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THESIS

qu

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

Race and the Gothic Imagination
in Matthew Lewis's Journal 9i
3 West India Proprietor

presented by
Kelly Eileen Battles

has been accepted towards fulfillment
', of the requirements for

M.A. degree in English

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RACE AND THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION IN MATTHEW LEWIS’S JOURNAL OF
A WEST INDIA PROPRIETOR

By

Kelly Eileen Battles

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT

RACE AND THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION IN MATTHEW LEWIS’S JOURNAL OF
A WEST INDIA PROPRIE T OR

By

Kelly Eileen Battles

This thesis examines the ways in which the gothic becomes an organizing
structure through which Matthew Lewis is able to interpret and represent the culture of
the African slaves on his Jamaican sugar plantation as recorded in his Journal of a West
India Proprietor (1834). In appropriating the gothic as a mode of describing and
narrating the Jamaican slave culture, Lewis takes advantage of the epistemological
intersections between the gothic and ethnographic discourses as both grapple with
questions of the unfamiliar and the uncanny. The racialized gothic tropes established by
Lewis in his texts prior to the Journal provide a foundation on which Lewis builds his
subsequent and steadily more direct gothic representations of race. Beginning with his
popular play The Castle Spectre that debuted in 1797 and was censored for its
controversial treatment of slavery, to his final work, the Journal of a West India
Proprietor, Lewis conspicuously deploys the gothic vocabulary as a way of representing

racial difference and, ultimately, assuaging racial anxiety.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1
SECTION 1
THE TRANSGRESSIVE SPECTACLE .......................................................... 5
SECTION 2
THE MONK AS EPISTEMOLOGICAL TEMPLATE ........................................ 10
SECTION 3
THE CASTLE SPEC T RE: REVENGE OCCLUDED .......................................... 14
SECTION 4
THE ISLE OF DEVILS: TEXT AS LIMINAL SPACE ....................................... 23
SECTION 5
THE JOURNAL: LEWIS’S GOTHIC VISION AT WORK ................................... 28
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................... 35

iii

It was near midnight,--when I woke with a kind of feverish

start, and a flashing remembrance of the events of the day.

All was quiet, and though the night lamp twinkled faintly, I

could distinguish most of the objects in my apartment. I

was not only literally awake, but painfully so, for such,

indeed, was the state of wakefulness at that hour. I closed

my eyes as it were with an effort, and tried to fancy myself

drowsy. Suddenly, a gentle vampire-like breeze swayed

my light jalousie . . . (Life and Correspondence, 220-1,

italics in original)

--Matthew Lewis
In the above passage from his published letters, Matthew Lewis, best known as

the author of the 1796 gothic novel The Monk, describes an unexpected visit to his
bedroom from one of his slaves whom he had earlier that day accused of stealing yams.
In the posthumously published Journal of a West India Proprietor Lewis records his
experiences and impressions gathered during two visits he made to the Jamaican sugar
plantations he inherited upon his father’s death in 1812. Lewis omitted from the Journal
this episode in which the slave Quawboo, struggling with his conscience over the act of
thievery, enters his master’s bedroom in the middle of the night ostensibly to confess.
The episode, discovered on a “fragment of a kind of diary found among Lewis’s papers”
(213), was subsequently published by Margaret Baron-Wilson in her 1839 biography of
Lewis.1 The midnight encounter with Quawboo, in which Lewis leaps from his bed to
accost the unknown visitor and laps into unconsciousness after hitting his head on a
marble pillar, is the only moment of incipient danger in which Lewis’s slaves break out
of the role of grateful, happy children to his benevolent and paternal master that Lewis
carefully crafts throughout the Journal. Whereas the other material from his letters and
notes mostly appears in the Journal, perhaps the Quawboo episode’s discordance with
the rest of the Journal explains its omission. Nevertheless, it establishes the explicit fear

of insurrection and violence present as an undercurrent throughout the Journal. I argue

that the text of the Journal acts as a site of mediation where Lewis attempts to disarm this

 

1The episode also appears, along with a similarly excised African “Nancy story,” as an appendix in thel999
Oxford UP edition edited by Judith Teny, (262-8).

fear in two ways: by maintaining the amused and carefiee tone of an objective
ethnographic observer and, most uniquely to Lewis, by molding his account according to
a template of gothic conventions he establishes earlier within his particular body of
gothic fiction. His lurid metaphors inform and prescribe his rendition of Jamaica,
predetermining Lewis’s narrative construction of the African slave culture.

The Quawboo passage has undeniable echoes of the nocturnal visit made by The
Monk’s Ambrosio to the sleeping Antonia’s bedchamber. The supematural stealth with
which the intruder enters Lewis’s room results in his intuitive perception of the trespass
by the movement of the “vampire-like breeze” that awakens him. Rather than directly
perceiving the intruder, Lewis senses Quawboo’s palpable presence through the half-
heard murmurs of insects and the “dimly cast grotesque shadows” produced by the
waning light of the lamp. This menacing and distinctly inhuman threat generates “a
succession of crowding fancies” suggesting “stealthy footsteps and half-suppressed
breathings approaching nearer every moment” (221-2). The level of suspense is slowly
built up as Lewis repeatedly is awakened by a half-heard noise, listens to the silence, and
returns to sleep. Finally the stirrings of anxiety escalate into full terror when Lewis
notices a “tall shadow pass[ing] slowly between the struggling flame and the transparent
draperies” and a “hand and swarthy arm” reaching out (222). Upon leaping at the
intruder, Lewis describes the throat he grasps as “the throat of a human being” (222), a
modification whose necessity renders explicit the previous hints of the supernatural. The
insinuations of a supernatural presence and the heightened drama with which Lewis
embellishes the slow approach of the intruder renders an affective distance to this scene
of transgression against Lewis as slave master. Casting the episode in the tropes of a
fictional mode effectively disarms the terror by removing it from reality. As a dramatist
with a taste for extravagant effects and picturesque tableaux, Lewis casts this episode in
particular as a set piece in the style with which he had achieved fame on the London

stages. The Journal itself becomes a type of rhetorical performance in which Lewis

2

displays an anxiety about the representation of alterity that is then offered to his readers
as a gothic spectacle.

Lewis’s strategies for representing this encounter with the slave Quawboo
resonate throughout his Journal. Stephen Greenblatt and others have established that the
ethnographic accounts of travelers always exhibit a heavily coded mode of representation
employed by the traveler to make sense of the unfamiliar. These codes are an
epistemological tool that takes the form of “a powerful set of mediating conceptions by
which they [travelers] assimilate exotic representations to their own culture” (Marvelous
Possessions, 122). The form taken by these mediating codes is heavily dependent on the
popular modes of cultural discourse available at the particular historical moment of the
traveler’s account. At the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, one of these
prevalent modes of representational discourse is the gothic, a term that I employ based on
Michael Garner’s conception of it as a shifting, “organic and protean” aesthetic, rather
than as a genre (a formulation that came retrospectively and much later).2 For Matthew
Lewis traveling in 1815 to view his sugar plantations in Jamaica for the first time, a
pivotal moment just eight years after Great Britain abolished the slave trade, the gothic
becomes an organizing structure through which he is able to interpret and represent the
culture of the African slaves on the island. In appropriating the gothic as a mode of
describing and narrating the Jamaican slave culture in his Journal of a West India
Proprietor (1834), Lewis takes advantage of the epistemological intersections between
the gothic and ethnographic discourses as both grapple with questions of the unfamiliar

and the uncanny.3 In this way, the phrase “vampire-like breeze” comes to signify an

 

2Gamer dates the use of the term “gothic” to denote a specified genre of literature to approximately the
18205, well after the initial wave of popularity enjoyed by practitioners of the gothic in the late eighteenth
century.

3Freud’s use of this term is the standard reference point: “that class of the terrifying which leads us back to
something long known to us, once very familiar.” I am particularly interested in the terror affect produced
by the collision between norm‘ally opposed terms: familiar and unfamiliar, animation and death. My use of
the term “uncanny” also is indebted to Fred Botting’s definition of it as “an effect of uncertainty, of the
irruption of fantasies, suppressed wishes and emotional and sexual conflicts. A disruptive return of archaic

.,
J

entire way of seeing in which “the gothic supplies only the metaphors and the gushing
response of the safely distant spectator” (Paulson, 217).

