Abstract

Abstract:

Marryat scholars have considered the fear of racial-national difference and of guilt over slavery in The Blood of the Vampire. This article breaks new ground by examining contemporary perspectives on post-emancipation conditions in the British West Indies in The Blood of the Vampire and A Daughter of the Tropics. Both take part in assessing black progress in the Caribbean, offering justifications for British Crown rule. Both are situated in relation to the place of Jamaica and Haiti in the British imaginary in the 1880s and 1890s and to the intertwining of political questions with Marryat's depiction of mixed-race West Indian women. While Anglo-American spiritualism was notable for the way it enabled social, gendered, and sexual transgressions, Marryat's post-emancipation political imaginary attached Afro-Caribbean spiritualism more potently to the realm of the political. Marryat's Gothic tropes of predatory, supernatural, black and mixed-race female power warn against encroaching Haitian ideas of black liberation.

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