Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Click here for the first in the series. 
​For the first post on this series about Mansfield Park and slavery, click here.

    In an earlier post I talked about how the death of parents and guardians was often used to set up the plot in 18th century novels. These timely deaths provided the starting point for the friendless hero or heroine.
    Going to the East or West Indies to seek one's fortune was a convenient plot kickstarter. Fictional parents sometimes died on long sea voyages. For example, the father of the heroine in the popular comic opera Rosina "went to the Eastern Indies to better his fortune," but he and his wife are lost in a shipwreck. Rosina is orphaned and raised by a loyal servant. 
​    In Whose the Dupe, a 1779 comedy, a character says his brother will "speak to Sir Jacob Jaghire to get me a commission in the East Indies: and, you know, everybody grows rich there." The Chevalier de Croustillac in A Romance of the West Indies "had dissipated his fortune, killed a man in a duel [and] had adapted the dangerous part of going to the West Indies to seek his fortune." He hoped to marry a rich widow with a plantation.
     If you need to raise a character from poverty to wealth for your happy ending, the sudden acquisition of a colonial fortune is just the thing. Mrs. Davenport, The Merchant's Widow, is left in reduced circumstances with seven children after her husband's business fails and he dies. After years of privation, word arrives of an enormous inheritance from her late uncle in "Rio Janeiro" in "Peru." The actual source of the monies with which "Providence blessed" the family is not discussed; the money is presented as a fitting reward for the family's industry, filial loyalty, and piety. The Merchant's Widow came out the same year as Mansfield Park. 
     Likewise, in the next-to-last paragraph of Persuasion, Austen rescues Mrs. Smith from poverty after Captain Wentworth untangles a problem with her late husband's property in the West Indies "with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend."  Collins Hemingway has a thoughtful article on this in Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America.
     The popular comedy The Liar (1762, but played in theatres in Austen's time) features an heiress with a huge fortune left to her by her father, "an India governor." "A governor!" exclaims the fortune-hunter. "Bushels of rupees and pecks of pagodas, I suppose."
      Dr. Samuel Johnson was an ardent abolitionist, but even he uses the conveniently-acquired fortune in his 1751 essay
#153: A second son of a gentlemen, who knows he needs to work for a living, is "trifling in uncertainty" before choosing a career, when "an old adventurer, who had been once the intimate friend of my father, arrived from the Indies with a large fortune." There's not a word about how that fortune was acquired. The focus of the story is how well everyone treats the young man when they think he's the old man's heir, and how they shun him when the old man dies before altering his will. Charlotte Lennox uses a West Indian fortune for the destruction of a family in Euphemia (1790). When Euphemia Lumley's father inherits "great riches" from his uncle, "he plunged deep into all the fashionable excesses of the age" and dies a bankrupt. This sets up the travails of the heroine.
     Maria Edgeworth's 1809 tale Maneuvering concerns a scheming widow. She hopes her late husband's friend, who has returned to England from Jamaica, will leave his fortune to her family. Her schemes, not the evils of slavery, are the theme of the novel. Wealthy Mr. Palmer is presented as a kind but credulous old duffer, not as an evil slave-owner. Elizabeth Helme's Modern Times (1814) introduces a wealthy uncle from India, a "Golden Nabob," in the third volume who nobody even knew about. Mr. Fortun is delighted to share his enormous fortune with his deserving nephews, which means they can marry the girls they love.