H.L. Malchow has argued recently that gothic literature and the colonial discourse
of race widely perform as a complementary pair: “[t]he gothic genre of the late eighteenth
century, and its various permutations thereafter, offered a language that could be
appropriated, consciously or not, by racists in a powerful and obsessively reiterated
evocation of terror, disgust, and alienation” (3), concluding that “both the gothicization of
race and the racialization of the gothic [are] inseparable processes” (3). Although the two
categories of racial discourse and gothic discourse do not converge completely, the tropes
of racial anxiety bleed into gothic literature quite frequently as Malchow explains.
However, whereas Malchow provides a fascinating account of this principle at work in
nineteenth century works such as F rankenstein, Dracula, and the variations of the
Sweeney Todd cannibalism legend in which racial tropes influence gothic literature, he
mostly ignores the reverse of this relationship between the gothic and racial discourses:
the instances in which gothic tropes encroach on ethnographic accounts of race and
slavery in the colonial era. While gothic texts such as those examined by Malchow often
feature racialized representations of European characters such as the eastern European
vampire, the cannibalistic lower class insurgent, or the “Irish Frankenstein,”4 Lewis’s
Journal renders this racialized discourse more explicit than these tacitly racialized
fictional figures by blending racial and gothic representation together in order to directly
represent and describe non-Europeans, thereby employing the gothic discourse as a
method of intervention inthe question of cultural difference. Lewis’s texts previous to
the Journal display a readily discernible evolution in his deployment of the gothic
vocabulary to represent racial and ethnic alterity. For Malchow, common gothic tropes

such as cannibalism, vampirism, the unnatural half-breed, and the gothic monster result

 

desires and fears, the uncanny disturbs the familiar, homely and secure sense of reality and normality” (l 1).
4See Malchow pgs. 36, 61-63, and 128.

in “the creation of a popular vocabulary in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by
which racial and cultural difference could be represented as unnatural--a ‘racial gothic’
discourse that employed certain striking metaphoric images to filter and give meaning to
a flood of experience and information from abroad” (2-3). For Lewis, his account in the '
Journal stands as an interpretation of race based on his first-hand experience of cultural
difference in an unfamiliar territory rather than the filtered “information from abroad”
employed by other writers as fodder for their gothic fiction. As such, Lewis’s Journal is
fascinating and useful as the record of a liberal-minded British slave-owner’s attempt to
grapple with the massive epistemological problem inherent in the representation of
cultural alterity.

Unlike the Journal, The Monk belongs to the category of gothic fiction discussed
by Malchow: texts that feature subtle racializations without directly addressing the topic
of race. The racialized gothic tropes established by Lewis in his texts prior to the Journal
provide a foundation on which Lewis builds his subsequent and steadily more direct
gothic representations of race. Beginning with his popular play The Castle Spectre that
debuted in 1797 and was censored for its controversial treatment of slavery, to his final
work, the Journal of a West India Proprietor, Lewis conspicuously deploys the gothic
vocabulary as a way of representing racial difference and, ultimately, assuaging racial
anxiety. I will begin with a delineation of the primary mechanism by which I propose

Lewis effects this assuagement: the transgressive spectacle.

The Transgressive Spectacle

Just as the gothic is obsessed with the return of the repressed, the Journal records
Lewis’s encounter and struggle with his own familial past. In 1812, Lewis’s father died
and left his son two slave plantations in Jamaica. Considerably ambivalent about the
institution of slavery and determined to exercise control over the treatment of his slaves,

Lewis made two voyages to Jamaica between 1815 and 1818, recording his experiences

5

in a joumal he intended for subsequent publication. He died of yellow fever in 1818
while retuming to England from the second of these two trips. Lewis’s circumstances at
the end of his life in Jamaica were such- that he lived under the constant threat of
imminent violence in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and fears of a similar slave
uprising in Jamaica. The gothic sensibility provides an especially fitting epistemological
template through which Lewis was able to interpret this threat and ultimately to disarm it
through the narrative negotiation for which his journal provided a forum.

The Jamaican slaves loomed in Lewis’s consciousness as a constant and visible
threat of transgression in the form of violence and insurrection. A literature of
transgression, the gothic typically turns on a willful violation of social boundaries that
threatens the individual subjectivity of those who witness the transgressive act. My use
of the term “transgression” is informed by that provided by Peter Stallybrass and Allen
White. In The Politics and Poetics of T ransgression, Stallybrass and White define their
use of the term “transgression” through the words of Barbara Babcock as the inversion or
contradiction of “commonly held cultural codes” (17), noting that the site of
transgression exists in those moments when a hybridization of discrete oppositional
categories is effected. Speaking particularly of the fair as a site of transgression,
Stallybrass and White note the simultaneous attractive and repellent qualities of the

transgressive spectacle in reference to the early modern fair:

The fair as a site of hybridization epistemologically' ‘
undermined the separation of the economic from ‘play’ and
the clean from the dirty. As a result the emergent middle
classes worried away at it, particularly striving to separate
and consolidate the binaries which the fair so
mischievously seemed to intermix and confuse. Such an
attempt to clean up the fair’s hybridization was a
paradoxical, even contradictory ideological project, for the
labour of conceptual separation was itself subject to the
seductive power of the hybrid. As these boundaries were
constructed they were haunted by the play between the
oppositions which had been formulated. (31)

Although Stallybrass and White focus on the fair as a site of transgression, my use of the
term turns on their formulation. The tropes of hybridization they invoke resonate with a
discussion of the gothic as deployed by Lewis because the paradoxical response of
simultaneous seduction and repulsion is central to the lurid effect produced in the reader
of horror fiction. The class dimensions with which they are concerned also transfer well
to a discussion of racial divisions because “in the colonial situation the fimction of class
is replaced by race” (J anMohamed, 7). Despite the inevitable threat posed to the
individual by the violation of social boundaries, the transgressive spectacle poses a
powerful seduction to the spectator, who cannot manage to look away. Stallybrass and
White’s notion of the “seductive power of the hybrid” has implications for Lewis’s
narrative negotiation between the instances of categorical and epistemological hybridity
that appear in his Journal.

In order for individuals to preserve a sense of self, they must participate in an
unending attempt to maintain the appearance or illusion of consistent boundaries between
self and other. According to sociologist Georg Simmel, “the deepest problems of modern
life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of
his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external
culture, and of the technique of life” (409). Since transgression violates boundaries,
transforming the scene of transgression into a spectacle as Lewis’s particular gothic
sensibility seeks to do operates as a preservation of boundaries because this delineates a .
rigid demarcation between the spectator of the transgression and the perpetrator of the
transgression. The spectator becomes an outsider to the-scene of violation, while the
attempt to violate social boundaries is subjugated under the inherent hierarchical power
structure between the powerful observer and the dominated observed. The Quawboo
episode previously mentioned serves as a typical example of this mechanism in action. '
By offering the scene to his reading audience as a gothic tableau, Lewis distances himself

from the frightening reality of it. At the same time that he pulls the reader ever closer by
7

heightening the sympathetic identification with the “victim,” Lewis ceases to constitute
himself as this “victim.” Instead, he positions himself as the retrospective narrator
operating form a position of safety while relating the events.

Contrasting Lewis’s employment of Gothic spectacle with Ann Radcliffe’s style,
Emma McEvoy notes that “[t]he empathetic reading-the heroine-reader sympathy--
demanded by Radcliffe’s text, gives way to the presenter-spectator relationship of
Lewis’s” (xiv). Transgression threatens the sense of separateness because it acts as a
violation of social norms, the maintenance of which is the individual’s most useful tool
for maintaining a sense of the self as discrete in the face of the undifferentiated and
heterogeneous masses. Transgression threatens to result in not only figurative violence
against the individual personality, but also implicitly takes the form of a submerged threat
of physical violence. As such, transgression inevitably harbors the specter of death. The
gothic preoccupation with images of death can therefore be described as an attempt to
disarm the threat of death by transforming it into spectacle.

The remarkably visual nature of Lewis’s particular brand of gothic narrative is

epitomized in Louis Peck’s analysis of The Monk in his 1961 biography of Lewis:

The Monk is good entertainment because so much happens
and because we see it happen. Lewis’ instinct for his
dramatic presentation gives him a distinct advantage over
his contemporary practitioners in Gothic fiction. The
action of the characters may sometimes be preposterous
and their speech banal, bombastic, or frenzied, but to see
and hear them directly is more effective than to read V
summarized narrative and conversations at second hand. . .
. . Lewis arranges his scenes as for a stage spectacle with
gaudy colors and striking contrasts of light and darkness.
(42)

Peck’s insistence that he and other readers of Lewis’s text can “see it happen” implies
that there is an inherent element of visuality and vivid representation in his style. Peck’s
likening of Lewis’s_novel to a “stage spectacle” perhaps explains the reason why the

major bulk of his work took the form of drama renowned among theater-going public for

8

sensational, even gaudy, tableaux.5 Peck perceives in Lewis’s writing a quality that I
argue is an inherent visuality or sense of narrative as spectacle.

