Moen 1
Joelle Moen
Engl 521, Lee
20 Nov 2010
Seminar Paper Draft
The Role of Race Science in the Drama of British Abolition
In England, enthusiasm for the field of race science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted from the confluence the taxonomic strain in European Enlightenment science, starting with the 1767 publication of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, and the travel writings of various explorers, epitomized by James Cook. Among most of the writers of race science, there was not only a confluence, but an intertextuality. In fact, Emmanuel Eze asserts that many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers of race science texts display a “promiscuous theoretical as well as stylistic dependence of one writer on another” (6). Yet these writers of race science not only interacted with one another, they engaged in larger cultural issues, none of which was more prominent than the British slavery abolitionist movement which nominally began with the Somerset case in 1772, coalesced with the formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, and continued until the 1833 British Slavery Abolition Act that finally resulted in freedom for blacks in British territories in 1838. Because the British abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a public debate, in many ways it took the form of a public drama, with a variety of actors playing differing roles. In essence, to use the language of Mary Louise Pratt, by engaging the cultural concerns of race, empire, and social structure, race scientists entered into a dramatic “contact zone.”[1] By participating in this public drama through a field that was as much art and philosophy as it was science, the race scientists influenced another public art form—portraits of Black Britons.
In Britain, there were numerous pro-abolition performers in this dialogue on race including members of benevolent societies who spread propaganda, Parliament members who publically debated abolition, and publishers and clergymen who wrote and spoke abolitionist tracts. Among the most effective and interesting people who entered this public dialogue were those of African descent or origin. Although some performers were seemingly more willing than others, theirs is a unique place among the players because they were seen as representatives of those whose fate was being debated. Some of the more prominent Black abolitionist performers during this era included Olaudah Equiano,[2] Mary Prince, Sarah Baartman, and Ira Aldridge.
Equiano entered the public dialogue with his narrative (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, 1789), purportedly written at the request of abolitionists who wanted to illustrate the evils of the slave trade through a portrait of the middle passage. Addressed to both Houses of Parliament, The Interesting Narrative went through nine editions in five years and featured an impressive number of subscribers from England, Ireland, and Scotland, including the Prince of Wales (15). While the publication of a book isn’t necessarily a performative event, in Equiano’s case it is, partially due to his public involvement in the abolitionist movement and partially because he made public appearances throughout Great Britain to promote book sales (Richardson and Lee 113). Like Equiano, Mary Prince was a former slave who published her narrative with the help of British abolitionists. Price was born in the West Indies and then brought to London by the Wood family, who treated her very poorly. After seeking refuge with in London with local branch of the Anti-Slavery Society, Price literally performed her story in two ways. First, in 1831 she dictated her narrative to Susannah Strickland at the behest of Thomas Pringle, the society’s secretary. The History of Mary Prince was then “marketed as a piece of propaganda” (Salih xxviii). Second, Prince publically testified to the veracity of her History in two court cases in 1833, once in a libel suit Pringle brought against the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine who called Prince’s history false and again in a libel suit brought against Pringle by the Wood family, whom Prince indicts in her narrative.
While Equiano and Price entered Britain’s racial drama though written texts, Sarah Baartman and Ira Aldridge literally performed on stage. Baartman, called the Hottentot Venus, was brought from her home in South Africa in 1810 and notoriously displayed near Piccadilly in London as part of a money making scheme conceived by Hendrik Cesars and Alexander Dunlop. Playing on the popularity of the burgeoning “freak show,” Cesars and Dunlop collected two schillings per person to witness Baartman parade around a stage and wiggle her body for the gaping, titillated Londoners. “She would attract both scientists and the general public,” “the former studied her,” while “the latter came to ‘view’ her” (Boetsch and Blanchard 63). Baartman’s public display offended a number of people and within six weeks of Baartman walking on stage, abolitionist Zachary Macaulay began a public letter writing campaign protesting that her exhibition amounted to slavery in free England. Macaulay’s efforts resulted in a legal investigation against Cesars and Dunlop for mistreatment and slavery. The inquiry did little more than increase Baartman’s notoriety and spectators (Crais and Scully 82-102). Although Baartman told investigators that she was a willing participant in the commercial scheme, many recent critics have wondered what other choice she had. The fact that, after a tour of England, her “contract” was sold (some would say she was sold) to Henry Taylor, an animal trainer, for exhibition in Paris shows she was little more than chattel.
In contrast to Baartman, Ira Aldridge came to England of his own volition. Born in New York, the child of free blacks, Aldridge was the first person of African descent to perform serious roles on the London Stage. When he debuted in the small working-class Royal Coburg Theatre as Othello in May 1825, he was advertised as “a Gentleman of Colour, from the New York Theatre” (qtd. in Lindfors 35). The only reviewer of Aldridge’s debut commented that he “was surprised to find the Hero of the Piece so ably pourtrayed” by this “gentleman of Colour lately arrived from America” (qtd. in Lindfors 37). Yet throughout the year and more performances, Aldridge gained attention and more critics who were seemingly so nervous that a black man might be able to act, they resorted to slander and stereotype in their reviews. For example, after Aldridge stared in The Revolt of Surinam, or A Slave’s Revenge, a revision of Oroonoko, The Times reviewer said that “owing to the shape of his lips, it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English” (qtd. in Waters 3). Of the same performance, a Globe reviewer wrote that Aldridge’s “enunciation is distinct and sonorous” (qtd. in Waters 4). Having become a symbol in the middle of the abolitionist debate, by the end of the year, Aldridge left London for the Theatre Royal in Brighton, perhaps because his marriage to a white Englishwoman pushed the tolerance of even abolitionists.
