Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel by Victoria Barnett-Woods M.A. in English, May 2013, Marquette University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Science of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 20, 2018 Dissertation directed by Tara Ghoshal Wallace Professor of English Daniel DeWispelare Assistant Professor of English i The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Victoria Barnett-Woods has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of March 8, 2018. This is the final approved form of the dissertation. Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel Victoria Barnett-Woods Dissertation Research Committee: Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director Daniel DeWispelare, Assistant Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director Ralph Bauer, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland, Committee Member Jennifer James, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2018 by Victoria Barnett-Woods All rights reserved iii Dedication To Bryan and Declan: my allies in love and life. You have made me strong and have given me the faith to believe I can accomplish anything. iv Acknowledgements There are many individuals who have helped this dissertation come to fruition. I am grateful to the English Department at The George Washington University for their support of this project these past five years. My dissertation directors, Tara Ghoshal Wallace and Daniel DeWispelare, have both been generous with their guidance and unwavering in their encouragement. Their thoughtful attention to my work at each step of this project shaped and reshaped it for the better. My third reader, Ralph Bauer, graciously attended to each chapter with great care. His insight provoked me to reflect on the ways that I can transform this dissertation into a monograph in the future. I also want to thank the people from various institutions who have helped guide me in my research. At the Institute for Caribbean Studies in Río Piedras, my many thanks go to Nadya Menedez Rodriguez and Humberto Garcia Muniz. It is because of them I was able to explore the Hispanophone Caribbean in ways that I had not thought possible. I also want to thank Lucy McCann and Gillian Humphreys at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University for their assistance in acquiring materials that were invaluable to the successful completion of the third and fourth chapters. The most critical institutional support came from The George Washington University Graduate Student Fellowship Office. It was because of that department I was able to conduct research in England and Barbados and was granted a summer dissertation completion fellowship grant during my last summer of writing. Finally, I want to express the deepest gratitude to the friends and family who have kept me going throughout this journey. Thanks to Kimberley Clarke, Leah Grisham, Alan v Montroso, Leigha McReynolds and Sam Yates for their open ears and hearts. Most importantly, I want to acknowledge the greatest support I’ve had these past years—my husband Bryan Barnett-Woods. He was (and continues to be) my emotional coach, grammar expert, sounding board, and partner in the world that exists outside this dissertation. He also gently reminded me from time to time that this outside world is rather large and worth exploring and that I should take a break. I want to also thank Declan, who has just recently come into our lives, for delaying his arrival until I had finished a draft of this work. He has been a beautiful and disarming distraction since. vi Abstract of Dissertation Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel This dissertation contends that the historic events of the eighteenth-century Caribbean directly shaped the rise of the novel. The first chapter considers the conflicting cultural representations of the eighteenth-century pirate in the burgeoning genre of the maritime picaresque. The second chapter reads the role of mixed-race women in the Atlantic Bildungsroman, what would later be categorized as domestic fiction due to the gendered politics of eighteenth-century long-prose writing. The third chapter examines the rhetorical value of silence in autobiographical slave narratives, a genre of writing foundational to the African-American literary canon. The fourth and final chapter posits that the Caribbean gothic, formulated during the height of the slave trade debates, was influenced by slavery apologist anxiety over slave rebellion in the Atlantic. Each chapter is dependent upon postcolonial theory and empire studies and is grounded in primary source material spanning from 1690-1840. In providing a more globalized vision of the novel’s rise, my dissertation offers a unique perspective on the long eighteenth century and the literary history to follow. vii Table of Contents Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. v Abstract of Dissertation .................................................................................................... vii Introduction: Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel.......... 1 Chapter 1: Moveable Worlds: The Maritime Picaresque, Piracy and Resisting Empire .. 19 Chapter 2: Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and the Woman of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century .................................................................................................. 81 Chapter 3: Listening to Silence in the Autobiographical Slave Narrative ...................... 153 Chapter 4: Tropical Terror: Obeah, Vodou, and Plantocratic Anxiety in the Caribbean Gothic ............................................................................................................ 224 Conclusion: Memory, History, and Reading the West Indies ........................................ 295 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 309 Appendix A ..................................................................................................................... 327 viii Introduction: Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery and the Rise of the Novel This dissertation project operates under a simple premise: the imperial and diasporic history of the eighteenth-century Caribbean had a direct influence on the so- called “rise of the novel.” The concept of the novel rising out of the eighteenth century, particularly out of the English literary tradition, has earned its qualifying scare quotes over the years due to the critical interrogative gestures of the scholars who have informed this project. Scholars like Ian Watt, Michael McKeon and Benedict Anderson maintain that the social conditions, changing literary practices, and advances in print technology in England led to the novel as a form. This claim carries significant weight, as it has informed the curriculum of classrooms and inextricably and exclusively tied the bibliographic history of the novel with a European, specifically British, history. In more recent years, scholars of the British imperial eighteenth century have complicated the insular nature of these claims and illuminated the cross-cultural fluidity of literary colonial contact. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theoretical contention that the genealogy of European thought falsely universalizes the Enlightenment to a global scale, is what lays the foundation for the intellectual road on which my project treads. In his Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty critiques Eurocentric formations of modernity, and his work “struggles with the problems of representation that [European political thought] invariably creates.”1 His seminal claim seeks to pluralize modernity to a global scale. While his project gives greatest focus to South Asia, his critique offers other scholars to 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22. 1 consider his conceptual framework in other geographical spaces. Within the field of literary history, Srivinas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism is another work that problematizes the naturalized lineages of European modernity. In it, Aravamudan argues that English imperial contact with South Asia and the Middle East fostered new forms of long-prose writing that resisted the telos of the European metropolitan realist novel. His argument rests on the idea that there was a literary transcultural exchange in the imperial contact zone, allowing for the perforation of forms and narrative modes to inform different types of literary production.2 Following Aravamudan’s and Chakrabarty’s claims, I argue that the imperial and diasporic events that occurred in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean were essential to the evolution of the novel as a form and still resonate in literary tropes and figures to this day. As the novel is arguably a historical signifier of a unique “climate of social and moral experience,” as well as a critical marker of a secularizing nation-state, the novel form serves as a critical artifact in which the historical Caribbean is relayed. There