In Anne McClintock's critique of Benedict Anderson, most fully
argued in the recent Imperial Leather, she posits that
his reliance on the spread of print as essential to national
formation "neglects the fact that print capital has, until
recently, been accessib1e to a relatively small literate elite"
(374). McClintock asks how the nation, supposedly a lateral,
democratic entity, could possibly be imagined through the elite,
inaccessible medium of print. In presenting a solution to this
problem, McClintock disregards print almost entirely, arguing
instead that the nation is experienced primarily throllgh spectacle.
The opposition she constructs (print versus spectacle) seems
in large part a matter of critical strategy: pcrhaps both Anderson
and McClintock would agree if pressed that "nation"
arises through both print and spectacle, depending on historical,
geographical, and other contingencies. Nevertheless, McClintock's
opposition to Anderson has much to tell us about the limitations
of both the Anderson and McClintock models. For in response to
Anderson, McClintock argues for a generalized theory of nation
based on "the visible, ritual organization of fetish objects,
flags, uniforms, airplane logos, maps, anthems, national flowers,
national cuisines and architectures as well as through the organization
of collective fetish spectacles in team sports, military displays,
mass rallies, the myriad forms of popular culture and so on"
(374-5). Thus, while Anderson imagines an uneducated population
imbibing tea, coffee, and newsprint, McClintock sees an illiterate,
disempowered crowd howling at a soccer match.
McClintock and Anderson have several thing in common: like many other theorists of nationalism, each imagines that groups of individuals, whether literate or illiterate, internalize national symbols through absorption, and thus have no role in their construction. Such theories, of course, make sense; groups do internalize national symbols uncritically. But what one might call the symbolic identification theory belies any active role for consumerism, oral culture, and "the people" in constructing symbols of nation. Further, both Anderson and McClinttock bifurcate print and spectacle: Anderson neglects the spectacle that the new ubiquity of print presneted, while McClintock ignores the print aspects of popular spectacle. This insistence on either print or spectacle as primary reinscribes a sharp divide between "pre-national" and national cultures, one that assumes similarly sharp divides between literate and non-literate culture, as well as between thc elite and the lower orders
In this paper, I want to suggest that literary scandals in general, and one early nineteenth-century scandal in particular, straddle print and spectacle, the literate and the oral, the elite and the "people," and thus provide a model for understanding non-elite participation in national identity formation. As I argue in the longer project from which I take this paper, literary scandals from the 1750s to the 1830s engaged both print and spectacle and thus functioned as sites where national identity was negotiated, mediated, and defined. Seeing these events as sites for identity formation calls for a shift in our thinking about literature and politics. We tend to assume tbat national ideology emanates from, as Simon Gikandi puts it, "a body of stable value and shared experiences" -- that is, in literary terms, a canon. But the story told by literary scandals implicated in national identity is one in which transgrcssion rivals authority. Literary scandals originated in transgressive acts of writing, in instances of what official culture labels literary forgery, piracy, or libel. But they expanded to organize much larger textual networks, rnade up of literary and national traditions, as well as of a multiplicity of literary works, popular tracts, legal treatises, and proclamations of aesthetic theory. Moreover, they were made visible to the public in the spectacles of trials, plays, public appeararlces, and pilgramages, engaging a wide range of interests beyond those of the literate population.
Literary scandals thus worked on many different cultural levels as British national identity emerged and was consolidated. The scandals of greatest national import brought print and popular culture together at a site where class, racial, regional, and gender differences were negotiated in support of the public fantasy of nationa1 unity. The national work performed by literary scandals thus challenges the "sharp divide" model and replaces it with a set of intersecting, not necessarily analogous continua. This model may seem unmanageable, even unimaginable, but it makes legible the formation of the imagined community of "nation" in cultures neither bound together by full literacy nor entirely (and only) under spectacle's sway.
The scandal surrounding Mary Prince's
autobiographical narrative, published in 1832, like other literary
scandals of national import, served as a site for the intersection
of various contested identity components important in formulating
national iderltity, particularly those of race, class, and gender.
