New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

Julie Nash, Julie Nash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351152587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Devoted to the varied writings of the influential novelist, children's author, and educator, this collection situates Edgeworth's writing in the context of her life and times. Combining postcolonial, historical, and gender criticism, the contributors offer fresh readings of Edgeworth's novels, stories, letters, and educational texts, including Belinda, Moral Tales, Practical Education, Helen, and The Absentee. Throughout her work, Edgeworth confronts a world whose values, while grounded in tradition and supported by slavery and colonial domination, are being challenged and ultimately changed in surprising ways by women, peasants, servants, and other voices from the margins. In discussing Edgeworth and her writing, the contributors also offer innovative perspectives on the novel and other central issues of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The collection will be invaluable to established scholars working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, women's studies, and children's literature, as well as to students encountering Edgeworth for the first time.

Chapter 1
West Indian Obeah and English 'Obee':
Race, Femininity, and Questions of
Colonial Consolidation in
Maria Edgeworth's Belinda¹

Alison Harvey

I

In her novel of English manners, Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth stages the story of Belinda’s quest for a suitable husband as a morality tale in which deviant exemplary women serve as models of behavior among which Belinda must choos rightly if she is to marry successfully. Edgeworth presents the shortcomings of th dissipated aristocrat Lady Delacour, the too-radical antics of the mannish Harriet Freke, and the successes of the exemplary wife and mother, Lady Percival, as lessons on Belinda’s road to marital happiness. In order to clear the way for Belinda’s progress, the novel requires that the ‘failed’ women be integrated into or excised from the narrative; thus Lady Delacour is reformed into a good wife mother, while Harriet Freke is removed from the novel, last seen with her leg caught in a ‘man-trap’ (Belinda 309).

Edgeworth’s technique of portraying clearly good and bad characters as moral models for her protagonist—and for the reader as well—is characteristic of her work and can be seen in her Moral Tales (1801) as well as in her novels and plays.² But in Belinda, as in several of her other works, Edgeworth also interrupt those binaries, in the form of characters that cannot be contained within the simply moralistic binary schema. Thus even as the narrative of Belinda’s development into a sensible and properly married woman requires the excision of the mannish Harriet Freke from the narrative, the novel first maps Harriet’s distance from English domestic society by aligning her with the obeah woman, a figure in African-Caribbean culture who was feared by white West Indian plantocrats for her notorious involvements in Maroon and slave rebellions. In making this link, Edgeworth implies that the threat that Harriet’s gender-bending antics pose to the social order represented by the English family is in some sense parallel to the threat posed by the black obeah woman to white English colonial order in the West Indies.

Critics have for the most part interpreted Edgeworth’s portrayal of Harriet Freke as an obeah woman as an expression of Edgeworth’s anxious and conservative views regarding Harriet’s radical feminism and the institution of slavery.³ But none has noted the multiple relationships that Edgeworth establishes in this novel between English women and both slaves and West Indian Creoles, relationships through which Edgeworth draws implicit parallels between the sexual subordination of Englishwomen and the ethnic i and racial inferiority attributed by English society to slaves and West Indian Creoles. A close examination of these relationships suggests that Edgeworth is not simply enacting what Andrew McCann identifies as a dual containment of difference and insurgency (McCann 56-58). On the contrary, by aligning English women with Creole and African-Caribbean figures whose marginalizations she views with some ambivalence throughout her work, Edgeworth constructs a more complex view of women’s positions in what McCann calls ‘Enlightenment conjugality’ than critics have hitherto considered.⁴

