Juba’s “Black Face” / Lady Delacour’s “Mask”:

Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

Sharon Smith
South Dakota State University

“Well, Lucy,” said lady Anne, “have you overcome your fear of poor Juba’s black
face?” The girl reddened, smiled, and looked at her grandmother, who answered
for her in an arch tone, “O, yes, my lady! We are not afraid of Juba’s black face
now. . . . [T]he eyes are used to a face after a time, and then it’s nothing.”1

In the first edition of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, published in 1801, Juba, an

African slave, marries Lucy, an English farm girl. As the above conversation
between Lady Anne Percival and Lucy’s grandmother suggests, the novel is
characterized in part by the colonialist impulse to assimilate Juba into Eng-
lish domesticity, to erase the signs of his cultural and racial “otherness” until
his blackness becomes “nothing.” Edgeworth’s representation of marriage as a
fundamental part of this endeavor made some of her readers uncomfortable;
this included Edgeworth’s father, who convinced his daughter to remove the
marriage of Juba and Lucy from later editions of the novel. According to re-
cent critics, a consideration of the marriage’s inclusion in and subsequent era-
sure from the novel is essential to an understanding of Juba’s role in the text.2
Just as essential is a consideration of the connection that Edgeworth creates
between the African slave and another Englishwoman in the text, the wealthy
and dissipated London socialite Lady Delacour. In Belinda, this connection al-
lows Edgeworth to explore a version of womanhood that promotes domes-
ticity by negotiating the boundary between domestic and public life; at the
same time, however, it reveals the anxieties surrounding this understanding
of womanhood.
Edgeworth’s novel configures Lady Delacour as a plotting woman who
bridges the public/private divide, revealing domesticity to be as much a public
construct as a private reality. In fact, in the novel’s concluding scene, domes-
ticity is represented as a public performance that shapes private interactions.

The Eighteenth Century, vol. 54, no. 1 Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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 72 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Early in the novel, Lady Delacour’s public pursuits, which are driven by her
desire for admiration and applause, are described as performative:

Abroad and at home, Lady Delacour was two different persons. Abroad she ap-
peared all life, spirit, and good humour—­at home, listless, fretful and melancholy;
she seemed like a spoiled actress off the stage, over stimulated by applause and
exhausted by the exertions of supporting a fictitious character. When her house
was filled with well-dressed crowds, when it blazed with lights, and resounded
with the music of dancing, Lady Delacour, in the character of the mistress of the
revels, shone the soul and spirit of pleasure and frolic. But the moment the com-
pany retired, when the music ceased, and the lights were extinguishing, the spell
was dissolved. (10–11)

As the conclusion of the novel makes clear, it is not Lady Delacour’s penchant
for performance that is problematic; rather, the problem lies in the way she has
plotted her performance, a purely “fictitious” display which is designed to hide
“domestic misery” rather than promote domestic happiness (10). For Edge-
worth, an adherence to domestic ideals is key to the improvement of human
relations within both private and public contexts; however, as Edgeworth’s
representation of Lord and Lady Delacour’s marriage suggests, domestic sym-
pathies, though natural, do not always flow naturally, and domestic roles must
be learned. Even in private life, the words and actions through which these
affections are expressed must frequently be performed, and public representa-
tions of domesticity function as indispensable models. The representation of
domesticity that closes the novel, a representation that is as performed as it is
natural, is the culmination of Lady Delacour’s plotting. However, while this
performance is plotted, or constructed, it is not entirely “fictitious” in the man-
ner of Lady Delacour’s earlier public displays. Rather than hiding a private
reality from which it is entirely disconnected, Lady Delacour’s later plotting
gives rise to a public performance that functions as a stimulant to and a channel
for domestic sympathies and, in doing so, shapes private interactions in a posi-
tive way. In this way, Edgeworth acknowledges the positive potential inherent
in the power Lady Delacour claims.
However, by connecting Lady Delacour with the figure of the colonized
other, whose domestication was frequently read as a performance that hid
threatening, rebellious impulses, Edgeworth also identifies this power as a
source of anxiety. She suggests that while the public performance of domes-
ticity can indeed be positive, it is never completely stable; in fact, it is subject
to disruption and (when plotted by a woman) can serve as a potential site for
rebellion. Edgeworth, though she acknowledges the important social contri-
butions women can make by exerting themselves within the public sphere, is
nonetheless plagued by the persistent belief that women’s public activities con-
stitute a threat to domesticity, an ideal she adheres to and supports throughout

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 73

her body of work. The anxieties attendant upon women’s increased participa-
tion in public life emerge within the context of the parallel subplots involv-
ing Lady Delacour—­a hybrid figure whose performance of domesticity blurs
the boundary between public and private life—­and Juba—­the domesticated
but always potentially rebellious “other” who threatens the boundary be-
tween colonizer and colonized. Alison Harvey discusses the many connections
Edgeworth creates between Englishwomen, West Indian Creoles, and African-
Caribbean slaves in Belinda. According to Harvey, Edgeworth’s exploration of
the intersections between gender and race exposes the degree to which white,
male colonial power “others” both women and people of color. This explora-
tion, Harvey asserts, supports Edgeworth’s critique of colonialism.3 I argue,
however, that the parallel subplots Edgeworth forges between Lady Delacour
and Juba reveal her examination of the connections between race and gender
to be problematic. These parallel subplots allude to Edgeworth’s uncertainties
regarding women’s public activities by representing African slaves as super-
stitious, irrational, rebellious, potentially violent, and incapable of managing
their freedom. While Edgeworth critiques certain elements of colonialism, this
critique is ultimately undermined by her own propensity to write within the
terms provided by colonial discourse without sufficiently examining them.
As Edgeworth’s novel suggests, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century conceptions of women’s role within public and private life were being
constructed during a period in which Britain increasingly understood itself as
a colonial empire. As a result, representations of English womanhood were
sometimes configured within terms characteristic of colonial discourse, a dis-
course that represented the colonized person not as an individual speaking
subject, but as a mere extension of the colonizer’s identity. In Belinda, Juba func-
tions not as a distinct character, but as the racialized reflection of Lady Dela-
cour’s hybridity and the embodiment of the disruptive impulses that drive her
considerable, though never total, resistance to the domesticating influence ex-
erted by the novel’s heroine. Even more than the process of assimilation, which
the novel ultimately rejects as impossible and undesirable, it is this troubling
configuration of character that threatens to bring about Juba’s “nothingness”
within the text.4
According to Homi K. Bhabha, representations of self and other within co-
lonial discourse are reflective not of the actual relationship between colonizing
and colonized individuals but of the divided identity of the colonist. In The
Location of Culture, Bhabha writes, “The ambivalent identification of the racist
world . . . turns on the idea of man as his alienated image; not Self and Other
but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial
identity.”5 The identity of the colonist is fraught with tension, Bhabha argues,
because colonialism necessarily disturbs a vision of society that represents the
transition from nature to culture—­from the human psyche to civil society—­as
seamless. According to Bhabha, “The civil state is the ultimate expression of the

