The Wollstonecraft Statue at Newington Green (Review)

Review by Miriam Al Jamil
The Wollstonecraft Statue at Newington Green (Review)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.19
Cite: Jamil, Mariam Al. 2021. “The Wollstonecraft Statue at Newington Green (Review) ,” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 58-58.
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The Wollstonecraft Statue at Newington Green reifies in many ways the unresolved painful issue of disempowerment with which the history of the female nude is imbued, making it all but impossible to see it in any other way. This representation is in spite of the driving force of the statue’s campaign, which is stated in the artist Maggi Hambling’s description of its meaning and fortified by the historical revisionist approaches of feminist art that interrogate Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1956)—such as work produced by Griselda Pollock and Lynda Nead.

Classical sculptures of goddesses represented the divine and were divested of the bodily signs of the reproductive body, a feature that characterized the archaic female nude. The design of these classical sculptures allowed the male gaze, particularly in the last two or three hundred years, to relentlessly reduce and sexualize the female nude to the exclusion of all other interpretations. This reduction is compounded in the more recent phenomenon of pornography in which the female body, though driving male fantasy, is infantilized and glabrous.

Hambling’s figure both references the “ideal” female figure in its youthful, slim, and perfectly proportioned anatomy and resolutely incorporates the pubic hair, which is either missing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art or, when included, is the subject of scandalized critical responses. Current reactions to Hambling’s figure express similar outrage but mainly because Wollstonecraft should be honored without the baggage of art historical female nudity to deflect from her reputation as a thinker, philosopher, and writer. It is a question of what measure of dignity and meaning can be assigned to the female nude. Can it convey extraordinary pioneering achievement, strength, and fortitude in the face of adversity, both creative energy and courage? Or must it always remain generalized, idealized, transcendental?

In many ways, the inchoate female forms from which the small figure emerges in the final piece are, for me, the most fascinating elements of the project and deserve to be appreciated in their own right. Building on Hambling’s previous sea and wave sculpture and paintings, these forms convey flesh and bone, twist in restless and dynamic movement, and gather force to bring the triumphant female to birth, like Venus rising from the foam. We are invited to contemplate what constitutes “female forms.” How would “male forms” differ? Is it easier to abstract and construct “female” shapes from the wealth of historical sculptural tropes with which we are familiar? I would like to know more. The installation has set in motion yet another layer of debate about the value and purpose of public sculpture, this time focused on gender but is as much about entitlement, veracity, and respect as all the previous examples which have galvanized participation. I hope this reinvigoration of sculpture as a significant cultural phenomenon will continue to inspire emotional engagement.

“Honoring” Mary Wollstonecraft (Review)

Review by Rebekah Andrew
“Honoring” Mary Wollstonecraft (Review)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.18
Cite: Andrew, Rebekah. 2021. “Honoring” Mary Wollstonecraft (Review),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 57-57.
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Walking through Newington Green Park to get somewhere important to do something important, briefcase heavy with paperwork, one sees a bright silver sculpture glistening in the distance. There’s no time to move closer, examine it in any detail, or read the little plaque explaining its significance. The only fleeting impression is of a doll-size female form standing rigidly atop a seething mass of undulations. Before an opinion can be formed or any more thought given, the park is behind and the business of the day ahead.

This brief encounter is how most outdoor sculpture is viewed. It is not studied in detail; people do not read the little plaque. It is seen from afar, judged, and left behind. The sculpture supposedly honoring Mary Wollstonecraft will be no exception to this rule after the initial controversy has died down. Viewed in this way, would you know the sculpture was supposed to honor anyone? Without reading the artist’s statement, would you understand the significance of the piece? I doubt it. When I first saw the sculpture “honoring” Mary Wollstonecraft (but not depicting her), I voiced, “Are you kidding me?” to an empty room, only with an expletive inserted. I was unsurprised that within the hour, someone had thrown clothing over the tiny naked figure. I am half surprised that no one has dressed it in Barbie clothes (yet).

To clarify, I have nothing against the sculpture itself—I actually quite like it. However, “the irony of a figure erased from history being erased from her own statue,” in the words of my husband, is difficult to ignore. Designed to commemorate one of the founders of the feminist movement who demanded to be seen as more than a body, the statue seems to be more than a little offensive to both Wollstonecraft and all women who have campaigned to be treated with respect and dignity rather than valued only as a source of titillation for the gaze.

And what titillation that gaze gets. The figure at the top conforms to most of the twenty-first-century Western standards of beauty, aside from some unruly pubic hair, the hallmark of a feminist, apparently. Toned, pertly large-breasted, and slim, it is another representation of the idealized womanhood people are confronted with on a daily basis. The figure lacks wrinkles, cellulite, and all the other “imperfections” human bodies have. Wollstonecraft desired to be free from the prison of societally imposed standards of beauty, yet the first sculpture that commemorates her appears to buttress what society tells women they should look like and to suggest that they are only allowed to rebel in usually invisible ways.

“I really must go to the gym today,” thinks the woman passing back through the park after her meeting, walking close enough this time to see the figure. With more time, but without energy or inclination to consider the significance of the sculpture, she remains unaware of who the sculpture supposedly commemorates or what significance that person’s work, now two hundred years later, has had over her life.

‘The Wealth of Worlds’: Gender, Race, and Property in The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)

Roundtable by Kerry Sinanan
‘The Wealth of Worlds’: Gender, Race, and Property in The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.17
Cite: Sinanan, Kerry. 2021. “‘The Wealth of Worlds’: Gender, Race, and Property in The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 53-56.
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Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression from this act of hatred and contempt.1

Towards the end of The Woman of Colour, Olivia Fairfield declines to entertain the idea of an offer of marriage from Charles Honeywood. Olivia’s first marriage to Augustus Merton has been annulled upon the discovery that his first wife, Angelina, whom he was told was dead, is in fact still alive, and they are reunited with Olivia’s blessing. Although Olivia is legally free to marry again, she refuses because of fidelity to her “first love,” Augustus: she cannot, she says, love another and considers herself to be “the widow of my love.” At the same time, Olivia insists that her constancy in loving Augustus is no threat to his true union with Angelina: “Heaven is my witness . . . that I consider Augustus Merton as the husband of Angelina, that for the ‘wealth of worlds’ I would not interrupt their happiness” (182). This particular phrase of Olivia’s, which Lyndon Dominique suggests is likely to be a quotation from Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1774), takes on a particular resonance in a novel that rewrites the norms of gender, race, and property inheritance at the time of the Abolition Bill (1807). The phrase participates in the trope of romantic love as colonial conquest but inevitably suggests the actual plundering of empire that is less romantic. Olivia refuses the role of plunderer, of taking what is not hers even while she “loves” Augustus and the novel’s plot allows some restitution of the actual “wealth of worlds” that her father, a white Jamaican planter, has accumulated.

