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Transferential Rhetoric and Beyond: The West Indian Presence in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray

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Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond

Abstract

By engaging with the Burkean family metaphor through their considerations of the national importance of motherhood, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805) provide an intersectional study of class, race and gender in the context of the abolitionist movement. Despite rehearsing colonial power dynamics by portraying their slave characters as in need of the care and condescension of British women, Edgeworth and Opie also engage in a discourse of “colonial cosmopolitanism” through their extension of “grateful negro” tropology. Characterising their freed and escaped slaves as the moral arbiters of a greedy and unscrupulous British society, Edgeworth’s and Opie’s fictions question the slave system and seek to reform both domestic and colonial conduct.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 reprint), 55.

  2. 2.

    Ibid.

  3. 3.

    Michelle Faubert, “The Fictional Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Literary Compass 12, no. 12 (2015): 656.

  4. 4.

    The largest slave revolt in Jamaica had taken place in 1760, while Saint Domingue’s rebellion of 1791–1804 was ongoing at the time of the publication of Edgeworth’s novel. The years 1795–1796 also saw the Second Maroon War in Jamaica between the Maroons of the Trelawny settlement and the British.

  5. 5.

    See Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 144. For passage from Burke, see Edmund Burke, Reflections on Revolution in France (1790), ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47.

  6. 6.

    Yoon Sun Lee, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24.

  7. 7.

    For a discussion of the transmission of Kant in Britain throughout the 1790s, see Michael Scrivener, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 63.

  8. 8.

    Although David Simpson does not discuss Hermsprong, Marilyn Butler was the first critic to consider the revelatory potential of Bage’s hero. For a discussion of Hermsprong, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 76–85. For Simpson’s discussion of the “stranger” as an “inciter of change,” see David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 52.

  9. 9.

    See Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 9.

  10. 10.

    For the fullest account of Edgeworth’s biography, see Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

  11. 11.

    Burke quoted in Kevin Whelan, “The Other within: Ireland, Britain and the Act of Union,” in Acts of Union: The Causes Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union, ed. Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 20.

  12. 12.

    Gary Kelly offers a particularly full consideration of the conservative reaction to the French Revolution in novels of the period. See Gary Kelly, Women Writing and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  13. 13.

    I borrow the terms “court culture” and “courtly woman” from Gary Kelly’s work, cited above. See pp. 2–26 for Kelly’s discussion of the terms.

  14. 14.

    Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 41.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 42.

  16. 16.

    Quoted in Patricia A. Matthew, “Corporeal Lessons and Genre Shifts in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 4, no. 1 (2008), para. 11 of 20, http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue41/matthew.htm (accessed February 21, 2017).

  17. 17.

    Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 2.

  18. 18.

    Edgeworth, Belinda, 25 (see note 14).

  19. 19.

    Both Kathleen B. Grathwol and Alison Harvey, amongst other critics, have discussed Day’s influence on the “Hervey and Virginia” subplot. See Kathleen B. Grathwol, “Maria Edgeworth and the ‘True Use of Books’ for Eighteenth-Century Girls,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 75; and Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’,” 10 (see note 17). Day’s relationship with the Edgeworths has also been explored by Sophia Woodley in “‘Oh Miserable and Most Ruinous Creature’: The Debate between Private and Public Education in Britain, 1760–1800,” in Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices, ed. Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 26.

  20. 20.

    Edgeworth, Belinda, 362 (see note 14).

  21. 21.

    Natalie Taylor Fuehrer explores Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Emile in detail in The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Routledge, 2007), 39–62.

  22. 22.

    For discussion of the Creole wife, see Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 28.

  23. 23.

    Edgeworth, Belinda, 391 (see note 14).

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 233.

  25. 25.

    Berman, Creole Crossings, 93 (see note 22) and Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’” (see note 17).

  26. 26.

    Edgeworth, Belinda, 392 (see note 14).

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 206.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 312.

  29. 29.

    For a fuller discussion of the works of the Scottish physician, philosopher and travel writer, Dr. John Moore, see Henry L. Fulton, Dr John Moore, 1729–1802: A Life in Medicine, Travel, and Revolution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015).

  30. 30.

    For a fuller discussion of the West Indian marriage plot in Edgeworth’s novel and of interracial marriage in domestic society, see Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick, “‘Gentlemen have horrors upon this subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no. 4 (1993): 342 for quotation from Edgeworth’s letter to her aunt in which she details her father’s reaction to Juba’s marriage.

  31. 31.

    Edgeworth, Belinda, 244 (see note 14).

  32. 32.

    As Peter J. Kitson has pointed out, not only did Thomas Clarkson valorise African manufactures, but he also praised African language and art. Although he viewed African societies as being at an earlier stage of development than the nations of Europe, Clarkson’s views are still noteworthy for their attempts to sympathetically portray African cultures as, in many ways, equal to those of Europe. See Peter Kitson, “‘Bales of Living Anguish’: Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing,” ELH 67, no. 2 (2000): 520–21.