In his Journal, Lewis figures himself as a spectacle, situating himself on the
categorical cusp between transgressor and transgressed. Stephen Bruhm notes that “for
writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries [gothic] spectacality takes on
particular importance, for it underlies the ways writers saw and thought about their
world” (xvii) so that eventually “the spectacle of another’s suffering is channeled through
the spectator’s more self-centered concerns” (xix). As a purveyor of the gothic world
view in his writings, Lewis already participates in an unorthodox, controversial discourse.
As a slave owner, he becomes the authority against whom others transgress. Lewis
exhibits an unusual blend of liberal and liberatory political leanings in his Journal,
particularly for a slave owner. He maintains an uncomfortable tension between his status
as a slave owner, writing about his slaves in terms of their economic value, and his
obvious liberal tendencies as exhibited in his communication with the famous abolitionist
William W ilberforce6 from whom Lewis sought advice concerning the improvement of
slave conditions on his plantations. He displays what Abdul JanMohamed, writing of
Nadine Gordimer, describes as “the dilemma of the liberal consciousness that is trapped
between its own humanistic values and the highly antagonistic manicheanism of
- apartheid” (9). Lewis differed still further from the typical plantation slave owner of his

time in that his mode of racism stems from a Biblical rather than a scientific mode of

 

5Peck explains that “[g]othic drama was for him primarily a vehicle for thrills and spectacles . . . Lewis’
success lay primarily in his ability to arrange arresting effects . . . He delighted in conceiving scenes calling'
for lavish and gaudy costume. . . . His knowledge of the theater’s new mechanical resources, of what
mechanics and carpenters could do if they had to, made him bold in planning spectacles. and managers
quickly learned that money was well invested in them” (109-1 10). Of particular note is Lewis’s 181 1 play
T imour the Tartar, written specifically for a performing troupe of horses. Peck quotes‘a letter in which
Lewis refers to this play as a “showy spectacle for Covent Garden” and the preface in which Lewis
explains that the play was composed “to oblige Mr. Harris, who prest me very earnestly to give him a
Spectacle, in which Horses might be introduced” (103, italics in original).

6The correspondence between Lewis and Wilberforce can be found in The Correspondence of William
Wilberforce. Ed. Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, (London, John Murray). 1840

9

rationalization. As D.L. MacDonald notes, “Lewis’s discourse is shaped, not by the
pseudo-scientific racism of the Enlightenment, but by an older, religious racism that sees
in blackness a sign of the curse of Canaan (Genesis 920-5), and of the diabolical” (203).7
The religious cast of Lewis’s racism lends itself particularly well to the gothic because of
the presence of the demonic and diabolical in gothic conventions. Also, the rational,
scientific tone of Enlightenment racism contrasts sharply in tone with the heightened
passions and visceral responses of the gothic sensibility. Instead, Lewis’s textual
discourse remains firmly grounded in an epistemological exploration of the slaves’
culture through Lewis’s reliance on gothic tropes established in his earlier texts that
places his ethnographic account within a larger gothic framework.

Within the trajectory of Lewis’s literary career, his participation in the discourse
of the “racial gothic” moves from the subtly racialized imagery of The Monk, to his first
overt grapplings with the political and representational issues of race within the genre of
gothic fiction in his play The Castle Spectre, and finally culminates in the Journal, a
work that is completely occupied with this issue. Although references to race and slavery
are sprinkled throughout Lewis’s body of work, these three texts specifically display a
demonstrable intensification of the racial gothic within the timeline of Lewis’s life. They
also address the issue of race in an increasingly more complex manner. Beginning with
his earliest work, The Monk, Lewis employs the gothic vocabulary as a means of entering

into a wider racial discourse

The Monk as Epistemological Template
Lewis’s 1796 novel was by far his most popular and well-known work, resulting

in his life-long moniker “Monk” Lewis. Despite the novel’s fame and commercial

 

7MacDonald has performed an exhaustive identification of gothic trOpes that appear in Lewis’s Journat' in
Monk Lewis, A Critical Biography (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000), 198-210. He does not seek to connect
these tropes to a specific resonance with Lewis’s ethnographic imagination or his conception of racial
difference.

10

success, Lewis never ventured to write fictional prose again, choosing instead to focus on
poetry and drama. No matter what form his writing takes, however, he always operates
within the auspices of his own particular deployment of the gothic vocabulary. As
Lewis’s first significant foray into the gothic genre, the novel provides the foundation and
precedent for the way Lewis will turn its conventions to his own ends later in The Castle
Spectre and The Journal. By first establishing the terms in which critics have
traditionally discussed The Monk as a transgressive deployment of gothic conventions
within a genre typically viewed as transgressive itself, it will be easier to read his later
texts as indebted to the unique gothic sensibility that eventually grows out of this initial
text. The representational matrix that Lewis establishes in The Monk literalizes one of
the most common gothic tropes: the specter of The Monk haunts Lewis’s later works,
creating a framework through which Lewis later is able to understand and represent the
racially unfamiliar and the culturally uncanny.

The Monk has often been described as a novel that while it operates within the
discourse of what is considered gothic literature, simultaneously turns the conventions of
the genre on itself in a critical manner. Botting notes that “Lewis’s marvellous twist to
the conventions of the Gothic tale is indicative of The Monk’s ambivalence as it
interweaves horror with a general mockery of the genre” (77). Lewis satirizes the
moralizing tone in which the Radcliffean tradition explains and diffuses the threat of
transgression. Unlike the “terror” category of the gothic defined and employed by
Radcliffe,8 Lewis’s “horror” text “does not refrain from vividly invoking supernatural
elements. It ofien does so in a satirical or brutally mockingmarmer” (Botting, 77).

Drawing from a conception of transgression as a hybridization of binaries that

produces a terror affect, Lewis establishes in The Monk a tendency to place his gothic

 

8Radcliffe establishes her distinction between terror and horror in the essay “On the Supernatural in
Poetry,” published after her death in the New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 145-52. “Terror and horror are
so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other
contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (149).

ll

characters on categorical cusps between genders, races, and even traditional
categorizations of hero and villain. For instance, the female demon Matilda not only
poses as the young boy Rosario to gain the trust of Ambrosio, but she also situates herself
on the cusp between the madonna/whore binary by conflating her image with that of the
Madonna portrait in Ambrosio’s chamber. Agnes and Antonia break from the
Radcliffean model of chaste femininity by participating in scenes of overt sexuality.
Multiple characters succumb to prolonged states of unconsciousness due to sickness,
delirium, poison, or enchantment, blurring the lines between life and death. The
character of Ambrosio himself caused contemporary readers much consternation by
failing to align himself completely with immorality and evil. Although Ambrosio is
certainly not the first sympathetic villain to appear in popular literature, this hybridization
proved to be especially disturbing in the transgressive gothic genre.9 Ambrosio’s ability
to “pass” as a well-respected and virtuous religious leader and Matilda’s ability to cross-
dress and thereby enter the sanctified haven of a masculine religious order ties into this
fear of hidden hybridization through the transgression of real and symbolic boundaries.

