The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

3. Romanticizing Racial Difference: Benevolent Subordination and the Midcentury Novel

Chapter 3 Romanticizing Racial Difference Benevolent Subordination and the Midcentury Novel [A] man ennoblesthe woman he takes, be she who shewill; and adopts her into his own rank, be it what it will: but a woman, though ever so nobly born, debases herself by a mean marriage, and descends from her own rank, to that of him she stoops to marry. — SAMUEL RICHARDSON, Pamela (1740) Where there is no Legal Impediment, we find that differences of Nation —Religion, or even Color, cannot prevent People from marrying amongst each other. — BENJAMIN RUSH, ^4 Vindication of the Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, on the Slavery of the Negroes m America (1773)1 D, FOE's Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton, as well as many other early eighteenth-century narratives, punctuate their tales of colonial encounters and imperial adventure with interracial sex. The numerous sexual liaisons between European men and Other women allow us to see it as constitutive of European masculinity in forging an empire. To be sure, interracial sex is an unsurprising by-product of the colonial enterprise or vast networks of trade. Reproduction is absolutely necessary to the project of colonization. In the final pages of Robinson Crusoe, for example, Crusoe records the fate of his new colony.The Europeans, he tells us, invade the mainland to capture slaves and sexual partners in order to expand the settlement. In his own provisions for the island, he sends a variety of supplies from Brazil , including native women, and for the Englishmen he promises "to send them some women from England, with a good cargoe of necessaries."2 The casual juxtaposition of sending goods and women, of kidnapping a subjugated workforce and securing women, all as necessary to the future of the colony, suggests the importance of reproduction (in both senses) to the continuation of the colonial settlement. This unsentimental treatment provides a startling contrast to the novels that I examine in this chapter, which focus on marriage between Englishmen and Other women rather than on casual or violent sexual relations.3 Popular assumptions about skin color and other distinctions commonly surface in tales of interracial sex and romance, not as a central preoccupation but as an indication of the ideological limits Britons accorded racial differences. Sexual relations between Englishmen and non-Europeans had long fascinated consumers of literary and travel narratives, but what distinguishes midcentury novels from earlier narratives like Henry Neville's Isle of Pines (1668) or "Inkle and Yarico" are the organizing tropes of Christian conversion and romantic love. Although Daniel Defoe's novels, for instance, point to the importance of Christianity as a defining feature of European men engaged in colonial exploitation, intermarriage novels suggest its significance in legitimating interracial desire for domestic British consumption. In midcentury, Europeans tend to find dark skin color initially unsettling but surmountable through the power of love and through Christian conversion, which proves necessaryto happily resolving all intermarriage plots. Religious education is the main process of acculturation for the fictional Other, which marks the acceptance of these characters at once into the marital bond and English society. When dark color and religious dissimilarity are conjured up as temporary barriers rather than permanent impediments to marriage with non-Europeans, the ideology of race reveals its emergent rather than developed character. D R O M A N T I C I Z I N G R A C I A L D I F F E R E N C E 139 By analyzing fictional representations of interracial desire that span the midcentury, I show that imaginative visions of human difference correspond to colonial practices or scientificinquiry only obliquely. Because midcentury intermarriage novels bear traces of older racial ideology, based chiefly on religious difference, and a newer concern with skin color, they capture ideology in transition byjuxtaposing two distinct ideas about race. Midcentury novels demonstrate that even though racial ideology was based on a superficial conception of human variety, it worked in at least two registers that could be at odds with each other. The concern with dark complexion that momentarily surfaces in these narratives signals a notion of human variety that is visible on the body, a view that contrasts with a concept of difference that is defined by cultural practices, such as religion. Ideologically, then, it was still possible for the British to subordinate dark skin color to high rank and the profession of Christianity in relation...