Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750

Catherine Ingrassia

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780813948102
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This "domestic captivity" was inextricably connected to England's systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period.

This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood.

Chapter 1

Cultures of Captivity

Captive Subjects

Martin Madan, husband of poet Judith Cowper Madan (1702–81), was by any measure a man of privilege. The son of a West Indian plantation-owner, the Cambridge-educated Martin (1700–56) rose to the rank of colonel in the King’s Dragoon Guards, was appointed as a member of the household of Frederick, the Prince of Wales, and, near the end of his life, served as a member of Parliament.1 Perpetually insolvent and something of a spendthrift, Martin pinned his financial aspirations on the potential profits to be realized from sugar plantations he owned in Nevis and Antigua, operations dependent on the labor of enslaved people. Like many gentlemen of his class and generation, Martin recognized how the West Indies could make a man rich; his father had “made his fortune there,” his maternal grandfather had been governor of Nevis, and Martin himself held the unrealized aspiration to be governor of the Leeward Islands.2 Martin had an intimate understanding of the colonial enterprise.

Despite Martin’s self-described role as “a Proprietor in the Land of Canaan” (February 12, 1732), a reference to the land and human property that comprised his West Indian holdings, Martin perceived himself to be unfree. He “repines” his condition as an “unhappy dependent” and desires to be “releas’d” from “this Disagreeble confinement.” He laments that “I have not a minute I can call my own.” He repeatedly uses the language common to the institutionalized system of colonial enslavement—a system in which he is an agent of control—as a metaphor for his own life. Explicitly comparing himself to an enslaved laborer on his own plantation, Martin asks “when shall I be free?”3 Martin introjects a paradigm of captivity into the narrative of his own life.4 He conceives of his situation as one of subjection—to the demands of his commanders, to the Prince and his entourage (“my fate is in the Hand of Courtiers”), and to domestic pressures from afar. Most keenly, perhaps, he feels constrained by an economic instability exacerbated by the failure to realize financial gains from his West Indian holdings.5 A man with connections to some of the most powerful people in the empire nevertheless believes he lives a life of confinement, a life characterized by restraint rather than liberty. Martin’s expressions of frustration provide a glimpse of the complex, interdependent web of power and powerlessness, liberty and restraint, shaping all but the most rarified existence during this period. He is most certainly not enslaved, yet he believes himself to be not fully free. He understands himself to be a captive subject.

The irony of such an attitude from a slave-owning white man like Martin is not lost on the twenty-first-century reader. Martin, attempting to profit from the labor of enslaved humans commodified on a global scale, remains enured to the institutionalized violence he enables, and focuses instead on easing the social and financial strictures he believes limit his own life. Like other absentee landlords of the West Indies, he seems, in Simon Gikandi’s words, “oblivious to the lived experience of slavery.” Gikandi observes how the brutal reality of slavery “could be strictly quarantined” from the “consciousness and everyday existence” of those owning plantations and estates.6 While such a lack of consciousness could result from geographic distance (Martin left Nevis by the time he was eight years old), it also stemmed from attitudes that naturalized the condition of captivity. The perpetual bondage of enslaved people is never questioned or commented upon; their condition detailed only in connection to their capacity for labor. Every element of the situation is normalized. Surrounded by the scaffolding of captivity, Martin remains completely unreflective about the vast divide between his situation and that of the human property he owns and to whom he so readily compares himself.7

Martin’s indifference to the foundational and institutional inequalities that structure eighteenth-century culture extends, unsurprisingly, to his marriage.8 Despite his expressed affection for his wife, Judith, Martin, like many men of his time, never questions (and at times embraces) the legal power he has over her. Judith, as a married woman in eighteenth-century England, exists in a subordinate state. When William Congreve’s Millamant in The Way of the World (1700) laments she must “dwindle into a wife,” she articulates a legal reality later codified by William Blackstone who asserted that married women do not have a separate “legal existence.” Judith bristles at the limitations placed upon her as a wife within a union that she rightly believes confines her. The Madans’ extensive correspondence, the result of prolonged absences demanded by Martin’s thirty-year military career, reveals Judith’s complicated relationship with the forms of confinement she experiences and observes.