As a woman whose mother was the enslaved legal property of her planter father, and as a native of Jamaica, Britain’s most productive colony at the time, Olivia is all too well aware of what accumulating the “wealth of worlds” actually involves. Her linking of colonial wealth with romantic possession in order to rhetorically refuse both is also a refusal to participate in the yoking of property and of variations of Black and white female disposability that the novel examines in detail. As Saidiya Hartman notes in “The Belly of the World,” if the bequest of slavery is theft, and the enslaved “mother’s only claim—to transfer her dispossession to the child,” then Olivia verbally dispossesses herself here as a way to renounce her claims to Augustus.2 In another sense, though, her phrase articulates a claim to her freedom outside of white marriage and white possession: she does not wish to possess at another’s cost. Her ideal of renouncing colonial wealth in reality, however, is not possible: by the end of the novel, she independently possesses the “wealth of worlds” in the form of her £60,000 fortune accumulated by her slave-owning father, and this enables her freedom from any form of white male patriarchy. And, so, even with Olivia’s freedom, as Hartman asserts, “The plantation is the belly of the world.” Between the womb of her mother and the plantation profits of her father, Olivia’s attempt to refuse “the wealth of worlds” registers the novel’s simultaneous reach for Black emancipation and awareness of the limits of freedom in a transatlantic world underwritten by the dispossession of Black mothers.

In the epigram above, Condé enacts what Saidiya Hartman calls the “critical fabulation” necessary to tell the histories of enslaved women.Hartman’s term names the methodologies needed to approach the archives of slavery, which do not record the lives of enslaved women from their point of view: it is an archive of absence and loss. In these conditions, the methodology that is needed requires both a critical attention to history and “laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible” through narrative (fabula).4  The Woman of Colour may be read as an extended “critical fabulation” that wrestles with the demands of the romance plot and the realities of what Condé tells us of the experiences of enslaved women. The novel improbably, and violently, romanticizes Fairfield’s relationship with Marcia, telling us “She loved her master!” (54). Marcia’s consent is not sought and her desire is co-opted to make the plot’s beginning possible in the Romantic period. But this is also why Olivia’s verbal rejection of “the wealth of worlds” is significant, spoken as it is by an enslaved woman’s daughter. As Felicia Denaud asks, “But what if the mouth is just a belly by another name? What if partus sequitur ventrum, the law of enslavability, was just as much a claim to the mouth as it was to the womb?” 5 This law, originally forged in Virginia in 1662, decreed that all children born from enslaved woman would follow their mother’s condition: “offspring follows belly.”6 Olivia’s phrase interrupts the “wealth of worlds” to claim her freedom that is, initially, dependent on two white patriarchs. In the first instance, her father, Mr. Fairfield, grants Olivia her full status as his daughter, rather than making her his chattel, which he legally could have done and as many white men did with their Black children in the West Indies. Indeed, according to Olivia, Fairfield refuses to marry Marcia, her mother, because of “the prejudices which he had imbibed in common with his countrymen,” leaving Olivia in a precarious state after his death (55). In A Dark Inheritance, Brooke Newman traces the legal frameworks of colonial Jamaica, which incrementally defined whiteness in a chain of dispossessive acts. It is in Jamaica that “a genealogical concept of whiteness concerned with ancestral bloodlines came to determine the basis of local eligibility for the full rights and privileges afforded to British subjects”.And, by 1733, a voting act to “determine who should be deemed mulattoes” stipulated that “above three degrees removed in a lineal Descent from the Negro Ancestor Exclusive” gave voting rights to the person and moved them out of the category of “Mulatto”.8 The word removed captures the legal dispossession of life and rights from Black mothers that creates whiteness. Olivia, at one degree “removed” from Marcia, remains far away from the rights of a white subject and closer to the realm of property, according to Jamaica’s racist laws. And Olivia acknowledges this closeness to her correspondent Miss Milbanke: “The illegitimate offspring of his slave could never be considered in the light of equality by the English planters” (53).

Between the danger of uncertain freedom in Jamaica following the death of her father, and his will’s provision that she must marry her English cousin, Olivia wishes for independence: “Had my dear parent left me a decent competence, I could have placed myself in some tranquil nook of my native island” (56). This cannot be: the “tranquil nook” that Olivia dreams of is a fantasy for the daughter of a slave in eighteenth-century Jamaica, and so Fairfield’s arranged marriage for his daughter is her only hope of any freedom. Via this arrangement, not only does Fairfield attempt to “secure his child a proper protector” but he also ensures the transmission of a substantial fortune to his nephew, the son of his deceased sister. While Olivia is not herself enslaved, via her, the plantation profit is returned to the metropole, and Olivia remains what Hortense Spillers defines as a “captive body”, her love for Augustus notwithstanding.9 Following the dissolution of her marriage to Augustus, Olivia once more loses her (father’s) fortune to the next male heir, Augustus’s mercenary brother George. In return for promising never to take legal action to reclaim her dowry, George agrees to only “fifty pounds every three months” (149). The “wealth of worlds” has successfully been reappropriated by white patriarchy.

In a further divestment following Augustus’s reunion with Angelina, Olivia declares that “the jewels which had been presented to me on my marriage by Mr Merton, it was my firm resolve to give to Mrs Augustus Merton,” underlining that she is not able or willing to possess anything in England as the daughter of an enslaved woman (149). Single once more, Olivia manages to find the “tranquil nook” she desired in Jamaica in the Wye valley, “a very snug habitation” (158). Although it is not as quiet as she had imagined, she hopes that her poverty, combined with her “race” will ensure her isolation: “a woman of colour will not be a courted object” (158). In this precarious, unprotected state, dependent on the word of George Merton and on not being “courted,” Olivia is set to remain and the novel insists on showing us how Fairfield’s will fails to protect Olivia precisely because she is a woman of color in a slave-owning society: while she is not chattel, at this point she remains prey to white male possession.

One of the many remarkable aspects of The Woman of Colour, however, is that the plot does find a way through the legal network of white slave owning to give Olivia her fortune and her freedom, independent of male control. Her uncle, Mr. Merton, dies and wills Olivia the return of the fortune she had lost following the ending of her marriage to Augustus. By regaining the money accumulated from her father’s slave owning, Olivia simultaneously remains within the network of inheritance and disrupts it forever because she will never marry and have her own children. In a world in which, as Hartman says, “the reproductions of human property and the social relations of slavery were predicated upon the belly”10 this is what Brigitte Fielder names, “a radical reproductive choice”that attempts to halt the plundering of the “belly” by plantation economics.11 As an unmarried, unreproductive woman, Olivia will have some force in Jamaica: she is returning to an island in which the white settler population was diminishing as free Black people continued to push for the rights of “white men”.12 She will be an independent, free woman of color who will put under pressure the fictions of racialized taxonomies forged in Jamaican law.

