Humanitarian pornography: John Gabriel Stedman's narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of Surinam (1796)

New Literary History

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 559-587

  Klarer, Mario ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK   (Austria)

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EID: 60950416001     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2006.0006     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. For biographical information, see Stanbury Thompson, John Gabriel Stedman: A Study of His Life and Times (Stapleford, UK: Thompson, 1966)
2. See, for example, John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of Joanna; An Emancipated Slave, of Surinam (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838). Photograph from Princeton University Library, Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
3. Thomas W. Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 177
4. Also, the entry on Stedman in the Dictionary of National Biography stresses the instrumental function of the punishment scenes in the Narrative. "His descriptions of the cruelties practised on the negroes . . . forms one of the most vivid indictments of slavery that have been penned." Dictionary of National Biography: 1885-1901, 54:127
5. The Marquis de Sade, for example, writes in Justine that there "is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience." Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 606
6. See also David B. Morris, "Sex, Pain, and the Marquis de Sade," in The Culture of Pain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 198-243
7. Also, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century parliamentarians, who were exposed to or initiated abolitionist debates, considered this very technique as the backbone of the discourse as such. Brought before parliament, the graphic details of the horror of slavery stirred the emotions of the listeners in such a way that, in the event of a vote on these issues, the outcome of the ballots was very likely to be in favor of the abolitionists' cause. That fear was voiced in a number of cases, mostly in order to postpone votes during the emotionally heated situation after the depictions of cruelties. See Mary A. Favret, "Flogging: The Anti-Slavery Movement Writes Pornography," in Romanticism and Gender, ed. Anne Janowitz (Cambridge: Brewer, 1998), 19-43
8. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. E. G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976) sec. 1, chap. 1, 48 (emphasis added)
9. Aristotle refers to this technique as "expressions which set things before the eyes . . . words that signify actuality." Aristotle, The "Art" of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), book 3, chap. 11, line 2 (1411b)
10. The rhetorical concept of enargeia (or energeia) has retained this visual connotation ever since Aristotle's use of it. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century BCE), for example, uses enargeia to characterize the rhetorical descriptions of Lysias, which convey to the listener the feeling "that he can see the actions which are being described going on and that he is meeting face-to-face the characters in the orator's story." Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Critical Essays, trans. Stephen Usher (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 2:7
11. Quintilian discusses energeia in the context of the formation of visual images: "phantasía, or imagination . . . assists us to form mental pictures of things." Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), book 8, line 88
12. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, ed. Richard Price and Sally Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 145 (hereafter cited in text)
13. When not indicated otherwise, all quotations follow the unabridged edition of the manuscript version. Based on Stedman's 1790 manuscript for the publisher, this edition is closest to Stedman's intentions. I will, however, provide the text of the 1796 printed version if the differences are significant. In this particular case, the 1796 printed text is equally explicit and more or less identical with the above quotation from the manuscript version. At times I will also make recourse to his journal, The Journal of John Gabriel Stedman, 1744-1797, ed. Stanbury Thompson (London: Mitre Press, 1962)
14. See Geoffrey Keynes, Blake Studies: Essays on His Life and Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 100. Photograph from Princeton University Library, Rare Books Division, Départaient of Rare Books and Special Collections
15. William Cobbett, J. Wright, and T. C. Hansard, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London: Longman et al., 1817), 29:1070
16. Stressing the nudity of females in distress is also something that Edmund Burke is quite susceptible to, as, for example, when he describes Marie Antoinette being surprised by a band of assassins in her bedroom, "from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked." Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 8:122. Tom Furniss sees this particular passage on Marie Antoinette, which is only about a page long, as a catalyst for Burke's Reflections on the whole
17. See "Stripping the Queen: Edmund Burke's Magic Lantern Show," in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Steven Blakemore (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 69-96
18. It is quite remarkable that this passage also tended to be singled out for quotations in newspapers and served as a springboard for caricatures. See F. P. Lock, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 138-43
19. "Particulars of the Trial of Capt. Kimber," London Chronicle, June 9, 1792
20. The Trial of Captain John Kimber, for the supposed murder of an African girl, at the Admiralty Sessions . . . on Thursday, June 7, 1792. Of which he was most honorably acquitted. . . . (London: William Lane, 1792)
