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.
