Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  Read as fragments or glimpses into a day in the life of an Englishwoman in the second half of the eighteenth century, Larpent's diary entries strike one as quotidian, but considered as a whole, in their entire seventeen volumes, these diaries now stand as some of the most impressive records of the lived experience of the culture of taste in the eighteenth century, a compelling account of what John Brewer has termed the “pleasures of the imagination.”2 Here we have a vivid account of an intellectual, middle-class woman at the end of the long eighteenth century, one whose identity had been enabled by an aesthetic sensibility, cultural uplift, and the careful mastery of the economy of manners and taste. For those looking for the objects and practices that constituted the fabric of modern, cultured life, Larpent's diaries affirm the principle of the archive as one of “consignation, that is, of gathering together” fragments of the everyday to constitute a social, regulated order of the self.3 In this record of a life, carefully recorded and choreographed to live up to the ideals of sense and sensibility, commerce and politeness would appear to have been reconciled. Here we have a subject going about the business of consuming culture as the precondition of a modern identity. And for women like Larpent, to be modern was to find a secure space at the intersection of art, civility, and good manners.

  2.1 Entry from The Diaries of Anna Margaretta Larpent, A Woman's View of Drama, 1790–1830.

  Monday, April 24, 1797, did not go too well for an African woman named Nealee. On that day she was part of a coffle making its way slowly through the Sahel region of West Africa on the way to the Atlantic coast. As a slave, Nealee did not leave a diary or any kind of record about her life or experiences; indeed, had she not been traveling in the company of Mungo Park (fig. 2.2), the Scottish botanist and explorer, she could have been one of the many voices lost in the vault of African slavery. Park was in the final phase of his journey through the unforgiving terrain of the Sahel, and his route had taken him from Jillifree (Juffurreh), on the mouth of the Gambia River, through the Bambara and Wolof countries, and then back to the Atlantic coast. At a place called Kamalia (fig. 2.3) “situated at the bottom of some rocky hills, where the inhabitants collect gold in considerable quantities,” Park was the guest of a slave trader called Karfa Taura.4 During Park's stay in Kamalia, Karfa acquired slaves—presumably bartered for gold dust—from the Bambara country and kept them under fetters and bolts, waiting for the opportune time to transport them to the Gambia, on the Atlantic coast. On April 19, 1797, Karfa and his slaves—and Park, the sole scriptural witness to this event—embarked on their arduous journey in a typical slave coffle consisting of “twenty-seven slaves for sale, the property of Karfa and four other slatees.”5 Several days later, on April 23, the coffle left the Mandingo territories and entered what Park described as the “Jallonka Wilderness,” a landscape bearing the scars of war as rival African kingdoms fought to harvest human captives to feed the expanding plantation economies of the Americas.6

  On April 24, the very day when Anna Margaretta Larpent was going about the ordinary business of consuming culture and consolidating her middle-class identity, reading books on Russian history and holding conversations with her friends, Nealee, one of Karfa's slaves, got “very sulky,” refused to eat, and developed an irreversible wish to die.7 Apparently, Nealee had decided that it was better to die in the Sahel than live under servitude in the alien lands that lay across the unknown ocean. Of course, we don't know the exact reasons for Nealee's desire to die, but from Park's description, it is quite obvious that a certain drive for death had overcome her. Park observed how Nealee lagged behind the coffle and complained “dreadfully of pains in her leg”; he also noted how her laggardness functioned as either as an expression of a death wish or a form of passive resistance:

  Her load was taken from her, and given to another slave, and she was ordered to keep in the front of the coffle. About eleven o'clock, as we were resting by a small rivulet, some of the people discovered a hive of bees in a hollow tree, and they were proceeding to obtain the honey, when the largest swarm I ever beheld, flew out, and attacking the people of the coffle, made us fly in all directions. I took the alarm first, and I believe was the only person who escaped with impunity. When our enemies thought fit to desist from pursuing us, and every person was employed in picking out the stings he had received, it was discovered that the poor woman abovementioned, whose name was Nealee, was not come up; and as many of the slaves in their retreat had left their bundles behind them, it became necessary for some persons to return, and bring them. In order to do this with safety, fire was set to the grass, a considerable way to the eastward of the hive, and the wind driving the fire furiously along, the party pushed through the smoke, and recovered the bundles. They likewise brought with them poor Nealee, whom they found lying by the rivulet. She was very much exhausted, and had crept to the stream, in hopes to defend herself from the bees by throwing water over her body; but this proved ineffectual; for she was stung in the most dreadful manner.8

  2.2 Mungo Park, frontispiece, 1799. From Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. Copy in Princeton University Library.

