"Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject": West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda

"Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject": West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick When Maria Edgeworth published her second novel, Belinda (1801), her heroine drew fire from critics. As writers at the Monthly Review observed, Belinda "has not called forth in us a great portion of interest on her behalf, nor entitled herself to our highest love and admiration, as a perfect model of the female character."1 What kept Belinda from love, admiration, and perfection was her "admission of a second attachment." Although her feelings for the English aristocrat, Clarence Hervey, are never spoken, and Hervey himself makes plans to marry someone else, Belinda's subsequent romantic attachment to the West Indian Mr Vincent did not meet with her critics' approbation. In response to her critics' demands and advice from her father, Edgeworth made extensive revisions to the early edition of Belinda, and when it reappeared in 1810 as part of Mrs Barbauld's British Novelists Series, the novel was significantly altered. Taken as a whole, these revisions reveal something more than the reformation of Belinda as "jilt." For in the process of cooling Belinda's second attachment, Edgeworth effectively rewrote her representations of romantic relationships between English women and West Indian men. In the 1801 edition Edgeworth had not only brought her heroine to the brink of marriage with the Creole 1 Monthly Review 37 (1801), 369. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 4, July 1993 332 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION gentlemen Mr Vincent, she had also married that gentleman's black servant Juba to an English farm girl. The lengthy cuts and revisions which Edgeworth made in her 1810 edition censored both relationships. Edgeworth's early edition of Belinda attacks established notions of racial purity and patriarchal authority. Her own position as a colonial in Ireland allowed her to challenge the endogamy of English society by extending its parameters to other English colonies such as those in the West Indies. Just as the English had always viewed overly close contact with the Gaelic people as likely to produce degenerating and uncivilizing effects , so they objected to the interracial sexual mixing which Edgeworth portrayed in her novel. What was at work in this notion of "purity" was the perpetuation of primogeniture.2 Interracial marriages not only failed to produce white English heirs, they also, when the husband was "other," failed to consolidate colonial wealth in the hands of white English gentlemen . The early edition ofBelinda thus illustrated the subversive potential involved in an Englishwoman's choice of a West Indian husband. Although the English had been trying to conquer Ireland since the twelfth century, it was not until the late sixteenth century that English officials began to view Ireland as a colony whose English planters faced the same perils as settlers among the North American Indians. According to Nicholas Canny, the word "colony" in the sixteenth century was used interchangeably with "plantation" to mean "the introduction of nucleated settlements of Englishmen into an area that had not previously been subject to English government control."3 The English government's 2 I am indebted to Françoise Lionnet's Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) for this theoretical formulation. I have also found Laura Donaldson's "The Miranda Complex: Colonialism and the Question of Feminist Reading," Diacritics 18 (1988), 65-77, extremely useful for assessing Edgeworth's attempts to "see" the indigenous other. My reading of Belinda is grounded on the assumption that Edgeworth's gender and colonial status cannot be separated. I differ from critics who evoke an exclusively English context and focus on gender. See Gary Kelly, "Amelia Opie, Lady Carolina Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology," Ariel: A Review ofInternational English Literature 12 (1981), 3-24. While such an approach allows Edgeworth to be compared with other English women writers, it gives little attention to the particularity of her Anglo-Irish background . Another tendency in Edgeworth criticism encourages analysis of her work as precisely the product of a colonial background, the Big House landed gentry of the Protestant Ascendancy . For example, see P.F. Sheeran, "Colonists and Colonized: Some Aspects of Anglo-Irish Literature from Swift...