Noting Edgeworth’s tendency to undermine binary structures of thought Esther Wohlgemut has argued that, in her Irish novels such as Castle Rackrent (1800) and Ennui (1809), Edgeworth offers a redefinition of nationalism that is neither English nor Irish but rather blurs the boundary between such national identities.⁵ In her treatment of English colonialist structures of thought in Belinda, Edgeworth blurs conventional views of two other categories as well—gender and race. Such blurrings, which also appear in Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bullls (1802), ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1804), and The Two Guardians (1817), suggest that, while Edgeworth neither endorses the radical feminism of her contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, nor holds a radical view of slaves’ emancipation efforts, she nonetheless offers a critique of the hegemonic power assumed by white English patriarchal society. In Belinda, Edgeworth exposes how a society based on white male privilege views both women and non-whites as ‘others’ whose potential to disrupt social, economic, and domestic English structures must be contained. The irruptions into Belinda’s English world of West Indian Creoles and African-Caribbean slaves, and the structural parallels Edgeworth draws between English women and these ‘other’ characters, derail any understanding of her novel as a straightforward narrative of Belinda’s progress toward a seamless integration into rational English domesticity. Rather than read Edgeworth as aligned with the white colonial power she explores in Belinda and other works, my analysis will show that she is—in surprising ways—its critic.

II

In regard to Edgeworth’s complicated an st ce toward race, sexual difference, and questions of colonial power, the revisions Edgeworth made to Belinda for its publication in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s 1809 British Novelists Series are particularly revealing. These revisions concentrated on rewriting those parts of the plot dealing with the relationship between Belinda and the West Indian Creole planter, Mr. Vincent, and the marriage between Vincent’s black servant, Juba, and Lady Delacour’s white servant, Lucy. ⁶ Kathryn Kirkpatrick reads both revisions as Edgeworth’s removal of the threat of inter-racial alliances from her novel of English manners. As Edgeworth explains in a letter to Barbauld, her decision to rewrite the inter-racial marriage of Juba and Lucy as an inter-class one between ‘Jackson’ and Lucy came as a result of ‘gentlemen’s’ reactions to her novel: ‘My father says that gentlemen have horrors upon this subject, and would draw conclusions very unfavorable to a female writer who appeared to recommend such unions; as I do not understand the subject, I trust to his better judgment’ (quoted in Kirkpatrick 342).

As Kirkpatrick points out, however, ‘this kind of mixed-race marriage [as that between Juba and Lucy] was far from unheard-of in late-eighteenth-century English society’ as slaves had been brought back to England as servants ‘since the beginning of the slave trade’ and ‘did sometimes marry lower-class English servants’ (342). In her novel, Edgeworth presents informed portrayals of West Indian Creoles and slaves and their ambivalent status in England, through her portrayals of Vincent’s colonial inheritance and his position as ward to the benevolent English gentleman, Percival; Juba’s position as a freed slave in England; and Harriet Freke’s ‘obeah’ tricks and Juba’s responses to them Edgeworth certainly seems to ‘understand’ a substantial amount about colonial and race matters in England at the time, and thus her disavowal—‘I do not understand the subject’—seems disingenuous at the very least, and is difficult to read without hearing in it a level of irony.

Kirkpatrick suggests that what shocked readers of Edgeworth’s novel was not that Edgeworth had imagined an inter-racial marriage but that she had given ‘social sanction to such a marriage’ (342) in Belinda. I would further argue that if there is anything that Edgeworth ‘do[es] not understand [about] the subject,’ it is not the subject itself but rather the fact that ‘gentlemen’ would find such a portrayal by a ‘female writer’ so particularly unsettling. In the idea that an inter-racial marriage portrayed by a woman writer is particularly offensive to ‘gentlemen' readers, questions of gender, race, and power intersect. There seems something almost equally threatening in a woman's having portrayed an inter-racial relationship as there is in the inter-racial relationship itself. Edgeworth’s revisions, and her comments to her father, suggest that Edgeworth was not unaware of such intersections. To return to her portrayal of Harriet Freke as an obeah woman, one could argue that in this portrayal of Freke, whose frightening of Juba mu explained and soothed by Belinda’s scientific explanation of an apparently supernatural phenomenon, Edgeworth in some sense defines white English womanhood against racial others in Belinda. But, even as she at times defines Englishness against otherness, she also portrays in this novel a discomfort with how the two distinct categories of gender and race are in fact conflated in a white English male perspective, one that views both women and blacks as others to mainstream English society and as threats to English domestic and colonial stability.