With her “wealth of worlds” untethered from her father’s plantation, Olivia has circumvented the power of Jamaican officials who alone “held the power to determine who was a slave and who was free, who was black and who was white, and who could invoke a right to the English common law inheritance and who could not”.13 The plot of the novel has turned English inheritance back upon itself to deliver Olivia the money, and it will, she tells us at the novel’s end, go towards the amelioration of her people. In this way, she becomes the mechanism for delivering reparations, returning some degree of profit and freedom to those from whom it was stolen. As Fielder argues, “Olivia ultimately returns to a black Atlantic community intending to take up the work of racial uplift”.14 This uplift is manifold: Olivia will not produce inheritors of white property; she may well liberate her father’s property in those she repeatedly acknowledges as her “kin”; she will forge multiracial alliances beginning with Dido, a Black woman, and Miss Milbanke, a white woman; and she will be in a position to forge an alternative self-sustaining community outside of white profit, possibly through land ownership.

In the most utopic reading of the novel’s end, Olivia’s maneuvers between the possessions and dispossessions licensed by white slave ownership signify the possible end of the plantation as “the belly of the world” and the reappropriation of it as a site for emancipation, as it was in Haiti. If this sounds too optimistic, the novel offers only a puncturing of plantation-based primogeniture with the future possibilities yet to be plotted. And yet Haiti offers the real alternative that The Woman of Colour will only tentatively suggest.15 As Grégory Pierrot asserts: “The fact remains: Black Caribbeans and Americans had achieved precisely that which the entire Atlantic world conspired to prevent,” and in doing so, it eradicated not white people, but it “did indeed eradicate whiteness” in its 1805 constitution that declared that “all Haitians, no matter their complexion and origins, were Black”.16 This assertion sits in a direct opposition to Jamaica’s forging of legal whiteness: its entire legal framework might be erased by a Black constitution. And Olivia can be read as part of this Black Atlantic reversal. Olivia refuses possession in a novel which breaks the usual “reward” of a husband to allow her virtue “to be its own reward,” and the “wealth of worlds” might be replaced by a nonprofit, feminine-centered, multiracial community that defines itself as Black.

ENDNOTES

[1] Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors, Souls,” Souls 18, no.1 (2016): 166–173.

[2] Maryse Condé, I, Tituba. Black Witch of Salem (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 1.

[3] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14, 11.

[4] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.

[5] Felicia Denaud, “Renegade Gestation: Writing Against the Procedures of Intellectual History,” Black Intellectual History: A JHI Forum (October 23, 2020), Section I, https://jhiblog.org/2020/10/23/renegade-gestation/.

[6] See Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe 22, no. 1 (2018): 1–17.

[7] Brooke Newman, A Dark Inheritance. Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 6.

[8] Newman, 20.

[9] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81, 67.

[10] Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 168.

[11] Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement,” Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, edited by Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 171–185, 183.

[12] Newman, 15.

[13] Newman, 20.

[14] Fielder, 183.

[15] In my reading of the novel, Haiti remains a silent but persistent presence in the Black Atlantic world in which The Woman of Colour was written. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Western historiography, and in turn Western political systems, sought to suppress the significance of the Haitian Revolution that overthrew French colonial rule to establish the first free Black republic in a series of rebellions against white enslavers between 1791–1804: “The general silence that Western historiography has produced around the Haitian Revolution originally stemmed from the incapacity to express the unthinkable, but it was ironically reinforced by the significance of the revolution for its contemporaries and for the generation immediately following.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 97.

[16] Grégory Pierrot, “Black Revolutionary Violence: The Luxury of Ethical Thinking from a Temporal Distance,” The Funambulist 25, “Self-Defense” (September–October 2019): 30–34, 34.

Teaching The Woman of Colour and Transatlantic Women —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)

Roundtable by Misty Krueger
Teaching The Woman of Colour and Transatlantic Women —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.16
Cite: Krueger, Misty. 2021. “Teaching The Woman of Colour and Transatlantic Women —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 51-52.
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In 2015, I first taught a special topics course at The University of Maine at Farmington (a small, public liberal arts university) I called “Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women.” I have since taught the course two more times and have added it to my English department’s recurring curriculum. This course focuses on long eighteenth-century women writers who traveled transatlantically and the women travelers they portray in their writings. I wanted students to see that British and American women not only wrote transatlantic tales but also traveled in a space that has been coded as male and masculine. The course, and that very idea, inspired me to edit a volume of essays on transatlantic women travelers, which includes an essay by Octavia Cox on The Woman of Colour—a text I had not even heard of when I first designed the course. Once I read this novel, though, I realized that it was a perfect fit for my class.                                                           

The novel begins with a woman’s transatlantic journey that is not typically portrayed in British and American literature—that of a woman of color’s travel from the Caribbean to England and back. Often, transatlantic narratives focus on women traveling from England, the Americas, Africa, or Europe to the Caribbean and to British, Spanish, French, or Dutch colonies. Sometimes the travelers return to their homelands, thus engaging in two-way transatlantic travel. Oftentimes, narratives show that travel only operates one way, as in the case of white women settling in colonies with their families, or enslaved women of color ripped from their families and homelands and transported to plantations. In such narratives, women’s involuntary travel points to a lack of autonomy, but it particularly reveals the racial disparity in women’s transatlantic travels, for white women had a freedom not afforded to women of color. White women had the potential to return home, wherever it may be, but Black women did not.

The Woman of Colour intervenes in the corpus of involuntary transatlantic women’s travel narratives. Olivia, the daughter of an enslaved woman of color and a white enslaver (thus making her a free woman of color), travels to England to start a new life, but she ultimately shows how little control she has over her own life. While Olivia’s travel may seem to be voluntary because of the style of the epistolary narration, it is not. Her trip is intended to be a one-way journey for her to marry her white cousin, who controlled her inheritance and thus her life, and settle in England. However, calling England home does not end up being a real possibility for Olivia, and her tale begins and ends with travel to and from Jamaica, which gives students a chance to see two-way transatlantic travel and to think about travel as the bookends for a text that depicts free women of color who travel to England.              