Their correspondence—more than 350 letters between 1723 and 1750—exemplifies the collision of the emotional intimacy and the legal realities of marriage most acutely felt by women. (Judith’s sentiments anticipate Eliza Haywood’s description of marriage as an institution that binds women by the “irrevocable ties of love and law.”)9 In the same letter in which Judith characterizes Martin as “the most desirable of your sex,” she acknowledges that marriage inevitably forces her to “give up my liberty.”10 The emotion she has for Martin, “an endless source of undiminished Fondness, a Love no Language can Express,” will be “Proof against the very Bondage of marriage” she knows to be inescapable.11 She draws on the financial and colonial language of the public sphere to characterize her dominated condition. Martin maintains an “Empire so Firmly Establish’d” over her that nothing “can ever have power to dispossess you.”12 However, she also feels his affections to have a volatility comparable to the new financial instruments; “Like Publick credit or The Stocks,” she writes, “I Rise or fall in value according to . . . the Reputation I maintain with you.”13 She can only hope that the sympathetic distress she experiences—“my heart is opprest w^th y^e Difficulties you Labour under, & I am Seiz’d & Perplext to y^e last Degree w^th your Disappointments”—will be reciprocated. Despite her confinement, she characterizes her devotion to Martin as liberating, signaling the complex situation for wives: “it is not Life to me worth Having that is not Imployed in y^r Service, w^ch ever was, & ever will be to me Perfect Freedom.” Her service to him is a form of freedom. “’Tis in vain to Struggle,” she writes, “we can only Sooth our Fate by an absolute submission, w^ch will reward us by Giving the most Abject Slavery all the Charms of the most unbounded Liberty.”14 Her expressions of affection to Martin that convey her emotional devotion—“I put myself into your power”—simultaneously reiterate the legal status of a married woman. Marriage gives Martin complete control—indeed ownership—over everything that “belongs” to Judith (and, technically, over Judith herself). Like all wives of her time, Judith lives in what might be considered a form of domestic captivity. She more intimately experiences a condition of confinement that Martin believes he endures; she too can be seen as a captive subject.

Over the course of their marriage Judith assumed increasing domestic responsibilities because of Martin’s prolonged absences. But she did not enjoy commensurately increased authority or unfettered access to their financial resources, and she was acutely aware of the discrepancy between the responsibilities that devolved to her and the limited power she actually held. A consistent source of tension in the Madans’ marriage was their financial situation. When Martin describes “the many anxieties I feel” and “the disappointments I have met with,” he refers to his finances.15 Perpetually low on household funds, Judith had to consult with him about which debts or servants to pay, where more economical housing for the family can be found, and when to sell livestock. Martin apologizes that her “occasions for money have been so pressing,” implicitly acknowledging his own carelessness in reducing her to that level.16 She chides him when he repeatedly fails to “Remember my Finances w^ch indeed were very Low,”17 while he simultaneously admonishes her to be careful with his money: “I need not recommend frugality to you, you too well know the necessity there is for it.”18 She loses their cook because of unpaid back wages (“I am extreamly distress’d”),19 but does not have the power to change the situation.

More profoundly than the quotidian irritations, Judith keenly felt the withholding of the independent funds that had been negotiated specifically for her upon the occasion of their nuptials. In her will, written twenty years after the 1756 death of her husband, Judith reveals that throughout their thirty-three-year marriage Martin diverted the money expressly stipulated in their marriage contract as her pin money to compensate for the lackluster return on the investments in his Caribbean estates. As she tells her daughter Maria: “I had the Best & Dearest of Fathers—he always had given me £100 Gineas per year & insisted on y^e same for me from your Dear Father—w^ch was readily agreed to, & the Settlements to the Effect be made accordingly: I rec^d one half year from y^r Father of this, in Money, & only once—.” She explicitly attributed his failure to honor this agreement primarily to the fact Martin was “Disapointd in his Estate, (then only y^t at Nevis).” That Martin diverted money owed to Judith toward his West Indian holdings created a situation in which his repeated, annual investments in the purchase of enslaved Africans and the mechanisms of their bondage exacerbate Judith’s own sense of confinement (at times desperation) within the marriage. She lacks any means to compel Martin to provide her negotiated “Allowance,” as she termed it. She “in a slight, trifling way, would remind him, how much he was Running on, in my Debt” only to have him “smile, & Say ‘very True.’”20 His passivity exacerbated her frustration over a withholding she felt quite sharply (and a frustration she clearly still felt twenty years after his death). Not only did Judith express her dissatisfaction in writing, she also created a financial narrative “in a book w^t became due to me, from year to year on Acct of My allowance.” She calculates his nonpayment over the years “as nearly as I could Compute it” as “about 12 or 13” hundred pounds. Such a narrative accounting, written expressions of a persistent anger, becomes her only means to articulate her resistance to the strictures her role as wife places upon her—the kind of domestic captivity inevitable for married women.