While out of London, Aldridge crafted a new identity. Being a “Gentleman of Colour lately arrived from America” wasn’t romantic enough, so Aldridge created a better part for himself. He assumed the identity of an African prince, the descendent of a Senegalese king, and soon called himself the “African Roscius” (Courtney 106-07). Having fashioned this new identity and honed his skills as an actor, Aldridge returned to London fulfill his most important role in the drama of abolition and in the English theater. Despite removing himself from London’s turmoil of the 1820s, in April 1833, at the very time Parliament was debating the British Slavery Abolition Act, Aldridge replaced the recently deceased Edmund Kean as Othello in Covent Garden. Reviewers had a field day, responding to Aldridge’s performance seemingly according to their stance on abolition and the equality of blacks. As biographers Marshall and Stock catalog, one paper said Aldridge was “threatened with damnation” for even attempting the role (118), another that he had no “fitness” for the part other than “his own native hue,” (121) another called him a “mere novelty,” (123) another mocked that “no part could be more soot-able” for him (128), while yet another commented that “his acting was more than respectable” (127) and another that “he succeeded in deeply affecting the feelings of his audience” (124). Such reactions are somewhat predictable, considering Aldridge’s real-life self-fashioning as an African prince married to an Englishwoman. When the actor playing Brabantio protests that Desdemona, who “shunned / The wealthy curléd darlings of our nation” would not “Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou,” (1.2.67-71) he was giving voice to very real fears of miscegenation. Aldridge was the real-life embodiment of such fears, even as he fulfilled the role of a Shakespearean tragic hero. At the same time, the play challenges the idea that outward looks allow for an interpretation of personality. When Othello first elopes with Desdemona, the Venetian Duke comforts Desdemona’s enraged father by ensuring him that his new son-in-law has a good soul despite his skin color: “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.290-91). Yet even Othello falls prey to the dominant discourse that skin color reflects the state of his soul. In describing his reputation and concern over Desdemona’s possible infidelity, he tells Iago, “My name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face (3.3.385-87).
In contrast to these black performers, the race scientists prominent during England’s abolition drama were all well-educated white men. Their performances as scientists were automatically different because they were examining an other rather than a self in their performances. That the field of race science would develop during the debates on abolition is no accident because it was also the same time that travelers returned to England with a variety of plant, animal, cultural, and even human specimens and souvenirs from throughout the world. The amount of these imports was seemingly overwhelming. One of the most prominent collectors, Joseph Banks, increased Linnaeus’ comprehensive list of plant species by 25% by virtue of the specimens he received from voyagers (Fulford, Lee, and Kitson 36). For some, this abundance of foreign materials and people represented a chaotic loss of control and people attempted to understand. At the same time enclosure laws (need dates) led many rural British to migrate to London in search of jobs. The city was no longer a stable place to live. Pearl explains that “the scale of London changed the nature of human interaction in dramatic and pressing ways” (10). But the same scientists who were increasing the number of new objects and people in London also provided an answer to understanding them—categorizing.
As Stuart Hall argues, “Stable cultures require things to stay in their appointed place.” Indeed people within a shared culture have an urge to classify because “Social groups impose meaning on their world by ordering and organizing things into classificatory systems” (236). While all cultures generally like to categorize, the urge to classify became extraordinarily great in late eighteenth-century scientific communities because, as Mary Louise Pratt argues, the confusion resulting from an overabundance of collecting naturally lead to categorizing. Pratt writes, “natural history asserted an urban, lettered, male authority over the whole of the planet” (38). Linnaeus’ taxonomy made complete categorization of the world seem possible.[3] As Pratt asserts, “The discursive impact of natural history and the new planetary consciousness” (39). This planetary consciousness, compounded by the urge to categorize, led even those with abolitionist leanings to delve into race science.
Two systems of categorizing people which were big on drama and demonstration but light on scientific evidence were phrenology and physiognomy. Both of these “fields of science,” although popular with the public were marginalized by most natural scientists looking for a key to categorizing and discerning the differences between races. Phrenology was basically the “science” of feeling lumps on a person’s head to understand their emotional, moral, and intellectual capacities. Because such an activity worked so well into the developing “freak shows,” even a leading proponent of phrenology, George Combe, President of the Phrenological Society of the United States, had to admit that the field had been “injured by quackery” (373). Yet phrenology’s two major proponents in Britain, Franz Joseph Gall and J. G. Spurzheim, were actually neurologists interested in the brain as “the organ both of the moral feelings, and of the intellectual faculties” (Spurzheim 133). However, as Spurzheim admitted, measuring morality and feelings, such as someone’s benevolence, by the shape of his or her skull was an estimate at best. Because nineteenth century neurology was too difficult to quantify, it did little to help race scientists categorize the people of the earth. Yet Gall, Spurzheim, and Combe were in many ways actors like Aldridge and Equiano. Gall, the most famous of these men, gave popular speeches around Britain and even went on the lecture circuit in the United States.
While phrenology succeeded with the public, it had little traction with other scientists. However, another early method of categorizing people, physiognomy carried some weight. Physiognomy, the “science” of understanding a person’s character based on facial features was, as Sharrona Pearl argues, “used as a technology to make decisions about individual others” (1). In a city that was teeming with new people and from around the country and around the world, “Physiognomy helped urbanites deal with the simultaneous overload and lack of human information by allowing people to make judgments on the basis of sight” (10). This pseudoscience was popularized throughout Europe by Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss doctor. His Essays on Physiognomy: For the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind was edited and translated by Thomas Holcroft into English in 1789. First produced in large expensive tomes with elaborate drawings, Lavater’s guidance for judgment became so popular that the publisher came out with The Pocket Lavater in 1801 so people could more easily and conveniently size each other up while walking around town. When Lavater died, The Scots Magazine proclaimed the loss of “one of the most famous men in Europe” (qtd. in Graham 561)