Adding Woman of Colour to my syllabus allowed my students to compare Olivia and Dido (Olivia’s Black Jamaican servant who travels with her to England) with other characters in the course, including Imoinda from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), who were stolen from their homes in Africa, enslaved, and then praised by everyone around them. The Woman of Colour afforded my students an opportunity to think more about how race and autonomy work in women’s transatlantic travel texts and to build on what they saw in Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (another text that is framed as a true story but whose author is unknown, as there is not a historical record of a person named Unca Eliza Winkfield). The Woman of Color also does things The Female American does not: its smart, sympathetic heroine criticizes racism; the novel portrays a range of white Englishmen and women’s attitudes toward and treatment of people of color; and it addresses intersectional diversity among women of color in its portrayal of Olivia and her darker-skinned servant, Dido, whose skin color and dialect distinguish her from her mistress. The novel thus places Olivia between two racial categories (white and Black) but closer—in terms of class and social status—to her white relatives.                                                                                  

In examining Olivia, Dido, and the Mertons (Olivia’s white English relatives who control her inheritance, to which she can only gain access by marrying one of them) in terms of race and class, I could further have a conversation with students about the virtual absence of women of color’s perspectives and voices in British and American canonical literature. I added The Woman of Colour to my revised syllabus because I realized that my syllabus was too white. I included The Female American, supposedly written by a biracial author-protagonist, but of course we cannot verify the author of that text. I included poetry by Phillis Wheatley and biographical material about her life, as well as white authors who created Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) characters, such as Imoinda from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and the creole women discussed in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; Or, the Horrors of San Domingo (1808), but that was not enough either. I realized that I needed to cut more white writers from my syllabus, as well as texts focused on white women, to make more room for narratives featuring, if not written by, women of color. I cut Anne Bradstreet’s and Mary Rowlandson’s writings, as well as excerpts from white women’s travel journals, and in their place, I added The Woman of Colour. I also used The Woman of Colour to set up a discussion of two other texts I had not taught before, Lucy Peacock’s “The Creole” (1786) and Jane Austen’s “Sanditon” (1817)—Austen’s only work that includes a character of color.

Along with my students, I imagined how The Woman of Colour could show readers the potential for Austen’s narrative. Austen died before she could finish her book, but my students and I could not help but wonder if the experiences of Austen’s Miss Lambe, a young “half-mulatto” inheritress from the West Indies, would turn out in any way to resemble Olivia Fairfield’s.Thus, The Woman of Colour could be considered a prototype for Austen’s tale: we know that Olivia was welcomed into English society because of her financial circumstances, and in Austen’s would-be-novel, Miss Lambe, too, was sought after by the Denhams for her “large fortune.”2 Strangely enough, The Woman of Colour inspired me (an Austen scholar at my core) to introduce my students to an Austen text in a course where I could not imagine finding a place for Austen. While The Woman of Colour brought me back to a white writer—which is still problematic—teaching it before “Sanditon” gave Austen’s text a kind of depth I do not think it would have had otherwise in this course. Ultimately, I see The Woman of Colour as a text that opens students’ eyes to what came before it and what follows it. It is a work I will continue to teach in both my transatlantic class and other courses.

ENDNOTES

[1] Jane Austen, Sanditon, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 64.

[2] Jane Austen, Sanditon, 42.

The Romantic and Contemporary Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)

Roundtable by Mariam Wassif
The Romantic and Contemporary Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2020.2.2.15
Cite: Wassif, Mariam. 2021. “The Romantic and Contemporary Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 48-50.
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At an August 6, 2020, anti-racism teach-in in the long eighteenth century, speakers Shelby Johnson, Brigitte Fielder, and Kerry Sinanan urged academics to reexamine our approach to pedagogy and research in light of the current racial reckoning in the United States and beyond.1 Atrocities such as the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, which sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the country and reverberated around the globe, have galvanized movements to interrogate how historical and ideological developments in our period of study continue to shape our world, as well as our approaches to researching and teaching Romanticism and the long eighteenth century. The Woman of Colour can allow us to do just that: the novel offers the opportunity to foreground Critical Race Theory in Romantic and eighteenth-century studies, as well as to “pull the threads of our readings into our current moment,” as Fielder put it.

The Woman of Colour is both rooted in eighteenth-century and Romantic conventions, and it is strikingly contemporary in depicting the intersection of race, gender, and the global network of empire. In the epistolary form typical of the period, the author emphasizes Olivia Fairfield’s learnedness in the English literary tradition. Beyond knowing Milton, Cowper, and Wordsworth, Olivia pulls the threads of their writing into her experiences as a woman of color, her outsider and insider critiques of English society, and her consciousness of that society’s global reach.

One such moment occurs shortly after Olivia has married her cousin and thus secured—or so she thinks—her place in English society. Exploring the “vast metropolis” of London with her husband, Olivia flies into raptures:

Oh, Mrs. Milbanke, England is, sure, the favoured isle, where benevolence has taken up her abode! Here she dwells, here she smiles, while, towards my native island, she turns her “far surveying,” her compassionate eye. She descries the sufferings of the poor negro, and promises benign assistance. —Yes! the cause of Afric’s injured sons is heard in England; and soon shall the slave be free!3

The passage echoes both Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches (1793) and Cowper’s The Task (1785). The term “far surveying,” as Lyndon J. Dominique glosses in the critical introduction to the Broadview edition, is drawn from Wordsworth’s account of a tour through the Alps in Sketches:4 “But now with other mind I stand alone / Sublime upon this far-surveying cone.”5 Wordsworth has just described the deaths of four notable men,6 including James Wolfe (1727–1759), who evokes colonial expansion as the so-called “conqueror of Canada.”7 But the poet ignores Wolfe’s imperial role, focusing on the men’s significance as heroes whose deaths arouse a passion that rivets the visitor to the scene. In the transition to the stanza above, Wordsworth turns from these figures, who have blended with the landscape, back to himself as he stands alone with “other mind,” a mere onlooker on the vast Alpine expanse.

Olivia’s use of the phrase far surveying changes this meaning. In her usage, the eye takes in an explicitly political geography of empire and looks forward to abolition, but not in any simple way. She personifies benevolence as an English maternal figure to “Afric’s injured sons” (reversing the gender dynamic of Olivia’s parents, a white planter father and an enslaved Black mother) who casts a “far surveying” eye to Jamaica. In so doing, Olivia implicitly identifies herself as the English mother who sees these sufferings and hears these cries. Throughout the novel, Olivia claims kinship both with her enslaved “brothers and sisters” and with their enslavers (77; emphasis in the original), and these identifications are mobile and relative rather than essentialized.8 In this scene, Olivia’s superior vantage to what she calls “the poor negro” skews toward identification with her white parent.9 Furthermore, her praise of England as the favored abode of benevolence echoes a passage from Cowper’s The Task in which he glorifies England’s free air, writing that “Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs / Receive our air, that moment they are free.”10 These lines recall the 1772 Mansfield ruling that James Somerset could not be reenslaved once he set foot on English soil—a decision that moved towards abolition, but also distinguished England from the colonies.11 Although Cowper challenges this thinking—“We have no Slaves at home- then why abroad?” (line 37)—his argument rests on the nationalist premise of a native English nobility. This premise also underlies Olivia’s description, which similarly absorbs the cognitive dissonance of acknowledging that the English established the conditions that created what are now objects of their compassion. The moment is then both subversive and complicit in empire. On the one hand, the woman of color is the owner of the “far surveying” eye whose Wordsworthian consciousness connects the metropole to the colony. On the other hand, the passage positions Olivia above enslaved people and rehearses the myth of English superiority. The novel thus breaches imperial boundaries through Olivia’s Romantic subjectivity, even as it foregrounds the uneasiness of these transatlantic crossings.