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 74 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

innate ethical and rational bent of human nature.”6 However, the destruction,
violence, and hatred that characterize colonialism threaten to disrupt the no-
tion of civic virtue that creates a sense of cohesiveness between self and society;
destruction, violence, and hatred must therefore be incorporated into a new
understanding of civic virtue that rationalizes the colonial project. The devasta-
tion of the colonized culture, for example, is represented as a necessary step in
the process of civilizing and modernizing “the native.”7
But, according to Bhabha, the disruption that colonialism creates within
the social identity of the colonizing culture remains in spite of that culture’s
attempts to validate its actions. He describes this disruption as a splitting or
“perversion” and argues that the representative figure of this perversion “is
the image of post-Enlightenment man tethered to, not confronted by, his dark
reflection, the shadow of colonized man, that splits his presence, distorts his
outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his actions at a distance, disturbs
and divides the very time of his being.”8 Within the discourse of the coloniz-
ing culture, representations of otherness fail to authentically describe colonized
subjects. Instead, these representations emerge out of the “disturbing distance”
that exists between the “colonialist Self” and the “colonized Other.”9 The “fig-
ure of colonial otherness” that exists within colonial discourse is little more
than “the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body.”10 To a great
extent, Bhabha’s ideas illuminate the nature of the connection that Edgeworth
forges between the characters of Juba and Lady Delacour. Far from speaking
to the actual lives of former African slaves transported to England during the
eighteenth century, Juba’s character functions as an extension of Lady Dela-
cour’s and becomes a vehicle for exploring a conception of womanhood that
blurs the boundary between public and private life. Concerns about the prob-
lematic nature of public womanhood are projected onto the figure of the Afri-
can slave, or—­to use Bhabha’s words—­they are “inscribed on the black man’s
body.” Juba’s character is the product of the “white man’s,” or in this case, the
white woman’s, “artifice.”
The parallels Edgeworth draws between Lady Delacour and Juba materi-
alize within the context of her exploration of the relationship between plot-
ting and domesticity, specifically the antithetical plotting that occurs between
Harriet Freke and Belinda Portman. Alison A. Case, who offers one of the few
sustained studies of women’s plotting in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
fiction, associates plotting with narration, and the female plotters she identi-
fies are first-person narrators. However, many of Case’s observations are ap-
plicable to other kinds of fictional plotters; these include characters who are
not narrators, but who nonetheless manipulate events within the narrative in
order to claim control over their outcome. According to Case, plotting is a sign
of agency and represents “an act of authority.”11 Women’s plotting, however, is
problematic, for it is at odds with the passivity that was generally expected of
them. As Case notes, “some of the most consistent threads in Western gender

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 75

ideology concern women’s purported inability to take purposive action—­to be

goal-oriented—­and the inappropriateness of their assuming certain kinds of
authority over others.”12 Case notes that female plotters during the period were
often considered “unsavory.”13 Indeed—­following the precedent set by Aphra
Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe early in the period—­ eighteenth-
century fiction is populated with women whose plotting is criminal or sexual
in nature.
During the eighteenth century, plotting was also associated with political
and social upheaval. This association was informed to a great extent by events
that included the actual and supposed plots to assassinate King Charles II at
the beginning of the period and the overthrow and execution of King Louis XVI
of France toward the end. It was also informed by the numerous slave insur-
rections that terrified European colonists throughout the century. The plotting
of slaves was problematic because, like the plotting of women, it entailed the
rejection of a passive role and signified a desire for power and authority. In
Belinda, Juba comes to represent the threat posed by the plotting slave. Through
her association with Juba, Lady Delacour—­ who is repeatedly “racialized”
throughout the text—­comes to embody this threat as well. As a result, her plot-
ting, in spite of its positive potential, takes on an ambiguous tone that reveals
Edgeworth’s own doubts about the possibility of reconciling women’s domes-
tic obligations with their desire to construct a public persona.
What Edgeworth would have considered the more ominous qualities of plot-
ting are reflected in the character of Harriet Freke, whose cry of “I hate slavery!
Vive la liberté!” simultaneously connects her to both slave revolt and political
revolution. Notably, the next words Harriet speaks are “I’m a champion for the
Rights of Women” (229). As Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick argues, Edgeworth was a
supporter of women’s rights and women’s learning.14 Nonetheless, Edgeworth
was careful to separate her understanding of women’s rights from that em-
bodied by Harriet Freke, an understanding that associates women’s advance-
ment with social upheaval. For Edgeworth, an improvement in the condition
of women should enhance rather than undermine both domestic and social
harmony.
While Harriet’s plotting undermines social order by threatening the domes-
tic space that helped to support it, Belinda’s plotting strengthens this order
by promoting domestic peace. Not surprisingly, Belinda and Harriet attempt
to undermine each other’s plotting throughout the narrative. Their plotting
focuses largely upon the lives of Lady Delacour and Juba, both of whom are
subjected to a process of domestication that is meant to culminate in their inte-
gration into a stable and harmonious family unit—­Lady Delacour must reunite
with her husband and child, while Juba must marry Lucy. Lady Delacour’s
domestication is a process of reformation that becomes necessary after her com-
mitment to a shallow and dissipated social life leaves her not only miserable,
but estranged from her husband and child; meanwhile, Juba must undergo a

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 76 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