  2.3 View of Kamalia. 1799. From Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. Copy in Princeton University Library.

  Apparently, whichever way she looked at it, Nealee's life would end at a point of death. The only question was how and where this death would occur.

  Here we have one day in April 1797, two cultural geographies, two distinct lives: Anna Margaretta Larpent, icon of social mobility in the culture of taste, writer of voluminous diaries, a woman attuned to the cultural sensibilities of her time; and Nealee, a faceless African woman slave in a coffle, bought for gold dust in an Bambara slave market, destined to die somewhere between Sego and the Gambia. These two women were in the crucible of modern culture, invariably separated by race, geography, and fate, but also conjoined by a new global economy that revolved around the sale of black bodies on the West African coast, their enforced labor in the Americas, and their use in the production of the goods—primarily tobacco, coffee, and sugar—that were to epitomize luxurious living and the culture of taste. These small stories of two women represent the true entanglement of modernity, of the unlikely yet inevitable meeting of the most elevated and the most demeaned subjects of the modern era, the age of reason, enlightenment, and civility, which was also the time of slavery. And beyond their individual and asymmetrical experiences in the library of empire, the stories of these two women raise several issues that go to the heart of the tenuous relation between slavery and the culture of taste: How does one tell the stories of lives and experiences that were structurally connected through the political economy of slavery yet conceptually and symbolically separated? How does one overcome the ostensible incommensurability between Larpent's highly visible narrative of modern self-fashioning and Nealee's almost invisible story of abjection, her existence as a thing without a sign, one condemned to “bear the weight of meaninglessness” and to leave behind a mere trace in the archive of modern identity?9 And how does one tell these two stories in the same register? This chapter will seek to answer these questions in three discursive operations. First, I will sketch out the context in which subjects like Larpent were transformed through the consumption of culture; then I will provide a reading of the typical life of a slave like Nealee confronting European modernity for the first time; and, finally, I will explore the intersections of these two modes of life in the theater of our modern identity.

  To examine Larpent's life in the eighteenth century or to consider her mastery of the practices and theories of modern life is an invitation to reflect on the exemplary ways in which culture became the most obvious form of social mobility and self-making in the century that invented the modern individual.10 Larpent's elaborate diaries contain a tutored insider's view of the culture of taste in the eighteenth century and represent the elegance of a Georgian woman of taste. And in her command of high culture, which involved, among othe
r things, reading radical pamphlets and conduct books, attending plays and art galleries, and socializing with public officials and diplomats, Larpent transformed herself from an ordinary housewife into a lady of taste, a cultured middle-class subject. Married to John Larpent, who was the examiner or censor of plays at the office of the Lord Chamberlain, Anna Margaretta was so deeply involved in the Georgian art scene that she often acted as the unofficial deputy to her husband; in this capacity she had access to some of the most important dramatic works of her age.

  Larpent's central location in the geography of English society at the end of the eighteenth century—the period in which the category of culture became central to British self-understanding—has prompted John Brewer to identify her as the quintessential “cultured lady of late eighteenth-century London”:

  She was not an aristocrat but neither was she poor. Though she was busy with household duties and the education of her children, like many other moderately prosperous women (the family income was more than £400 a year) she had enough time and leisure to enjoy many of the metropolis's cultural activities. But she did not view her recreations frivolously. She aspired to what she called “a refinement which can only be felt in the pure pleasure of intellectual pursuits.” The proof of this quest, the evidence that her frequent play-and concert-going, together with her assiduous reading, were edifying rather than amusing, is to be found in her journal.11

  Working with the evidence Larpent left behind in her diaries, Brewer notes that she was not only living the cultured life but was also “carefully and repeatedly” representing herself as “a cultured person”: “Though she certainly saw herself in other ways—as a Christian, a friend, a mother and a wife—her overriding concern in the diary was with her fashioning of a refined persona. Her version of the good life is one devoted to self-improvement through literature, the arts and learning.”12 Larpent's social mobility, and thus her self-willed movement from the margins of English society to its center, was not enabled solely by money (her means, as Brewer rightly notes, were modest), nor was her rise on the social scale achieved by rank or marriage; rather, her self-fashioning was shaped through the mechanisms of cultural consumption that I discussed in the last chapter.13

