Mackenzie grants subjectivity to both father and son, initiating impulses of identification in her readers and accessing sentiments of universal humanitarianism. It must be acknowledged, however, that Mackenzie’s sentimental story of Adolphus and Zimza is a personalized memoir, one that not only shrouds systemic issues of cultural imperialism but also perpetuates ideas of a common, ignoble Negro Other by granting subjective viewership only to the African royal schooled and cultivated in Europe. Although Mackenzie’s motives are seemingly to reform social attitudes about racial inequality by humanizing the African male, her portrayal also reinforces colonial themes through its objectification of peripheral black bodies. Ellis summarizes this conflict: Sentamentalist writers found it difficult to cross certain limits in their portrayal of the victims of social and economic change without endangering the entire system of values by which their world was ordered, and this they were disinclined to do. Whenever these limits were approached, benevolent emotions were channelled into safer images of suffering and exploitation [like that of a royal slave with an European education]…which offered secure and unproblematic ground for testing and developing new attitudes. (86) For this reason, as Wylie Sypher reports, “A planter might read this novel without having his feelings outraged” (289). At the same time, the investment of subjectivity and interiority to African figures and a sentimental disparagement of slavery’s cruelties are present in the novel, so those reading with an abolitionist eye might also see championship in Mackenzie’s tale. Of this conflict, Sypher concludes that Mackenzie “is somewhat baffled by her principles on equality and her principles on liberty” (294). These mixed messages, however, do not preclude the novel from a position of importance within the on-going abolitionist debate of the late eighteenth century; as Eve Stoddard argues of Sarah Scott in her ameliorative work Sir George Ellison, the author adopts a strategy of compromise “rather than take the position of a voice crying in the wilderness” (383). Like Stoddard’s examination of the tensions in Sir George Ellison, a study of the inconsistencies of subject/object positions for black and white characters in Mackenzie’s novel is equally valuable as it examines the ways in which women writers

negotiated the professional space that was allowed them: one where they were forced to balance their responsibilities to family, business, art, politics, and personal morality. The examination of Mackenzie’s sentimentalized viewership begins with Slavery’s epistolary form. This narrative mode relates the firsthand point-of-view of the African man, allowing the reader to identify with him in two ways: one, exposing his interiority and teaching European men and women to see the internal emotive processes of the foreigner similar to their own rather than to focus on external differences; and two, placing him in the subject position to express his perspective and to communicate his view of the world around him, granting him the privileged role of “monarch-of-all-I-survey.” For example, Zimza, the African king, not only speaks for himself and embraces subjectivity through the epistolary structure, but he is also granted the premier role in the narrative since his letter begins it. Traditional narration institutes a mediator to translate the experiences of its characters, but the epistolary form allows for unfettered expression. Obviously, authorial control is in fact mediatory, particularly in this case as the characters are based on actual African men and Mackenzie is literally speaking for them; however, the author’s audience is still exposed to the African man familiarized to them and placed in a subjective role, allowing him to express his views about the eighteenth-century colonial world and make judgments about its state. His looks command respect and his speech communicates thoughts and feelings that bind him to the reader in that they can identify with his intellectual and emotive processes, accessing the ruminations of his heart. Mackenzie’s use of expressive punctuation aids in the communication of such sentiment; for example, although we cannot see Zimza’s eyes, we understand his anger and consternation when he has not received word of his son and censures Hamilton: I have trusted thee with a deposit more sacred than Zimza’s existence.—For what is life without honour, that enlightening principle of Zimza’s soul, which for so many moons he has preserved unsullied?—Thou hast promised to guard it unblemished in the person of his son. But what is the promise of a European?...Oh! let him not sink, with the noble name of Zimza, those qualities which, I am honest to own, are resident in my bosom. And may the sacrifice I have made, in permitting my son to take the title of a European, never burn indignantly on Zimza’s conscious cheek! (1-2)

