"Her Blacks, Her Whites and Her Double Face!": Altering Alterity in The Wanderer

"Her Blacks, Her Whites and Her Double Face!": Altering Alterity in The Wanderer Sara Salih The representative emblem of this book might be a chiasmatic "figure" of cultural difference whereby the anti-nationalist, ambivalent nationspace becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture. The "other" is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously "between ourselves."1 Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration At the beginning of Frances Burney's least-known, least-liked, and most difficult novel, The Wanderer (1814), the nameless, stateless heroine steps out of the shadows on a French sea-shore and begs for safe passage across the Channel from a boatload of English travellers who are about to make the crossing. During the ensuing boat trip the passengers interrogate the Incognita about her origins, and although her answers are guarded, from her appearance and her accent it seems she is a francophone African fleeing from the persecutions ofRobespierre's Terror. At this early stage in the text she could well be mistaken for Homi Bhabha's "chiasmatic 'figure' of cultural difference," the "hybrid" infiltrator whose presence 1 Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 4. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 3, April 1999 302 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION troubles and undermines the notion ofa "pure" indigenous culture.2 In fact, she is an Englishwoman fleeing from the French revolutionary commissary she has been forced to marry in order to save her guardian, a Roman Catholic bishop, from the guillotine, although neither the reader nor the other characters are given this information until well into the narrative. Juliet's alterity is altered during the course of The Wanderer, so that by the time the novel concludes, the unfathomable "other" has been converted into a reassuringly "native" subject, who may assume her rightful place in the upper echelons of English society without disturbing existing social or racial structures. In my readings of The Wanderer I will attempt to measure the significations and the significance of this racial erasure—both narrative and literal—as well as the metonymizing of race it facilitates. By this I mean that "race" in The Wanderer serves as a means of revealing the subordination ofwomen in late eighteenth-century English society. My approach will differ from that of other feminist critics, who have attempted to incorporate race into a socialist feminist praxis that, until recently, has uniquely addressed the concerns of white women. What might be called "race matters" are typically handled in one oftwo ways by feminists who are anxious to diversify : on the one hand, an invocation of the issue followed by a telling silence, and on the other, a well-meaning but mistaken proclamation of commonality-in-oppression, which effectively relegates and trivializes the question of difference. Cora Kaplan's essay "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism" exemplifies the first tendency. Insisting that "the languages ofclass, race and gender are fused," Kaplan seems to have little difficulty disconnecting them in order to concentrate almost exclusively on class, and when she does turn her attention to race (in, for example, some useful readings ofJane Eyre), her comments are apt to strike the reader as perfunctory afterthoughts appended to preserve the integrity of the tripartite nexus which is now something of an academic shibboleth.3 Laura Brown's essay "Oroonoko and the Trade in 2 Fordiscussions ofhybridity, seeHomiBhabha, TheLocation of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 13,1 12. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture andRace, Robert Young argues that it is not possible entirely to break with the nineteenth-century racist use of the word "hybrid" (pp. 619 ). While recognizing that the biological-racial connotations of the term are problematic, I use it here in Bhabha's sense as "a difference 'within,' a subject that inhabits the rim of an 'in-between' reality" (p. 13). 3 Cora Kaplan, "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism," Feminisms: AnAnthology ofLiterary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R.Warhol and Diane Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 857-77. For discussions of race and difference in an eighteenth-century...