The Jamaica Lady; or, The Life of Bavia (1720) tells the purportedly true story of the
amorous adventures of two “notorious women” who talk their way onto a ship
bound from Jamaica to England. Holmesia is the comely daughter of a white
shoplifter from London and is maintained by multiple lovers on both sides of
the Atlantic; she is conceived during her mother’s transatlantic
transportation, during which her mother “hold[s] too much familiarity with a
mullatto belonging to the ship” (42). Bavia, who even as a child “never was
tolerably handsome, or indeed passable […] though the West-India climate has
something alter’d her for the worse,” is the daughter of a Scotchman; after
aiding many a woman in Britain to cuckold her husband and engaging in multiple
affairs herself, she is forced to flee to Jamaica to escape prosecution (53). The
novel’s story takes place almost entirely in the middle of the Atlantic ocean,
on the ship of Captain Fustian. The bulk of the tale is made up of four
interpolated stories about the two women—two “false” tales of respectability
that the ladies deploy to enable them to be allowed aboard the ship, and two
“true” tales that expose the respective vices of each. The Jamaica Lady is usually attributed to William Pittis, who may
never have traveled to the West Indies himself. The author enthusiastically adopts
the trope of creole degeneracy nonetheless; when Bavia first boards the ship, for
instance, Captain Fustian inquires, “how
she came into that cursed country; for he said none but mad people and fools,
when posses’d of a plentiful fortune, or even of a moderate competency in
England, in paradice, would leave it, to go to Jamaica, the sink of sin, and receptacle
of all manner of vices” (11).
I am interested in The Jamaica Lady as a particular accumulation of formal conventions
and practices that mark a discrete place in the history of the English novel. I’d
contend as well, in spite of its English author and London publication, that it
can be usefully incorporated into a
genealogy of the novel form in early America. The
Jamaica Lady is a novel of the Americas, situated quite literally in the
middle of the Atlantic world. Its portrait of the British creole is an
important touchstone in any consideration of the ways in which early American
authors interpreted and endeavored to shape the narratives of their colonial
past.
It is worth looking first at how the
author himself defines his novel’s place amongst contemporary narratives. Like
many novels of this period, the author of The
Jamaica Lady strenuously denies that it is one. In his preface, he boasts that
he has undertaken a task “far more difficult than that of writing a novel only,”
which he says is the work of painting “man in general;”[1] in
his “true” story, on the other hand, he has aimed to draw “the portraiture of
some particular person, and to make the copy exactly resemble the original.”
According to the author, “novels” are only of two sorts: the first is an
abridgment “of some larger history, from which he picks and culls what he
believes most apt to please the palate of the reader;” the second is a
“translation of some foreign piece, where the plot, humour, and discourse, are
ready made to his hand, and he has nought to do but to render it into English.”
The author seems to allude here to the tradition of amatory fiction as it was imported
into England from the French in the seventeenth century, and in the first
category especially may have been thinking of the popular secret history genre.
The Jamaica Lady, however, purports to be a kind of chronique
scandaleuse itself, though set in the
colonies rather than in the palace. The authorial preface says that the work
represents
“persons of different characters distinctly wide one from the other: And the
story being true, an author, if he designs to have the picture known, without
(like a bad painter) writing under it, is tied up close to the pattern, must
suit his words not only to the reader’s taste, but to the persons represented.”
The author here desires “to have the picture known”—to have the reader guess
the real life counterparts of the work’s characters; his skill as a writer
rests on his ability to paint a recognizable portrait. He admits, meanwhile, to
shaping the story for narrative pleasure: he purposefully omits “long
discourses of insignificant courtship, and tedious soliloquies” because they
are “neither pleasant nor profitable and serve only to increase the bulk and
diminish the beauty of a history.” The romance tradition is explicitly invoked
and dismissed within the context of the novel’s action when the second mate
calls Bavia’s initial story of respectability “all a romance, and contriv’d purely to gain a passage” (22). Indeed
the story partakes in many romantic clichés, such as the woman of “beauty,
birth, and fortune” who is taken advantage of by a tyrannical, duplicitous
husband. The only modern editor of The
Jamaica Lady[2]
attributes this false account of Bavia’s life to the contemporary novels of
Eliza Haywood: it “is in the highly romantic style typical of Mrs. Haywood’s
novels” and makes use of Haywoodian trademarks such as “the indignant aside,
[…] the verbatim repetition of involved conversations, and the description of
the heroine’s swoon” (McBurney xxi).
Another way we might understand this
novel’s truth claim is with reference to the non-fictional genres that
contributed to the origins of the novel form in the eighteenth century.