In The Monk Lewis establishes the categorical hybrid as a transgressive type in his own
conception of the gothic world view, and the type continues to subsequently appear in
much of his fiction. Later the legacy of this type appears in his Journal as a ready-made
template for interpreting the heterogeneity of the African slaves in Jamaica as a
dangerous rupturing of boundaries which he both fears and admires as a transgressor

himself.10 Lewis displays significant anxiety over his own position as a slaveholder with

 

9Malchow’s exposition of the racial half-breed as represented by the vampire as “gothic unnatural”
conforms to this model: “Both vampire and half-breed are creatures who transgress boundaries and are
caught between two worlds. Both are hidden threats--disguised presences bringing pollution of the blood.
Both may be able to ‘pass’ among the unsuspecting, although both bear hidden signs of their difference,
which the wary may read” (168).

loMany have speculated about Lewis’s probable homosexuality and its implications for psychoanalytical
readings of his texts. See, for example, Malchow (186), MacDonald (59-92), as well as Louis F. Peck’s
vehement denial of Lewis’s homosexuality in his 1961 biography of Lewis (65-66). Implications for my
argument rest in the fact that Lewis as a homosexual would have inhabited a controversial and potentially
dangerous position on a categorical cusp that would have aligned him sympathetically with not only his

12

liberal abolitionist tendencies, constantly oscillating between a humanitarian and an
economic concern for the well-being of his slaves. Keith Sandiford suggests that Lewis

reconciles these antithetical tendencies by aestheticizing his experiences in Jamaica:

[Lewis] situates himself between these two politically
conflicted constituencies. He negotiates between the
ideologies and institutions of enlightened polity allied with
subversive contestation on one side (the anti-slavery
ideologues), and exploitative economic interests allied with
oppressive politics on the other (the pro-slavery interests).
The Journal accommodates these conflicted impulses by its
formal capacity, as narrative, to sublimate Lewis’
revolutionary impulses, and to redeem them from the
category of mere atomistic collisions with the status quo by
transforming them into aestheticized constructions beyond
the disquisition of material history. (159-60)

Sandiford’s description of Lewis’s “aestheticizing” of his Jamaican experience as a
strategic tool used to exercise control over his ethical conflicts regarding slavery
corresponds to the wider phenomenon I describe as the rendering of transgression into
spectacle. Although Sandiford attributes this function to a characteristic of narrative in
general, I argue that it has specific resonance as a function of gothic narrative in
particular because of the transgressive nature of the gothic imagination.“ Lewis in his
fiction inspires horror partly through the effect of categorical slippage in which his
characters exhibit a frightening proteanism. He employs this trope of hybridity in the

Journal to negotiate between his own conflicting ideological and epistemological

 

Uansgressive gothic characters, but also with his African slaves. According to Malchow, “Lewis himself
was a species of hyphen, a man of ambiguous identity” (186).

llSandiford provides a useful exposition of this phenomenon in Lewis’s Journal as a function of Lewis’s
employment of the romantic notion of the sublime as the vehicle by which Lewis effects his control over
the spectacle of transgression, particularly in the case of Plato the rebellious obeah practitioner: “As an
aesthetic construction, the sublime permits Lewis to address an otherwise threatening encounter with
otherness, to discover self in other and thereby to transcend otherness” (169). Despite the pervasive role
the sublime plays in Lewis’s narrative, Sandiford does not pursue the idea further to establish it as a
recurring rhetorical strategy in the Journal. His argument concerning Lewis remains strictly dedicated to
supporting the overall theme ofhis book in which his concept of “sweete negotiation” ties the colonial
rhetorical strategies of a group of six colonialists to a metaphor involving the production of cane sugar in
the Caribbean.

13

positions.

The Monk also establishes Lewis’s treatment of another common trope of the
gothic. The “return of the repressed,” the insurgence of those who have been wronged in
a demand for bloody revenge. The Monk features instances in which the justifiable desire
for revenge exceeds the bounds of reason. The death of the prioress at the hands of an
angry mob and Ambrosio’s own rebellion against the authoritarian Church are “cases of
justification followed by honible excess” (Paulson, 218). The admittedly evil actions of
the Prioress result in the rioters require a justice that goes beyond the desire to punish in
that they continue to act out their rage on her body long after she has died: “Yet though
She no longer felt their insults, the Rioters still exercised their impotent rage upon her
lifeless body. They beat it, trod upon it, and ill-used it, till it became no more than a mass
of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting” (356). The specter of the gothic mob, with
all its echoes of the French Revolution, posits the ultimate outcome of the justifiable
desire for revenge as an inevitable disintegration into rage and uncontrolled violence. For
the same reason, Lewis for all his liberatory leanings fears the prospect of freedom for his

slaves because of the potential for retaliation. He writes in his Journal:

Every man of humanity must wish that slavery, even in its
best and most mitigated form, had never found legal
sanction, and must regret that its system is now so .
incorporated with the welfare of Great Britain as well as of
Jamaica, as to make its extirpation an absolute
impossibility, without the certainty of producing worse
mischiefs than the one which we annihilate. (249)

The examples of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the specter of the
gothic mob leave little doubt as to the form in which these “worse mischiefs” would

manifest themselves.

The Castle Spectre: Revenge Occluded

Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre was a great success upon its initial opening on

14

December 17, 1797, and the play proved to be a perennial draw at the Covent Garden
theater throughout the nineteenth century. It was highly popular on stage as well as in
print, with eleven editions published by 1803 (Cox, 39). Despite its contemporary
popularity the play has received little subsequent attention, with most scholarly interest
concerned with Matthew Lewis focusing solely on The Monk. This critical neglect
compels a brief pause in my argument as I offer a short but necessary summary of the
events of the plot.

The Castle Spectre opens sixteen years after Osmond, a jealous younger son,
murders his brother Reginald and his sister-in-law Evelina in order to seize control of the
family title and hereditary property, Conway Castle. Having discovered that the
murdered couple’s infant daughter Angela survived the attack and lives in a neighboring
village, Osmond seizes Angela as a captive in an attempt to force her to marry him.
Angela’s lover Percy makes an unsuccessful attempt to rescue her from the castle.
Subsequently it is revealed that Osmond’s long-time servant Kenrick saved Reginald,
heretofore assumed to be murdered, and has kept Reginald imprisoned in the castle
dungeon for sixteen years unbeknownst to anyone else. Kenrick’s resentment of
Osmond’s tyranny grows until he reveals to Angela that her father lives despite
Osmond’s murderous plot. Also learning that Reginald lives, Osmondthreatens to kill
her father if Angela does not agree to marry him. After threading their way through the
secret, subterraneous passageways to Reginald’s cell, Osmond’s attempt to kill Reginald
is thwarted by the appearance of Evelina’s ghost. Angela takes advantage of the
distraction to kill Osmond with his own dagger. .

None of the significant plot developments rely on the three African slaves that
Lewis includes as minor characters. However, these characters--Hassan, Saib, and
Muley--prompted significant censorial changes in the performance edition of the play.
Lewis subsequently restored many of the expurgated passages in the 1798 published

edition, along with explanatory comments that addressed accusations that “the language

15

[of the play] was originally extremely licentious . . . [and] the sentiments were violently
democratic” (The Castle Spectre, 221-2). The African characters represent Lewis’s first
attempt at the overt representation of race within his body of work. Strangely enough
given the censorial problems they caused with the examiner John Larpent,12 the
“violently democratic” sentiments, especially those contained within the speeches of the
slave Hassan, were completely secondary to the general plot of the play. In one of the
expurgated speeches that Lewis later restored in the published version of the play, Hassan

laments his sorrowful state to his fellow slave Saib:

Oh Saib! my heart once was gentle, once was good! But
sorrows have broken it, insults have made it hard! I have
been dragged from my native land, from a wife who was
everything to me, to whom I was everything! Twenty years
have elapsed since these Christians tore me away: they
trampled upon my heart, mocked my despair, and, when in
frantic terms I raved of Samba, [they] laughed, and
wondered how a negro’s soul could feel! In that moment
when the last point of Africa faded from my view, when as
I stood on the vessel’s deck I felt that all [on earth] I loved
was to me lost for ever, in that bitter moment did I banish
humanity from my breast. I tore from my arm the bracelet
of Samba’s hair, I gave to the sea the precious token, and,
while the high waves swift bore it from me, vowed aloud
endless hatred to mankind. (161)

Hassan’s desire for revenge only erupts as he stands on a ship pulling away from Africa:
this ship is literally a liminal space between two cultures and geographies. Hassan’s
physical positioning on a categorical cusp renders concrete the transition he undergoes
from passive victim to potential perpetrator of violence. Since this is a move from an
acceptable position to a transgressive one, Lewis in this case elides his habitual conflation
of transgression and hybridity with a physical liminality as the scene of violation.