In its complex rendering of a free woman uncertainly positioned between England and Jamaica, and between enslaver and enslaved, The Woman of Colour introduces a shrewd cosmopolitanism to Romantic studies, as well as testifies to the varied textures of Black lives in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Beyond expanding these fields, The Woman of Colour can also pull their threads into our current moment and help scholars demonstrate to students and the broader public that the eighteenth century is ongoing. Students may be surprised that Olivia refers to herself as a woman of color, a phrase often assumed to be a modern accession to political correctness. Olivia’s vexed relationship to white women will also strike a note with contemporary women of color. As Kerry Sinanan puts it, Olivia’s sister-in-law Mrs. Merton is an eighteenth-century “Karen.”12 The contemporary term Karen, originating in humorous memes, has become a lightning rod for discussions about racism in 2020. While some commentators view it as a misogynistic dismissal of women, others, like Sinanan, see Karen as an important means of critiquing the role of white femininity in race relations. Karen names the worst attributes of middle-class women who use the gendered authority white supremacy affords to belittle those they see as social or racial inferiors. Mrs. Merton inflicts a similar form of violence (which later escalates) when she attempts to insult Olivia by serving her rice, exemplifying what Koritha Mitchell terms “know-your-place aggression” by reminding Olivia of her proximity to the enslaved people who subsist on this diet.13 Finally, the novel’s “strategic activism” expands our sense of the racial justice work that was possible in the eighteenth century: critiquing texts from that era does not necessitate demanding they meet twenty-first-century standards.14 The Woman of Colour appeared the year after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 but before slavery in the colonies was abolished in the 1830s. It was published at a transitional moment, when significant progress had been made but the work of abolition was not finished. It still is not.

ENDNOTES

[1] Kerry Sinanan et al., organizers, “Race, Pedagogy, and Whiteness: A Teach-In,” (video stream, August 6, 2020), https://utsa.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx?id=cb541de4-1fb4-4b5a-aa90-ac0f0132e86c&autoplay=false&offerviewer=true&showtitle=true&showbrand=false&start=0&interactivity=all.

[2] Sinanan et al., “Race, Pedagogy, and Whiteness: A Teach-In.”

[3] Lyndon J. Dominique, “Introduction,” in The Woman of Colour: A Tale (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2008), 95–96. All subsequent citations will be referenced parenthetically.

[4] Dominique, “Introduction,” The Woman of Colour, 96 n.2.

[5] William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, eds. Eric Birdsall and Paul M. Zall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984), lines 366–67.

[6] Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 88.

[7] See John Pringle, The Life of James Wolfe, the Conqueror of Canada, (London: printed for G. Kearsly, 1760), https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/apl7st/cdi_gale_digitalcollections_CY0101427355.

[8] Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement,” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, eds. Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 172.

[9] As Julie Murray notes, Olivia’s views and preference for the country at times align with sentimentalized depictions of reforming plantation owners who earn the gratitude of enslaved people through kindness. See “The Country and the City and the Metropole in The Woman of Colour,” Lumen 33 (2014): 87–99, 93, https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1026566ar.

[10] William Cowper, The Task, in The Task and Other Selected Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London: Routledge, 1994), book 2, line 41, https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/apl7st/cdi_proquest_ebookcentral_EBC4511815.

[11] Norman S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013), 296.

[12] Kerry Sinanan, “The Woman of Colour with Prof. Kerry Sinanan,” interview by Laura Burke and Hannah Chapman, Bonnets at Dawn, October 22, 2020, MP3 audio podcast, https://soundcloud.com/bonnetsatdawn/s45-e2-the-woman-of-colour-wprof-kerry-sinanan.

[13] Koritha Mitchell, “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care,” African American Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 253–262, 253.

[14] Dominique, “Introduction,” 37.

Enwhitenmen’ and The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Ap-proaches (Roundtable)

Roundtable by J. Ereck Jarvis
Enwhitenmen’ and The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Ap-proaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.14
Cite: Jarvis, Ereck J. 2021. “Enwhitenmen’ and The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Ap-proaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 45-47.
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Recently, in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, I regularly refer to Enwhitenmen’, a term I fashioned, though I deny any claim to its origination or ownership. The pun marks the maintenance of patriarchy and the development of white supremacy implicit in Enlightenment: the equation of “Universal reason” and “specific European logic . . . form[s] part of the unspoken epistemological matrix of European superiority, the Enlightenment’s legacy, a conflation that helped secure the hierarchical racial order of the imperial world.”1 I connect persistent racist colonizing influences of Enlightenment to my classroom by noting that university—our institution’s type, part of its name—gestures at “Universal reason” and that, for example, literary study at our school is almost exclusively in English (primarily British or American). I foreground the past racism of, say, Macaulay’s 1835 minutes on education as legacy of Enwhitenmen’ in its assertions that dialects of India “contain neither literary nor scientific information” and that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”2 Yet, I reenact Macaulay’s ideas institutionally and disciplinarily; I reinscribe the faux universality of English. Perhaps my use of Enwhitenmen’ as a critical term playfully invokes and promotes code-meshing, the espousal of multidialectalism particularly through the intentional blending of dialects in formal and informal speech to “reduce language prejudice and promote the power of language as opposed to the codes of power.”3 Yet, my code-meshing and critical invocation of it as a white cis-male professor are not radical or transformative articulations. Vershawn Ashanti Young explains, “The big deal is that for white people, it’s okay [to code-mesh]. But when minorities do it . . . we say it isn’t  . . . . We tell them that, in order for them to be successful, they have to turn off and deny a large part of themselves.”4 Obstinately tied up with Enwhitenmen’, the literary education I impart risks what Ross Gay protests as “one of the objectives of popular culture . . . to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness . . . to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering.”5

The Woman of Colour works to unsettle this conflation. Read alongside Dominique’s critical introduction and his “A Chronology of Women of Color in Drama and Long Prose,” the novel functions as one component of emergent literary history coincident with but divergent from Enwhitenmen’.6 The titular Olivia Fairfield demonstrates a self-possession bequeathed from her mother, Marcia, upon whose character she “love[s] to dwell” (55). An African woman enslaved by Olivia’s father, Marcia taught Mr. Fairfield to respect the humanity of Black peoples before dying in childbirth. Olivia, who denies her own heroic potential later in the novel, explains, “It was from my father that I adopted this opinion of my mother . . . and learned to venerate this sable heroine (for heroine I must call her)” (55). Such regard for her mother supports Olivia in advancing what Brigitte Fielder describes as a “radical articulation of mixed-race women’s alignment with enslaved people  . . . without ignoring the privileged position in which our woman of color is situated.”7