  33. 33.

    Kant’s cosmopolitanism relied upon the argument that the development of reason would promote an interconnectedness between all humanity given that “reason could be fully developed only in the species, but not in the individual” (italics mine). See Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings, trans. David L. Colclasure, ed. Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 5. Esther Wohlgemut has also explored cosmopolitan impulses in Edgeworth’s fiction, but with specific reference to Edgeworth’s Irish novels. See Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 71–94.

  34. 34.

    Berman, Creole Crossings, 97 (see note 22).

  35. 35.

    Mitzi Myers, “Godwin’s ‘Memoirs’ of Mary Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject,” Studies in Romanticism 20, no. 3 (1981): 302.

  36. 36.

    See, for instance, Patricia A. Matthew, “Biography and Mary Wollstonecraft in Adeline Mowbray and Valperga,” Women’s Writing 14, no. 3 (2007): 382–98.

  37. 37.

    Roxanne Eberle addresses criticism of Amelia Opie’s apparent “conservative turn” in her reading of Adeline Mowbray. See Roxanne Eberle, “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, The Vindication of a Fallen Woman,” Studies in the Novel 26, no. 1 (1994): 124–25.

  38. 38.

    Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray, or the Mother and Daughter, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 4.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 41.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 27. For a discussion of stereotypes surrounding the absentee Irishman, particularly in theatre, see Maureen Waters, The Comic Irishman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 41–57.

  42. 42.

    Opie, Adeline Mowbray, 27 (see note 38).

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 138.

  45. 45.

    Ibid.

  46. 46.

    Carol Howard, “‘The Story of the Pineapple’: Sentimental Abolitionism and Moral Motherhood in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 3 (1998): 359.

  47. 47.

    See Anne K. Mellor, “‘Am I not a Woman, and a Sister?’ Slavery, Romanticism and Gender,” in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 322 and Joanne Tong, “The Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Finding the Family in Amelia Opie’s Novels,” Studies in the Novel 36, no. 4 (2004): 478.

  48. 48.

    Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 41.

  49. 49.

    Eberle, “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” 142 (see note 37).

  50. 50.

    Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 52 (see note 8).

  51. 51.

    Edgeworth’s sentimental novella “The Grateful Negro” was published in 1804.

  52. 52.

    For a discussion of the so-called plantation pastoral, see David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 178. The fullest and most recent account of “grateful slave fictions” in the period is found in George Boulukos’ The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  53. 53.

    Josiah Wedgwood, of course, was a noted abolitionist and head of the Wedgwood pottery factory. Throughout the 1780s his factory produced a famous medallion featuring a supplicant slave with the motto “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” around its edge. For a fuller discussion of Wedgwood’s role in abolitionism, see The Wedgwood Museum Website http://www.wedgwoodmuseum.org.uk/learning/discovery_packs/pack/lives-of-the-wedgwoods/chapter/slavery (accessed April 7, 2017).

  54. 54.

    Opie, Adeline Mowbray, 144–45 (see note 38).

  55. 55.

    Howard, “The Story of the Pineapple,” 356 (see note 46).

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 38.

  57. 57.

    For Adam Smith’s discussion of the dangers of monopoly economics in the West Indies, see Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Andrew Skinner, 5th edn (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), IV, 193.

  58. 58.

    I use Tong’s terminology, here, though Tong refers to the “corollary” between slave traders and “the nation’s fathers.” Although he owns slaves, Berrendale is not a trader. See Tong, “The Return of the Prodigal Daughter,” 478 (see note 47).

  59. 59.

    Eberle, “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” 142 (see note 37).

  60. 60.

    Opie, Adeline Mowbray, 183 (see note 38).

  61. 61.

    Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 40 (see note 48).

  62. 62.

    See Susan C. Greenfield, “Mothers, Daughters, and Mulatto: Women’s Exchange in Adeline Mowbray,” in Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance Frances Burney to Jane Austen, by Susan C. Greenfield (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 134.Greenfield also dedicates a chapter each to Belinda and Adeline Mowbray in her study.

  63. 63.

    Howard, “The Story of the Pineapple,” 363 (see note 46).

  64. 64.

    For critics unsatisfied with the close of Opie’s novel, see, for instance, Eberle, “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” 146 (see note 37). For discussion of the “spinster cluster” see Amanda Vickery, “No Happy Ending? At Home with Miss Bates in Georgian England,” Persuasions 37 (2015): 136.

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  1. Department of English Literature, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

    James M. Morris

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    Barbara Leonardi

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Morris, J.M. (2018). Transferential Rhetoric and Beyond: The West Indian Presence in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_8

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