Gender and Race in Yarico's Epistles to Inkle: Voicing the Feminine/Slave

Gender and Race inzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Yarico’s Epistles to Inkle: Voicing the Feminine/Slave MARTIN WECHSELBLATT Q n z t forty years ago, in what is still one of the finest overviews of noble savagery in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, Wylie Sypher wrote: “Two legends sustain the tradition of the noble Negro —that of Oroonoko and that of Inkle and Yarico.”1 While the first of these two narratives has remained familiar through Aphra Behn’s most famous work, the second has been all but forgotten, in spite of the fifty recorded poems, plays, operettas, ballets, and occasional pieces it generated in Europe and New England between 1711 and 1830.2 Recently, Peter Hulme has given Richard Steele’s influential version of the tale its first sustained close reading in his Colonial Encounters,3 though without connecting its use of the deserted heroine motif to his analysis of its colonialist apologetics. This connection seems worth inves­ tigating since the popularity of Yarico’s story was maintained in England primarily through the verse form of heroic epistles from this Amerindian native woman to the English trader who betrays their love and sells her into slavery. The following essay will show how certain aspects of the pathetic heroine’s representation in the heroic epistle, a genre intimately involved with the emergence of humanitarian sensibility, links the sentimentalized slave to a much broader system of thought concerned with representing trade as a civilizing agent of progressive “refinement.” In fact, as Yarico’s 197 198 / KJIHGFEDCBA W E C H S E L B L A T T epistles demonstrate, the two levels of domestic reorganization and geo­ political expansion were aspects of the same process of change, and were accepted as such by contemporaries.4 In terms of moral philosophy and social theory, “sensibility” and “primitivism” merged early on in the period, thus enabling the domestic values and economic aspirations of “the middling sort” to be situated within, and forge a link between, national and world history. I The story of Yarico and Inkle finds its way into the genre of the heroic epistle through an early historical account and a popular prose redaction of that account in fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The Spectator. An Amerindian woman named Yarico, who “for her love lost her liberty,” first appears in the pages of John Ligon’s True and Exact Account of the Island of Barbadoes (1657).5 In Spectator 11 (13 March 1711), written by Richard Steele, Ligon’s story is retold (and considerably embellished) by Arietta, a fashionable, but sen­ sible, woman of the world, whom Mr. Spectator finds at home debating a town fop over the relative unfaithfulness of the sexes.6 The story, as Arietta tells it, concerns an English seaman shipwrecked in the Caribbean, but saved from the bloodthirsty natives by the princess Yarico, who shelters him in a cave. They conceive a child, whereupon Inkle promises to take Yarico back to England as his wife. When they eventually arrive together in Barbados, however, Inkle sells her into slavery in order to recoup the money his father has lent him for the expedition. Moreover, since she is carrying a child he is able to get twice Yarico’s market value. As in Ligon, Steele’s lovers are fascinated with the visible signs of their racial and cultural differences. But even though Steele writes that “the European was highly charmed with the limbs of the naked American” and that “the American was no less charmed with the dress, complexion and shape of the European, covered from head to foot,” it is nevertheless the “naked American” whom Steele makes the locus of dress and its cultural significations one sentence later: “She was, it seems, a person of distinction, for she everyday came to him in a different dress, of the most beautiful shells, bugles and bedes.” Whereas for Steele’s shipwrecked seaman Yarico’s attractiveness lies in her native nakedness, for Steele the polemicist her significance also lies in her dress: the portable goods of the colonial world which, paradoxically, her nakedness wears. Although he has been shipwrecked, Steele’s trader has nonetheless found his way to the plenum of portable goods which that world...