At “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the long 18thc: An Online Teach-In,” Fielder implicitly extended this argument. She applied “Black futurity” to other eighteenth-century works, positing ways in which Black authors from the period—constricted by the racist limitations of British society—imagine anti-racist reconfigurations, Black futures, through their writings.8 Fielder suggested that that eighteenth-century “Black futurity” is coterminous or co-operative with Afrofuturism, standardly recognized as a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon. Anticipating Fielder’s intervention, Danielle Fuentes Morgan asserts, “The term [Afrofuturism] itself is malleable because it treats these traditional realms of time and space, of identity and context, as malleable—it practices what it preaches. Past experience is contextualized through future insights, the future holds the possibilities of the past, and both influence the present.”9

Olivia Fairfield then operates not only as a “radical articulation” or “Black Atlantic figure” but also as a persistent participant in Black futurity.10 Olivia herself acknowledges this participation when, following the discovery that her husband’s previous wife remains alive, she departs from her newly established residence in New Park: “Shall I not go on, upheld by an approving conscience, and the bright hope of futurity?” (148). Olivia invokes a Christian futurity that is also necessarily a Black futurity. In her Christian devotion, she follows the “glorious example” of her mother whose race is reinforced in the identification of her strength “though an African slave.” Olivia’s discourse here bridges two instances when she actively applies herself to Black futurity: her anti-racist lesson for young George, son of Mrs. Leticia Merton, and the vocation she pursues in willfully returning to Jamaica at the novel’s conclusion—“ameliorating the situation . . . instructing the minds . . . mending the morals of our poor blacks” (188). In her return to Jamaica, she enacts moral justice, which her father, agent of Enwhitenmen’, “could not adopt” (55).

In a current course considering the bildungsroman and nineteenth-century British imperialism, The Woman of Colour fits neatly alongside Mansfield Park. Yet, it also destabilizes the components of the bildungsroman: subjectivity, national-historical time, and the nation “as the ultimate horizon of cultural identity and the largest unit to which one can bear any meaningful moral responsibility”—all constituents of Enwhitenmen’.11 What is Black-historical time? How does one read “human emergence . . . on the border between two epochs” when the latter continues to emerge presently?12 Olivia’s Black futurity cannot diminish the infinitude of suffering and destruction faced by Black peoples past and present. It reveals a counterhistory of Black women “striving for the future [they] want to see, right now, in the present,” a counternarrative “as imperative rather than subjunctive.”13 Such an imperative connects critically with the present in which we encounter it: it inquires the extent to which Olivia’s Black futurity has been realized. It likewise insists that current creation and endorsement of Black futurity are inextricable from those in The Woman of Colour.

ENDNOTES

[1] Anna Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 215. See also Justin E. H. Smith, Race and Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. ch. 9. For maintenance of patriarchy, see, for instance, Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21–22.

[2] Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Indian Education: Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835,” in Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, ed. G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 719–730: 721–722. On the relationships between knowledge, nation, national language, and colonialism, see Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 5 and ch. 6.

[3] Vershawn Ashanti Young, “Coda: The Power of Language” in Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2018), 153–156; 156. Over the last decade, code-meshing— embrace of “multidialectism not monodialectism”— has emerged especially in the fields of composition, TESOL, and education as a pedagogical alternative to code-switching (A. Suresh Canagara, “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 57, no. 4 [June 2006]: 586–619; 598). Code-switching asserts that students who grow up speaking undervalued languages and dialects, such as African American English or Black British English, should be taught to shift into dominant or mainstream English in formal contexts to better access power. According to Young, “code-switching is a racialized teaching method that manufactures linguistic segregation and unwittingly supports it in society” (Vershawn Ashanti Young, “Linguistic Double Consciousness” in Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy [Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2018], 55–65: 58). Code switching does not promote anti-racism but rather directs racial minorities to avoid racist judgment, thereby reenforcing white supremacy.

[4] Vershawn Ashanti Young in conversation as quoted in Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, “Code-Meshing and Responsible Education” in Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2018), 87–93: 89.

[5] Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019), 220. Commenting on the television series Being Bobby Brown, Gay here writes in an expressly American context. In recontextualizing his words, I do not intend to collapse racial and ethnic distinctions, but rather I hope momentarily to extend the meaning of Black to include the Blackness of students in my American classroom along with an earlier conception of the term as “a conscious political rather than a racial identification, used to forge allegiances between African and Indian anticolonial liberation activists” (Heidi Safia Mirza with Yasmin Gunaratnam, “‘the branch on which I sit’: reflections on black British feminism,” Feminist Review, no. 108 (2014): 125–133: 127).

[6] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008). All subsequent citations will be noted parenthetically.

[7] Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement,” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, eds. Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 171–185: 173.

[8] Brigitte Fielder, “18th-century African American Literature and Community” (lecture, “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the long 18thc: An Online Teach-in”, UTSA Department of English and Mills College Center for Faculty Excellence, Zoom, August 6, 2020). Cited with generous permission of Fielder. Part of this work is forthcoming in her “Early Black Futures,” African American Literature: In Transition, 17502015, Volume I, 1750–1800, ed. Rhondda Thomas. Cambridge University Press.

[9] Danielle Fuentes Morgan, “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Afrofuturism and Black Histories in Neo-Slave Narration.” Journal of Science Fiction 2, no. 3 (July 2018): 19–33: 19–20.

[10] Fielder, “Woman,” 173, 175.

[11] James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century Novels (Princeton: Princeton University, 2005), 47. On The Woman of Colour as bildungsroman, see Victoria Barnett-Woods, “Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour,Women’s Studies 45 (2016): 613–623. In Barnett-Woods’s thoughtful analysis, I resist her reading of the novel in strictly national terms.

[12] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59: 23.

[13] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 17.

From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)

Roundtable by Rebecca Anne Barr
From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.13
Cite: Barr, Rebecca Anne. 2021. “From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 41-44.
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In 2019–20, during the squalls of socioeconomic crisis that preceded the global pandemic, academics across the United Kingdom took industrial action to protest cuts to pensions, increases to workloads, and the increasing casualization of higher education. Before lockdown emptied universities, the escalating strike halted teaching in many places. Classrooms were quiet, picket lines less so. As precarity and casualization disproportionately affects Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) scholars, academic equality is also a racial issue.1 Writing on the tragic and untimely death of historian Thea Hunter, whose adjunct status deprived her of access to adequate health care, Adam Harris notes that casualized labor is “often described as akin to a form of slavery . . . [but] Thea, a scholar of rights, slavery, and freedom, would have [said] . . . that is not the case. It is more like the lowest rung in a caste system, the one that underrepresented minorities tend to call home.”2 If academia frequently relies on the labor of underpaid minorities, it trades on a phantasm of equal intellectual opportunities, which ironically helps sustain a reality of racialized hierarchies. Before America’s Black Lives Matter movement reignited a long-overdue reckoning with structural racism, issues of academic decolonization and British universities’ confrontation with the legacies of slavery, were combining to make 2020 an important moment to read The Woman of Colour.