process of assimilation that will prepare him to participate in the domestic, eco-
nomic, and cultural activities associated with English life and with Englishness.
Harriet Freke’s tireless plotting hinders the process of domestication for
both Lady Delacour and Juba. Lady Delacour is already unhappy when she
meets and befriends Harriet. Her marriage is failing, for her desire to dominate
her husband—­the oafish and habitually inebriated Lord Delacour—­has been
thwarted by his obstinate refusal to be “governed by a wife” (38). Lady Dela-
cour has fared even worse as a mother. Her maternal failures are reflected in
the deaths of her first two children (one stillborn, the other unable to sustain
life when Lady Delacour’s attempts to nurse her prove inadequate), as well as
in the neglect of her third child, Helena, who is raised by a nurse until the age
of three and then sent away to school several years later.15 Harriet’s plotting
exacerbates this already unhappy domestic situation. Two of Harriet’s plots in
particular render the Delacours’ home life nightmarish. First, Harriet arranges
for Lady Delacour to take a carriage ride with Colonel Lawless, one of Lady
Delacour’s admirers, knowing full well that the colonel will attempt to seduce
her friend. In response to the attempted seduction, Lord Delacour kills Colonel
Lawless in a duel; the guilt both Lord and Lady Delacour experience as a result
of his death deepens the misery that already plagues their marriage. Second,
Harriet convinces Lady Delacour to dress in men’s clothes and engage in a duel
with her arch-nemesis, Mrs. Luttridge. When Lady Delacour’s overcharged pis-
tol backfires, she receives an injury to her breast, an injury that comes to func-
tion as a dreadful symbol of her maternal failures.16 The pain Lady Delacour
experiences as a result of the injury brings about her addiction to laudanum.
Meanwhile, her belief that she is dying from the injury leads to her fascination
with Methodist literature, a fascination which the novel represents as irrational
and superstitious. Harriet’s plotting involves Lady Delacour in a downward
spiral that moves her farther and farther away from domestic happiness.17
In Belinda, Harriet’s attempts to control the plot ultimately prove ineffectual,
and this is due largely to Belinda’s influence. Like Harriet Freke, Belinda at-
tempts to plot the course of Lady Delacour’s life.18 She endeavors to bring hap-
piness and peace to the Delacour household by moving Lady Delacour closer
to the ideal of domestic femininity that she herself represents. As a result of Be-
linda’s encouragement, Lady Delacour begins to perceive her husband’s good
qualities. In response to his wife’s increasing attention and kindness toward
him, Lord Delacour spends less time drinking and gambling and more time at
home. Belinda also brings Helena back into the household and introduces Lady
Delacour to Dr. X—­, who weans Lady Delacour from laudanum and initiates
the cure of her injured breast.
The conflict between Harriet and Belinda comes to a head when, with the
encouragement of Dr. X—­and the support of her family, Lady Delacour moves
to a house in the country and prepares to undergo surgery on her wounded
breast. While there, she believes she is visited by the ghost of Colonel Law-

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 77

less and interprets the visitation as a sign that she will not survive the surgery.
As Heather Macfadyen notes, Lady Delacour’s Methodist readings lead her
to entertain this faulty interpretation.19 Lady Delacour’s “cure” begins in ear-
nest when the ghost is revealed to be Harriet Freke in disguise—­the appear-
ance of Colonel Lawless is yet another of Harriet’s dangerous plots. Belinda
is responsible for the discovery; it is she who spies the mysterious figure in
the garden and sends Dr. X—­and several servants to investigate. Though it is
the gardener’s “man-trap” that hinders Harriet’s escape, it is Belinda who first
recognizes her (311). When she does so, she asserts her control over the subplot
focusing upon Lady Delacour and essentially exorcises the spirit of Colonel
Lawless, a symbol of the Delacours’ domestic unhappiness and a representa-
tive of Harriet’s influence upon Lady Delacour. Soon after Belinda uncovers
the truth regarding the supposed specter, Lady Delacour is weaned from both
laudanum and Methodism and cured of the painful injury to her breast. She
is finally free to embrace life with her husband and daughter. In an effusive
speech that marks her transformation into responsible wife and mother, Lady
Delacour praises Belinda and identifies her as the one to whom she owes her
recovery: “She has saved my life. She has made my life worth saving. She has
made me feel my own value. She has made me know my own happiness. She
has reconciled me to my husband. She has united me with my child. She has
been my guardian angel” (335). As Lady Delacour’s speech suggests, Belinda’s
plotting has undone the damage caused by Harriet’s.
A number of the elements that prove central to Lady Delacour’s reformation—­a
reformation that is plotted by Belinda—­are repeated in Juba’s story.20 It should
be noted, however, that while Edgeworth creates numerous parallels between
these two characters, she does not develop their stories evenly; the subplot fo-
cusing on Lady Delacour is much more elaborate than that focusing on Juba.
Far from establishing the equality of these two characters, the parallels that
exist between Lady Delacour and Juba underscore the extent to which the novel
reduces his entire character to a reflection of several of her character’s defining
qualities. As a result of her association with the former African slave, Lady
Delacour’s character gains complexity; his, however, is rendered flat, underde-
veloped, stereotypical.
The story of Juba’s integration into English society is ultimately a condensed
and oversimplified version of the story of Lady Delacour’s domestication. Be-
fore Juba’s acculturation can occur, his attachment to African culture, which is
figured as irrational, must be dissolved. Just as Lady Delacour’s domestic at-
tachments are undermined by her belief in Methodism, Juba’s domestication is
threatened by his belief in the Obeah religion, which is represented as the prod-
uct of his excessive superstition.21 Juba’s belief in Obeah, which the novel refers
to as a “species of sorcery” (221), represents a tie to his African slave culture
that must be severed in order to ensure his acculturation into English society.
This becomes a particularly dangerous tie in the novel because of its associa-

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 78 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

tion with the threat of slave rebellion.22 As Alan Richardson points out, Obeah
during this period was associated “not only with the supernatural or with (in a
double sense) ‘black’ magic, but with political power as well, specifically with
slave rebellions and the incursions and revolts of West Indian Maroons.”23 Ac-
cording to Wylie Sypher, colonists during the period lived in continual fear of
slave revolt. He writes, “[T]here were uprisings every year from 1730–1740, not
to mention the serious disturbances of 1690, 1760, 1795, and 1796.”24 In 1791,
the slaves of San Domingo organized a violent revolt and successfully wrested
control of the island away from the French; the British became terrified that the
same could happen in their own colonies. Slave rebellion remained a very real
threat throughout the eighteenth century, and the religion of Obeah was iden-
tified as a motivating force behind it. According to Andrew McCann, Obeah
ultimately served as an outlet for expressing “the always concealed resentment
of the apparently submissive slave.”25 As harmless as Juba seems, his continued
belief in Obeah is a threat that must be neutralized; the neutralization of this
threat becomes an integral part of his assimilation.
Like Lady Delacour, Juba becomes the focus of Harriet’s and Belinda’s an-
tithetical plotting, as Harriet attempts to disrupt Juba’s domestication while
Belinda attempts to promote it. In a scene that anticipates Lady Delacour’s en-
counter with the supposed ghost of Colonel Lawless, Juba is overcome with
fear when he is visited by the figure of an Obeah woman, an “old woman, all in
flames” who “appeared at the foot of his bed every night” (221). He interprets
her appearance as an omen of his death and is “persuaded she would never let
him escape from her power, till she had killed him” (221). Significantly, the ap-
pearance of the Obeah woman has been orchestrated by Harriet Freke. In much
the same way that she will initiate Lady Delacour’s cure by “exorcising” the
spirit of Colonel Lawless, Belinda initiates Juba’s cure when she recognizes that
Harriet Freke is responsible for the appearance of the Obeah woman. Juba’s
cure is signaled by his marriage to Lucy, which marks his introduction into
domestic life. At his wedding, he sings a song in which he

described in the strongest manner what had been his feelings, whilst he was under
the terrour of Mrs Freke’s fiery obeah-woman, then his joy on being relieved from
these horrours, with the delightful sensations of returning health; and then he
suddenly passed to his gratitude to Belinda, the person to whom he owed his
recovery. (258)

