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.