Janet Todd elaborates on this sentimental technique: “In the sentimental work words are not left to carry a message alone, but are augmented by other heightening devices. Exclamation marks, brackets, italics and capitals pepper and disturb the flow of sentences” (5). Through these marks of punctuation, emotions are conveyed, like in Zimza’s first letter, which utilizes dashes and question marks to express his outrage over the absence of communication about his son. The reader cannot see his eyes or facial expressions, which denies him or her scopic viewership; instead, Zimza’s interiority is exposed—his heart. The king interrogates Hamilton through his emotion-filled words, questioning his loyalty and honesty and communicating Zimza’s role as proud father and prudent ruler. It is the epistolary form that enables the reader access to Zimza’a inner self through this personalized emotive expression, and the English reader understands and empathizes with his parental concern. The sentimental relationship between reader and African allowing for empathic bonds is one established from Zimza’s first letter. Every parent can relate to the king’s feelings of uncertainty about his son’s future, to losing sight of their children and therefore control over them; the king speaks about this role using spectatorship imagery: Had I not so thought, had I not so witnessed, during the years of my residence in England, Adolphus should yet have remained in his father’s house, still have retained his influence in the nations of his forefathers, improving in every masculine accomplishment under a parent’s inspection, nor quitted the mansion of peace and glory, the rough abode of stern virtue, to receive a polish which, in less skillful hands than thine, might lose its original luster in the indiscriminate indulgence of his prejudices, appetites, and wishes. (2) Zimza struggles with his decision to relinquish control over his son, releasing him from parental surveillance, and this universal parental conflict binds him to English readers—they see him strictly as a concerned father, not as a defamiliarized Other. Ellis elaborates on sentimental characterization like Mackenzie’s in the following remark: “The sentimentalist discussion of slavery is particularly eloquent because of the priority and privilege it accords to the feelings and to the heart, rather than the scopic typologies of complexion and race. Sentimentalism wants to believe that all humanity is equally capable of feeling and that this equality of feeling is not determined or prejudiced by appearance or skin colour” (86). The characterization of Zimza,

therefore, as caring, concerned father perfectly appeals to sentimentalist aims as it reveals his natural emotive processes and relates all parents regardless of skin color. Sentimentalism re- focuses the traditional scopic gaze of colonial ideology centered on external difference onto internal familiarity and likeness. By redirecting the gaze of English men and women to the hearts of Africans, Mackenzie’s novel forges sentimental bonds of empathy and compassion. Zimza’s opening letter establishes these emotive bonds and also introduces an interesting dichotomy between Africans, characterized as active/masculine, and Englishmen, characterized as passive/feminine, a reversal of the imperial gaze paradigm. Traditionally, colonialism disrupts the gendered notion of masculinity as inherent to men and femininity as inherent to women because Othered men are effeminized by inequities of power cast by Eurocentric beliefs about the world. Within a colonial context, African men are stripped of their active, masculine, subjective control and reduced to passive objects. However, in Mackenzie’s novel, the African king refutes this gender-crossing as natural; instead, he views Africans as inherently masculine and Europeans as inherently feminine: “Adolphus should yet have remained in his father’s house, still have retained his influence in the nations of his forefathers, improving in every masculine accomplishment under a parent’s inspection,” Zimza reports. “—But oh be careful not to indulge his inclination at the expence of his reason,” he warns Hamilton. “Yet wear not away, by a slavish impression of national and feminine habits, the brilliant boldness (if I may so speak,) which characterises [sic] children of the sun; those I mean whose spirits have not been bowed by slavery” (2). Zimza acknowledges that the inherent masculine power of some Africans has been stripped, that they have been emasculated and reduced to objects, but he attributes that lack to slavery—the spiritedness of African men has been stolen by their enforced indenture to colonial slavers. This idea of inherent masculinity is reinforced later in the text when Sambo, one of Zimza’s loyal followers, sees his wife, Omra, fresh from birthing their child along The Middle Passage, being manhandled by an overseer. Observing the transaction, Sambo “muttered something in his own language, and shook his hands, ironed as they were, at the menacing wretch who had so rudely treated the poor woman. The ready whip was immediately applied to punish his temerity” (12). In this scenario, the African male responds aggressively to the affront on his wife, despite his chains; his masculine response is then brutally denounced by the violent response of the overseer. Mackenzie’s glorification of black masculinity reveals in