Just like Lady Delacour, Juba associates Belinda’s plotting with his deliverance.
For both Lady Delacour and Juba, this deliverance is marked by their integra-
tion into a peaceful, blissful domestic existence.
The story of Juba’s domestication seems, at least on the surface, to reinforce
the domestic tale at the core of the novel, a tale that focuses on Lady Delacour’s
integration into a harmonious domestic sphere. But Juba’s story is permeated

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 79

by the anxiety that his acculturation can never be complete. This anxiety was
characteristic of the assimilationist impulse that often informed abolitionist
sentiment throughout the eighteenth century. According to Srinivas Aravamu-
dan, the assimilationist endeavor is inevitably accompanied by a certain degree
of skepticism. By way of illustration, he points to a trope that, before and dur-
ing the eighteenth century, denoted the impossibility of any given enterprise:
the image of “washing the blackamoor white”—­in other words, the image of
actually washing the blackness off of an African’s skin until it appears white,
what Aravamudan refers to as “epidermal laundering.”26 This trope simultane-
ously expresses both the desire to bring about the assimilation of the African
and skepticism that such an undertaking is possible. This skepticism under-
mines the stability of Juba’s story and, in turn, calls attention to the instability
of Lady Delacour’s own domestic tale.
The attempt to assimilate Juba into English culture is characterized by an
effort to “whiten” him. This is most apparent in the conversation Lady Anne
Percival has with Lucy and her grandmother. When Lucy’s grandmother as-
serts that the blackness of Juba’s face has become “nothing,” her words ap-
pear to point to the success of the process of assimilation to which the text has
subjected Juba. But Juba’s assimilation is never complete; signs of his “other-
ness” continue to surface in the text. For example, at his wedding, the event that
should mark his full integration into white English domesticity, the words Juba
sings are a “mixture of English and of his native language” (258). Later in the
novel, Mr. Vincent calls attention to Juba’s otherness when he fails to fully dis-
tinguish his former servant Juba from his dog, also named Juba. When he tells
Belinda, “Juba is the best creature in the world,” Belinda points out his “foible”
and asks him if he refers to “Juba, the dog, or Juba, the man” (346).
As the narrative proceeds, there is, indeed, confusion regarding Juba’s iden-
tity, for even though he has married Lucy and become a farmer, he still acts as
Mr. Vincent’s servant. A scene late in the novel shows Juba returning to Mr.
Vincent’s bedchamber after running an errand for him. Instead of tending to
his wife and farm, Juba is tending to Mr. Vincent, a fact that is emphasized
when Juba begins reading a letter that his wife sends to him at Mr. Vincent’s
residence. It is also during this scene that Juba argues with Solomon, a Jewish
lender who has come to transact business with Mr. Vincent. Juba and Solomon
reflect each other’s otherness. This is revealed by the parallel syntax the narra-
tor employs when naming and identifying them—­“It was Juba, the black, and
Solomon, the Jew”—­as well as by the manner in which they argue—­“each went
on talking in their own angry gibberish as loud as they could” (446, 447). The
text’s continued insistence upon Juba’s otherness is at odds with its attempt to
represent his assimilation as successful.
Juba’s assimilation is further undermined by the fact that he is configured
in these later scenes not just as a servant, but as a slave. As McCann suggests,
many abolitionists who advocated the assimilation of slaves into English cul-

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 80 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

ture during the eighteenth century were driven as much by economic motives
as by humanitarian impulses. During this period, economists such as Adam
Smith were beginning to argue that it cost more for a master to maintain slaves
than it did for wage laborers to maintain themselves.27 McCann writes, “Many
abolitionists accordingly argued that the economic benefits of colonial produc-
tion could only be guaranteed by converting the master-slave relationship,
which now appeared as a feudal relic, into a contractual relationship between
employer and employee.”28 When Juba marries Lucy, the transformation of the
relationship between Mr. Vincent and Juba from that of master-slave to that of
employer-employee appears complete.29 However, after Mr. Vincent is nearly
ruined as a result of his gambling addiction, Juba wishes to abandon his wife
and farm and go into exile with the man whom he still considers to be his
master. During his last appearance in the text, Juba—­reluctant to return home
to his wife and cottage—­is undoubtedly configured as an African slave rather
than an English husband/worker. Sobbing “like an infant,” Juba says, “But
massa will not be there—­massa is gone!—­When shall we see massa again?—­
Never—­never!” (449). The scene, which suggests that the process of “washing
the blackamoor white” has failed, emphasizes the text’s skepticism regarding
the possibility of assimilation.
At the same time, the text questions the desirability of this process, which—­as
Juba’s story suggests—­results not in the individual’s complete rejection of one
culture and absorption into another, but in hybridity. This hybridity is racial to
the extent that, while the subject of assimilation might adopt some of the stereo-
typical characteristics associated with the dominant race, he or she will neces-
sarily maintain some of the stereotypical characteristics associated with his or
her own race, characteristics related not only to appearance but also to speech
and temperament. Ideas concerning racial hybridity were inextricably linked
to ideas concerning cultural hybridity; even though the subject of assimilation
begins to engage in the symbolic rituals associated with the dominant culture,
he or she will almost certainly maintain a connection to the symbolic rituals as-
sociated with his or her own culture.
Recent gender and race theorists represent the transgressive potential of
hybridity, or “border crossing,” in positive terms. Judith Butler, for example,
discusses the liberatory possibilities inherent in drag, which points to the way
in which gender is performed; in other words, it is not a “natural” expression
of essential categories that are rooted in biological sex.30 In her discussion of
“passing”—­which occurs when an African American, for example, is able to
pass as white—­Amy Robinson uses Butler’s ideas to explain how race is also
performed rather than essential.31 In gender, race, and postcolonial theory, hy-
bridity frequently serves as a means for

unsettling the border, for breaking out of the prisonhouse of oppositionalist logic
into some kind of radically emancipated, free floating condition where the subject

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 81

is free to move between the great dualities inherited from the enlightenment—­
mind and body, culture and nature, rationality and emotion, self and other, and
so on—­as well as the great dualities emerging from the history of colonialism—­
colonizer and colonized, settler and native, active and passive.32