As a Romantic-era fiction that satirizes the myth of enlightened Englishness and reveals the prevalence of white hostility, The Woman of Colour offered an ideal opportunity for a “teach out”: a learning event which analyzes a contemporary problem through an academic text.3 In its heroine, Olivia Fairfield, the novel concerns the living legacy of slavery and its transformative effect on romantic conventions. If romance threatens to “awaken a form of aesthetic or emotional response without a correspondent sense of responsibility,” Woman of Colour holds both its heroine and its reader to a rigorous sense of accountability.4 Systems of morality and pleasure exert competing pulls from the outset. Olivia’s religious conscience and “kindred claims” impel her to remain in Jamaica to proselytize and “meliorate” the enslaved. “But,” she laments, “my father willed it otherwise—Lie still then, rebellious and repining heart!”No “mere state machine,” her “heart revolts” (59) at the prospect of the marriage arranged by her white planter father. The projected union between Olivia and her cousin, Augustus Merton, aims at assimilating the financial and sexual products of Caribbean slavery into the libidinal system of (white) marriage: sentiment smoothing over violence.

Irrespective of professed benevolence, the novel shows how white paternalism brutalizes the dutiful protagonist: she is oppressed and estranged by both her filial obedience and her own desire. Olivia’s sanctioned love for Augustus proves inherently harmful. As Olivia’s mother, Marcia, is disavowed by the man she “loves,” so her daughter is likewise traduced by her husband, Augustus, who remains in thrall to the irradiating whiteness of his first wife, Angelina. Though she becomes besotted by Augustus’s goodness, Olivia is consistently aware of his ambivalence and the insufficiency of his desire, his distance, and lack of intimacy. His praise of Olivia’s “noble and dignified soul” palls beside his rapturously erotic reminiscence of Angelina’s “transparent skin of ivory” (102). Augustus’s rationalized acceptance of Olivia (and her dowry) bespeaks both a white savior complex and a fundamental incapacity for romantic reciprocity with a Black woman: “I must rescue her from a state of miserable dependence . . . my heart does not beat with the rapture of passion—How can I assail her with professions of love, whilst conscious that heart can never more feel that passion?” (102–104).6 As Western “economies of attraction . . . resemble more or less the economies of attraction of white supremacy,” Black and colored women are not merely deprecated but disposable.7 The novel thus illuminates the racial inequalities of love, providing an historical instance of what Averil Y. Clarke pungently calls “race-based romantic deprivation”: educated Black women marrying later and more rarely than their white peers and having fewer children because of adverse circumstance and reduced opportunity.These “symptoms of black women’s disadvantage in romance and marriage and racial inequality in the distribution of love” are clear in Olivia’s experience in England.9 Despite her superior intelligence and moral acuity, Olivia’s social position is marginal: as a wife, emotionally deprived; as a feme sole, subject to racist remarks and sexual objectification.

Despite her vulnerable status as a woman of color in England, Olivia attempts to assert “sexual citizenship”—that is, a claim to social protection from sexual violence and the liberty to choose whether to marry or reproduce.10 Since conventional romance “charts the heroine’s liberation from oppressive circumstances and the resolution of difference with a move into domesticity,” England should provide the locus for marital liberation.11 Instead, The Woman of Colour “rewrites the heterosexual love plot”: a Caribbean women’s “antiromance” which “rethinks alternative ways of belonging to the nation by shifting the focus to the sexual complexities of dwelling at home and abroad.”12 Once Augustus is reunited with the hyperfeminine Angelina, Olivia rejects a proposal from the milksop Honeywood. Quashing the prospect of interracial marriage and the consolations of sentiment, her decision also conveys a bracing skepticism about white men of feeling. But rather than tragedy or self-sabotage, Olivia’s refusal is resistance. The “Dialogue between the Editor and A Friend” robustly dismisses objections that the heroine ought to have received the hedonic dividends of romance. Having failed to “reward” Olivia “even with the usual meed of virtue—a husband!” the editor insists that “there is no situation in which the mind . . . may not resist itself against misfortune, and become resigned to its fate” (189, emphasis added).

Students’ responses to the ending confirm the continuing power the “happy ending” still exerts. Does the novel deliberately foreclose (Black) women’s sexuality, they ask, consigning Olivia to a sexless unhappily-ever-after in the West Indies? Here, I think, the novel challenges readers, asking us to take seriously the explicitly religious form of love and self-fulfillment Olivia elects. As Brigitte Fielder rightly argues, the “insistence on remaining single involves a radical reproductive choice, as women of color’s childbearing was often dictated (and even forced) within the white patriarchal system of enslavement. Olivia ultimately rejects the social reproduction of Englishness, whiteness, and empire, and embraces kinship with the African diaspora of the colonies.”13 But in its theological ultimatum, The Woman of Colour also poses a powerful argument for decolonial love.14 Defined by Joseph Drexler-Dreis as an expression of a faith which “calls and actualizes liberation,” decolonial love frees Olivia from love under the sign of white supremacy.15 By rejecting England, “not only as a physical referent in a political and economic sense, but also as a narrative or epistemological referent,” Olivia recognizes that libidinal relations within a colonial framework are frozen “into hierarchical patterns of domination.”16 What might read as resignation is recalibrated by that reflexive “resistance against misfortune”: failure is reconfigured as emotional opportunity, a new beginning rather than plot termination. She anticipates a “communion with and participation in God’s gratuitous love . . . [but most] specifically love concretized as solidarity with the oppressed . . . a praxis that moves toward liberation.”17 The novel thus proffers a distinctly theological response to colonial modernity, arguably born from evangelical Christianity. Returning Olivia to the West Indies, the novel suggests that “love is made concrete in history” not through the gratifications of the romance plot but through the labour of care for others: “struggles to reveal and shatter the structures of colonial modernity” which will remake the conditions for love itself.18

Reading The Woman of Colour in a time of gathering crisis counsels against comforting fictions of economic and libidinal fulfilment, of falling in love as a quick fix for prestige and cultural capital. As the success of the “postracial” TV series Bridgerton confirms, twenty-first-century readers are hungry for the generic consolations of regency romance. But The Woman of Colour transcends such ersatz imaginings by being the real thing in all its discomforting refusals. In light and humorous prose it deftly reveals the ways in which romantic narratives and forms of love are inherently racialized in the eighteenth century (and beyond). It subverts romance’s affirmation of personal happiness and individual fulfilment and chooses the jouissance of struggle. If pedagogy sometimes depends on imaginative pleasure to generate academic engagement, The Woman of Colour forces readers and educators alike to question our investment in “happy endings”, and to ask what forms of narrative might be compatible with love and respect.

