"Rendered Remarkable": Reading Race and Desire in The Woman of Colour

"My colour, you know, renders me remarkable," writes Olivia, the titular heroine of the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour.¹ Olivia's story is indeed remarkable: she journeys from Jamaica to England to follow the wishes in her late father's will and marry her distant cousin to secure her father's fortune. The white English characters she encounters gossip about the racially distinct presence in their midst, and this gossip only worsens once it is revealed that Olivia and Augustus have accidentally committed bigamy. Early nineteenth-century readers would likewise have remarked upon the rare phenomenon of a novel with a mixed-race Black protagonist, especially one who narrates her own story and actively rewrites the traditional marriage plot.² In this essay, I examine another aspect of Olivia's remarkable nature: the reactions she inspires in twenty-first-century readers grappling with this character's complexities and ambiguities. Today's reader finds a real paradox in Olivia, who apparently critiques racism on the one hand and idealizes the plantation on the other. Olivia becomes particularly remarkable to the twenty-first-century reader when she ostensibly espouses abolitionist politics but apparently takes possession of a benevolent plantation at the novel's end. I contend that we can untangle this paradox by recognizing the ways that The Woman of Colour remains committed to a colonial project. Olivia pairs her firmest anti-racist politics with calls for more malleable racial hierarchies. She apparently seeks to improve the existing system without demanding its disintegration. This becomes clear when we examine how and why Olivia perpetuates as well as enacts colonial authority from her particular position as a mixed-race elite woman who becomes a Jamaican planter.

The paradox of a novel that both condemns racist prejudice and dreams of a brighter future on the plantation makes sense in the context of its own colonial logic—a logic with real historical referents. I want to move beyond that logic, though, and demand something else from The Woman of Colour, a novel that in many ways fails to offer a successful challenge to eighteenth-century hegemonic discourse. In addition to remarking upon the crucial ways Olivia's narrative succeeds or fails to satisfy the desires of today's readers, I want to turn also to the ways this novel sheds light on the origins of those desires.

England provides many opportunities for Olivia to respond to racism. George Merton, Jr., the young son of Olivia's racist brother- and sister-in-law, refers to Olivia's enslaved maid Dido as "that nasty black woman," claiming she "has been kissing me, and dirtying my face all over!" (WC, 78). At first, the Mertons assume that young George refers to Olivia, but George quickly explains that he refers to someone "much, much dirtier" (78). Even located safely off-page, Dido remains a threat in this scene. She ostensibly maintains the power to frighten a child with the darkness of her skin, a darkness that George imagines could transfer to his own skin. Without explicitly knowing it, George depends on racism grounded in biological commitments to feel safe. The threat of the Other, according to this model of racism, can be contained by containing Dido's body, which is always marked as inferior by a set of fixed, phenotypical traits. In such a context, Dido's kiss, her physical demonstration of giving and receiving affection, is transgressive. The final decades of the eighteenth century mark a shift in understandings of race in Britain from a model that took skin color into account along with factors such as religion, clothing, and customs to a model that prioritized skin color as a primary marker of difference.³ As a result, racist discourse justifying slavery turned more virulently towards the body as a site of restriction, punishment, or disempowerment. The rise of the sugar plantation across the long eighteenth century encouraged an understanding of Black bodies in utilitarian terms. Bodies matter in this discourse according to their ability to perform labor, to survive hardship, and to obey orders.⁴ Raised in slavery...