But as Annie E. Coombes and Avtar Brah suggest, the concept of hybridity
must be subjected to scrutiny; critics must “take account of the multiple uses
and meanings of the term depending upon the configuration of social, cultural,
and political practices within which it is embedded at any given time.”33 In
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the transgressive possibilities
inherent in the concept of hybridity were represented largely as a source of
anxiety.34
In Belinda, the anxieties regarding hybridity that are embedded in Edge-
worth’s representation of Juba become explicit in her representation of Juba’s
master, Mr. Vincent. Mr. Vincent’s hybridity is tied to his identity as a “Creole,”
an individual of European descent raised in the West Indies.35 Though the text
does not identify Mr. Vincent as racially mixed in the technical sense—­he is ap-
parently a full-blooded European—­he is described as a hybrid figure by virtue
of the fact that he has spent so many years immersed in the West Indian culture.
He is, then, a cultural hybrid, but his hybridity manifests itself in descriptions
of his physical features that are unmistakably racialized. As in Juba’s case, the
signs of racial and cultural hybridity become almost indistinguishable. Mr. Vin-
cent’s nose is “aquiline” and his hair is “fine,” but his eyes are “large” and
“dark,” his complexion darkened by the sun (217). That his face has been dark-
ened by sunlight rather than by a biological pigmentation of the skin does not
serve to distinguish him from his African slaves; during the eighteenth century,
Africans’ skin was generally believed to be darkened as a result of excessive
scorching by the heat of the sun.36 Mr. Vincent’s hybridity is further exemplified
by his excess of feeling. He is “totally deficient” in the “power and habit of rea-
soning” and is characterized by an “epicurean zest” and a “never-failing flow
of animal spirits” (217). As Felicity Nussbaum points out, natives of the “torrid
zone” were often believed to be characterized by an excess of passion—­often
sexual passion—­that they were ill-equipped to regulate.37
There is an attempt made within the text to convince Mr. Vincent of the
superiority of a particularly European brand of rationality, which is embodied
by characters like the Percivals and Belinda. Mr. Vincent makes some strides
in this direction: he comes to prefer European women to West Indian women
and the European climate to the West Indian climate (237, 254). But Mr. Vincent
finally fails to regulate his passions with reason: “Thus persisting in his disdain
of reason as a moral guide, Mr. Vincent thought, acted, and suffered as a man of
feeling” (424). Mr. Vincent’s failure to regulate his feelings ultimately leads to
his downfall, as his fondness for gambling proves to be the end result of his too-
passionate nature: “Emotion of some kind or other was become necessary to

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 82 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

him; he said that not to feel, was not to live; and soon the suspense, the anxiety,
the hopes, the fears, the perpetual vicissitudes of a gamester’s life, appeared
to him almost as delightful as those of a lover’s” (424). After he gambles away
his entire estate, he tells Clarence Hervey, “I am not master of myself” (432),
implying that he has relinquished the role of master for that of slave—­in this
case, slave to his passions.
As a representative of the figure of the cultural and racial hybrid, Mr. Vin-
cent raises questions within the text regarding the efficacy and desirability of
assimilation. Tainted as a result of his immersion within the colonized culture,
Mr. Vincent represents the threat of contamination a system of assimilation
poses to the culture-at-large. This contamination is presented as having dis-
tinctly economic consequences. Because of the qualities he has developed as a
result of his ties to the “torrid zone,” Mr. Vincent becomes incapable of manag-
ing his wealth. It is for this reason that Belinda breaks off their engagement. She
writes to him, “The hopes of enjoying domestic happiness with a person whose
manners, temper, and tastes were suited to my own, induced me to listen to
your addresses. Your unfortunate propensity to a dangerous amusement . . .
puts an end to these hopes forever” (448). To many during the eighteenth cen-
tury, the assimilation of Africans into the English social system seemed the
logical response to the economic uncertainties surrounding slave labor. Belinda,
however, suggests that the inherent qualities of individuals with roots in the
“torrid zone” are incompatible with the regulation of a rational economy. The
doubts concerning racial and cultural hybridity that color Mr. Vincent’s story
intensify those at the heart of Juba’s tale. Just as Mr. Vincent remains a slave
to his uncontrollable passions, Juba remains a slave to his Creole master. Even
though his loyalty to his master appears to hold him in check, the continuance
of Juba’s identification as a slave means that the threat of rebellion remains.
Edgeworth maintains a close link between hybridity and rebellion—­both of
which entail the crossing of established or accepted boundaries—­throughout
the text. As the representations of Juba’s and Mr. Vincent’s cultural and racial
hybridity and Harriet Freke’s gender hybridity make clear, the terms in which
these concepts are configured are profoundly problematic if not negative. In the
case of Lady Delacour’s character, however, the concept of hybridity—­though
still configured in terms of its transgressive potential—­is presented as having
positive consequences. In fact, it is possible to read Lady Delacour’s hybridity
within the terms provided by theorists such as Butler and Robinson, as a cel-
ebratory performance that reveals the constructed nature of overly restrictive,
socially established boundaries—­in this case, a gendered boundary that associ-
ates women’s activities with domestic space and men’s activities with public
space. At the conclusion of the novel, Lady Delacour’s hybridity is manifested
when her public performance of domestic femininity allows her to reveal the
instability of this boundary; hybridity becomes the defining characteristic of
a positive, pragmatic, and socially beneficial understanding of womanhood.

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 83

Certainly, Lady Delacour exhibits qualities—­especially in the first part of the

novel—­that seem incompatible with such a representation. Lady Delacour’s
participation in public life—­a life emphasizing little more than display and dis-
traction—­is represented as shallow, dissipated, and even dangerous. Toward
the end of the novel, however, Lady Delacour learns to channel her desire for
public significance in ways that are beneficial both for her and her “audience.”
This transformation is marked by her usurpation of Belinda’s role as the
character responsible for “plotting” domesticity in the text. Edgeworth explores
the representational quality of domesticity at various instances in the novel—­a
notable example is the picturesque moment that occurs when Mr. Percival takes
Clarence Hervey home to meet his wife for the first time: “They found Lady
Anne Percival in the midst of her children; who all turned their healthy, rosy,
intelligent faces towards the door the moment that they heard their father’s
voice” (98). In moving such representations of domesticity into the public
sphere, Lady Delacour does what Belinda cannot. Belinda represents the thor-
oughly domesticated woman. Though she is not entirely removed from public
life like the unfortunate Virginia St. Pierre,38 she is nonetheless devoted to pri-
vate life and void of public ambition. Meanwhile, though she comes to embody
certain elements of domesticity, Lady Delacour is not simply transformed into
another Belinda. Unlike Belinda, she is able to negotiate the boundary between
public and private life and, in doing so, is able to explore the possibilities inher-
ent in public constructions of domesticity. This enables her to bring the novel
to its proper conclusion.
Lady Delacour gains control of the plot after her reformation, when Belinda
discovers Mr. Vincent’s gambling addiction and determines not to marry him.
Sensing that Belinda still has deep feelings for her first love, Clarence Hervey—­a
natural inclination that Belinda refuses to acknowledge—­Lady Delacour de-
termines that she must take control of the situation by putting an end to the
unfortunate engagement between Clarence and Virginia and by bringing Clar-
ence and Belinda together. The reader of Edgeworth’s novel knows that this is
the correct course of action. Both Clarence and Virginia are secretly in love with
other people and clearly do not belong together. By finding Virginia’s true love,
Captain Sunderland, as well as Virginia’s long-lost father, who sanctions their
marriage, Lady Delacour frees Clarence to marry Belinda. In doing so, she es-
sentially carries out Edgeworth’s intentions as novelist within the context of the
novel itself. This is made particularly clear by the words Lady Delacour speaks
to her companions before she orchestrates the closing scene. “And now, my
good friends,” she asks, “shall I finish the novel for you?” (477).
The theatrical quality of the novel’s conclusion emphasizes the public nature
of Lady Delacour’s identity. As the novel draws to a close, all the proper cou-
ples are brought together—­Belinda and Clarence; Virginia and Captain Sun-
derland; and Lady and Lord Delacour, together with their daughter Helena.
Lady Delacour marks the occasion by organizing a kind of tableau vivant that