this instance that African men are not by nature effeminate; they are artificially emasculated, physically restrained, dominated, and subordinated only through violent means. The violence utilized to quash the African subject and force him into passivity speaks to his inherent strength and to the recognition of it by English slavers: they uneasily view Sambo’s uprising anger when his rights to the ownership of his wife are denied and react with the “ready” whip to physically relegate him back within his passive role. As this particular scene continues, the spectacle of enslavement takes center stage when the planters begin marketing their goods to a rapacious group of onlookers. Hamilton, who appears at the slave ships only to retrieve Adolphus, is not a part of the auction until the prince recognizes Sambo as his father’s loyal follower and emotionally prevails upon Hamilton for his purchase, to which Hamilton agrees. He relates the occurrence to Zimza: Adolphus joyfully congratulated the astonished negro on his success, attempting, at the same time, to raise him from his knees. Sambo spoke not, but stood mute and dejected. Lifting his eyes to the boat which contained his wife and child, he gazed on the affecting objects till they had reached the landing-place, while your son, with the eager benevolence of youth, was drawing him towards the cabin steps, that he might go down to receive some refreshment. But Sambo gently remained fixed and pensive. (13) This passage calls attention to the spectatorship tropes of colonial narratives illustrating shifts in the traditional gaze paradigm. Sambo, once an African patriarch who viewed as a powerful subject, now stands emasculated and disempowered, watching helplessly and brooding over the objects of his heart. He stares “fixed and pensive,” arrested by his emotional suffering, and as he gazes longingly at his wife and child, the reader gazes upon him, empathizing with his personal tragedy and relating to his capacity to feel. This scene evidences the emotional constitution of the male Other, familiarizing him to the readers of Mackenzie’s novel and elevating his status from one unrecognizable, sub-human, to that of a fellow human being. Just as the father-son relationship of Zimza and Adolphus humanizes the African Other, so does the husband-wife relationship of Samba and Omra. His love for her is clearly expressed when he decides to give up his personal freedom to remain enslaved in Port-Royal with his wife: Sambo tank you,—but, Omra stay, me stay too…Me go, who comfort her? She cry, man laugh.—She sick, tired, labor all day, no one pity.—She call Sambo.—Sambo gone.—

Sink down.—Die!’—He could say no more, but, passing his arm over his face, strove to hide or wipe off the swelling drops that would force themselves a passage. (14) The finality of his words, though communicated in stereotypically broken English that momentarily focuses the reader’s attention on outward forms of difference, is heart-rending and removes any doubt of a lack of humanity. As Hamilton relates, “The scene was pitiable”; interestingly though, he passively “continued silent” (14) as if he had no power nor will to affect the tragic scene. It is Adolphus who subsequently acts by producing enough gold to buy Sambo’s wife and child. Hamilton’s statement of inaction, “The scene was pitiable, but I continued silent,” is an interesting end to this scene as it highlights the conclusions of this project: Hamilton, the benevolent European, stares fixedly, as if in stone, at the spectacle of horror that is slavery while it is nonetheless sustained undeterred around him. He is in many ways similar to Southerne’s Blanford and Smith’s Warwick: he wishes to mediate on the behalf of one extraordinary African while the ignoble and undifferentiated languish within the system. Each of the men intercedes only for the Other who becomes familiar to him, illustrating the ameliorative ideals of the sentimentalist. Despite his inability to see the common slave as a subject in his own right and to act on his behalf, Hamilton stands in the text as a bastion of philanthropy, justice, and virtue; he is the friend and confidante of Zimza, the African king, and the guardian of his son, the prince, and he views them as his equals. His position is opposed by the villainous planters of Jamaica, for whom, like Smith’s Desmond and Warwick, Mackenzie’s hero has the utmost disrespect and disgust. The author’s distaste for those who view the Africans as commodified goods is communicated through Hamilton’s relation of his and Adolphus’ attempt to leave Jamaica with Sambo and his family: Going, therefore, into the cabin, where I left several opulent planters, who were come on- board to view the cargo, I mentioned, in a general way, the hardships of those females who superadded, to the sorrows of their own captivity, that of introducing to their helpless little ones such an unfortunate inheritance; and then strengthened my observations by a more particular description of the affair I had just witnessed. My remarks were received with the contemptuous half-concealed smiles of one of my auditors; but, not intimidated, I went on to paint in strong colours the sufferings of those

