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.2
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.