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 84 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

captures each character in an attitude of domestic felicity. Stepping outside of

the domestic scene she has created, she takes charge of the moment, which she
represents as one occurring upon the stage:

Now I think of it, let me place you all in proper attitudes for stage effect. What
signifies being happy, unless we appear so?—­Captain Sunderland—­kneeling with
Virginia, if you please, sir, at her father’s feet—­You in the act of giving them your
blessing, Mr. Hartley. . . . Clarence, you have a right to Belinda’s hand, and may
kiss it, too—­Nay, Miss Portman, it is the rule of the stage . . . . Enter Lord Delacour,
with little Helena in his hand . . . . Stand still, pray, you cannot be better than you
are—­Helena, my love, do not let go your father’s hand—­There! quite pretty and
natural! (450–51)

What is striking about the happy ending to this domestic tale is, of course,
its overtly constructed quality. Even more significant, however, is the way in
which this closing scene underscores Lady Delacour’s emergence as the con-
trolling force not just in the novel, but also of the novel.
As Lady Delacour concludes the narrative, she steps forward, away from
the domestic tableau she has constructed, and directly addresses her audience.
She promises them a moral, but instead of delivering it, she calls upon the au-
dience to figure it out for themselves. She does so in the form of a couplet, a
common way to end a scene in eighteenth-century drama: “Our tale contains
a moral, and no doubt, / You all have wit enough to find it out” (478). Lady
Delacour’s control of this moment of representation is so complete that she
is able to completely shift genres from narrative fiction to sentimental com-
edy. Macfadyen argues that the theatrical ending of Belinda indicates that Lady
Delacour has fully embraced her new domestic role; in contrast to her earlier
theatrical displays, “the tableaux she creates are not designed to display her
person, but rather to display the harmony made possible by domesticity” (438).
However, as several critics have noted, when Lady Delacour steps away from
the domestic circle she creates and addresses her audience, she reveals domes-
ticity to be a public construct that does not fully contain her and that she only
loosely embraces.39 Lady Delacour’s power resides in her ability to construct,
revise, broaden, and move beyond conventional representations of domesticity
as she herself transgresses the boundaries of domestic space in order to develop
a public identity—­as she becomes, in other words, a public/private hybrid.
Though it is indeed tempting to read this moment as a celebratory one, such a
reading is rendered unstable by Edgeworth’s insistence upon associating Lady
Delacour’s potentially positive public/private hybridity with Juba’s poten-
tially threatening racial/cultural hybridity, an association she forges through-
out the novel not only by embedding the characters in parallel subplots, but
by “racializing” Lady Delacour. Lady Delacour is repeatedly connected with
“the native”; she is represented as “dark” and as “other.” This is indicated,

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 85

for example, in her reference to herself as “the princess Scheherazade” and in

her comparison of herself to the sunburnt women of Antigua (51, 353) and the
Amazons (34, 194).40 Within the context of her identification with the Amazons,
Lady Delacour’s injured breast becomes not simply a symbol of her maternal
failures, but also a sign of her otherness.
Lady Delacour’s use of cosmetics further likens her to the racial “other.”
Though Belinda, like all of Lady Delacour’s acquaintances, knows that she
“paints,” she has no idea what the make-up hides until she sees Lady Delacour
without it. In a passage loaded with Gothic imagery, Lady Delacour reveals her
true face to Belinda:

She . . . wiped the paint from her face, and . . . held the candle so as to throw the
light full upon her livid features. Her eyes were sunk, her cheeks hollow—­no trace
of youth or beauty remained on her deathlike countenance, which formed a horrid
contrast with her gay fantastic dress. (31)

In hiding the traces of her illness, Lady Delacour’s cosmetics disrupt the other-
wise clear distinction between sickness and health. According to Tassie Gwil-
liam, women’s cosmetics generated anxiety during the eighteenth century
largely because they were believed to make supposedly “natural” distinctions
unreadable.41 While Belinda’s emotions are registered throughout the novel by
a natural blush that perpetually comes and goes, Lady Delacour’s emotions,
hidden under layers of make-up, remain a mystery. In one scene, the narra-
tor writes of Lady Delacour, “Through the mask of paint which she wore, no
change of colour could be visible; and as Belinda did not see the expression of
her ladyship’s eyes, she could not in the least judge of what was passing in her
mind” (202). In her description of Lady Delacour’s face as a surface upon which
emotions cannot be read, Edgeworth employs a racist rhetoric that, during
the eighteenth century, was frequently used to describe black faces. Gwilliam
writes, “The fear that a stabilization of color could mask fundamental distinc-
tions reappears in another form in eighteenth-century thought: in the belief that
black skin, like makeup, stymied interpretation of the face.”42 Lady Delacour’s
use of cosmetics both connects her to the colonized other and points to anxieties
regarding the rebellious impulses that potentially lurk beneath the unreadable
countenance of even the most docile slave.
Lady Delacour’s domestication can be read as an attempt to “whiten” her.
Ultimately, however, the trope of the “blackamoor” speaks to Lady Delacour’s
story as much as it does to Juba’s; like Juba, Lady Delacour is never fully “whit-
ened.” Even after her “cure,” she tells Lord Delacour that she will not “wash
off her rouge, and lay aside her airs, and be as gentle, good, and kind as Be-
linda Portman” (314). In other words, compelling Lady Delacour to wash off
her rouge, or turning her into a paragon of domesticity like Belinda Portman,
proves as impossible as “washing the blackamoor white.” Lady Delacour does

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 86 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

come to exhibit some degree of sensibility. She is not, she tells Lord Delacour, a
“brute” after all, and kindness proves to have a powerful affect upon her (314).
But she is never fully mastered. Lady Delacour tells her husband,

My actions, the whole course of my future life, shall show that I am not quite
a brute. Even brutes are won by kindness. Observe, my lord . . . I said won, not
tamed!—­A tame Lady Delacour would be a sorry animal, not worth looking at.
Were she even to become domesticated, she would fare the worse. (314)

