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ABSTRACT
The History of Mary Prince (1831) not only recounts Prince’s experience of the brutalities of life under plantation slavery, it frames that story with an extraordinary array of authenticating paratextual material (preface, supplement, footnotes and appendices) that take up more space than the core narrative itself. For this reason, scholarly attention to the narrative has been critical of Pringle’s framing of Prince’s story, claiming that the paratexts suppress, undermine or efface her black voice, even as they aim to validate that voice. Yet these readings fail to consider the ways in which the paratexts create spaces of discursive transaction that effectively foreground a process of demand and response, in which the contestations over her claims not only attest to the precarity of the black, female slave. They foreground her claims as sites of disturbance within an English public sphere anxious over its morality, thus creating a radically new kind of abolitionist text – one that remains inherently relational, foregrounding the structures of address upon which moral demands are made as those that are, in this instance, generated from a confrontation with difference and the shock of the elsewhere.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the reviewers of this essay for their insightful and enormously helpful feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Jennifer Wawrzinek researches and teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is a research associate of NELK, Goethe Universität, and the ERCC, Melbourne University, the author of Ambiguous Subjects: Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime (Rodopi 2008) and the recently completed monograph entitled Beyond Identity: Decreation and British Romanticism.
Notes
1 James McQueen, ‘The Colonial Empire of Great Britain. Letter to Earl Grey, First Lord of the Treasury &c. &c.’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1831.
2 Patricia L Hamilton, ‘Monkey Business: Lord Orville and the Limits of Politeness in Frances Burney’s Evelina’, Eighteenth Century Fiction 19(4), Summer 2007, p 418.
3 The most influential slave narrative in England was published in 1789 by Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African became the mainstay of the abolitionist movement in England. The book went into eight editions and was translated into Dutch and German. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert “Ukawsaw Gonniosaw”, an African Prince was published earlier, in 1772, but received less attention. Ottobah Cugoano’s political treatise entitled Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species was published 1787. It did not include, however, any autobiography and cannot therefore be counted as a slave narrative.
4 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, London: Penguin, 2000, p 7.
5 Henry Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 219.
6 Much of this scholarship, in aiming to recover Prince’s voice, ends up constructing arguments based largely on speculation, given that we can only guess at what is not there. See, for example, Jenny Sharpe, A.M. Rauwerda, and Jessica L. Allen. Scholars that do not rely on speculation in order to fill the gaps between text and paratext, nevertheless aim to reclaim, or to draw into presence, either an essentialised, albeit emergent, ‘West Indian subjectivity’ (Sandra Pacquet), or by positioning the body as a central site of resistance to Pringle’s putative colonisations (Barbara Baumgartner). See Jenny Sharpe, ‘“Something Akin to Freedom”: The Case of Mary Prince’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8(1), 1996, pp 31–56; A M Rauwerda, ‘Naming, Agency, and “A Tissue of Falsehoods” in The History of Mary Prince’, African American Review 26(1), 2001, pp 397–411; Jessica L Allen, ‘Pringle’s Pruning of Prince: The History of Mary Prince and the Question of Repetition’, Callaloo 35(2), Spring 2012, pp 509–519; Sandra Pouchet Paquet, ‘The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince’, African American Review 26(1), Spring 1992, pp 131–146; Barbara Baumgartner, ‘The Body as Evidence: Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation in The History of Mary Prince’, Callaloo 24(1), Winter 2001, pp 253–275.
7 Prince, The History, p 55; Clare Midgely, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870, London: Routledge, 1992, p 90.
8 Mary Jean Larabbee, ‘“I Know What a Slave Knows”: Mary Prince’s Epistemology of Resistance’, Women’s Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal 35(5), 2006, p 463.
9 Rachel Banner, ‘Surface and Stasis: Re-Reading Slave Narratives via The History of Mary Prince’, Callaloo 36(2), Spring 2013, p 307.
10 Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900, London: Routledge, 2000.
11 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing (trans), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p 16.