This reading runs against the grain of the marriage plot that appears structure Edgeworth’s novel, but that plot resists straightforward readings, not least because of the way Edgeworth literally stages her novel’s closing scene as a highly artificial tableau of domestic bliss. Edgeworth’s narration of this final scene acknowledges the artificiality and illusory quality of narrative representation as Lady Delacour offers to ‘finish the novel for [Belinda],’ and proceeds to arrange the characters ‘in proper attitudes for stage-effects’ (478). Lady Delacour places Captain Sunderland and Virginia kneeling at Virginia’s father’s feet, and to Clarence she gives ‘the right to Belinda’s hand’ despite Belinda’s implicit resistance (‘Nay, miss Portman,’ says Lady Delacour, ‘it is the rule of the stage' [478]). Finally, Lady Delacour places herself in a posture of being embraced by her husband, who holds their daughter Helena’s hand: ‘There!’ Lady Delacour exclaims; ‘Quite pretty and natural!’ (478).

The fact that Lady Delacour has to arrange all the now-presumably-happy couples in positions which even they do not seem to find entirely comfortable reveals the uncertainties within the narrative that leads to this scene. The kneeling position of Virginia (the daughter of the West Indian planter Hartley) and her affianced, the English captain who saved her father from a West Indian slave rebellion, finds an echo in Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), where the kneeling of an Irish peasant before his Anglo-Irish landlord and ‘master’ is seen as an inappropriate deference to paternal and colonial authority: ‘And my father was dropping down on his knees, but the master would not let him; and obsarved, that posture should only be for his God’ (The Absentee 277). Lady Delacour’s direction to Belinda to give her hand to Clarence co ntains the hint of Belinda’s reluctance to do so, and Lady Delacour’s own assertion that ‘what signifies being happy, unless we appear so?’ undermines the putative moral of the novel: that appearances are not what are most important to happiness.

In fact, although the novel purports to narrate a liberation of its characters from the baneful effects of false appearances, it belies its own appearances, not just in the final scene but at several other points as well. One such slippage occurs in the portrayal of the Creole heir, Vincent. Critics have asserted that, in preventing Belinda from marrying Vincent, Edgeworth enacts a rejection of his racial ambiguities as a Creole. ⁷ Vincent, though loosely positioned as white in the novel, is, as a Creole, identified by the English in the novel with the ‘negroes’ among whom he was raised and from whom he learned his inveterate gambling habits.⁸ In suggesting that Vincent’s penchant for gambling is due to the corrupting influence of his plantation slaves, Edgeworth alludes to turn-of-the-century discourses that viewed slaves’ practices of obeah and their habits of gambling as dual proofs of their uncivilized and irreligious natures.⁹

In the context of those discourses, Belinda’s rejection of Vincent for his seemingly fatal flaw of gambling could be read as her seeing that habit as a racial taint that Vincent has picked up in the West Indies and, further, as her cloaking her resistance to his otherness. Rather than endorsing Belinda’s rejection of Vincent, however, Edgeworth complicates it, for while it is true that Vincent is ruined at Mrs. Luttridge’s table, he is ruinon ed ly because she is cheating. The novel emphasizes the way in which Vincent is the ‘victim’ of the calculating Mrs. Luttridge, who ‘hesitated only whether it would be more her interest to marry him to her niece, or to content herself with his fortune. . . [T]he aunt, careless of her niece’s disappointment, determined that Mr. Vincent should be her victim; and sensible that she must not give him time for reflection, she hurried him on' (Belinda 427). While Edgeworth has Belinda reject Vincent because of his gambling tendencies, she also makes it clear that an English woman’s manipulation of him is the true source of his downfall. Belinda’s rejection of Vincent solely for his gambling tendencies thus emerges in the novel as a moment in need of further explanation. While Vincent is not, ultimately, ‘redeemed’ in the novel by being allowed the ‘right to Belinda’s hand,’ his being positioned by Edgeworth as the victim of a scheming and morally-bereft society woman—with whom Lady Delacour has fought a duel and whose character resembles that of Lady Delacour before her ‘reformation’—conveys the idea that Vincent’s ‘one fatal propensity' (444) is at least in part exacerbated by English societal pressures, even as it is not totally disavowed in the novel as connected to his West Indian character.

