Intermarriage in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Literature: Currents in Assimilation and Exclusion

Tales of interracial romance between Europeans and Africans surfaced on the continent during the Renaissance, when both male and female authors felt free to deal with cross-racial affections. The theme of interracial love or sexuality, quickly taken up in English literature, generally reflected the European point of view toward amorous relationships, which were usually thought to occur between men and women of high social status. A representative list of English works includes minor poems by George Herbert, John Cleveland, and Eldred Revett; tragedies such as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594) and Othello (ca. 1604); romances such as Lady Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomeries Urania (1621); and travel narratives such as Richard Ligon's A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657).¹ Indeed, building on fables, continental literature, travel narratives, and natural and political histories, British writers over the centuries have produced a large and generically diverse corpus of works that describe, often sympathetically but sometimes coarsely, the bonds forged between interracial lovers and spouses.² As Robert J. C. Young notes, Britons confirmed their fascination with interracial romance and marriage throughout the period of "comparatively benign" race relations that endured in England until 1840 (118).

In his recent essay The Political Economy of Reading, William St. Clair reminds us that readers left to their own devices rarely select books in the order in which they were published.³ For the eighteenth-century reader, as for a reader today, older literature that remained accessible, whether in early or updated editions, and newly published texts that featured interracial marriage or sexuality provided reflexive reinforcement, each text contributing to thematic continuity or change and, thus, helping shape contemporary responses to this persistent motif. This essay will examine three late-eighteenth-century texts that illuminate British attitudes and that, I will argue, reveal a significant shift in British toleration of interracial marriage or sexuality across the period. The texts are: George Colman the Younger's comic opera Inkle and Yarico (1787), set primarily in Barbados and plotted from the legend of Yarico originally printed in Ligon's History of the Island of Barbados; John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), set in Suriname, an autobiography that exploited the market niche in colonial travel narratives that Ligon helped establish; and Maria Edgeworth's "moral tale" Belinda (1801), set in England, one of the first novels by a British woman to feature an interracial marriage, in this case between a rural Englishwoman and a manumitted Jamaican slave.⁴ These three publications address interracial marriage involving low-ranking blacks in Barbados, Suriname, and Britain respectively. Moreover, at a crucial stage in the publication process, all these texts underwent authorial or publishing-house revision designed to enhance public receptivity. When evaluated in relation to each other, these works suggest the emergence of a comprehensive model that both depreciates the common practice of interracial marriage among the lower classes and deprecates the white participants.⁵

Although white Britons reconsidered their attitudes toward interracial sexuality and biracial children at the close of the century, earlier behaviors had varied considerably in the Anglophone world, ranging from the de facto assimilation of blacks and their mixed-race progeny in the metropolis, to the de jure exclusion of blacks, and their consignment to slavery, in North America. Laws and social mores with respect to intermarriage imposed limits on both its occurrence and acceptability. Where laws permitted interracial marriage, prevailing sexual codes, the social class of the participants, and the tone of public accounts of intermarriage were of paramount significance in determining levels of toleration. Two antithetical views of blacks had an effect on the ways in which writers could deal with the issue of intermarriage. One was the abolitionist view, brilliantly strategized by British activists, which pulled the suffering slave to the forefront of national consciousness and stirred widespread public support for abolition, the other, the proslavery view, which demeaned slaves as irremediably uncivilized, and gained adherents after the violent slave revolts in several West Indian...