English 609 Topic 53 - The Colonial Periphery at the Margins of Fiction, Ned Ward to Jane Austen
Winter 2010
Instructor: Dr. David Oakleaf
oakleaf [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
Tuesday 12:00 noon - 2:30 pm
Course Description:
This course will examine how English fiction registered the presence of England's Caribbean slave colonies in the century before Jane Austen. Since the spirit of Edward Said's influential reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism presides over the course, we'll probably begin with Austen's novel. After that, we'll move chronologically from the late seventeenth-century to the early nineteenth century. The colonial margin occupies the centre only of marginal fictions. We'll sample Ned Ward's Grub-Street pamphlet, A Trip to Jamaica (1698), and (perhaps) an obscure, misogynist parody of women's fiction called The Jamaica Lady (1720). But surprisingly often, it appears at the margins of more central fictions. Consider Daniel Defoe. The hero of Robinson Crusoe famously rescues and enslaves a native on an island; the protagonist of Moll Flanders incestuously marries a Virgina planter; the hero of Colonel Jack (1722) is first an overseer, then a planter in Virginia. At the margins of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740)-the novel Charlotte Bronte rewrote in Jane Eyre-a fugitive seduced maiden marries a Jamaica planter and sends a slave boy to her child by her former seducer. Even the feminist utopia at the centre of Sarah Robinson Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), which is narrated by a former Jamaican merchant, is underwritten in part by plantation profits. The History of Sir George Ellison, its sequel, reimagines its narrator as a benevolent planter become English baronet, eventually becoming part of the American debate on slavery. In Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), a planter courts the heroine and his slave marries an English farm girl-a passage the novelist's father bullied her into eliminating in a later edition.
Reading a selection of these works-the class can divide some of the labour-we will ask what work these colonial traces perform? We will also ask how they illuminate the imperial attitudes of Mansfield Park.
Required Texts:
Familiarity with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (and ideally Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea) will be a real asset. All of us will read the following:
Ned Ward, A Trip to Jamaica (available from the instructor)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford WC) [canonical with brief illuminating colonial presence)
Sarah Robinson Scott, Millenium Hall (Broadview) and The History of Sir George Ellison (Kentucky)
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (Oxford WC)
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Oxford WC)
Other texts to be announced.