Her sensibilities are awakened, but she is not “tamed.” Rather than being mas-
tered by the role of domestic woman, she masters it. Though Edgeworth ex-
plores the positive potential inherent in such mastery, she also configures it as a
source of anxiety. As Lady Delacour masters domesticity, she also steps outside
of it, a move that allows her to claim a public identity that contributes to the
improvement of social relations, but that simultaneously threatens to disrupt
the relations upon which the existing social order depends. In this way, she is
connected to the potentially rebellious African slave whose story parallels her
own, and her plotting takes on an ambiguous, if not a menacing, tone.
Perhaps even more problematic than the ambiguity of Lady Delacour’s char-
acter is the way in which Juba’s character is reduced to little more than a sign of
this ambiguity. As Lady Delacour emerges as a powerful force within the novel,
Juba’s character recedes, as if her character absorbs his. Critics whose discus-
sions of Juba focus on his marriage to Lucy disagree whether Edgeworth’s
novel renders the African slave visible or invisible. Kirkpatrick asserts that by
making an African visible within the English social hierarchy, the marriage ex-
poses the relationship between English commercial wealth and the enslave-
ment of West Africans.43 McCann, however, argues that the marriage represents
the impulse to render an African invisible at a time when Britain’s dependence
upon slave labor was increasingly viewed as economically unsound.44 In ac-
tuality, the novel comes to represent Juba as hovering somewhere in between
these two states. Even after his character disappears from the text, traces of Juba
remain—­in the rouge Lady Delacour refuses to wash off her face, for example,
or in the reference Virginia’s father makes to slave rebellions in Jamaica (476).
We might read this as the colonized subject’s stubborn refusal to be erased
from the text and conclude that novels as well as characters lend themselves to
the trope of “washing the blackamoor white.” This reading must be asserted
with caution, however. In his influential work on European and American
imperialism, Edward Said defines “Orientalism” as a Western discourse de-
signed to describe colonized cultures and individuals. According to Said, this
discourse says more about the culture that constructs it than it does about the
culture it purports to describe. In Orientalist discourse, “the Orient” functions
as the other against which Western culture describes, defines, and understands
itself.45 Juba plays a similar role in Belinda. As we recognize the transgressive

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 87

potential inherent in his character’s resistance to erasure, we must also ac-

knowledge that the transgression of the colonized individual in this case serves
a subordinate function in the text, as it underscores, heightens, and problema-
tizes the transgressive potential embodied in the figure of female power repre-
sented by Lady Delacour.

NOTES
1. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford, 1999), 244. Subse-
quent references are to this edition and will appear in the text.
2. Suvendrini Perera argues that the marriage points to the existence of revolution-
ary challenges to empire by revealing connections among women, menials, Africans,
and other non-Europeans (Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens
[New York, 1991], 32). Meanwhile, Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick and Andrew McCann discuss
the ways in which the marriage reveals the economic realities of slavery during the pe-
riod (Kirkpatrick, “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject’: West Indian Suitors in
Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no. 4 [1993]: 331–48, 342; Mc-
Cann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere [London,
1999], 56–57).
3. The parallel Edgeworth creates between Lady Delacour and Juba comprises just
one part of Alison Harvey’s larger discussion, which also explores connections among
characters and figures such as Belinda, Harriet Freke, Virginia St. Pierre, the Obeah
woman, Mr. Vincent, and Belacour from Richard Cumberland’s play The West Indian
(“West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial
Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie
Nash [Aldershot, 2006], 1–29).
4. Mary Jean Corbett explores the equally troubling perpetuation of colonial discourse
in Castle Rackrent, in which humor and irony are generated as a result of the distance
Edgeworth creates between the “us” represented by the English and the “them” rep-
resented by the Irish (“Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle
Rackrent,” Criticism 36, no. 3 [1994]: 383–400).
5. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London, 2006), 62–63.
6. Bhabha, 61.
7. Bhabha, 62.
8. Bhabha, 62.
9. Bhabha, 64.
10. Bhabha, 64.
11. Alison A. Case, Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century English Novel (Charlottesville, 1999), 13.
12. Case, 13.
13. Case, 15.
14. As Kirkpatrick points out, numerous critics have read these words and Harriet
Freke’s character as an attack on the feminist ideas of Edgeworth’s contemporaries Mary
Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays. Both Kirkpatrick and Deborah Weiss reject this reading
and assert that Edgeworth actually shared many of Wollstonecraft’s ideas, including
the belief that women’s behavior was shaped by cultural rather than natural influences
and that women could and should be educated to become knowledgeable and rational
human beings. For Kirkpatrick, Harriet represents a false brand of feminism that is ir-
rational and uneducated and that, rather than sharing in rational pursuits that were
mistakenly identified as “masculine,” simply mimics insubstantial masculine behaviors
(Introduction, Belinda , ix–xxv, xix–xx). According to Weiss, Harriet’s character exhibits an
understanding that is more stereotypically feminine than masculine and thereby serves

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 88 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

to critique both her culture’s understanding of the “female philosopher” and negative
representations of Wollstonecraft that were circulating at the time. Weiss asserts that Be-
linda comes to represent Edgeworth’s revised notion of the female philosopher, an intro-
spective and independently thinking woman who acts on the basis of judgment rather
than feeling and who exhibits generosity, courage, and self-control (“The Extraordinary
Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth’s Female Philosopher,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction
19, no. 4 [2007]: 441–61).
15. For a discussion of the way in which Lady Delacour’s domestic failures are rep-
resented by her failure to adequately nurse her child, see Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace,
Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford,
1991), 101–4, 128–37. For a discussion of breastfeeding in Edgeworth’s Ennui [1809], see
Julie Costello, “Maria Edgeworth and the Politics of Consumption: Eating, Breastfeeding,
and the Irish Wet Nurse in Ennui,” Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature,
1650–1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington, Ky., 1999), 173–92. Ac-
cording to Costello, Edgeworth uses the representation of the Irish wet nurse to confront
the issue of consumption among the Irish lower classes.
16. While Heather Macfadyen connects Lady Delacour’s diseased breast to her do-
mestic failures in general, McCann and Kowaleski-Wallace associate it more specifically
with her inability to mother; see Macfadyen, “Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edge-
worth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48, no. 4 (1994):
423–39, 425; McCann, 187; and Kowaleski-Wallace, 128. Meanwhile, Teresa Michals as-
serts that the consumption of Lady Delacour’s body by disease and addiction represents
her own irrational and uncontrolled economic consumption (“Commerce and Character
in Maria Edgeworth,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 49, no. 1 [1994]: 1–20, 17–20). Accord-
ing to Leah Larson, Edgeworth intends for us to read Lady Delacour’s breast-related
illness as psychosomatic, a representation that would have been in keeping with medical
thinking of the period (“Breast Cancer and the ‘Unnatural’ Woman in Edgeworth’s Be-
linda,” Explicator 67, no. 3 [2009]: 195–98).
17. Susan C. Greenfield discusses the homoerotic nature of Lady Delacour’s friend-
ship with Harriet Freke and argues that Belinda represents this homoeroticism as analo-
gous to the threat of miscegenation elsewhere in the novel. The demarcation of gender
difference upon which heterosexuality depends, Greenfield argues, interconnects with
the desire to establish a British nation free from the threat of contamination by its colonial
subjects. Lady Delacour, once her homoerotic tendencies are suppressed, becomes a cen-
tral agent in this process (“‘Abroad and at Home: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and
Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 112, no. 2 [1997]: 214–28).
18. Though Belinda’s plotting has not been discussed in previous criticism, Toni Wein
does emphasize her artfulness and asserts that the image of female propriety Belinda
represents is something she herself crafts and manipulates. As the novel progresses,
however, she increasingly comes to exemplify a form of moral prudence that Edgeworth
strongly endorses for women, one that emphasizes rationality, honesty, and self-possession
(“‘Dear Prudence’: The Art of Management and the Management of Art in Edgeworth’s
Belinda,” Women’s Studies 31, no. 3 [2002]: 299–322).
19. Macfadyen, 436. For a discussion of the way in which eighteenth-century Meth-
odist literature emphasizes the contribution of the affections, or “passions,” to religious
experience, see Isabel Rivers, “Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity,”
Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York, 1982),
127–64, 128–34.
20. Harvey identifies several parallels between Lady Delacour’s character and Juba’s:
both believe they are dying from a mysterious disease, both are tormented by Harriet
Freke in disguise, and both are profoundly affected by their religious beliefs (6–8).
21. Harvey explains that Methodism functions as more than just a parallel belief sys-
tem to Obeah. It is associated with Obeah also by virtue of the fact that, under the in-