21. "The Execution of Breaking on the Rack," plate 71
22. Stedman, Narrative, 287. Photograph from Princeton University Library, Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
23. Stedman's carnivalesque male victims of public punishment are quite in line with the standard norms of expected theatricality on these occasions. This carnivalesque quality of execution scenes is by no means restricted to Stedman, it is also a standard feature of British executions. As Laqueur has convincingly shown, the crowd present at public executions actually expected this kind of subversive talk as part of the execution theatrical. Laqueur, "Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604-1868," in The First Modern Society: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 305-55
24. Samuel Richardson, for example, reports about an execution that only two of the prisoners were "suitably sad" while the other three were "most shamefully daring and wanton" in laughing and talking obscenely in such a way that "would have been ridiculous in men in any Circumstance whatever." Richardson, Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (1741; London: Routledge, 1928), letter 160, 217-20
25. See also Laqueur, "Crowds, Carnival and the State," 321
26. and Manchester Observer, May 6, 1820)
27. see also Laqueur, "Crowds, Carnival and the State," 322
28. "A Negro hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows," plate 11, Stedman, Narrative, 52
29. cf. Morris, The Culture of Pain, 129-31. Photograph from Princeton University Library, Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
30. Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989), 19 (hereafter cited in text)
31. For a commentary on this passage see Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke, 134-42
32. and Frans de Bruyn, "Edmund Burke's Gothic Romance: The Portrayal of Warren Hastings in Burke's Writings and Speeches on India," Criticism 29 (1987): 415-38 (esp. 432-33)
33. Grosz E., Voyeurism/Exhibitionism/ the Gaze, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, 1992, 447-450, For a good summary of these points see, ed. Elizabeth Wright Oxford: Blackwell Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell)
34. "Medusa's Head," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 28:273 (hereafter cited in text)
35. Freud's original reads, "sie ersetzen den Penis, dessen Fehlen die Ursache des Grauens ist. - Eine technische Regel: Vervielfältigung der Penissymbole bedeutet Kastration, ist hier bestätigt." Freud, "Das Haupt der Medusa," in Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnet, ed. Anna Freud et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1993), 17:47 (hereafter cited in text)
36. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998), book 1, sec. 7, 86 (hereafter cited as PE, with book, section, and page numbers)
37. Burke's Enquiry not only underwent seventeen English editions during his lifetime, but was translated into German and French, thus influencing Kant, Lessing, and Diderot, among many others
38. The connection between the theater and suffering is a longstanding tradition going back to Aristotle's Poetics, which lists suffering as one of three components of the plot (mythos), defining suffering as "a destructive or painful action, such as public deaths, physical agony, wounding, etc." Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), book 11, line 1452b
39. William Gilpin's Dialogue at Stow (1748), his Essays on Picturesque Beauty (1792)
40. Uvedale Price's Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794)
41. and Richard Payne Knight's The Landscape: A Didactic Poem (1794) codified this new aesthetics, which was already the dominant mode of seeing among the educated. Mentioning the three major proponents of the picturesque movement, undifferentiated in one sweep, obviously does not do justice to their related but nevertheless distinct goals
42. For an attempt to address this particular problem, see Kim-Ian Michasiw, "Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque," Representations 38 (1992): 76-100
43. This phrase almost anticipates Edgar Allan Poe's famous dictum that "the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition," in Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 19
44. For Poe's fascination with the dead female body and the larger nineteenth-century aesthetic concepts governing this choice of object, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992)
45. Dugald Stewart, Philosophical Essays (Edinburgh: Ramsey, 1810), 255-56
46. The published 1796 version of the Narrative tones down "fascination" by changing it to: "Strongly affected with this shocking circumstance, I took a draft of the unhappy sufferer." John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition, ed. Rudolf van Lier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1972), 13
47. We get a visual rendering of a pipe-smoking, masculine Negro woman later in his narrative, when Stedman envisions the Utopian conditions of slaves belonging to benevolent slave owners. See "Family of Negro Slaves from Loango," plate 68, Stedman, Narrative, 274
48. Stedman's journal entry for that incident is less indirect when he writes "I - one of his negro maids." Entry for 8 February 1773, in The Journal of John Gabriel Stedman, 119
49. For issues of race and gender in Burke, see also W. J. T. Mitchell, "Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility," in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 116-49 (esp. 129-31)
50. Burke to Charlemont, 9 August 1789, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 6:10
51. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), 286
52. quoted in Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, 146
53. Karen Halttunen, "Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture," American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 307
54. Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America, (London: Reaction, 1988), 7