Crossing the Line

Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation

Candace Ward

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813940007
• eBook ISBN: 9780813940021
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Crossing the Line examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain's Caribbean colonies. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived by their metropolitan contemporaries as far removed—geographically and morally—from Britain and "true" Britons. Routinely portrayed as single-minded in their pursuit of money and irredeemably corrupted by their investment in slavery, white creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labor.

The emancipation-era novels that anchor this study of Britain's Caribbean colonies question categories of genre, historiography, politics, class, race, and identity. Revealing the contradictions embedded in the texts' constructions of the Caribbean "realities" they seek to dramatize, Candace Ward shows how these white creole authors gave birth to characters and enlivened settings and situations in ways that shed light on the many sociopolitical fictions that shaped life in the anglophone Atlantic.

1Hortus Creolensis

Cultivating the Creole Novel

OF THE pre-Emancipation creole novels examined in this book, only one—Montgomery; or, The West-Indian Adventurer—was published in the Caribbean. Written by “a Gentleman Resident in the West-Indies” for “upwards of 25 years,” Montgomery is set primarily in 1790s Jamaica, then the largest and most productive of Great Britain’s Atlantic sugar colonies.¹ The novel, printed at the newspaper offices of the Kingston Chronicle, appeared in three volumes, the first two in 1812 and the third in 1813. According to Frank Cundall, the early twentieth-century scholar of anglophone Caribbean print history, the author of Montgomery was likely a “Scotchman,” drawing from autobiographical experience to present a picture of white creole life that “may be taken as historically correct.”² The novel is of interest, suggests Cundall, “as being from the pen of one who wrote sympathetically both of the manners and morals of the inhabitants of Jamaica, with the example of St. Domingo before his eyes, and of the question of the gradual abolition of slavery; and, often in the form of post-prandial conversation, gives views on the condition of life in Jamaica generally and forms on the whole a true account of life on the sugar estates and pens at that period.”³

Cundall’s brief assessment provides a useful springboard for my reading of the novel, as does Kamau Brathwaite’s later description of Montgomery as an obviously partial documentation of Jamaican life due to the absence of any sustained treatment of black or brown people, enslaved or free. The latter do appear, as Brathwaite notes, but despite—or because of—the hero’s ameliorist tendencies, “the fact remains that no slaves appear in the novel who are or can be viewed with more than ‘pity and condescension.’”⁴

Read together, these commentaries—one emphasizing the novel’s accuracy, the other its inadequacies as a realistic depiction of West Indian slave society—capture the conundrum white creole writers sought to resolve through the novel form. Tasked with demonstrating that dependence on institutionalized slavery did not diminish white colonists’ potential as enlightened partners in achieving Britain’s economic and cultural aims, Montgomery’s author must confront the paradoxes of the plantation system and white creoles’ position in it. Of course, many West Indian texts take up this challenge, performing acts of “sweete negotiation” that Keith Sandiford identifies in his study of colonial narratives. As Sandiford’s reading of works like Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History . . . of Barbadoes and William Beckford’s Picturesque Tour of . . . Jamaica illustrates, if white slaveholders hoped to refute charges of West Indian degeneracy, it was necessary for them to construct persuasive counter-narratives to emancipationist depictions of Atlantic slave societies.

Montgomery contributes to this project but stands apart from other colonial prose as the first novel to engage the connections between “literary production and the more secular business of sugar production.”⁵ As discussed in the introduction, white creole writers were drawn to the novel form as a promising tool to carry out the aesthetic and sociopolitical labor required to overcome what most white West Indians viewed as antislavery propaganda. More specifically, Montgomery’s author looks to the tropes and conventions of the sentimental novel—popularized decades earlier by writers like Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Henry Mackenzie, Sarah Scott, and Laurence Sterne—to construct a Jamaican-born man of feeling, a protagonist whose sympathetic and exemplary character is tried and proved by his West Indian adventures.

As this chapter demonstrates, however, the very conditions that give rise to Montgomery—its situatedness in Jamaica, its status as a Caribbean artifact penned by a long-term resident and printed by a colonial press devoted to shoring up slave-owner interests—pose particular, site-specific problems for the author’s construction of creole sentimentality. Simultaneously bound by the novel’s formal demands to draw scenes and characters “as nearly after life as possible” (which, the author insists, “ought to be the case in every performance of this sort”) and to provide moral instruction to West Indian readers by stimulating “a love and emulation” of “whatever [is] amiable and praiseworthy in human nature,”⁶ Montgomery must accommodate the uneasy relationship between West Indian processes of cultivation and enculturation, between the hero’s ambitions as a prospective West Indian planter and his and the author’s work as sentimental cultivators of creole morality.