       If you need a romantic foil to compete for your heroine, and you want someone with a touch of sexy exoticism, a West Indian planter is a good choice. That’s Mr. Vincent in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) who comes complete with a black servant. He doesn't succeed with our heroine, who rejects him because he's a gambler--not because he owns slaves.
​      The West Indian, (1771) another popular comedy, is not about colonialism or enslaved persons. It's about a high-spirited planter who is a bit of a rogue. It's also about timely surprise inheritances. (Though one character remarks, "girls of her sort are not to be kept waiting like negroe slaves at your sugar plantations," which presumably means "waiting" in the sense of "serving," like "wait upon you" or "waiter.")
     The nouveaux-riche planters were also sometimes portrayed as being social upstarts. In The Gipsy Countess (1799) Colonel Cary is a "nabob," that is, a man who obtained his fortune of "half a million" in India. His low-born second wife is the "rich widow of a West India planter." Author Elizabeth Gunning has much to say about his vulgarity, but apart from a passing reference to "ill-gotten wealth," little to say about how he obtained his fortune. At most you could say that Gunning's vulgar nabob and his wife are behave horribly because that's what nabobs and slaveowners do. But the focus is not on the people they enslaved and exploited. The stepmother is a villain because of the way she treats her stepdaughter, not because she's a slaveowner. [Update: see also this post on a conversation about slavery in Eleanor Sleath's 1809 novel, The Bristol Heiress, which features a vulgar West Indian planter's wife].
     The sudden acquisition of a colonial fortune was sometimes used to raise the hero from poverty to riches.  As D.N. Ghosh (2001) points out being a West Indian planter was actually more respectable than being a merchant, to Austen's contemporaries. It’s a more gentlemanly profession; it’s akin to farming. So, Savillon in Julia de Roubigné goes to the West Indies.  So does Captain Sunderland in Belinda -- he needs to make a fortune so he can court the beautiful Virginia whom he has seen but never spoken to. Unbeknownst to him, while he is away, Virginia falls in love with his portrait. He returns a few years later with his friend Mr. Hartley, who--what a coincidence--turns out to be the father of Virginia.  
      “My dear daughter,” [says her father], “give me leave to introduce to you a friend, to whom I owe more obligations than to any man living…. This gentleman was stationed some years ago at Jamaica, and in a rebellion of the negroes on my plantation he saved my life...”
     No-one asks about the fate of the negroes, or how many of them were killed during the uprising or afterwards. The entire focus is on the first meeting of the lovers, and we move straight on to the happy ending.   
      Finally, If you need to send one of your characters away for a long time for plot purposes, the East or West Indies are handy.  Elizabeth Inchbold sends her main character Lord Elmwood to his "very large estates" in the West Indies in A Simple Story  (1791). He's gone for just a few paragraphs on the page, but in the story, he's away for three years, and his wife is unfaithful to him. Henry St. Clear, hero of The Gipsy Countess, reunites with his long-lost sister when he returns to England.  Amelia Opie used the distant heir who shows up to claim his inheritance in Appearance is Against Her (1813). 
​    Jane West, in A Gossip's Tale (1796), has the father of two daughters take the oldest, Louisa, off to Barbados where he has "a comfortable estate, for the improvement of which he judged his presence absolutely necessary" while the younger Marianne is left behind in England. Louisa grows up on a slave plantation, but no reference is made to the enslaved people. We are told Louisa grows in "moral and mental excellence." Marianne’s guardian dies, and at the same time “discouraged by the terrible devastations of a hurricane, [the father] abandoned the schemes of improvement he had projected upon his estates, and return[ed] with Louisa into England." It's not moral scruples that hold dad back from getting more revenue out of his estate, it's the weather. But in the end, the reason dad goes to Barbados is because the plot calls for the sisters to grow up separately and be educated differently.
   In Sense & Sensibility, Colonel Brandon goes to the East Indies to forget his broken heart over Eliza after she is forcibly married to his brother. He returns too late to save her from disgrace and death. Unspecified financial trouble in Antigua is the excuse to get rid of Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, but Austen's purpose in getting rid of him was to serve her plot. If the troubles in Antigua were intended to raise a plot conflict over slavery, then there should be some mention of it and some resolution of the issue in the novel. There is none.