Moreover, it questioned the various ideologies expressed but
also elided by British and English national culture. But most
particularly, it called into question nationalism' s simultaneous
and contradictory dependence on an elite print culture and an
ideology of class leveling, suggesting that slavery and working
peoples despite their supposed indifference to and distancing
from print culture, both recognized its power and engaged it
when possible.
Prince's oral narrative, which told the story of her birth into slavery and her eventual importation to London, was taken down, edited, and published by Thomas Pringle and his friends, leaders of the abolitionist movement. After publication, both Prince and Pringle's morality were attacked by anti-abolitionists, leading eventually to several libel lawsuits played out in the courts and debated in the press. The narrative's subsequent editions appended discussions of the public reaction and the lawsuits, suggesting that we read the entire scandal as one interrelated text that itself imported a number of different forms of national culture. Such forms ranged from the juridical, or as Lauren Berlant calls it the "official culture," of the nation to cultures much less official but just as powerful in impacting national identity. Most importantly, Prince's tcxt integrated the story told by workers' bodies into the life of the nation, placing the "marks" of labor next to those of literacy.
In part, the public criticism of the narrative resulted from its disruption of the identity components essential to understanding Britain as "nation. " The narrative's "told to" form confounded categories of oral and literature, suggesting an alliance between popular, more regional, and more traditional, older forms of British culture and "high" or elite culture. Meanwhile its intermingling of historical detail, political purpose, and personal (at times explicitly sexual) detail suggested an equally confounding conflation of high and low. In short, Prince's complicated and repeated overlayering of supposedly disparate ideologies, images, and identities (literacy versus orality, white editor versus black speaker, choice versus compulsion, economic difference versus racial difference) articulated the central contradictions contained by late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century "Britishness."
As many historians have argued, Britain's identity rested on claims of liberty and individual rights, claims antithetical to slavery. The grossest blutalities of slavery were thus necessarily kept at bay, relegated by and large to the colonies, imagined in important ways as "foreign" rather than domestic. Prince brought slavery home to Britain, partly by telling the story of her importation to London and her treatment there, but also by repeatedly referencing the dissonance between British ideals and the practices of slavery. While it was not true as Prince argued that "few people in England know what slavery is"(64), Prince's assumption throughout the narrative that greater knowledge would almost automatically dictate English support for change underscored the challenge to British goals that slavery represented.
Prince's narrative moved back and forth along the trajectory from slavery to freedom and thus pointed to Britain's own ambivalence about the slave system, played out most particularly in English law. In her story, the motifs of captivity and release are embedded in the juridical confusion inscribed in Blackstone's ambivalence concerning slavery. l Oddly enough, from the time Pnnce entered London, she experiences herself as both ''free" and "not free." Brought to England from Antigua, ~he finds herself in captivity in London, despite a legal context in which, as she says, "I knew that I was free in England, but I did not know where to go, or how to get my living...." Even freedom in England--whatever its advamages and disadvantages--meant nothing in Antigua. Thus, throughout her tenure with the Wood family, who owned her during this period, Prince consistently tried to buy her freedom so that she could return to her home and husban~ in Antigua without risking re-enslavement. As she put it, "The laws of England could do nothing to make me free in Antigua" (81).
In an ironic reversal of the escaped slave narrative so well-known in African-American history, Prince is repeatedly evicted by her owners. When they attempt to throw her out the door, she stay~, saying "but I was a stranger, and did now know one door in the street from another, and was unwilling to go away" (77). The narrative suggests that technical freedom in England would merely subject Prince to the tyranny of want experienced by any displaced and exhausted laborer. Throughout the narrative, we find Prince trying out two versions of personal identity, slipping back and forth from slave to worker, and demonstrating the constraints that confined both categories. Her vacillation--from insider to outsider, from slave to free, from compliance to resistance--far from indicating a desire for slavery or a psychological dependence on the Woods, narrates a conflation: that between institutional slavery and the slavery of the labor market.
