Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour

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Notes

¹ Although The Female American and The Woman of Colour are central to this discussion, there are other representative women of the New World who demonstrate moral strength through their religious beliefs. Among these is Yarico from Frances Seymour’s “The Story of Inkle and Yarico” (1738), who converts to Christianity and writes to her sadistic lover Inkle years after he had sold her into slavery while she was pregnant with his child. Another literary subject is Imoinda from Behn’s Oroonoko (1668), who pleads to be decapitated, despite being pregnant, firmly believing that she will see her husband in the afterlife. Both Seymour and Behn, in their own understanding of the woman’s body, have their primary female characters beg for death over enslavement. The unspoken but understood desire for the unmolested body can be seen here as not only demonstrative of self-preservation, but as having moral implications in Christian discourse.

² Although Unca Eliza’s adventures are chronicled through journal entries and Olivia’s narrative is structured in the epistolary form, the organizing framework of each work does not exclude them from being Bildungsromanen. As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes in her Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, “the epistolary novel does not define an exclusive category, nor does the novel of consciousness. Pamela, as striking case in point, is both an epistolary novel and a story of development” (94).

³ As Carolyn Vellenga Berman notes in her Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery, it was common colonial practice to “send the Creole daughter of a Jamaican planter [in this case a Virginian landowner as well], for an education” overseas (3). According to Jane West’s 1793 Advantages of Education … A Tale for Misses and their Mammas, should the young colonial subject not go to England for her learning, she is likely to be “vitiated by pernicious examples of pride, cruelty and luxury by the common vices of the irregularities at which an English libertine would blush” (qtd. in Berman 3).

⁴ There are a number of works in the eighteenth century that would use the colonial subject of empire to supposedly visit the metropolitan center for advanced education and development of cultural sensibility. However, as these works progress, there is a pivot in the plot in which the “native informant” focuses on the inherent moral degradation of London. Typically written in the epistolary form, these novels include Hamilton’s Letters of the Hindoo Rajah (1796) and McKenzie’s Slavery; Or, The Times (1793).

⁵ The connection between the female body and the terrain it occupies has been the foundation for ecofeminism, a term first coined in 1974. Since then, scholars have incorporated many works into the ecofeminist canon, tying the young female Bildung to her home space. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this space would be considered ecologically frontier or wild. Examples of this include the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder in the North American context.

⁶ Olivia’s claim of racial equality in Christian scripture anchors to one of the the earliest anti-slavery arguments. An example comes from Thomas Tryon (1634–1703), who critically considers the complaints of slaves, despite the fact that he couches his concerns in advice for the benefit of the plantation owners in his work Friendly Advice to Gentlemen Planters (1684).

⁷ The fact that Olivia and Unca Eliza are never impregnated counters Anglocentric tropes on the sexual fecundity of African women and the reproductive animality of indigenous North American women (as illustrated by Unca Eliza’s more savage-like aunt). Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women traces these tropes. Morgan argues that African women and their roles as both productive and reproductive laborers created a central ideological crux, justifying and perpetuating slavery: a mode of racialized and gendered slavery that had already been reasoned and supported with over two hundred years of Eurocentric and ethnographic cataloging and othering. In this particular moment in history (1808) when labor was still needed but not legally “importable,” African and Afro-Caribbean women were even more central to the colonial enterprise’s continuation.