“The Sable Venus” and Desire for the Undesirable

This article examines Isaac Teale’s “The Sable Venus. An Ode,” first published in Jamaica in 1765 but later included in Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), as well as the illustration that subsequently accompanied it, Thomas Stothard’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus (1794). The essay places the poem and picture in the larger context of the “Black Venus” construction, a frequent eighteenth-century characterization of African women that invokes black beauty primarily to show the superior beauty of whiteness yet often registers an anxious desire for these “undesirable” women.