In clinging to "home" (such as it was) Prince signs on to British notions of national identity. The official and idealized version of English domesticity conflated home and nation, both of which were seen as protected spaces of order, civility, and safety. In Prince's narrative, England functions as a safe harbor. She comes to England with her owners certain that she will be accorded better treatment there. But her subsequent experiences lead her to attack the whole notion of "home," to reveal that the domestic virtue of the English household on which so much of English national fantasy relied was far from orderly, clean, and peaceful. lnstead, her story of household life constructed English domesticity as dirty, chaotic, sexualized, and violent.
Given McClintock's work on soap and washing in the constmction of English national identity, it is interesting to note that much of Prince's tale of London life revolved around the work of washing. Imbricated in both the sexual "shame" she had experienced in Bermuda, and the hardships of her work in the salt ponds of Turk's Island, washing comes to represent the abuses of slavery. Indeed, while Prince's accusation that her "old master" in Bermuda "had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked and ordering me then to wash hirn in a tub of water,"(66) has resulted in much critical speculation concerning sexual abuse, little has been said about the significance of the washtub. While washing her master in Berrnuda "was worse to me than all the licks," washing also caused illness and disease. Prince tells us that washing for the Wood family was physically more difficult, more debilitating than salt mining on Turk's Island (69). Washing, wit its hard physical demands, its exposure to extremes of temperature, and its use of caustic chemicals, stands in for the labor required of the enslaved.
After her removal to England, washing takes on even greater weight in Prince's narrative. Significantly, Prince is ordered to wash clothes "the English way" almost upon landing in London, and she first protest~ the Woods' treatment of her when she is ordered to wash the "five bags of clothes which we had used at sea"(77). Like the work in the salt ponds, washing is not negotiable. Prince's resistance to this hard work, work to which she was not originally assigned, prompts the first of several attempts to banish her from the home. Her repeated discussions of washing, coupled with the Woods' insistence that she either wash the colonies out of their clothes, or leave the house herself, suggests that a conflation of slavery, washing, and dirt have come to rcpresent the difficult ideological task involved in absolving Englishness of responsibility for slavery.
But washing is also connected to wage labor, significantly the major issue facing the British public in 1832. When washing in England, other washerwomen help Prince with her work, and Prince compares their "pily" to the Wood's cold indifference. Thus, while Moira Ferguson tells us that "Prince's resistance represented a nlicrocosm of black opposition, an individual expression of the collective consciousness that sought an end to illegitimate domination," the narrative itself tells a much more complex story of a resistance that attempts to relate institutional stavery and wage slavery.
Such a narrative strategy intersected with the public interest in reform. As Robin Blackburn has shown in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Prince's narrative was deeply bedded in the larger and more overtly national struggle for reform, in the realignment and restructuring of the class system, that characterized the period. While Prince's account "directly nourished the radicalization of British abolitionism" (Blackburn 442), it also, as part of the larger anti-slavery movement, "assembled an unstable class coalition" (Blackburn 442). The anti-slavery movement evemually took second place to the movement for reform, but it served an important function nevertheless, as it both metaphorically shadowed and directly supported reform. At times it served as the extreme example, the "limit case," of worker oppression, and at times as a sign of the good will and hu nanitarian spirit of the reform movement.
Given all that was at stake in Prince's story, it is not surprising that British libel law was pressed into service to remedy the destabilization tbe narrative attempted. The action for personal libel performed cultural work quite suited to the problems Prince represented. As Francis Holt asserted in his 1812 treatise The Law of Libel, public and private libel law were closely connected. While public libel law protected "political persons of all kinds," private law protected all England's "subjects whatever." Holt waxes patriotic as he explains the relationship: "No man can reasonably set his own character at a higher estimation than the law of England itself puts upon it. Acting in the same spirit, in which in all criminal cases [the law] presupposes the party innocent till proved to be guilty, it takes the honesty, morality, and sound religion of every member of the community, as a reasonable presumption...."(160). Thus, libel law presumed a close connection between individual reputation and national reputation, between individual character and national character.