poor creatures, and declared my intention to purchase Sambo, his wife and child, for the purpose of liberating them, and freely added my wishes that I could emancipate the whole cargo. A look of incredulous wonder went round. (15) Hamilton “paints” for his unsympathetic audience the tragic scene of slavery that he previously witnessed, and he prevails upon them to see the interiority of their victims, inviting them to look beyond racial difference and see that the Africans share the same feelings. When his pleas are met with incredulity, Hamilton clearly posits himself against the slavers and regards them with contempt, particularly in that they are described as smiling, taking pleasure in the cruelties and dehumanization that colonial slavery inflicts upon African women and children. It is through this visual dichotomy, Hamilton and Adolphus opposing the planters and slavers, that Mackenzie establishes good versus evil: Hamilton views the slaves as subjects in their own right, and he is a model of honor and goodness. Conversely, the unnamed planters view the Africans as commodified objects, which vilifies them as treacherous and mercenary. Mackenzie includes their voices in Hamilton’s letter from Jamaica as he cites a conversation amongst the planters: “Here I give forty, fifty, sixty pounds for a negro.—Well, he becomes my property, and consequently I shall do with him as I please; and let any of these soft-souled gentry condemn me for it, if they please. I have the law on my side” (16). The italics used in the planter’s statement highlights the divide between pro- and anti-slavery factions, and his snide remark about the “soft-souled gentry” illustrates that the divide is commonly thought to have been drawn by class. Often, colonial narratives sought to separate those Creole planters, members of the mercantile nouveau riche, from the more genteel class of landed Englishmen when in fact, as Eve Stoddard points out, profit from the slave trade was expansively distributed throughout England: “through financial investments, shipbuilding, cloth production, sale and consumption of sugar, rum, or molasses, or the secondary jobs spawned by these” (383). Regardless of its factual bases, Mackenzie’s characterization of the gentry as more feeling toward Africans was common and attests not only to Hamilton’s relationship with Zimza and Adolphus but also his pity for “the whole cargo.” He views the suffering of the slaves and pities them, wishing that he could liberate the entire ship. Hamilton continues to rail against the greed-driven slavers, widening the schism between his sentimental perspective of colonial slavery and theirs. They are represented as unfeeling and

inhumane, images of heartlessness, in contrast both to Hamilton and to the African characters like Adolphus and Sambo. Hamilton abandons his emotional appeal after unsuccessfully citing the familial bonds of mother and child and follows with a rational one: I do not mean, at present, to descant on their equality, as that, in my estimation, admits not of a doubt. I shall take, for a moment, your side of the question, and ask, if you think our beasts of burthen would quietly submit to the yoke, if they were sensible of their own importance? Now, as you must allow these men the possession of some degree of reason, is there not danger to be feared (should they act according to their feelings) that a day may come when rebellion shall tinge your land with blood, and the wretched dependents, you so severely force beyond their strength, turn with fatal fury upon their masters? (18) Hamilton begins this argument with an extremely strong and progressive abolitionist statement of equality, highlighting that his personal beliefs are at odds with the planters by the italicization of the first- and second-person pronouns. He then moves forward to testify to the emotional and rational capabilities of African men and women; in doing so, he argues the emotional and rational equality of the African race. His comments are reinforced by the subsequent instruction of Adolphus and his ability to progress in his European studies under Hamilton’s tutelage: “He reads with avidity, is fond of his pen, and listens with serious attention to lectures upon geography” (24)—the prince is regarded as the model subject, and his intellectualism is not up for debate. In fact, Hamilton relates, “His genius is equal to every thing, and does honour to his first preceptor” (97). In Hamilton’s estimation, Adolphus’ intellectual capacity is without question elevated to the level of his European peers; his equality is asserted in no uncertain terms. Mackenzie’s endowment of intellectual equality to her African prince is sentimentally paralleled by his ability to command an audience utilizing poetic language and to prevail upon them utilizing rhetorical prowess. In one instance, when Adolphus reunites with Miss Hamilton, the sister of his tutor, after a number of years, she exclaims about “the majesty of his figure, and dignity of aspect” (98). Adolphus responds, “The sun, madam, which warps and contracts our unhappy countrymen, in the West Indies, does but invigorate and strengthen the free African. And the same plant, which his influence refreshes in its native soil, sinks overpowered when torn from thence. It droops (how he sighed!) unsheltered on the scorching lands” (98). His contempt