Interestingly, despite Hassan’s ominous threats, Lewis does not employ the slaves as the

 

l2In Seven Gothic Dramas, 1 789-1825. Jeffrey Cox combines material from the Larpent approved version
of the play as well as the full, uncensored version subsequently printed for the reading public by placing the
censored material within double quotation marks. '

16

instrument of their master Osmond’s downfall. Rather, Osmond is ultimately betrayed by
his long-time white servant Kenrick. Whereas Hassan’s speech invokes the common
gothic plot device in which revenge for wrongs committed is called down upon the
transgressor by the victim, Hassan continues inactive as others such as Kenrick, Percy
and Angela succeed in effecting the revenge he desires. The length and threatening
vehemence of Hassan’s speeches naturally lead the reader to expect the character’s desire
for revenge to figure in some way with the culmination of the plot. In the customary
gothic schema Hassan would effect his own revenge on his master Osmond perhaps by
colluding with the many other characters who also seek such revenge, but Hassan’s desire
never materializes, remaining a loose end in the plot that is never explained or resolved.
This blatant rupture in the normally tight and economic plot lines of stage drama is
explicable as a manifestation of Lewis’s racial anxiety. Virtually every biographical
discussion of Lewis has notedthe remarkable sensitivity he diSplays to the plight of his
slaves, as evidenced by his letters, Journal, and fiction.13 However, this sensitivity does
not extend to a willingness to allow any active challenge of the established social order of
the slave system. This unwillingness extends to Lewis’s fictional representation of slaves
as well. They are given great eloquence with which to argue their case, but they remain
passively submissive to the established institution of slavery.

In The Castle Spectre, the pattern of accordance between the representation of the
African slaves and the other characters in the play, coupled with the displacement of
Hassan’s calls for vengeance onto these other characters for their actualization, requires

that a fundamental question be addressed: how central is the discourse of race and the

 

l3See, for example, MacDonald (22, 49-58); Peck(151, 157); and Sandiford (161). Margaret Baron-
Wilson’s effusively laudatory biography praises Lewis’s efforts toward the “amelioration of the unfortunate
negroes on his extensive West Indian estates” (120). Lewis attempted many reforms on his plantation,
including the abolition of the cart-whip, the recording of punishments in a register, a system of rewards in
the form of extra food and health care for expectant mothers, and additional Saturday holidays for his
slaves (Baron Wilson, 155-6, and Sandiford, 161). Between his two voyages to Jamaica, Lewis added a
codicil to his will witnessed by Byron, Shelley, and Pclidori in Geneva in which he expressly requires his
inheritors to “pass three whole calendar months in Jamaica every third year” or risk disinheritance in order
to avoid the managerial abuse caused by absenteeism.

17

racial gothic to the narrative of this play? Lewis himself addresses this question in a note
he attached to the published version of the'play in which he sought to answer his critics.
Although Lewis devotes much space in this note to argue of the character Hassan’s
originality, he denies that the ethnicity of the four slaves contains any larger significance

for his drama. Of Hassan, Lewis writes:

I shall not so readily give up my claim to novelty, when I
mention my misanthropic Negro: He has been compared to
Zanga [in Edward Young’s 1721 play Revenge]; but
Young’s Hero is confined to one object; to destroy the
happiness of that object is his sole aim, and his vengeance
is no sooner accomplished, than he repents its gratification.
Hassan is a man of violent passions, and warm feelings,
whose bosom is filled with the milk of human kindness, but
that milk is soured by despair; whose nature was
susceptible of the tenderest affections, but who feels that all
the chains of his affections are broken for ever. He has lost
every thing, even hope; he has no single object against
which he can direct his vengeance, and he directs it at large
against mankind. He hates all the world, hates even
himself; for he feels that in that world there is no one that
loves him . . . But though Hassan’s heart is changed by
disappointment and misfortune, that heart once was feeling
and kind; nor could he hate with such inveteracy, if he had
not loved with extreme affection. (222-3)

This description conforms to the typical characterization of Africans in this time as
susceptible to wide emotional extremes, never reacting in moderation. In the Journal,
Lewis portrays Africans as vulnerable to sudden swings between loyalty and gratitude on
one hand and betrayal on the other. However, in The Castle Spectre this is more accurate
as a description of the servant Kenrick rather than the African slaves. Despite the space
and attention Lewis devotes to his defense of the character of Hassan in his note, and the
obvious pride he displays in Hassan’s originality as a dramatic creation, he downplays the
role that Hassan’s race occupies within the narrative, insisting that it was only an attempt
to lend “a pleasing variety to the characters and dresses, if I made my servants black; and

could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have

18

made her” (223). MacDonald explains this postscript as Lewis’s attempt to evade his
detractors owing to his increased sensitivity to criticism after the vociferous public
reaction to The Monk, arguing that “[t]his disclaimer has been taken too seriously . . . ,
with the result that the play has not been taken seriously enough” (51).

In the Journal, Lewis recognizes in his own slaves their occupation of a position
synonymous to that of the gothic victim hungry for revenge. However, like the Afiicans
in The Castle Spectre, he avoids the possibility that this revenge will be actualized,
thereby containing the dangerous threat of transgressive rebellion on the part of all
African slaves against their European masters which the character of Hassan articulates.
Instead, the revenge requisite for the culmination of the gothic plot is displaced. In the
Journal this occurs within the fictional framework of Lewis’s poem The Isle of Devils,
whereas in The Castle Spectre the character of Angela becomes the vehicle for this
actualization through the creation of parallels in their circumstances. Angela ofien
echoes Hassan’s expressions of longing for the shores of his native Afiica after her own
kidnapping and imprisonment. Not only does she yearn for a reconciliation with her
lover Percy, but she manifests an equal sentiment of desire for her home that is always
entwined with her love for him much as Hassan’s memories of his wife Samba are
inextricably tied to his appeals for Afiica: “Oh! sigh no more, my Percy!--Soon shall I
repose in safety on your bosom; soon again see the moon shed her silver light on Cheviot,
and hear its green hills repeat the carol of your mellow horn” (200). A song given to
Angela in the Larpent version of the play makes even more explicit the ties between

Angela’s kidnapping and that of Hassan:

Oh, sad was my bosom, by force, when removed

From all those who loved me, from all whom I loved;
With heart near to breaking, despair in my look,

The groves, where my Childhood was passed, I forsook,
And said, while I sighed that my pleasures were o’er,
--’Adieu, ye dear Scenes, I must see ye no more!’ (201).

19

Whereas Hassan can only extend his impotent threats out of the hearing of his enslavers,
Angela delivers a direct and ominous warning to Osmond: “Wonder you that the worm
should turn when you trample it so cruelly!” (189). These two characters who coincide in
their sentiments and desires appear together in the final scene that encapsulates the
divergent possibilities for the fulfillment of their calls for revenge. Angela clings to her
father in defiance of Osmond’s demand that she marry him. In Hegelian fashion, the
slave responds to the master’s call as Osmond demands Hassan’s help: “Aid me,
Hassan!” (218). At this pivotal point in the play, Hassan chooses to assist Osmond in
forcing Angela away from her father. Significantly, when Osmond drops his sword, it is
Angela who wrests herself away from Hassan to pick it up and stab the villain in the
back. At this vital point, Hassan remains dutiful and loyal to his master by restraining
Angela despite the vehemence of his previous statements, again embodying the attitude
of the ideal slave. Much like Lewis’s own slaves in the Journal, the slaves are allowed to
complain of their unjust situation but are always represented as being incapable of
translating those ineffectual vocalizations into any sort of dangerous physical action.

Lewis’s representation of the slaves in The Castle Spectre exaggerates this
dichotomy between voice and action because the slaves are given the power of a
remarkable eloquence at the same time that Lewis withdraws their ability to act on their
convictions. As D.L. MacDonald notes, Hassan speaks “not in the ludicrously
ungrarnmatical dialect usually ascribed to stage slaves . . . but in long and eloquent
speeches” (50), an assessment that generally holds up with the exception of Aphra Bchn’s
fluent and well-spoken Oroonoko. Hassan’s fellow slaves Muley and Saib are equally
gifted with eloquence, demonstrating a propensity to make wise epigrarnmatic
observations about human nature throughout the play. However, like Hassan, the two
slaves ultimately prove loyal to their master Osmond despite the opportunity given to
them by Percy to betray him easily enough in Act 11 Scene III. Interestingly, the

published version of this scene has Percy yell at Saib “Silence, fellow” after the slave

20

attempts to explain to Percy that his gold cannot bribe him and Muley to betray their
master, whereas the Larpent version approved for performance changes Percy’s statement
to “Silence, traitor” (177). While the shifi from “fellow” to “traitor” in the officially
sanctioned version of the play may have resulted from a number of explanations. the
drastically different implications of the two words cannot be ignored. Obviously the two
slaves have just passed a test of their loyalty to their master so calling Saib a traitor does
not make sense within the context. It may only be speculated that the examiner in some
way objected to the use of the word “fellow” in reference to an African slave. In the end,
this exchange between the two African slaves and Percy reinforces two important
representational tropes that Lewis later employs throughout his Journal: slaves may
engage in light-hearted trickster activities such as their swindling of Percy, but these
pranks act as an innocuous testing of boundaries that always reinscribes and reinforces
the ties of feudal loyalty. This phenomenon points to another way in which the gothic
vocabulary provides an apt method of entering into discussions of race. Whereas
Hassan’s vitriolic speeches and Percy’s attempt to bribe the other slaves to betray their
master hint at the dangerous potential of these slaves to actuate these threats, their
inability to do so strengthens the very ties they threaten. Similarly, the transgressive
nature of gothic writing “become[s] a powerful means to reassert the values 'of society,
virtue and propriety: transgression, by crossing the social and aesthetic limits, serves to
reinforce or underline their value and necessity, restoring or defining limits” (Botting, 7).
Whereas the conventional gothic fulfillment of revenge owed to Hassan and the
other slaves by virtue of their status as Osmond’s victims is subverted and ultimately
actualized by Angela, the character of Osmond embodies a different trOpe of the “racial
gothic.” He becomes a racialized figure, that of the villain with racially ambiguous dark
features. Angela describes him as having a “strange demeanour . . . in that gloomy brow
is written a volume of villainy” and rightly deduces simply from his appearance that he

must be “an assassin” (166). Elsewhere he is depicted as “gloomy and ferocious” (159).