Moreover, private libel law strictly insisted on the difference between print and orality, trivializing both oral slatements and Prince's attempt to merge the written and the oral. Under private libel law, oral statements were not actionable. Thus, the libel actions exerted in response to Prince's narrative attempted to reinstate the divide between oral and literate that she had attemptcd to undermine. Such a reinstaternent had cultural consequences that went beyond issues of literacy, asserting the triviality of all character disputes except those of the elite and meanwhile suggesting that groups associated with oral culture, the poor, the Celtic margins, slaves, and women had no standing under the law.
In the most important libel action against Prince, her owner sued Pringle, claiming that Prince's account was untrue and detrimental tn his reputation. As Prince defended herself, her body--displayed to witnesses for its evidentiary value, its scars, and physical mapping of the slave ' s travails--became a part of her narrative, and thus a part of the narrative of British identity. The Appendix to the Third Edition of the History suggests the interest that observers took in Prince's body: "As inquiries has been made from various quarters respecting the existence of marks of severe punishment on ~ary Prince's body, it seems proper to append to this Edition, the following letter on that subject." The letter itself details Prince's injuries in excruciating detail. Beginning "Dear Madam," it states that "the whole of the back part of her body is distinctly scarred, and, as it were, chequered, with the vestiges of severe floggins. Besides this, there are many large scars on other parts of her person, exhibiting an appearance as if the flesh had been deeply cut, or lacerated with gashes, by some instrument wielded by most unmerciful hands." The truth of the body trumped the Woods' claims against Prince. For eventually (in another reversal of the conventional slave narrative), Prince remained in England and the Woods returned to Antigua to escape public shame. But it also trumped the law's effort to trivialize the oral and all it stood for, turning the marks of slavery into a mark that could not bc erased by "official culture."
Prince's narrative demonstrated that racism in Britain was intricately intertwined with nalionalism. To push the metaphor of "marking" further, institutional slavery was ideologically marked as Britain's "other," as anti-rights and anti-liberty. The English displaced this mark onto the bodies of slaves, using color as a "natural" indicia of status to elide their own embrace of anti-liberty ideology, and simultaneously avoid the internal stresses racism and slavery exerted on English national identity. Prince offered another version of this "mark" in her defense to thc libel action, putting her own body to use as she attempted to intervene in a national culture intent on excluding her
Through emphasizing the marlcs of slavery7 Prince transformed her identity in the eyes of the British public. Her scars revealed both floggings, but they revealed the effect of hard labor under ba~i conditions as well. Making of herself both flogged slave and mistreated woker, she confounded distinctions between race and class and suggested the possible transformation of slave into worker. This version of identity was important in formulating British policy as the nation passed the Emancipation Bill in 1833, the bill that transformed Africans under British rule from slaves marked by race into workers marked by class. Thus, reading positively, one might see Prince' s work as important for the way it brings both materiality (bodies actually cut, maimed, situated in time and space) and materialism (racism re-expressed as class difference) to debates that have been primarily represented as textual. Reading more negatively though, we must ask whether Prince was simply assimilated into Britain's efforts to erase difference (the visible difference of race), and replace it with the less visible and more assimilable difference represented by class.
Notes:
1. In the first edition of the Commentaries. Blackstone writes: "this spirit of liberty is so deeply implanted in our constitution. and rooted even in our very soil, that a slave or a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws, and with regard to all natural rights becomes eo instanti a freeman. (123) He revised this in the next edition so as to render it meaningless, adding the words "though his master's right to his service may probably still continue." (Qtd. in Fryer, 121).
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. London; Verso, 1988.
Ferguson, Moira Ed. The History of Mary Prince. Ann Arbor: U of Mich P, 1987.
Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness. Ann Arbor: U of Mich. P, 1996.
Holt, Francis. The Law of Libel.
1812. Reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1978.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge,
1997.