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 SMITH—­PLOTTING DOMESTICITY IN EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA 89

fluence of Christian missionaries, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaican slaves

formed a belief system that was a hybrid of Obeah and Methodism (7).
22. Edgeworth explores this connection more explicitly in her tale, “The Grateful
Negro” [1804], in which Obeah is represented as a driving force behind a thwarted slave
rebellion (“The Grateful Negro,” Popular Tales, vol. 2 of Tales and Novels [New York, 1967],
399–419). According to Elizabeth S. Kim, Edgeworth uses the representation of this slave
rebellion to mask anxieties surrounding the Great Rebellion of 1798 in Ireland and to
represent rebellion as “temporary and containable” (“Maria Edgeworth’s The Grateful
Negro: A Site for Rewriting Rebellion,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16, no. 1 [2003]: 1–24).
23. Alan Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797–1807,”
Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 1 (1993): 3–28, 6. Richardson’s essay traces representations
of Obeah in British literature of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century,
including both Belinda and “The Grateful Negro.”
24. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the Eighteenth
Century (New York, 1969), 40.
25. McCann, 195.
26. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham,
1999), 2.
27. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
[1776], ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford, 1998), 80–81; and Sypher, 83–86.
28. McCann, 182.
29. Moira Ferguson discusses how “The Grateful Negro” asserts the superior profit-
ability of wage labor over slave labor in Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colo-
nial Slavery, 1670–1834 [New York and London, 1992], 231–34).
30. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York,
1990), 33, and “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” The Second Wave: A Reader in Fem-
inist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London, 1997), 300–15, 306.
31. Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Com-
mon Interest,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 4 (1994): 720–72.
32. Gerry Smyth, “The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems with Crossing the Bor-
der,” Comparing Post-Colonial Literatures: Dislocations, ed. Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray
(New York, 2000), 43–55, 43.
33. Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes, “Introduction: The Conundrum of
Mixing,”Hybridity and Its Discontents, ed. Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes (London,
2000), 1–16, 1.
34. Positive representations of racial and cultural hybridity during this period rarely
emphasized its transgressive potential, but—­as noted above—­represented it as a possible
response to economic uncertainties regarding the expense and inefficiency of slave labor.
Meanwhile, representations of hybridity that did emphasize its transgressive potential
were generally negative and were usually perpetuated by individuals concerned with
maintaining the purity of the white race and the integrity of English culture. According
to these individuals, a strategy of integration would create social disorder by leading to
sexual unions among individuals from different racial and cultural backgrounds. Some of
these critics argued that interracial unions would prove dangerously fertile. The progeny
of such unions might ultimately come to outnumber the colonizers, contaminating both
their “genetic stock” and their “cultural legacy”; see Avtar and Brah, 3–4. Meanwhile,
other critics of integration cited diminishing fertility as the result of hybridization; see
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London, 1995), 8. The
specter of infertility as the end product of assimilation does materialize in Belinda, most
notably in Edgeworth’s portrayal of Mr. Vincent; however, the anxiety that emerges here
has more to do with economic productivity, which is threatened by Mr. Vincent’s gam-
bling addiction, than with sexual reproduction. It is possible, of course, to read the former
as a representation of the latter.

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35. For discussions of Mr. Vincent’s status as a Creole, see Greenfield, 219–22; Harvey,
4–6; and Beccie Puneet Randhawa, “Penitent Creoles, Failed Hostesses, and the Impos-
sibility of Home in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Transnational England: Home and Abroad,
1780–1860, ed. Monika Class and Terry F. Robinson (Newcastle, 2009), 185–207.
36. Sypher, 50–51.
37. Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Narratives (Baltimore, 1995), 7–9.
38. Clarence has installed Virginia within a solitary rural enclosure, where—­following
the plan for female education outlined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau—­he limits her educa-
tion to those subjects that he believes will make her a perfect wife. Edgeworth was ap-
parently critiquing a similar plan undertaken by her father’s close friend Thomas Day,
who raised a young girl he christened “Sabrina Sidney” in seclusion with the intention of
eventually marrying her. His plan ultimately failed. See Mitzi Myers, “My Art Belongs to
Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women Writers and
Patriarchal Authority,” Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century “Women’s Fiction” and Social
Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Baltimore, 2000), 104–46, 106–7; and Jane Spencer,
The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (New York, 1986), 161.
39. See, for example, Greenfield, 224; Harvey, 4; and Susan Bolet Egenolf, “Edge-
worth’s Belinda: An Artful Composition,” Women’s Studies 31, no. 3 (2002): 323–48.
40. Laura Brown describes how eighteenth-century travel narratives often made ref-
erence to a race of warrior women who existed just outside the boundaries of colonial
space, a formidable and threatening presence that remained beyond the control of colo-
nists. These narratives locate the Amazons sometimes in South America, sometimes in
the West Indies, and often in Africa, especially Ethiopia (Ends of Empire: Women and Ideol-
ogy in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature [Ithaca, 1993], 159).
41. Tassie Gwilliam, “Cosmetic Poetics: Coloring Faces in the Eighteenth Century,”
Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea Von Mücke (Stan-
ford, 1994), 144–59.
42. Gwilliam, 148.
43. Kirkpatrick, “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors,’” 342.
44. McCann, 56–57.
45. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), 2–3.

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