     To recap: Austen could have explicitly emphasized the slavery in Mansfield Park, had she chosen to, but she didn't. Scholars who insist that Mansfield Park is about slavery are relying upon hidden symbolism, not the text or the plot. In my opinion, these interpretations are (1) questionable and (2) overthrow the structure and meaning of the novel.    
     My conclusions are not driven by a wish to avoid the subject of slavery, or a resistance to acknowledging it. Slavery and colonialism were not "erased" from my school textbooks or from what I have read on my own.  I was reading about world history and the British abolitionist movement 50 years ago. “Every generation thinks it invented sex, and every generation is wrong,” said the American writer Robert Heinlein. In the same fashion every generation thinks it has discovered the sins of the past. 
    Now, if it is true that Mansfield Park is not an abolitionist document in any significant sense, where does that leave us?  Can a novel about a slave-owning family still be a great novel and a literary masterpiece? Can it be a novel with profound moral lessons? It is for me, but I recognize that others may feel differently. It's still worth discussing, I think, but on another occasion.
     I've talked about what I think Mansfield Park is not about. Later I'll go back to discussing what I think it is about. I'll take a break and talk about fops and fools for a change!

     In my previous post, I gave a sampling of non-fiction books of the late 18th and early 19th century, including books for children, which discussed slavery and colonialism.
​       Mansfield Park, as previously discussed, is not explicit about slavery. In fact, as I discussed, references to Sir Thomas Bertram's trip to Antigua in the novel tend to be sympathetic to him, the poor guy who must make the journey away from his family.
    Critics nevertheless insist that Austen's third novel is all about slavery, and they prove this by pointing out that Austen never talks about slavery in the novel. 

• "The second major social issue that Austen makes notable by its absence from discussion is slavery."
• "Austen "mask[s] the issue of slavery throughout the novel."
• "Disengaging the subject of slavery from the Mansfield Park estate seems to be the implied
  critique of slavery in Austen’s Mansfield Park."
• "Slavery plays an important, though subverted, role in the novel." 
• "Austen's art is ironic and subtly allusive"
• More scholarly quotes are in my article here:

     In this respect, they sometimes rely on the incorrect claim that Sir Thomas Bertram was silent when Fanny Price asked him about the slave trade:

• "whatever political and colonial critique might have been implied by Fanny’s statement about Sir Thomas’s silence is subordinated to the familial drama of surrogacy and marriage and parenting... The world of the colonies is represented or subsumed by the terms of representation by the other world of the domestic."     
•  "the text disintegrates at 'dead silence,' a phrase that ironically speaks ..."
• “Austen deliberately invokes the dumbness of Mansfield Park concerning its own barbarity precisely because she means to rebuke it."
• "The unanswered question is a kind of Machereyan silence which ‘uncovers what it cannot say’ (Macherey 1978: 84). Slavery may haunt the novel as a negative presence - in the title, in Fanny’s preference for Cowper’s poetry, a noted abolitionist poet, and so on - but Austen keeps it off-stage..."

       Thus, so subtle is Austen's art that the less she mentions slavery, the more important it is to her narrative.
​      Below are some examples of novels which are not quite so subtle, There were also many plays which touched on the West Indies and the subject of enslaved persons, but for reasons of length, I'll stick with novels. In these novels the topic of slavery was raised without symbolism, allegory, implication, irony, haunting, veiling, or cloaking. As well there are many examples of people of colour being portrayed with sympathy, if not authenticity.
       In the Advantages of Education (1793) by Jane West, Mrs. Williams joins her husband in the West Indies but leaves her daughter behind in England with a guardian. She doesn’t want her daughter exposed to the unhealthy climate, or to her dissolute father.  “His faults,” [said Mrs. Williams of her husband], “are no more than the common vices of the island. The planters, generally speaking, countenance each other in irregularities, at which an English libertine would blush. The redundant fertility of their tropical climes, and the bad habits which slavery introduces, are not favourable to the cause of virtue. The Lord of the soil, accustomed to the mean subservience of those around them… soon overcomes every restraint of conscience."  
       It is clear that she is referring to sexual concubinage. Mrs. Williams also blamed the “too great distinction,” that is, the power disparity, between slave-owners and the enslaved, which led to “pernicious examples of pride, cruelty, and luxury, which is unhappily prevent.”  The emphasis is more on the harms to English virtue than to the enslaved persons, but if Jane West could say this in 1793, in a novel aimed at mothers and daughters, how can critics claim that Austen had to be more reticent in 1814? 

