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.³ 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”.⁷ 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.

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.¹ 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.

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!”⁵ 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.⁸ 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.

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.
PDF

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/