12 John Frow, ‘Prefaces to the Novel: Robinson Crusoe and Novelistic Form’, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 63(2–3), 2016, p 97.
13 Prince, The History, p 3.
14 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p 8.
15 Prince, The History, p 43.
16 Ranjana Khanna, ‘Frames, Context, Community, Justice’, Diacritics 33(2), Summer 2003, p 14.
17 Prince, The History, p 41.
18 Prince, The History, p 42.
19 Beth McCoy, ‘Race and the (Para)Textual Condition’, PMLA 121(1), January 2006, p 160.
20 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso, 2004, p 130.
21 Prince, The History, p 14, 21, 10.
22 Prince, The History, p 21.
23 Prince, The History, p 37.
24 Prince, The History, p 3.
25 Kremena T Todorova, ‘“I Will Say the Truth to the English People”: The History of Mary Prince and the Meaning of English History’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43(3), Fall 2001, p 291.
26 See Pringle’s footnote in Prince, The History, p 13.
27 Prince, The History, p 10, 15, 16, 17, 23, 38.
28 Banner, ‘Surface and Stasis’, p 305.
29 Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Pail A Kottman (trans), London: Routledge, 2000, p 92.
30 See, for example, the inclusion of extracts from the 1830 Report of the Birmingham Ladies’ Society, which stretches over two pages, the second of which takes up ninety percent of the second page. See Prince, The History, pp 52–53.
31 Prince, The History, pp 43–44, fn 44.
32 For full details of the various libel cases over The History in which Prince makes this claim, see Sue Thomas, ‘Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Cases over The History of Mary Prince’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40(1), 2005, p 128.
33 Butler describes the critical image as that which ‘must not only fail to capture its reference, but show this failing’. See Precarious, p 146.
34 Baumgartner, ‘The Body as Evidence’, p 264.
35 By the same logic, Pringle cannot be charged with the white heroism that is frequently directed towards proponents of the abolitionist cause because his efforts to authorise Prince’s claims are continually contested by the dissenting voices of the supplements.
36 Butler, Precarious, p 17.
37 Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, Singular Texts/ Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990, p 133.
38 Gérard Genette, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, New Literary History 22, 1991, p 261.
39 Khanna, ‘Frames, Contexts’, p 33.
40 Aida Hurtado, ‘Strategic Suspensions: Feminists of Color Theorize the Production of Knowledge’, in Knowledge, Difference, and Power. Essays Inspired by ‘Women’s Ways of Knowing’, J Tarule, B Clinchy, and M Belenky (eds), New York: Basic Books, 1996, p 386.
41 Prince, The History, pp 11–12.
42 Banner, ‘Surface and Stasis’, p 306.
43 In fact, as Todorova argues, the verification of factual details is typical to abolitionist texts in England at the time, given that their aim was to ‘disprove the planters’ claims that slavery was not all that bad’. Even as late as 1808, Thomas Clarkson’s The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament claims that, despite over one thousand pages detailing the author’s search for atrocities of the slave trade, no one could be found to give evidence of such horrors if called upon to testify. See Todorova, ‘“I Will Say the Truth”’, p 290; and Clarkson, The History, Vol. 1, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808, p 330.
44 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p 97.
45 McQueen, ‘The Anti-Slavery Society, and the West India Colonists, a Defence of Mary Prince’s slave-owners, Mr. & Mrs. John Wood’, The Glasgow Courier, 26 July 1831. For a full details of the court cases brought in reponse to the claims made in The History, see Thomas, ‘Pringle v. Cadell’.
46 McQueen, ‘The Colonial Empire of Great Britain’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1831.
47 Todorova, “‘I Will Say the Truth’”, p 295, 298.
48 Joan W Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity’, Critical Inquiry 27(2), Winter 2001, pp 284–304.
49 Butler, Giving an Account, p 36.
50 The Slave Emancipation Bill was passed in the UK on 31 July 1833. Although Prince remained in England until at least 1833, when she is on record as having testified in the two libel cases brought against Pringle, we do not know whether she returned to Antigua after the West Indian colonies completed full abolition in 1838.