Vacant spaces: Imaginings of the African woman in English literature, 1688--1838

This study explores representations of sub-Saharan African women in English travel writing and fiction, from the introduction of Imoinda in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), to the end of British slavery in 1838. I argue that English writers fundamentally perceived black women as disturbing and contradictory figures. Traditional thought associated blackness with monstrosity, savagery, and lasciviousness, while womanhood signified beauty, civilization, and chastity; thus, the black woman embodied a self-negating identity. Their symbolic vacancy rendered African women literary ciphers to represent the varied imaginings and anxieties of authors, who mainly figured them as sex objects, slave mothers, and sacrifices. My first chapter considers how travel accounts upheld ideas of European superiority by describing African women as monstrous others, yet the troubling admission of white men's desire for black women complicated these constructions. Chapter two analyzes the Black Venus, a frequent characterization of African women's contradictory appeal; examples include Behn's Imoinda, Isaac Teale and Bryan Edwards' "Sable Venus" (1793), and the "Hottentot Venus," a South African woman exhibited in London in 1810. As my third chapter discusses, travelogues depicted African women as ideal suppliers for the transatlantic slave trade due to their alleged hyper-fecundity and apathy for their offspring, but slave women in the British Caribbean bore few children and were often suspected of reproductive resistance. Chapter four explores how the rebellious potential of slave maternity influenced the imaginative literature; African mothers who defy slavery's claims on their children appear in variants of the Inkle and Yarico legend, William Earle's Obi (1800), and James Montgomery's "The West Indies" (1809). Chapter five examines travel writers' equation of polygynous marriage with abject slavery to suggest that African women would be better off in European plantations; however, abolitionist accounts revealed slave women's abuse. My final chapter discusses black women's literary roles as sacrificial victims: examples include the two lovers' legend, first told in Spectator 215 (1711); Edward Rushton's West-Indian Eclogues (1787); and Peter Newby's The Wrongs of Almoona (1788). The fact that nearly all of black women's portrayals end with their deaths brings about a final negation of their problematic presence.