    As scholar George Boulukos has explained, the trope of the "grateful negro" was a common one in literature of this period. A grateful "mulatto" woman features in Amelia Opie's novel Adeline Mowbray (1804). When the heroine rescues her husband from debtor's prison, Savanna vows her eternal loyalty. 
​       A young African tells how he was abducted from his parents while the girl he loved was murdered before his eyes in Cephisa, A Moral Tale (1802) by Mrs. Crowther. Unusually for this type of literature, the boy speaks in eloquent, grammatical English, instead of a cringe-inducing pidgin English.  He is so grateful to the planter who freed him that he sits and pines to death by the planter's grave. 
    The sufferings of black people in Cephisa and in the next two examples are used to provide a moral awakening to selfish white people. 
        The Barbadoes Girl: A Tale for Young People (1825) by Barbara Hofland is about the spoilt daughter of a West Indian planter who comes to live with a family in England. Her moral reformation is the central theme of the book, not emancipation. The tale includes graphic detail about the cruelties of slave-owners and there are discussions of emancipation.
      In Elizabeth Helme's Modern Times (1814) a selfish girl orders her slave, Juba, to jump into the ocean to rescue a whip she dropped which the waves are carrying away. He protests, but obeys, and is killed by a sea-monster. Fanny eventually becomes a better person through the good examples of others.
​         Maria Edgeworth’s 1804 short story The Grateful Negro tells of an enslaved African man who is purchased from a cruel planter by a more humane one. In gratitude, he alerts his master to a pending slave revolt. 
       The story is problematic for modern readers, but there is also a brief but significant passage where Edgeworth has her two planters debate the economic rationale for slavery: “Granting it to be physically impossible that the world should exist without rum, sugar, and indigo, why could they not be produced by freemen, as well as by slaves?” the kind planter asks.  Likewise, Henry MacKenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777) features an extended section in the second volume in which the hero, Savillon, improves the conditions of life on the plantation. He also wonders if paid labour or using cattle would work as well or better. 
      The wife of a plantation owner brags about her way of life in Eleanor Sleath's The Bristol Heiress (1809). You can read the conversation here. ​John Moore's potboiler Zeluco (1789) also features a slavery debate; a humane doctor argues with a cruel slaveowner. This kind of debate between a defender of slavery and an abolitionist also occurs in Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792). Smith repeated her anti-slavery message in The Wanderings of Warwick (1794).  Sarah Scott's The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), is an admiring account of a reform-minded West Indian planter. It details how he manages his plantation and how he attempts to protect the enslaved persons from maltreatment after his death.