Judith’s resentment about Martin’s withholding of the money owed her and his redirection of those funds to his Caribbean investments increased commensurately with her intimate knowledge of the plantations’ struggling operations. Martin’s status as an absentee landlord was, in a sense, twofold; neither did he live in the West Indies and have direct oversight of his holdings, nor was he present in England to receive the regular correspondence regarding plantation affairs or to monitor the sale or shipment of sugar from the colonies. Those responsibilities fell to Judith.

Even as Judith resists Martin’s preoccupation with the minutiae of their holdings and bristles at its continued presence in their written exchanges (particularly in light of her knowledge that he has diverted money owed to her to finance these endeavors), she accepts the responsibility as yet another moment of necessary self-abnegation. In a particularly pointed letter, she carefully delineates between information she must share with him and the subjects she actually wishes to discuss: “I have been as Particular as I can in relation to y^r Affairs abroad w^ch take as a Proof that I always Prefer w^tt I imagine may be acceptable to you to w^t is agreeable to myself.—indeed whilst I have been writing this long heap of stuff, Love has several times attempted to Turn my Pen to a more Pleasing Subject; but I have resisted all his importunities, being well assur’d tho you can’t tell w^t is doing at St. Kitts unless I tell you you well know w^t is Passing in my Heart.”21

His “affairs abroad” are a “long heap of stuff” keeping her from writing about “a more Pleasing Subject.” She does not suggest that the news from Saint Kitts is not pleasant because of the nature of information—the commodification and enslavement of humans—although she might at some level have some knowledge of the true working of a culture of captivity. Rather it is unpleasant because it is not about their love relationship. Judith defers what is “agreeable” to herself and anticipates what she knows will be “acceptable” to him. While she realizes that she is his only means to know “what is doing at St. Kitts,” she never threatens to withhold the valuable information. Certainly she expresses fatigue with his persistent preoccupation with their holdings and regularly signals her desire to pivot with the phrase “and so much for business.” For her, business is something “to w^ch tis with Difficulty I can attend at anytime, much more at this—when my whole Soul is Engross’d with Cares of a more Touching nature.”22 She describes it as “ever Disagreeable to me who have a heart and Head so Little Turn’d for it.” It is “doubly” disagreeable when “it Interrupts” what she considers the true, “the Darling Business” of her life—“The conversing w^th my ever Dearest Madan!”23 That business, unlike the plantations and the sugar trade, is one that her “Soul alone Dictates.” That business also enables her to create a kind of alternative economy within their exchanges.

Despite her stated resistance, Judith dutifully receives, transcribes, and summarizes for Martin letters from various functionaries connected to these Caribbean operations. In doing so, she essentially documents a narrative of failure. The letters bring nothing but bad news and do not offer much “Pleasure from their Contents.” Martin writes of his fear he “shall be told I am involv’d in the common calamity & must expect no Sugar from thence this year, hard tidings! but I am wise enough to arm my Self against the worst.”24 The vicissitudes of Caribbean weather diminish the value of his investment; some years his sugar “was Burnt up,” other years, “storms have done damage” and “pretty many canes yet to take off tho not very good.”25 Martin lacks the ability to expand his holdings, telling Judith how he was “much disappointed when I read Capt Pyms letter, not finding any encouragement from him to expect the purchasing of Land at St. Xtopher’s.”26 Judith carefully notes the arrival of ships from the West Indies, and monitors the price of sugar, although in her letters to Martin she pointedly refers to it as “your” sugar (and he, in turn, calls it “mine”). Martin alerts her to expect “20 hghd [hogshead] of sugar on board the Dispatch Captain Burroughs who was to sail in 5 weeks from the 4^th of April.”27 Later he instructs her to “send M^r Butler the names of the 7 ships on which M^r Ward has shi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Reading Captivity
• 1. Cultures of Captivity
• 2. Captivating Farce: Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon
• 3. Domesticating Captivity: Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers
• 4. Barbary Captivity: Penelope Aubin and The Noble Slaves
• 5. “Indentured Slaves”: Eliza Haywood, Edward Kimber, and British Captivity in Colonial America
• Afterword: Domesticating Captivity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index