ENDNOTES

[1] BAME is an acronym of “Black, Asian, and Ethnic Minorities,” and its usage is contested. However, the University and College Union (UCU) used it as a primary diagnostic in its survey on academic conditions (https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10899/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-May-20/pdf/ucu_he-precarity-report_may20.pdf), and it thus provides some insight into racial and ethnic disparity. See in particular 14–18 which details specific forms of precarity (fixed-term, hourly paid, zero hours, etc.) by race, ethnicity, and gender.

[2] Adam Harris, “The Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/adjunct-professors-higher-education-thea-hunter/586168/.

[3] See Eric Joyce, “From Teach-In to Teach-Out,” Center for Academic Innovation, University of Michigan, accessed January 7, 2021,

 https://ai.umich.edu/blog/from-teach-in-to-teach-out-recap-of-the-academic-innovation-forum-on-broadening-the-university-of-michigan-community/.

[4] Corinna Russell, Romance and the Ethics of Response, 1765–1837 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004) 7.

[5] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008), 55–6. All subsequent citations of the novel will be noted parenthetically.

[6] Coined by Teju Cole; the term defines self-serving interventions and philanthropy by white people for nonwhite people. See Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 12, 2012,

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/.

[7] Junot Diaz, “Junot Díaz on ‘De-colonial Love,’ Revolution and More” (keynote presentation, Facing Race Conference, 2012), accessed October 31, 2020, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/junot-diaz-de-colonial-love-revolution-and-more-video.

[8] Averil Y. Clarke, Inequalities of Love: College-Educated Black Women and the Barriers to Romance and Family (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.

[9] Clarke, Inequalities of Love, 21.

[10]. See Donette Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4.

[11] Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 4–5.

[12] Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 6.

[13] Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement,” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, eds. Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 171–185, 183.

[14] Joseph Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 4.

[15] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 3.

[16] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 1.

[17] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 4.

[18] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 4.

Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches

Roundtable by Kerry Sinanan
Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.12
Cite: Sinanan, Kerry. 2020. “Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches,” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 39-40.
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The Woman of Colour (1808), an epistolary novel by an anonymous author, remained out of print until 2008 when an authoritative, detailed new edition by Lyndon J. Dominique was published with Broadview. Featuring Olivia Fairfield, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her white “master,” the novel takes the reader from Jamaica to England. Olivia is sent to marry her white cousin Augustus Merton to whom she will bequeath £60,000 in return for being protected and assured of her freedom. As the daughter of an enslaved woman, remaining in Jamaica would be precarious, and, during her time in England, Olivia gains full independence and the wealth that enables her to return to Jamaica a free person. The plot is structured as a packet of letters that, like its antecedent Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), has been published by a fictional editor. Unlike Pamela, The Woman of Colour contains no editorial “preface.” Instead we have a concluding dialogue in which the fictional editor tells “a friend” that the purpose of the novel is to show how “virtue, like Olivia Fairfield’s, may truly be said to be its own reward.”[1] And so The Woman of Colour explicitly resituates eighteenth-century female virtue in an independent, legally unmarried woman—a woman of color, who leaves England for her home in Jamaica to pursue a better life. While the novel remains in many ways trapped within the plot conventions and gendered norms of the Romantic period, it simultaneously rejects them and offers trajectories of emancipation that unsettle gender, race, and nation. This double movement in the novel unsettles white hierarchies of moral superiority and liberal ideals exposing them to be less immutable than they appear.

The power of the novel, then, lies in the promise it holds to reach forward into a more multicultural future in which gender and race might not be such oppressive structures as they are in 1808. The very title, The Woman of Colour, is what many women today choose as a term that designates a politically conscious identity that is both defined by and resistant to whiteness. The term woman of colour came to prominence in the 1977 at the National Women’s Conference when The Black Women’s Agenda was being brought forward. As Loretta Ross explains in an interview,

All the rest of the “minority” women of color wanted to be included in the “Black Women’s Agenda.” Okay? Well, [the Black women] agreed . . . but you could no longer call it the “Black Women’s Agenda.” And it was in those negotiations in Houston [that] the term “women of color” was created. Okay? And they didn’t see it as a biological designation—you’re born Asian, you’re born Black, you’re born African American, whatever—but it is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been “minoritized.”2

Dominique’s detailed critical introduction suggests that the anonymous author, indeed, is likely to have been herself a woman of color. The author is thought to be Ann Wright, who was likely completing the novel just as the bill to abolish the British slave trade passed in 1807. Crucially, as Dominique tells us, the term “people of color” would, in eighteenth-century Britain, have been understood “to refer to specific groups of free people in the Americas—the gens de coleur in Haiti and free mixed-race and Negro North Americans, and mixed-race freedmen and women in Caribbean outposts” (21). The invocation of Haiti must have been fundamental to the term woman of colour as the liberatory consequences of the Haitian Revolution, and its second constitution, adopted in 1805, reverberated throughout the world. Dominique provides strong evidence that proposes, albeit inconclusively, that the author of the novel was Ann Wright, the mixed-race daughter of an English planter, Andrew Wright. Ann married a free man of color, Francis Maitland, in England in 1808 after her father’s death. Within this possible context, then, the title The Woman of Colour suggests a reforming multiracial, political solidarity, extending from the colonies as they fought for freedom to the morally stultified metropole.

In 2019, I set up a Facebook group called “Woman of Colour,” named after the novel. The group was intended to gather those of us in eighteenth-century studies and beyond who were teaching Woman of Colour and other texts that deal with enslavement, race, whiteness, and transatlantic histories. It was clear through discussion threads on the Facebook group “18thc Questions Quick Link,” and also at recent conference panels at ASECS meetings on the novel, that Dominique’s edition has made The Woman of Colour much more central to our teaching and research in intersecting areas of eighteenth-century studies. Important critical interventions have built on Dominique’s work. Notable examples include from Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire (2016), and Victoria Barnett-Woods, “Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour” in Women’s Studies (2016).                               

In the Facebook group “Woman of Colour,” the novel has become a site of multidisciplinary, academic solidarity and a hub for questioning the boundaries of disciplines and canons in the long period as many of us seek to “unwhiten” our syllabi and offer students texts that highlight the centrality of colonialism and enslavement to the period. This roundtable offers thoughts from a few of us on how we are teaching the novel and how it enables our incorporation of multidisciplinary approaches from Black Studies, gender studies, Critical Race Theory, and transatlantic historiography that both expose the endurance of slavery’s legacies and offer us the tools that eighteenth-century studies very much needs.

We dedicate this roundtable to British citizens who are descendants of the Windrush generation currently being illegally deported by the British government to Jamaica and the Caribbean.

ENDNOTES

[1] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008), 189. All subsequent citations of the novel will be noted parenthetically.

[2] Lisa Wade, “Loretta Ross on the Phrase, ‘Women of Color.’” The Society Pages, March 26, 2011, accessed January, 11, 2021. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/03/26/loreta-ross-on-the-phrase-women-of-color/