21

Osmond’s evil deeds are motivated by extreme resentment and jealousy of his older
brother Reginald, “a sweeter gentleman by half’ who succeeds in making the Lady
Evelina his wife. He explains to Reginald in the final scene, “Was not ‘Submit to your
elder brother,’ the galling lesson for ever sounded in my ears?” (216). From this we learn
that, similar to Angela, the servant Kenrick, and the African slaves, Osmond’s desire for
vengeance derives from his forced submission to an authority that he does not recognize.
Conforming to what MacDonald termed Lewis’s “religious racism,” Osmond’s racialized
villainy takes the form of a younger, Cain-like brother with murderous tendencies toward
his kind and accomplished older brother. His anger manifests itself within the play with
threats that mirror those most often associated with slaves: arson and poisoning.l4 As a
slave owner in Jamaica, Lewis later manifests a significant fear of these threats in the
Journal. In one significant speech, Osmond envisions a fiery death for both himself and
his enemies: “Soon will Northumberland’s guards encircle my walls, and force from me-
-Yet that by Heaven they shall not! No! Rather then resign her, my own hand shall give
this Castle a prey to flames: then plunging with Angela into the blazing gulph, I’ll leave
this ruins to tell posterity how desperate was my love, and how dreadful my revenge!”
(187). Immediately after this speech, Osmond exits and Saib informs Kenrick of
Osmond’s plot to poison him later that evening to rid himself of the possibility of
Kenrick’s betrayal. The juxtaposition of arson and poisoning so closely in the text, two
staples of the slave owners’ narrative production of the rhetoric of fear, heightens the
characterization of Osmond as a racialized villain.

While Lewis’s postscript denial of the importance of race to his play as anything

other than an attempt to produce variety may have satisfied his critics, it cannot be denied

 

14The fear of arson and poisoning extends beyond Lewis, becoming a prevalent and abiding fear among the
white planters and citizens of the Caribbean islands. In The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James mentions the
“homicidal mania” of the slaves in Haiti, noting that “poison was their method” (16). He describes the
torching of Le Cap in Haiti as the signal to other slaves that an insurrection had begun (86-89). The Haitian
revolution had resulted in freedom and the establishment of the Haitian state in 1803, an event whose
proximity in time and geography had serious implications for the slave-owning class in Jamaica.

22

that there exists within the play at least some points of significant parallelism between the
characterization of the African slaves and the more prominent European figures in the
play. The African as victim of gothic transgression is mirrored in Angela, while the
African as the tool of righteous gothic vengeance emerges in Kenrick and, only in the
end, Angela. Finally, the African as dark gothic villain is reflected in the character of
Osmond. Significantly, only the passive role of victim can be forthrightly shared by the
African slave characters while the more dangerous, subversive roles are inevitably taken
away from the Afiican characters, notably Hassan, and diverted to these subtly
Africanized European characters for fulfillment. This pattern of parallelism between the
African and European characters in the play looks toward the fear of racial impurity

displayed particularly in Lewis’s Isle of Devils poem.

The Isle of Devils: Text as Liminal Space

During Lewis’s passage back to England after his first voyage to Jamaica he
copied into the Journal a poem, The Isle of Devils, that he had written earlier enroute to
Jamaica. The sudden appearance of this long poetic interlude in an ostensibly non-
fictional journal renders the Journal itself into a type of mongrel text, a hybrid
construction of genres, voices, and discourses in competition with each other. The Isle of
Devils is the forum in which Lewis works out much of his anxiety conceming racial
impurity and the mixing of categories and it is interesting that in doing so, Lewis renders
his text an indefinable pastiche of narrative voices and interpolations. Composed and
copied in the liminal geographic space of the Atlantic Ocean, the poem occupies a middle
space in the text as well, appearing between the accounts of Lewis’s two voyages. The
geographic and textual space apart in which this poem exists attains in turn a discursive
liminality in which Lewis displaces his racial anxiety into a highly allegorical
manifestation of Biblical/religious racism. He temporarily abandons the objective

ethnographic project apparent in the rest of the Journal to fashion an allegorical fantasy.

23

Within this narrative Lewis’s most overtly racialized gothic villain acts out many of the
fears that by this time had become part of the rhetoric of hysteria among the white
population in the Caribbean.

Although the poem displays a fear of miscegenation in featuring the repetitive
rape of the chaste, white heroine lrza by the racialized demon king, the “sable lor ” of the
island (178), the two offspring that result from the rapes do not display the mixed features
of the half-breed. Lewis thereby denies biologism to create a fantasy of racial purity in
which each child takes on the features of one parent rather than exhibiting an
amalgamation of the physical traits of both parents such as the mulattoes Lewis
encounters in Jamaica. The first child has “shaggy limbs, and eyes of sable fire” (172)
and inspires only hatred and disgust in Irza because of his resemblance to the demon
father. The second child’s ivory skin, golden hair, blue eyes, and coral lips resemble
Irza’s own features, inspiring devotion and love in the mother. By denying the possibility
that miscegenation results in a mixture of racial categories and identities in this poem,
Lewis reflects and responds to his own disgust with the mulatto population in Jamaica.
Lewis desires a manichean allegory, in which a racially diverse society attains a “‘pure’
state of manichean Opposition and equilibrium between good and evil” through the
elimination of categorical hybridity (JanMohamed, 35).

The rest of Lewis’s Journal exhibits an anxiety of hybridity that borders on
hysteria. Although at many times Lewis speaks praisefully of his African slaves, for the

mulattoes he reserves contempt for their effeminacy and viciousness:

I think it is Long15 who asserts, that two mulattoes will

 

15The passage from Edward Long’s I774 The History of Jamaica. or, General Survey of the Antient and
Modern State of That Island: with Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products,
Commerce, Laws, and Government, reads in part:

“Some few of them [the mulattos] have intermarried here with those of

their own complexion; but such matches have generally been defective

and barren. They seem in this respect to be actually of the mule-kind.

and not so capable of producing from one another as from a commerce

with a distinct White or Black . . . Yet it seems extraordinary that two

24

never have children; but, as far as the most positive
assurances can go, since my arrival in Jamaica, I have
reason to believe the contrary, and that mulattoes breed
together just as well as blacks and whites; but they are
almost universally weak and effeminate persons, and thus
their children are very difficult to rear. On a sugar estate
one black is considered as more than equal to two
mulattoes. (68-9)

In Lewis’s estimation, racial purity prevails over racial hybridity. Lewis’s reference to
Edward Long suggests that he employed Long’s 1774 History of Jamaica as a resource
for information about the island and its inhabitants. Although Lewis displays a
willingness and disposition to read Long with a critical eye in his disagreement about the
mulattos’ reproductive capacities, Long’s anxiety about the mixing of races in both a
reproductive and social sense has implications for Lewis’s own anxieties. Describing the
jail in the Jamaican settlement of St. Jago de la Vega, Long bemoans the commingling of

races and genders necessitated by the common holding area:

In this delightful place of custody debtors and malefactors
of all sorts, all sexes, and complexions, are promiscuously
crowded; a circumstance highly disgraceful to the publick
humanity, more especially in a country where it is thought
politically expedient to maintain a distinction between
Whites and Negroes. It is therefore not a little astonishing
that the debtor and the criminal should be huddled together;
and that White persons, who have committed no other.
offence than that of insolvency, should be associated with
the most bestial and profligate wretches of the Negroe race, '
as if it was intended to show that incarceration, like death,
is a leveler of all distinctions. (Book II, 14) '

Long’s portrait of the heterogeneous and transgressive masses mingling in the Jamaican
jail recalls Stallybrass and White’s account of the early modern fair. Although Long

evinces nothing but disgust at this spectacle, it is the type of transgressive display likely

 

Mulattos, having intercourse together, should be unable to continue
their species, the woman either proving barren, or their offspring, if
they have any, not attaining to maturity; when the same man and
woman, having commerce with a White or Black, would generate a
numerous issue. (Book 11, 335-6)

25

to attract Lewis’s gothic imagination. The jail triggers the “seductive power of the
hybrid” with its challenge to social barriers that threatens to extinguish human difference
completely. Long’s comparison of incarceration to death, which he calls the “leveler of
all distinctions,” echoes Baudrillard’s conception of death as “incurable deviance”
because of its ability to obliterate human constructed boundaries and categories. Long’s
triangulation of transgression, death, and hybridity in this passage anticipates the three
primary elements of Lewis’s ethnographic conception of the African population in
Jamaica.