Prominent among these non-fictional prose traditions are the travel narrative
and natural history genres, to both of which The Jamaica Lady is indebted. Highly popular in the eighteenth
century, natural history serves, by the end of the century, as “lingua franca
of letters, art, and politics in Europe and the Americas” (Iannini 19). The
natural history genre, moreover, is inextricably intertwined with British
colonial exploration and settlement in the Caribbean: in the eighteenth century,
“the assumption that the colonial Caribbean was the site of the most
significant and valuable forms of empirical knowledge to be derived from the New
World was all but axiomatic” (Iannini 5). Christopher Iannini has demonstrated,
in addition, that the representational strategies employed by the natural
history genre cross-pollinate with the early novel form (15). Like the early
novel, natural history is “informed by the interaction between empiricist
technique and emblematic method” (Iannini 25).[3]
We can see this interaction at work in The Jamaica Lady. The novel was
published with a table of words at the end “Explaining the Sea, and other
Difficult Terms.” The table is a particularly fascinating and somewhat baffling
compilation of words that includes Caribbean place names (“Ligganee: a fine,
plain country, full of sugar-plantations, and is the most pleasant part of the
island”); West Indian cuisine (“Cassada, or Cassava, a shrub, the juice of
whose root is rank poison, but of the dry substance they make thin cakes, which
serve for bread”); nautical jargon (“Capstern, a draw-beam, by which they heave
up the anchor”); words in the “Negro dialect” (“Fumfum, […] beat”);
explanations of particular racial categories (“Mustee” and “Mulatto”);[4]
and even the fantastic (“Tritons, Fabulous sea-deities, having their upper
parts to the middle like men, and the lower like fishes”). What emerges from
this fairly short but diverse dictionary is a striking evocation of the
geographic, racial, economic, and imaginative makeup of the British West Indies
in the early part of the century.
I’ve only come across one critic who
acknowledges the presence of this table in her analysis of The Jamaica Lady,
a brief engagement to suggest that it “places the author and publisher, like
the captain, in the position of transporting readers from Jamaica to England,
and of translating all other languages into English. The ‘Table’ further suggests
the need for a unified English language (or, we might say, a stable linguistic
economy) at points of narrative - and cultural – stress” (Barash 420). While it
is certainly plausible to interpret this table as an act of epistemic control
on the part of a colonial power, I remain unconvinced that the novel is
particularly interested in maintaining a stable linguistic economy. The entire
action of the novel, framed by the limbo of the journey across the ocean,
depends upon the circulation of outrageous stories about its two female
protagonists. Its iterative structure, moreover, leads its ending to feel no
more final than its beginning. Even
within the world of the novel, no one is very concerned about the veracity of
the women’s stories. When Bavia’s man relates her false tale of respectability
to the captain, the captain lends “an attentive ear to the narration, but
really imagin’d she had been no more than a domestick servant, notwithstanding
the varnish with which the man cover’d it” (20). Captain Fustian easily
discerns the story’s fictionality, but it does not ultimately impact his
decision to let Bavia board the ship. The novel also lends space to supposed
colonial dialects for comedic effect. Holmesia
is marked explicitly as a creole, a term defined in the novel’s dictionary as “one
born in the island of Jamaica.” The reader hears Holmesia’s stories almost
entirely through the words of other characters; her voice breaks in only
intermittingly and stridently, almost always in anger. The author renders her
speech in near-unintelligible dialect, a vernacular that the novel describes as
“a sort of jargon, being a dialect peculiar to the natives of that island, it
being partly English, and partly Negroish; so that unless a man had been some
time in the country, he could not well understand their meaning” (9). This
creole dialect, incomprehensible unless one has spent time in the West Indies,
represents a particularly America mixture of racial and imperial identities.
In
a reading of Leonora Sansay’s Secret
History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo
(1808), Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has argued for an analysis of the early
American novel as “a genre that stands within a geopolitical framework distinct
from that of U.S. nationalism—namely, that of Atlantic colonialism and créole
empire” (81). Following the long-governing national allegory model of
interpreting early American novels, Dillon points out that a full understanding
of the genre must also take account of the “dominant cultural reality of créole
imperialism” in the post-revolutionary United States (Dillon 96). The Jamaica Lady is another American
secret history. The particular mix of generic features and literary
characterization that it employs to tell this scandalous tale of Britain’s
colonial domains gives us a mirror to hold up to the new national novels of the
United States.
Works Cited
Barash, Carol. “The Character of Difference: The Creole
Woman as Cultural Mediator in Narratives About Jamaica.” Eighteenth-Century
Studies 23.4, Special Issue: The Politics of Difference (1990): 406–424.
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “The Secret History of the Early
American Novel: Leonora Sansay and Revolution in Saint Domingue.” NOVEL: A
Forum on Fiction 40.1/2, The Early American Novel (2006): 77–103.
Iannini, Christopher P. Fatal
Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American
Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
McBurney, William H., ed. Four
Before Richardson: Selected English Novels, 1720-1727. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1963.
Pittis, William. The Jamaica Lady: Or, The Life of Bavia.
London: Tho. Bickerton, 1720.
[1]
An interesting anticipation of Henry
Fielding’s declaration in Joseph Andrews,
often read as a departure for novelistic nonreferentiality of character, that
his new province of writing describes “not men but manners; not an individual,
but a species.”
[2] Four
Before Richardson: Selected English Novels, 1720-1727, William H. McBurney, ed. (Lincoln, 1963).
[3] Iannini cites Cynthia Sundberg Wall in The Prose of Things: Transformations of
Description in the Eighteenth Century (2006) for evidence that “[e]arly fiction
tends to use the detail emblematically, but it frequently invests those emblems
with a rich ordinariness, a telling local concreteness, that seems to hold them
more firmly to the here and now than the hereafter” (3).
[4] “Mulatto: one whose father is a blackamoor, and
mother a white; or father a white, and mother a blackamoor;” “Mustee: whose
father is a mulattoo, and mother a white; or mother a mulatto, and father a
white.”
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