The terms of this negotiation, I argue, were determined by conceptions of culture and civilization taking shape over the course of the long eighteenth century. As Raymond Williams reminds us, prior to the dominance of a globalizing modernity and its concomitant -isms (colonialism, capitalism, imperialism), the term “culture” most typically functioned as a “noun of process,” the “culture of something—crops, animals, minds.”⁷ Coincident with the rise of English nationalism and expansion into the Americas, the term assumed a host of “new and elusive meanings,” variously articulated as “‘the arts’, as ‘a system of meanings and values’, or as a ‘whole way of life’” associated with a particular “civilized” population.⁸ In the anglophone Caribbean these strands of meaning proved inextricable from one another. As Montgomery reveals through its depiction of the Plantation—capitalized to indicate, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo puts it, “not just the presence of plantations but also the type of society that results from their use and abuse”⁹—agriculture and culture-building were performed simultaneously, in conjunction with and dependent on each other.

Throughout this chapter, I present Montgomery as a case study of the dialectical workings of these processes, as a dramatization of tensions produced by their interdependence. Such a reading demands close scrutiny of the novel’s West Indian setting as place and space, a locale comprising material and ideological sites where culture operates as noun of process (the large-scale cultivation of export crops by enslaved workers) and, for white creoles, as overarching sign of polite and enlightened planter society. More often than not, however, the novel’s representations of Jamaican scenes and characters and the hero’s sentimental responses to them expose the transformative violence endemic to the Plantation’s agricultural/cultural operations.

Such violence underwrites multiple scenes depicting the hero’s shifting position in Jamaican society, whether detailing his experiences working as a low-level employee on a large sugar estate, wandering in solitude through charming tropical scenery, or weeding a flower garden to demonstrate his devotion to the creole heiress he woos and marries. Such scenes, which I discuss more fully below, not only adhere to the demands of novelistic realism by reproducing the quotidian violence enabling the Plantation’s transformation of land and people on its behalf; they also expose the discursive violence required to wrest Henry Montgomery’s West Indian adventures into sentimental shape.

The instances of day-to-day and systemic, of material and aesthetic violence in the novel are staged most often on sites devoted to West Indian cultivation—of land, of men, of manners, and of romance. Before turning to the novel’s treatment of creole place, though, I want to look at another, extratextual but absolutely central site of cultivation: Montgomery’s place of publication, the printing offices of the Kingston Chronicle. At the time of Montgomery’s appearance, the Kingston Chronicle was under the editorship of Andrew Lunan, brother of John Lunan, editor of another of Jamaica’s daily newspapers, the St. Jago de la Vega Gazette in Spanish Town, and author of Hortus Jamaicensis, the botanical compendium that gives this chapter its title. The Kingston Chronicle was supported by a network (often familial as in the case of the Lunan brothers) of printers, editors, booksellers, and contributors affiliated with or members of Jamaica’s slaveholding elite.¹⁰ Like other regional arms of the colonial press, Jamaica’s print industry was central to the production and dissemination of local “knowledge,” its material output—from daily newspapers like the Chronicle, to the Proceedings of Jamaica’s House of Assembly, to Hortus Jamaicensis, to the first Jamaican novel—shaped and defined colonial life in various ways. In undertaking their work of cultural dissemination, these printing businesses operate as “site[s] of authority” and sites of cultivation. Taken together, they perform multiple roles, as Julie Codell observes of other colonial presses: “[a]gent of change, of hegemony, of resistance, and of many other inflected ideologies and opinions in between.” The press, she continues, “voiced many colonial experiences to and from readers who inhabited a real and a virtual Empire ‘at home’ and ‘abroad.’”¹¹ My reading of the Jamaican press in relation to Montgomery emphasizes the anxieties underlying iterations of the real and virtual, and explores how those tensions affected the press’s production of agricultural and cultural knowledge.