3 In his representation of the mulatto people Lewis conflates racial ambiguity with
gender ambiguity, suggesting that one type of hybridity expands to produce multiple
levels of hybridity. He styles the male mulatto as effeminate and the female mulatto as
masculine in appearance: “. . . [T]he women of color are deficient in one of the most
requisite points of female beauty. When Oromases was employed in the formation of
woman, and said,--‘Let her enchanting bosom resemble the celestial spheres’, he must
certainly have suffered the negress to slip out of his mind. Young or old, I have not yet
seen such a thing as a bosom” (69). Lewis banishes the gothic half-breed from his fictive
Isle of Devils, denying the potential for the uncontrolled proliferation of human
difference. Only two categories are allowed to exist: the virtuous white and the
tormented black. Lewis often evinces considerably more anxiety at the prospect of racial
or gender ambiguity as opposed to the complete otherness of the racially pure or ultra-
feminine figure. In this he again echoes his informational resource, Edward Long.
Warning his readers against miscegenation, Long describes in horrified tones the

situation in the Spanish colonies:

Let any man turn his eyes to the Spanish American
dominions, and behold what a vicious, brutal, and
degenerate breed of mongrels has been there produced,
between Spaniards, Blacks, Indians, and their mixed
progeny; and he must be of opinion that it might be much

26

better for Britain, and Jamaica too, if the white men in that
colony would abate of their infatuated attachments to black
women, and, instead of being “grac’d with a yellow
offspring not their own,” perform the duty incumbent on
every good citizen, by raising in honourable wedlock a race
of unadulterated beings. (Book II, 327).

Long reserves his most vitriolic racism for the progeny of mixed relationships, seeming
to place all racially “unadulterated” peoples hierarchically above these people of
ambiguous heritage. Lewis solves this anxiety through his banishment of the “gothic
half-breed” from his poem The Isle of Devils by only allowing lrza to give birth to
children of visually determinable race. This fantasy, however, does not extend to
Jamaica, where an ostensibly white child might indeed have a measure of African blood
in its veins. Outside the safe confines of The Isle of Devils, 3 constructed narrative over
which Lewis can maintain control, the racially mixed population of Jamaica reveals that
even whiteness itself is suspicious. As will be seen, eventually even the poem cannot
maintain this stance.

In Jamaica, which Lewis configures as a literal Isle of Devils, he lists and defines
five different racial categories other than black and white: mulatto, sambo, quadroon,
mustee, and musteefino. At the ends of the spectrum the categories bleed into each other
and Lewis notes that “the children of a musteefino are free by law, and rank as white
persons to all intents and purposes” (68). The racially ambiguous in Jamaica walk among
the white population unnoticed much as Lewis’s gothic villains like the monk Ambrosio
are able to pass among the population mistaken for the virtuous.l6 Echoing this
sentiment, the monk of The Isle of Devils urges lrza to abandon her demon-sired white
child, warning that evil may masquerade in the guise of beauty: “‘F air is the imp! and

shall he therefore breathe / To win new subjects for the realms beneath? / The fiends most

 

l6In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change, Kari Winter notes that “Gothic novels and slave narratives
show that some protagonists subverted the system by taking identification to its logical extreme: women
presented themselves to the world as men and blacks assumed the appearance of whites” (123). Winter’s
text locates a string of mostly superficial correspondences between slave nanatives and the texts of female
gothic writers without establishing any explicit representational ties between the two genres.

27

dangerous are those spirits bright, / Who toil for hell, and show like sons of light’” (180).
Although characters that exceed categorical boundaries abound in his earlier fictional
texts, Lewis strives toward a rejection of the possibility of hybrid constructions in
Jamaica, a position rife with contradictions that he is ultimately unable to maintain. This
rejection of liminality extends even to the most minor details of the Jamaican
environment. Lewis notes that even the twilight between darkness and day does not seem
to exist on the island (72) and during his first voyage to Jamaica he complains of the
tropical waters as exhibiting only the two extremes of “heavy gales or dead calms” (l 3).
Temperamental nature is thereby elided with the extreme moodiness of the slaves:

effusively happy or outright rebellious.

The Journal: Lewis’s Gothic Vision at Work

Fittingly given the anxiety displayed in The Isle of Devils and throughout the
Journal over hybridity in categories of human difference, Lewis establishes a rigid binary
structure in which the slaves in the Journal fall into one of two classifications: passive,
feminized victims suggestive of the helpless Agnes and doomed Antonia of The Monk,
and the charismatic villains reminiscent of Ambrosio. Lewis’s fascination with the
legendary exploits of Plato, the famed leader of African resistance on the island, and
Adam, an insurrectionist and purported practitioner of Obeah, speak to theseductive
powers of the mutinous and violent gothic villain. Lewis praises Plato as a romantic
revolutionist upholding a set of utopian ideals: “He robbed very ofien, and murdered
occasionally; but gallantry was his every day occupation. . . . Every handsome negress
who had the slightest cause of complaint against her master, took the first opportunity of
eloping to join Plato, where she found freedom, protection, and unbounded generosity”
(59).

Much more common than the charismatic villain, however, are the representatives

of the other type: the passive victim. Lewis’s sympathy and paternalistic benevolence

28

toward his slaves has been well documented. His personal identification with the misery
of the slaves torn from their homes and subjected to a transatlantic passage finds its first
manifestation in Hassan’s excised speech quoted above in which the slave expresses grief
for his homeland and lost wife Samba. Establishing a parallel, this speech is echoed in
Angela’s speech in remembrance of her homeland. Lewis repeats these two characters’
cries of loneliness and separation in the Journal. During his first transatlantic crossing in
which he re-enacts the passage of the Jamaican slaves he joumeys to see, he inserts in the
Journal a poem that echoes Hassan’s grief over the separation from his loved ones. It

reads in part:

No more can I, estranged from home,

Their pleasures share, nor soothe their moans;
To them I’m dead as were the foam

Now breaking o’er my whitening bones. . . .
Demon of Memory, cherish’d grief!

Oh, could I break thy wand in twain!

Oh, could I close thy magic leaf,

Till those I love are mine again! (1415)

The poem’s supplication to the oblivion of lost memory to erase the pain of an estranged
homeland and absent loved ones inserted during Lewis’s narration of a dangerous ocean
voyage to a Jamaican sugar plantation establishes unavoidable parallels with the journey
of his own slaves, as well as the fictional Hassan. In doing so, Lewis elides his ovm
situation with that of the slaves and, by extension, to that of his passive gothic victims,
potentially in an attempt to deny his own villainous collusion in the situation that
prompted such sentiments.

Whereas Lewis carefully places his slaves in one of the two rigid categories of
villain or victim, Lewis himself moves very freely between his own two. roles of
benevolent empathy and indifferent practicality as he repeatedly calculates infant deaths
in terms of economic loss. Immediately upon arriving in Jamaica for his second visit,

Lewis is disappointed to learn of the low number of infants produced by his slaves in the

29

previous year:

Yet, among upwards of three hundred and thirty negroes,
and with a greater number of females than men, in spite of
all indulgences and inducements, not more than twelve or
thirteen children have been added annually to the list of the
births. On the other hand, this last season has been
generally unhealthy all over the island, and more
particularly so in my parish; so that I have lost several
negroes, some of them young, strong, and valuable
labourers in every respect; and in consequence, my sum F
total is rather diminished than increased since my last visit.
(202)

 

That Lewis’s first concern upon arrival is an inquiry that enumerates human mortality in
terms of economic loss affirms that his “indulgences” have as their ultimate motive his
own commercial profit rather than a sincere benevolence. Although Lewis’s hysteria
about hybridity pervades the Journal, he remains aloof to the fluidity of his identity as a
slave owner with both abolitionist tendencies and a desire for commercial success.