for the slave trade is communicated through an appeal to emotion and morality, utilizing persuasive images of natural beauty and strength and the conventions of argument, rhetoric, and poetry: metaphor and personification. The devices granted to Adolphus in his speech situate him in a superior position as poet and skilled rhetorician, which is also accompanied by his proficiency in music. Adolphus becomes an image of the romantic ideal, endowed with morals, empathy, creativity, and skill. Hamilton relates, “Music is the food of his mind. Already he has mastered its first rudiments, and sings with a taste that must be seated in the soul, for there is a melody in his notes that prove their origin” (24). Mackenzie’s prince is provided talent and refinement—he is a Renaissance man, the epitome of morality and gentility. Adolphus’ noble character and sensitive demeanor attracts many white friends and admirers. One in particular, Miss St. Leger, becomes his travel mate on the journey to London. Their interaction is described as natural and innocent—the typical relations of an adolescent boy and girl. Miss St. Leger had recently lost her mother in Jamaica, where they lived on her family’s plantation, so she was traveling to England with an uncle to rejoin her relatives there. She interacts with Adolphus as a polite young lady would, but it is clear that she is partial to him and him to her. It is also clear in their relationship that Adolphus stands in a typical position of masculine authority and dominance. For example, he asks Hamilton if “all the European ladies were as pretty as Miss St. Leger; adding his wish to find them so” (29). Adolphus continues, “I cannot, at present, judge from comparison, except you permit me to mention my mother, who was as handsome as this young lady, and as good as Mr. Hamilton” (29). The prince views women as objects of aesthetic admiration, naturally occupying the traditional masculine position of visual mastery despite his Othered status within the colonial world. His sexually-driven behavior toward the young woman and their occupation of traditional gendered roles within visuality is natural and accepted by all of the characters around them. The acceptant attitude of Mackenzie’s characters is somewhat unorthodox for the time period as anxiety about miscegenation was represented in the writings of anti- and pro-slavery factions alike. Therefore, Mackenzie’s endowment of sexual subjectivity to Adolphus, that equal to a white adolescent male, was boldly drawn at a time when her readership was largely invested in ideals of white purity.

One final example of Mackenzie’s endowment of subjectivity to her Africans comes during the sea journey from Jamaica to London. In an interesting reversal of traditional scopic positions under colonialism, Adolphus witnesses the severe whipping of an English cabin-boy who is being punished for disrespecting the prince. Soon as Adolphus approached the deck, pity and terror became predominant. No wonder, when he beheld the boy tied up to the shrouds, his back stripped, the boat-swain standing close behind, with a cat in his hand, all the ship’s crew attending, while the captain, in a stern voice, insisted the rascal’s shoulders not be spared, for daring to insult an African prince. This, with poor Anthony’s petitions for pardon, accompanied with streaming tears, completed the solemn attack upon Adolphus’s tenderness. (26) Mackenzie’s sentimental scene evokes “extreme agony” from her prince; “his color went and came, his whole frame trembled, and he appeared overwhelmed with despair” (26). The prince subsequently begs, “On my knees, I solicit that unhappy creature’s pardon” (26). The spectacle of the whipping fragments traditional colonial roles, placing the African prince within the role of active viewer. However, unlike the European subject, who views with a smug sense of domination, Mackenzie’s noble prince cannot bear to view the violence, particularly that which he caused, for his capacity to feel is far too sensitive to such a scene. Adolphus is both forlorn and regretful, signifying his deep emotional ability to sympathize with those less fortunate. His emotive instincts for compassion, equal to that of Mackenzie’s white readers, not only humanize him, but they also position him above the other Englishmen on board the ship, including Hamilton, who watch and remain silent. Existing parallel to Mackenzie’s scenes of African sensibility, subjectivity, and humanity is an undercurrent of ethnocentric bias, which led Sypher to judge of Slavery, “This is no anti- slavery novel in the genuine sense of the word” (289). The limitations of the novel as a wholly abolitionist text relate specifically to the author’s choice of regal protagonists. Rather than adopt a common African family to stand as representative, like Sambo’s and Omra’s for example, the author chose to depict the story of an African who is neither enslaved nor unfamiliar; in fact, the premise of Adolphus’ tutelage under Hamilton, a surrogate English father figure, emphasizes his likeness to Europeans rather than celebrating his difference. Although Mackenzie’s choice of a noble, intellectual, sentimental African establishes his humanity and promotes the idea of one