The slippage between Belinda’s responses to Vincent and Edgeworth's own characterization of him as Mrs. Luttridge’s victim suggests that, whatever association Belinda’s rejection may imply between Vincent’s gambling habits and his racially ambiguous status as a Creole, Edgeworth questions the idea of his being tainted by West Indian culture and also questions the rightness of Belinda's rejection of him. In tandem with Edgeworth’s characterization of Harriet Freke’s threat to English culture as that of the socially threatening obeah woman portrayal of Vincent’s gambling as the flaw Belinda cannot forgive aligns Freke and Vincent with colonial outsiders denied legitimacy in English culture. A contemporary of Edgeworth’s, Benjamin Mosely, in A Treatise on Sugar (second ed. 1800), emphasizes the imagination needed for gambling, and links it with the imagination involved in the practice of obeah, remarking that ‘obi [obeah], and gambling are the only instances. . . among the natives of the negro land in Africa, in which any effort of combining ideas has ever been demonstrated’ (quoted in Richardson 18). Although Mosely’s remarks on obeah and gambling are meant to denigrate both of these activities (as well as the African-West Indians who practice them), they also reveal how both of these instances of colonial imagination were seen as threats to the stability of the colonial and English economic order. Edgeworth distances herself from Belinda’s rejection of Vincent by stating that Mrs. Luttridge’s scheming avarice is at least as much to blame for Vincent's failures as his own ‘native’ gambling habits. The narrative thus begins to articulate the idea that, rather than there being a parallel between Belinda’s attitude and Edgeworth’s, a more compelling series of parallels can be drawn between Mrs. Luttridge’s exploitation of Vincent, Belinda’s rejection of him, and the colonial fear of the gambling native as threat to colonial stability.

As Kirkpatrick argues, although Vincent is set up in the novel in the terms of a stereotypically intemperate West Indian whose actions and property are in need of control by his English guardian (Mr. Percival), Vincent’s property is ultimately ‘withheld from the novel’s ideal patriarch. Rather than depicting the reintegration of colonial wealth into the English social system, Edgeworth sunders the connection between Mr. Percival and his Creole ward’ (Kirkpatrick 347). In her thoughtful reading, Kirkpatrick argues that in severing Percival from his ward (and his ward’s money), Edgeworth evinces an undercurrent of resistance to English absorption of colonial fortunes and thus grants some independence to Vincent as a colonial figure whose property is not successfully absorbed into white mainstream English societ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Story to Tell
• 1 West Indian Obeah and English 'Obee': Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda
• 2 Maria and Rachel: Transatiantic Identities and the Epistolary Assimilation of Difference
• 3 Not the Angel in the House: Intersections of the Public and Private in Maria Edgeworth's Moral Tales and Practical Education
• 4 Maria Edgeworth and the 'True Use of Books' for Eighteenth-Century Girls
• 5 Finding Her Own Voice or 'Being on Her Own Bottom': A Community of Women in Maria Edgeworth's Helen
• 6 'I thought I never set my eyes on a finer figure of a man': Maria Edgeworth Scrutinizes Masculinity in Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee
• 7 Revising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belinda
• 8 'Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy': Servants in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda
• 9 Justice, Citizenship, and the Question of Feminine Subjectivity: Reading The Absentee as a Historical Novel
• 10 Maria Edgeworth and the Irish 'Thin Places'
• Index