With few exceptions, Lewis characterizes most of the slaves as gentle and light-
hearted. It is mostly in the narrative ruptures such as the short lyrical poems, the Isle of
Devils narrative, and the excised Quawboo episode when his racial hysteria emerges.
Although references to poisoning and arson by the Jamaican slaves and maroons abound
in the Journal, Lewis anticipates his own death by an allegorical poisoning even before
his first arrival in Jamaica. In a neoclassical poem dedicated to the figure of “tr0pic
Genius” Lewis represents the figure as an African king: “Of dark sea-blue is the mantle
he wears; / For a sceptre a plantain branch he bears; / Pearls his sable arrns surround, /
And his looks of wool with coral are crown’d” (18). Lewis gifts his allegorical figure
with sovereignty over tropical diseases that kill so many Europeans visiting the
Caribbean and begs the tropic Genius to spare him from the same fate: “Let not thy
strange diseases prey / On my life; but scare from my couch away / The yellow Plague’s
imps; and safe let me rest / From that dread black demon, who racks the breast” (19).
Lewis conflates the double threats of poison and disease and renders them under the

30

control of an African, thereby literalizing many of the fears experienced by European
slave-owners traveling to Jamaica. Lewis disarms the threat of poisoning by speaking of
it in a lighthearted and jocular manner. He decries “the facility with which they are
frequently induced to poison to the right hand and to the left” and relates several
anecdotes in which his neighbors and acquaintances suffer near escapes from a poisonous

death:
Another agent, who appears to be in high favour with the
negroes whom he now governs, was obliged to quit an
estate, from the frequent attempts to poison him; and a
person against whom there is no sort of charge alleged for
tyranny, after being brought to the doors of death by a cup
of coffee, only escaped as second time by his civility, in
giving the beverage, prepared for himself, to two young
bookkeepers, to both of whom it proved fatal. (93)

Interestingly, in the midst of his fears of poisoning by the slaves, Lewis associates
poisoning as a weapon of choice traditionally employed against the English aristocracy
by errant clergy: “ . . . more than one of our English sovereigns died of eating too many
larnpreys; though, to own the truth, it was suspected that the monks, in an instance or
two, improved the same by the addition of a little ratsbane” (67). Lewis’s propensity to
cast even violent, morbid, or unpleasant events in a mode of understated humor is a
defensive rhetorical strategy that belittles the perpetrators of the threat at the same time
that it acknowledges the efficacy of the threat. This mechanism not only operates as a
method of emotional distancing when Lewis makes observations of others.
Paradoxically, his blasé attitude has about it a forced quality that belies Lewis’s false
self-construction as a benevolent and well-loved master against whom no slave would
knowingly trespass. This attitude becomes most strained in episodes in which Lewis’s
slaves are obviously engaging in intentionally subversive behavior. During a significant
act of defiance in which a large group of female slaves refuse to work and manage to
completely halt the work of the plantation, Lewis dismisses the coordinated

insubordination as a “petticoat rebellion” led by “a little fierce young devil of a Miss

31

Whaunica” (87).

Just as Saib and Muley in The Castle Spectre are prone to test their boundaries
through innocuous pranks, Lewis fills much of the Journal recounting instances that he
attributes to “monkey-tricks” and laziness (86). Lewis seems to be ignorant of the slaves’
capacity to engage in acts of passive resistance, representing the perpetrators more as
naughty children rather than coming to terms with their capacity to undermine the
functioning of his plantation. He prefers to ascribe their blunders to stupidity rather than
artifice, particularly in the case of Cubina whose humorous misunderstandings waste
hours in lost productivity (244). This representation of the slaves as helpless and child-
like not only configures them within the gothic trope of the passive female victim. It also
configures Lewis himself as one of the benevolent paternal figures who frequently people
his plays and stories.

These episodes form part of a larger rhetorical phenomenon in the Journal
whereby Lewis aestheticizes the unpleasant or the anxiety-provoking, turning moments
of fear into amusing vignettes offered to the readers of the Journal as entertainment.
Even the sight of the Lewis family mausoleum is mined by Lewis for maximum dramatic
effect when he notes its similarity to a “theatrical representation of the ‘tomb of all the
Capulets’” (66). The aesthetic pleasure provoked by the mausoleum’s correlation to a
theatrical representation leads Lewis to ponder that “the sight of it quite gave me an
appetite for being buried” (66). Here as throughout the Journal Lewis renders his
environment and companions into a theatrical spectacle, valuing them more for their
potential dramatic effect rather than evincing any concern for the well-being of himSel‘f or
others. This tendency becomes massively evident during his perilous journey across the
mountainous Jamaican landscape to visit the city of Kingston. The striking landscape
corresponds to‘what the later Romantics would characterize as sublime, mixing the
awesome beauty and deadliness of raw nature. “The road [to Kingston] wound through

mountain passes, or else on a shelf of rock so narrow--though without the slightest

32

danger--that one of the wheels was frequently in the sea, while my other side as fenced
by a line of bold broken cliffs, clothed with trees completely from their brows down to
the very edge of the water” (98). Despite Lewis’s insistence on the complete safety of
the mountain pass, during a similar voyage to his second plantation, Hordley, one of his
horses falls into the water and barely manages to pull itself back on the ledge as the
carriage balances on one wheel (225). Lewis, however, is much more affected by the
theatrical power of the scene as his “cavalcade wound along through the mountains” (99),
commenting that “nor should I have been greatly surprised to see a trap-door open in the
middle of the road, and Captain Rolando’s whiskers make their appearance” (99) during
the voyage through the mountain pass. This reference to an imaginary trap-door is
reminiscent of Lewis’s fondness for the elaborate mechanical trappings and outlandish
props that characterize his own theatrical productions.

' Although these examples depart from a specifically gothicized vision of race, they
represent the wider application of strategy by which Lewis renders scenes of
transgression or anxiety into spectacle in order to defuse their threat. That this defensive
strategy extends beyond the Journal’s dealings with race speaks to the flexibility of the
aestheticizing gothic imagination in which it continuously reinscribes the boundaries that
it threatens through the very process of threatening those boundaries.

The gothic has often been characterized as a highly revolutionary and politically
subversive genre, closely associated with the violence and terror of the French
Revolution. Conversely, revisionist critics have argued that the apparently subversive
elements of the gothic are always ultimately nullified, instead resulting in an eventual
reaffirmation of the existing power regime. Lewis’s body of word culminating in The
Journal demonstrates that the gothic can paradoxically encompass both subversive and
conservative tendencies within the same moment. Lewis can simultaneously glorify the
transgressive and revolutionary potential of his slaves at the same time that he manifests

an anxiety of that potential. Ronald Paulson’s explication in which The Monk’s

33

 

Ambrosio encompasses a volatile mixture of contradictory tendencies can be expanded as
an apt representation of Lewis’s narrative construction of himself as a slave owner: “the
peculiar figure of Ambrosio as victim and aggressor” is traced in a trajectory of
“revolutionary activity imaged through Ambrosio’s career, as the progression from
repression, through revolution, to the Terror, where the repressed son assumes the same
aspect as the tyrannical father” (The Monk, xvi). Lewis is both enforcer of and
transgressor against the social hierarchy in Jamaica that privileges the dominance of the
planter class. He figures himself as both the “repressed son” and the “tyrannical father,”
a archetype that first appears in Ambrosio. Paulson notes that “the model of the sublime
as it emerges in ‘Monk’ Lewis does correspond to one version of the general pattern
Burke at once detected in the French Revolution: first destroy the father and then of
necessity become more repressive than he was” (220). Lewis begins his career as a rebel
and transgressor and, like Ambrosio, he ends his life as a “tyrannical father,” a role with
which he is morally conflicted. The Journal manages to encompass these antithetical
impulses by directing this ethnographic account of racial and cultural alterity through a
filter of gothic tropes. As a movement featuring inherently contradictory impulses of
revolutionism and conservatism, the gothic proves to possess a particular affinity to the

maintenance of such a paradoxical project.

34

 

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