global community, it also dismisses any real illustration of a cultural identity for the black population. In effect, it denies that there is an African culture that exists separate and independent of English influence; this is evidenced by the fact that Zimza writes his letters from a Western coastal port, never returning to his home inland in Sierra Leone. Although Mackenzie’s Negro précieux are noble and equated to the English in their emotional depths, her depiction isolates the experience of the African to one representative family that is highly misrepresentative. The illustrations of Africans drawn beside Zimza and Adolphus work only to elevate the nobility and gentility of father and son; this effectually subordinates their already inferior status. The common African is depicted in a lowly, ignoble form and is sacrificed in order to accentuate the high breeding and civilized natures of the royal pair. For example, Sambo and Omra, who owe their freedom to the benevolence of Adolphus and journey with him and Hamilton to London, are juxtaposed to the prince once they depart. While he has enjoyed much of the voyage in conversation and merriment with the young, pretty Miss St. Leger, the common couple remained distant and foreign to the passengers. Further, when they arrive in England, Hamilton contends, “I believe that Sambo and Omra would willingly exchange the plentiful comforts of an English table for the fruits and humble beverage of Tonouwah” (93). This remark highlights their Otherness and particularly their lack of civilization in that the two prefer organic produce to the rich foods and drink of European preparation. In addition to their aversion for the cuisine, the pair has neither adopted the mannerisms nor the dress of the English, which marks them as inflexible and old-fashioned and makes them a spectacle for the commoners of London: “The ungenerous observations their persons, dress, and manners, excited, when they first ventured abroad, added to the aversion they conceived against the lower class of people” (93). Their anxiety and discomfort is heightened by the comparison to Adolphus who is excited for the opportunity to learn of new customs and experience new adventures. Hamilton remarks of this contrast, “Already does Adolphus regard them with an anxious eye, and hints his pity for those who, in a strange country, cannot be content” (94). He continues with his comparison in a conversation with the prince, emphasizing Adolphus’ superiority, “You know we brought them hither in consequence of their inclination to serve us in England. Perhaps this anxiety may abate as they become familiarized to the modes and customs of our country. You are satisfied

apparently with your situation” (94). Hamilton divides the Africans by stressing their differences: Adolphus, worldly and wise, versus Sambo and Omra, native and uncivilized. His speech also accentuates difference by utilizing the singular form of the second-person pronoun and calling attention to it through italicization: “you” means Adolphus only, as a singular, separate entity, not “you” Africans, as one plural unit. Adolphus is clearly imagined as distinct from Sambo and Omra, regarded in a class all his own. While the ethnocentric bias of Hamilton in degrading the common Africans might be understood, it is surprising that Adolphus himself reinforces his distinction as a noble African separate from the likes of the common. He is reminiscent of Oroonoko in this way, who degraded his countrymen on numerous occasions in Southerne’s drama. Adolphus states, “I am neither a servant nor a slave; and the son of a king should not be capricious…I am no hypocrite” (94). His diction recognizes the ingratitude of Sambo and Omra while it also insinuates their naïveté and lack of wisdom in wishing to return to their native land. Adolphus concedes that he dearly misses his father, “yet,” he continues, “I cannot forget that Adolphus is a prince; that Sambo and Omra are but his father’s subjects. How should they then think as I do? I know that they are my fellow-creatures, claiming all the rights of humanity; but do not, good sir, do not suppose they are my equals, in strength of mind, self-denial, or descent” (95). This diatribe reads with a patrician, aristocratic tone, further accentuating the divide between ruler and dominion, subject and object. Adolphus acknowledges the humanity of his countrymen but denies them intellectual wit, humility, and nobility. He will neither grant them self-governance nor subjectivity, and he further distinguishes the commoners from himself by utilizing and magnifying with italics a vocabulary of difference: “I” versus “they.” In this case, Adolphus’ speech degrades and subordinates the common African, thereby reinforcing ignoble stereotypes of the Other and creating a justification for colonial ideals. Zimza’s letters also reinforce the disparate status of common Africans in some cases. For example, in his opening letter of concern for the welfare of his son traveling to Jamaica, the king denies the value of the other Africans on the ship by stating, “My son would be a prize worth their notice” (6). The use of italics in his pronoun choice again suggests an air of superiority and conceit, which devalues the importance of the others in cargo and denies their humanity. Furthermore, Zimza does not express concern for his countrymen who have been taken from

