02 December 2009

Sugar

Here's a list of novels I've been reading that are interested in talking about enslavement:

1) Robinson Crusoe—Crusoe is a slave in North Africa for a while (where he's in charge of catching fish for his master, but then he runs away). He makes his original £200 trading in slaves, then runs his own sugar plantation in Brazil for a while. Even on his deserted island, sugar follows him—he's delighted to find some of it, and some flour, in the last store of provisions he takes off the deserted boat before it breaks up and sinks.

2) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph—At the end, Sidney's mystery cousin, the one who comes back pretending to be poor and needing charity so he can find which relative is worthy to bestow his fortune on, is fantastically wealthy because he's returned from the Caribbean. One can only assume that what he's been doing there to make so much money is selling and buying sugar and slaves.

3) The Sentimental Journey—Sterne is both more oblique and more obvious. The overt context of the little caged starling that was trained to say "I can't get out! I can't get out!" is to get Yorick to realize that he doesn't really want to be shut up in the Bastille for coming to France from hostile England without a passport. But it's the sentimental 1760's, so the image of the caged starling asking for its freedom is also an image of enslaved people (the caged bird that sings, I guess). The fact that ship's captains keep trading and buying and selling the starling before it's finally returned to Dover and set free emphasize that the starling's a sentimental commodity.

4) Villette—M. Paul Charles David Emmanuel disappears off to the Caribbean at the end to take care of his dead fiance's family's estates there. He dies in a shipwreck, because in Bronte colonial ventures leave people dead or crazy or soon-to-die. (Or he doesn't die in a shipwreck—comes home to Belgium and marries Lucy and they're fantastically unhappy together because they both really just want to be alone and she doesn't seem attracted to him at all, and that's why the period before he's set to sail back is the happiest of her life. But I'm an optimist, so I choose to believe that he dies.) She refers to herself as a Quaker sometimes—because of the plainness of her dresses—but this doesn't seem to get her to think much about Emmanuel's role as colonial hegemon.

5)The Heart of Darkness—Sure, he's about the ivory trade instead of the sugar trade, but Conrad's still deeply interested in racist colonialism, and he gets as much mileage out of the contrast between the moral darkness of what white people are doing to dark-skinned Africans and the white Ivory (and the white linen shirts that that one weird guy at the Inner Station gets his unwilling servant woman to iron for him—Marlowe narrates something like "she didn't want to do it, but she did it) they're doing it for, that eighteenth-century British abolitionists got out of black people being enslaved to produce white sugar. (Did anyone ever connect dental cavities to the slave trade? Because THAT would have been awesome and amazingly overdone...)

5) A High Wind in Jamaica—Slavery's lately been abolished at the beginning of the novel; all the slave's huts are falling down hardly any sugar's being produced. There's that fantastically racist anecdote about the two old white women who're murdered in their beds and eaten (or something, says the narrator) by their former house-slaves. The novel seems to be being ironic about this, but it does it in that 1920's way where it still thinks it's really funny, because it's really interested in it as an image of the pathos of the British Empire going to hell. (Once you shut down slave labor in Jamaica, apparently, nice little English girls will start murdering Dutch sea captains while captive on board pirate ships, and then lie about it later in court in London.)

6) Flush—Elizabeth Barrett's family made their money in the sugar trade in Jamaica. Sterne-like, Woolf ties Flush's captivity in Miss Barrett's room, and Miss Barrett's captivity in her father's house, to the captive labor that made the Barretts' money. Not explicitly—but it's certainly there. Sugar is such a loaded concept in the English novel.