Abstract
The publishing history of Maria Edgeworth’s second novel, Belinda, registers the anxieties of a society intensely involved in debates over the abolition of slavery and the proper management of British colonies in the West Indies. By the time the novel went into its third edition in 1810, the depiction of interracial marriage in the previous two editions (1801 and 1802) had been all but erased, principally at the suggestion of Edgeworth’s father.1 In these earlier editions of the novel Juba, the African servant of a Jamaican plantation owner, marries an English farmer’s daughter and settles with her as a tenant on an English estate. The 1810 text removed the trauma of miscegenation for a reactionary audience not by omitting the Juba character completely, but by replacing him in this conjugal scenario with the ubiquitously named James Jackson. As Suvendrini Perera points out, this alteration appeased the most recalcitrant antiabolitionist fears about racial mixing and the integrity of British women in a metropolis overrun by freed slaves.2 The revisions do not efface Edgeworth’s own abolitionist sympathies, which are evident elsewhere in the novel, but they do affect the politics of the text in ways that might at first seem unexpected.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: a Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) pp. 494–5 and Suvindrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: the English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp. 29–30. See Kathryn Kirkpatrick, “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject”: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 5, no. 4 (1993) pp. 331–48 for a more detailed discussion of the changes made in the 1810 text.
My notion of non-identity is derived from Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which turns on an elucidation of the relationship between philosophical modernity and the drive towards identity. See Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995).
See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) pp. 59–95
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) pp. 10–11.
G. J. Barker-Benfield discusses Belinda in the context of Edgeworth’s response to Wollstonecraft. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) pp. 386–95.
Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early EighteenthCentury Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) p. 154.
Daniel Defoe, Roxana (1724; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) p. 171.
Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 8. See also Susan Greenfield’s ‘“Abroad and at Home”: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda’, PMLA, vol. 112, no. 3 (March, 1987) pp. 214–228, which offers a parallel reading of sexual ambiguity and the image of the Amazon in the novel.
Gary Kelly’s discussion of Elizabeth Hamilton’s 1796 Letters to Hindu Raja and her 1800 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers highlights the association between irrational idolatry, Quixotism and political radicalism in anti-Jacobin fictions. The figure of the Quixote in anti-Jacobin novels, I’d argue, is closely allied to the irrationality of the fetish in Edgeworth’s text. See Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 140–6 especially.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (London: Everyman’s Library, 1974) pp. 135–9.
See Alan Richardson’s ‘Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture 1797–1807’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 32 (Spring 1993) pp. 2–28, for a detailed survey of obeah in British sources and their relationship to British attitudes towards the West Indies.
James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London, 1784) p. 3.
These arguments are virtually ubiquitous in late-eighteenth-century abolitionist writing. See, for example, Ramsay, pp. 113–29 especially, but also Joseph Woods, Thoughts on the Slavery of Negroes (London, 1784) and John Gray, An Essay on the Abolition, Not Only of African Slavery, but of Slavery in the British West Indies (London, 1792).
See Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 3 vols (London, 1794) vol. 2, pp. 90–101, and An Introductory Account, Containing Observations on the Disposition, Character, Manners, and Habits of the Life of the Maroons, published with The Proceedings of the Governor and Assembly of Jamaica in Regard to Maroon Negroes (London, 1796), Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols (London: T. Lowndes, 1774) vol. 2, pp. 447–52, 473, and William Burdett, The Life and Exploits of Three-Finger’d Jack, the Terror of Jamaica, with a Particular Account of the Obi (Sommers Town: A Neil, 1801). See also Mavis C. Campell, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796: a History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal (Granby, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1988) pp. 176–8, for a discussion of the Maroon leader ‘nanny’, who also seems to have been an obeah practitioner.
See Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Men: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (Spring 1984) pp. 125–133, and ‘Sly Civility’, October, 34 (Fall 1985) pp. 72–80.
See ibid., vol. 2, pp. 96–101.
Edwards, An Introductory Account, pp. xxx-xxxi
Edwards, An Introductory Account, p. xxxi
‘The Grateful Negro’, in Tales and Novels by Maria Edgeworth, vol. 2 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1893) p. 399.
Moira Ferguson has discussed ‘The Grateful Negro’ in the context of abolitionist womeri s literature more generally, revealing the predominance of the tendency to valorize the transition from slavery to contractual obligation in explicitly sentimental terms. See Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992) pp. 231–4.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991) p. 99.
Thomas Day, The Dying Negro: a Poem (London, 1793) pp. 25–7.
Maria and Robert L. Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols (London, 1801) vol. 2, p. 105.
Heather Macfadyen, ‘Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 48, no. 4 (March 1994) pp. 428.
Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995) p. 162
Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968) p. 95.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Andrew McCann
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McCann, A. (1999). Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. In: Cultural Politics in the 1790s. Romanticism In Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376977_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376977_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40820-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37697-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)