After situating Montgomery in the context of Jamaican print culture, I turn to the novel itself. Here, too, constructions of the real and the virtual appear as part of the novel’s formal structure: realistic descriptions are woven into the West Indian narrative at the same time its plot unfolds through a discursive mode privileging white sensibility and refinement. In this, Montgomery can also be read as a site of cultivation, a self-consciously didactic text given over to the inculcation of sentimental virtues among its West Indian readers. Montgomery’s author repeatedly turns to the conventions and literary tropes associated with sentimental culture, from spectacles of suffering and sympathy to scenes of the pathetic and the picturesque. In the end, however, the novel’s textual (re)production of physical settings where those spectacles and scenes play out—whether on the estates and pens where agricultural activity is paramount, or in the beautiful-terrible wilderness of the Jamaican bush—makes it clear that the violence of the Plantation is unavoidable, ever-present.

As importantly, these passages demonstrate that violence is indispensable for the novel’s sentimental didacticism. Without it, Henry Montgomery’s exemplary sensibility would have nothing against which to define itself. The textual representations of Montgomery as he bears witness, both seeing and testifying to the violence inflicted on enslaved people, are transformed by his sympathetic responsiveness into displays of white West Indian sensibility—images to counter constructions of white insensibility that featured so prominently in antislavery rhetoric. Thus, even as the novelist incorporates instances of brutality as realistic elements of West Indian life, they create the conditions that give rise to the hero’s virtues; displays of these virtues in turn legitimize the novel’s claim of improving creole customs and manners. Montgomery, in other words, emplots the transformative violence necessary to the ideological work of the sentimental creole narrative. In so doing, this first Caribbean novel lays a foundation on which subsequent creole novelists will write through the problem-space—that “ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs”—of Emancipation-era colonial fictions.¹²

Printed for the Proprietors

Montgomery, as mentioned above, is arguably the first novel composed and printed in the anglophone Caribbean,¹³ appearing alongside a variety of materials offered by the Kingston Chronicle’s proprietors for the edification and entertainment of white West Indians.¹⁴ In addition to the main work of putting out a daily newspaper, for example, the Kingston Chronicle offices published works such as John Rippingham’s Jamaica Considered in Its Present State, Political, Financial, and Philosophical (1817); Alexander Campbell’s Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St. Catherine’s, Jamaica (1819); two scientific treatises by the Jamaican apothecary Alexander Watt, New Theory of Optics and New Theory of Physical Astronomy (both appearing in 1825); and the Proceedings of the Society for the Encouragement of Horticulture and Agriculture, and the Arts Connected with Them in Jamaica (1825).¹⁵ The wide range of material suggested by this partial catalog provides insights into both Jamaican colonial life and pre-Emancipation social relations: Lunan and the authors publishing with him are held up as representatives of enlightenment rationality and arbiters of creole morality. They were clergymen, council members, planters, and professionals: a “Society of Gentlemen.”¹⁶ The fact that their works appeared in print (often by subscription) reinforced these claims, making them “real” by providing documentary evidence that their sense of white creole entitlement and their efforts to institutionalize white privilege were justified.

The push by white creoles to (re)define themselves via a local print industry was crucial if they were to succeed in validating their society as enlightened and progressive. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, for example, resident and absentee planters were quick to describe slavery as a “cruel, and apparently unnatural system.”¹⁷ That description, however, was nearly always accompanied by the insistence, backed by self-declared knowledge of the actualities of West Indian life, that a “complication of difficulties” mitigated against general emancipation.¹⁸ Aside from arguments warning of economic ruin and lost colonies, punctuated by obligatory allusions to the recently declared Republic of Haiti, white planters and their allies presented readers with a central and indisputable “fact” of their own manufacture: enslaved people were incapable of understanding and undertaking the responsibilities of “freedom”; they remained “altogether ignorant of the modes of civilized life”—despite having “a civilized race” (the planters themselves) “always in view.”¹⁹

The colonial press played a key role in the (re)production of these...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Creole? Why the Novel?
• 1. Hortus Creolensis: Cultivating the Creole Novel
• 2. “A Permanent Revolution”: Time, History, and Constructions of Africa in Cynric Williams’s Hamel, the Obeah Man
• 3. “Lost Subjects”: The Specter of Idleness and the Work of Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica
• 4. Recentering the Caribbean: Revolution and the Creole Cosmopolis in Warner Arundell
• Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Early Creole (Historical) Novels
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index