Africa and are now enslaved; his focus is solely on the status of his son. When he does address the unfortunate status of the others enslaved, he does so with disparaging statements about the inhumanity of his fellow African leaders: That ship was—loaded with slaves! Unhappy sacrifice to domestic feuds, savage war, or interested, shall I not say, inhumanity?...Unpolished by education, unrestrained by example, and unawed by the Deity thou and thy countrymen acknowledge, (I will not say worship) they have not learned to disguise revenge under the name of justice or sanction of law: and in the infliction of that power, did not always advert to reason or mercy. It is likewise too true that many of our chiefs are deeply concerned in the vile custom of betraying their fellow-creatures.—But never shall Zimza gratify his interest at the expence of peace, or of the lives of those he may have conquered. (4) Zimza charges his people with a lack of civilization and inhumanity when he watches the slave ship depart from the West African port, reinforcing the image of them as barbarous. His contempt for the chiefs of his country aligns him with Europeans who justify the slave trade by transferring responsibility onto the Africans themselves. Not only does this acquit European merchants from accountability, but it also charges African chiefs with villainy and greed, deflecting blame from the mercenary interests of Europeans. Mackenzie’s vision siphons the experiences of slavery into that of one African king who smuggles his son from Sierra Leone to Jamaica so that he can join his English surrogate father to be schooled and raised in London. In this way, her text appeals to its English readership by presenting to them images of familiar characters, scenes, and situations and subsequently attends to her melioristic aims. Mackenzie has been justly criticized for her narrow focus and ignoble presentation of the common African; however, the sentimental attachment fused by the humanization of Adolphus and Zimza should not be ignored. She allows her audience to view the interiority of her African characters and invests them with subjectivity so that they can be seen as familiar, allowing a relationship to be forged out of like experiences and emotions. Ellis summarizes the importance of ameliorative efforts like Mackenzie’s: “Although the particular arguments examined by these novels may appear naïve, under-developed or reactionary, at the time of their articulation they were not only innovative and forceful, but also brave and even radical” (87). As a result, Slavery should be applauded for its positive representations rather than

dismissed for its limitations. Although the deficiencies of Mackenzie’s text must be acknowledged, it can also be celebrated for its presentation of a noble African who is a subject in his own right, endowed with intellectual and emotional depth. Her commemorative effort likens those who were traditionally depicted as Other and attempts to erase the racial divide perpetuating colonial ideals; therefore, she deserves laudatory notice rather than obscurity and disregard.

APPENDIX A LOUISE DE KÉROUALLE, DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH

APPENDIX B HORTENCE MANCINI

Benedetto Gennari, Hortense Mancini (Amussen 199)

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APPENDIX C “LENHALL”

Sir Edmund Verney, “Lenhall,” Mrs. John Verney, Née Mary Lawley [with a black slave] (Amussen 197)

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APPENDIX D PORTRAIT OF A LADY [WITH A BLACK SERVANT]

Studio of Anthony Van Dyke, Portrait of a Lady [with a black servant] (Amussen 200)

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APPENDIX E MRS. MARY GRIMSTON

William Wissing, Mrs. Mary Grimston (Amussan 204)

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APPENDIX F MARY DAVIS

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APPENDIX G ASSORTED EYE PORTRAITS

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APPENDIX H THE EYE OF MRS. FITZHERBERT

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APPENDIX I AMERICA

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APPENDIX J MADAME DE POMPADOUR

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APPENDIX K LES DEUX COUSINES

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Megan Campbell was born abroad in Bavaria, Germany, but lived and was schooled in southern Maine. She completed her undergraduate studies in English at the University of Maine in 1998 and transferred directly to Florida State University to begin a graduate program in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. As a Master’s student, she taught composition courses for the university; then, as a doctoral student, she taught survey courses in American and British short fiction and subject sections such as Gender and Sexuality in British Drama. Upon the completion of her Ph.D. coursework in 2002, in addition to adjunct employment at Florida State, she began teaching at a local community college on a tenure track. Three years later, she moved to South Florida to teach at North Broward Preparatory School and remained for three years. Currently, she teaches literature and composition at the University of South Carolina—Sumter, where her husband is contracted as a flight physician with the United States Air Force.

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