   If Austen had wanted to include a Black character in Mansfield Park, she could have had Sir Thomas bring an emanicipated slave back from Antigua with him. She didn't, and instead, scholars have resorted to Fanny-is-just-like-a-slave parallels. But other authors of the period did portray Black characters.  Perhaps the topic was going to come to the fore in Sanditon, her unfinished novel, which features a "half mulatto" heiress from the West Indies. 
​       Sarah Burney's Traits of Nature (1812) features a servant, Amy, who is devoted, but not slavishly so, to the heroine. Amy speaks her mind freely, (although in pidgin) and has some agency in the novel. The heroine's brother (who is a jerk to everybody) refers to her appearance in insulting terms, but Amy retains her dignity and self-possession. The most remarkable thing about Amy is that she is not presented as being anything remarkable. The same author featured a black servant in another novel, Geraldine Fauconberg (1808). Caesar is repulsed by a Welsh servant girl when he tries to flirt with her. The encounter is presented comically.
      In The Farmer of Inglewood Forest (1796), by Elizabeth Helme, Julia and Felix are emancipated from servitude. In the novel they serve a similar role as "Noble Savages" -- they are virtuous and wise, yet innocent. They provide commentary on English society. Felix is sent to sell a valuable watch so his friend Mrs. Palmer can bury her child. He explains she “must sell [the watch] to pay those rites which your country’s custom demands before the body of her child can be permitted to mingle with the dust; to hire men who assume the semblance of sorrow with a black coat, and pay for a peculiar spot of earth, as if all on which the sun shines was not equally hallowed!”
    Julia and Felix also have agency in the novel -- they serve, rescue, and otherwise support the white people to whom they are devotedly grateful.  Julia, more recently arrived in Jamaica, speaks in pidgin English. She defends a young lady from abduction at the risk of her life. ("Bad white man -- wicked Christian -- me die before let take away Missey.") This novel features branding, flogging, rape, and slave uprisings but even these lurid events are a minor sub-plot compared to the main plot of the story which focusses on an English family.
​      Elizabeth Helme wrote about slavery repeatedly, including child slavery in India, and she wrote approvingly of African society (the Hottentots) at a time when Africans were inevitably referred to as savages. She also outsold Austen in her day.   ​  
​      Africans are actually main characters in Anna MacKenzie's Slavery, or The Times, (1793). The novel features an inter-racial marriage between an Englishwoman and the son of an African prince. 

       The plot of Geraldine, or Modes of Faith (1820) calls for a wise fatherly figure to be absent from the heroine's life until later in the novel. So Mr. Fullarton is packed off to the West Indies. However, author Mary Jane MacKenzie adds a little anti-slavery editorial. “A small estate in the West Indies has lately devolved to him, which he wishes to dispose of; but, as he is anxious, if possible, to secure the freedom and comfort of the slaves employed on it, he thought it would be most effectual to undertake the arrangement of the business in person.”  We are then told the heroine "silently admired Mr. Fullerton’s benevolence.” Mackenzie gets Mr. Fullarton out of the way for plot purposes and she also indicates his good character as a moral arbiter in the novel. In contrast, there is nothing in Mansfield Park about Sir Thomas securing the comfort, much less the freedom, of any slaves. 
     Lastly, I'd like to compare Mary Brunton's Discipline with Austen's Mansfield Park. Discipline came out the year after ​Mansfield Park​. Both have main characters who leave England for an extended period to manage their plantations. In both cases, these characters are not portrayed as villains (Maitland is the hero) but they are enriched by their colonial holdings. In both books, the slavery connection is a minor part of the plot. Broadly speaking, female rectitude is the theme of both Discipline and (leaving the "symbolic" argument aside for a moment) Mansfield Park.
       Brunton and Austen both need to remove characters from the action for plot purposes -- while Sir Thomas is away, the Crawfords get up to mischief at Mansfield; while Maitland is away, the selfish, coquettish heroine is disciplined by tribulation. But Brunton puts the West India connection to a double use -- she speaks out against slavery. She tell us Maitland is a “West India merchant and interested [that is, benefitting from] the continuation of the slave-trade, he opposed, with all the zeal of honour and humanity, this vilest traffic that ever degraded the name and the character of man. In [Parliament] he lifted up his testimony against this foul blot upon her fame—this tiger-outrage upon fellow-man—this daring violation of the image of God.”
          After failing to overturn slavery in Parliament, Maitland returns to the West Indies “to mitigate the evil which he could not cure.” 
​          Compare that explanation to the one which sends Sir Thomas to Antigua: "Sir Thomas found it expedient to go to Antigua himself, for the better arrangement of his affairs."
​        Unlike Mackenzie and Brunton, Austen does NOT take the opportunity to say something about slavery or Sir Thomas's attitude toward it. The explanation is short as possible, and quite vague.