"Scenes of Horror," Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam

It has been asserted that sentimentality and transracial love plots work to mystify slavery and colonialism—to dematerialize them and take them out of the realm of exploitative labor—but John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) demonstrates that slavery and colonialism can also themselves serve to illuminate not only the contradictions and internal pressures endemic to sentimental love plots, but also the laborious and problematic process of creating sentimentality itself. ¹ In Stedman’s heterogeneous Narrative, the intermittently heard, countering voice of the beloved slave and the contamination of “romance” and the domestic by colonial violence together serve to reveal the holes in sentimentality. ² Despite (or perhaps even because of) the popularity of sentimentality in the 1780s and 1790s as “a powerful mode for representing colonial relations and the imperial frontier,” in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, its imperatives also tangle Stedman’s text, pushing narrator and narrative into unsustainable extravagance and unsought self-confrontation. ³

Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam is at once the description of a suicidal military expedition against the maroons (the “Revolted Negroes” of the title), a travel book exploring the natural history of South America, the narrative of a man of sensibility encountering a brutal and corrupt plantation society founded on the spectacular torment of slave bodies, a picaresque masculine adventure self-consciously modeled on Roderick Random and Tom Jones, and the avowedly sentimental tale of the transracial romance between Stedman and the mulatto slave Joanna, hopefully defined by Stedman as a reversal of Inkle and Yarico, the seminal sentimental-romantic encounter between new world and old. ⁴ Not only the wildly divergent genres and models invoked, but the dangerous congruence between slavery and the sentimental make the narration of this relationship both volatile and disruptive. ⁵

The ability of the sentimental—and of the love plot to which it is here tied—to represent sexuality in a context of slavery and violence undergoes intensive testing through Stedman’s Narrative. Because the story of Stedman and Joanna documents a series of negotiations with problematic facts—most vitally the fact that Stedman entered into the quintessentially colonial economic/sexual agreement of formal concubinage with Joanna—the text registers with peculiar clarity the compromises and coercion common in the sentimental love plot, both as a genre and as erotic wish-fulfillment. The inescapable, repeated confrontations with bodily torment, the proximity of transformative violence to the body of the heroine, and the baldly economic valuation of that body translate all too seamlessly into sentimentality.

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Stedman’s description of his romance with Joanna may be said to offer a classic example of (failed) containment; the juxtaposition and interpenetration between this forcefully but uneasily sentimentalized encounter and the violent spectacles of slavery demonstrate the impossibility of sealing off the realm of the personal from the political and social, as well as the inevitably disfiguring effects of slavery on the love plot. ⁶ Stedman’s narrative in fact documents the strains of the effort to convert the political to the personal. ⁷ The collapse of the clear lines of demarcation around romantic and sentimental interludes in Stedman’s narrative echoes the doomed attempt to carve out a domestic space in the overwhelming physical and psychic violence of colonial Surinam. ⁸ There is no inviolable domestic or narrative space under slavery; at each point that Stedman raises barriers between home and public spaces, or between sentimental diversion and central story, slavery confounds the drawing of boundaries. But the demands of sentimental narration also undermine Stedman’s efforts to cordon off this romance from the other experiences described: the need for a heroine in distress—and a hero suffering through her suffering—calls back in full force the cause of suffering, the heroine’s enslavement. The awkward effects of assimilating the institutional violations inherent in slavery to the modes of sentimentality pervade Stedman’s Narrative.

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