  Larpent had an uncanny ability to overcome the assumed divide between the business of everyday life and the rarified work of culture; in fact, an intriguing aspect of her method as a diarist was the fusion of quotidian matters with what Raymond Williams would call “the general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development.”14 Her diary entry for Wednesday, April 26, 1797, illustrates how on any given day she would make having breakfast, attending to family matters, and commenting on her readings for the day appear almost seamless: she rose at eight, said her prayers, attended to her journal, had breakfast, settled the last week's bills, dined at five, and then, as if the whole day needed to be laundered through the practice of culture, “read and finished Bertrand de Malleville's memoirs.”15 Larpent's deep sense of culture was crucial to her self-presentation in public space. Although born in Turkey (the daughter of a British diplomat) and orphaned early, she would adroitly use her intimate knowledge of the idiom of taste to enter the public sphere at its moment of emergence and consolidation.16 She fashioned herself with the best cultural objects available to her—assemblies, balls, plays, concerts, art galleries, and, of course, an engagement with the key texts of her time, including Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. All of this locates her at the center of a historical moment in which the rise of a culture of taste as the mediator of social position constituted an important mode of freedom, one as important as the philosophical treatises of the age of Enlightenment. Moreover, culturedness enabled women like Larpent to have access to a set of social privileges that in previous generations had been the preserve of aristocratic men.

  The terms in which female subjectivity was constructed at the end of the eighteenth century have been debated and questioned, and there is no doubt that women, even privileged ones, still occupied a subordinate position in relation to aristocratic and middle-class men, but as Ann Bermingham has noted, the “aesthetization of women” signaled a new valuation of the female as—almost—a work of art.17 Undoubtedly, cultured women like Larpent were presented and valuated through the anxieties and desires of male patrons and spectators (very much like aesthetic objects), but the dominance of the masculine gaze did not preclude a certain degree of freedom in the structure and mode of sensibility. In short, there is no indication that Larpent perceived her place in the family as a form of confinement, nor did she make the analogy between her condition and that of African slaves in the manner of Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's novel of that name.18 On the contrary, the journeys that Larpent would make on an ordinary day, crisscrossing London's cultural and human geography, suggest great mobility and with it a cherished sense of freedom. Her diary clearly, consistently, and forcefully demonstrates that the domestic scene, often associated with feminine confinement by many critics, overflowed into the public domain.19 It shows how an engagement with the fine arts and the cultivation of a cultural sense redirected the self toward a new set of privileges and entitlements, so that with “the gradual profusion of Georgian assembly rooms, plays, picture galleries, libraries, museums and pleasure gardens, a full range of cultural resources was now available for those who wished to be refined.”20 Moreover, the tone of her diaries indicates that Larpent felt fortunate to have been born in an age in which the palpable intersection of wealth, consumption, and culture had created a public space for presenting the self as freed by its contact—and contract—with culture.

  For Larpent and many of her contemporaries, then, an association with the culture of taste, the self-conscious engagement with cultural matters, located the modern self in a larger moral space. This moral space, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, was one of the preconditions for the emergence of a modern identity.21 In the domain of cultural consumption and refinement, the private self would become a public subject. Indeed, the presentation of the cultured self in public spaces of entertainment such as luxury gardens, concert halls, and theaters, or even the presentation of what might appear to be private gestures, including reading, as public acts was a prerequisite for what one may call the pose of the self. Even when culture was consumed privately, it needed to be publicized in portraits and conversational pieces. Indeed, paintings such as Sir Joshua Reynolds's Theophila Palmer Reading “Clarissa Harlowe” are often cited as prominent examples of the staging of reading as an act of cultural distinction, a fact that Larpent was conscious of, because the longest entries in her diaries are about the books that she read.22 Similarly, the proliferation of “conversational pieces” was a striking feature of English culture in the eighteenth century. Affirmed and mocked in William Hogarth's best works, such as The Cholmondeley Family, these domestic scenes of cultural posturing provided the prism through which the new leisure class wanted to be viewed in the emergent public sphere. In paintings like these, domestic scenes would be conceived as simultaneously private and public spaces, sites of cultural refinement and its possible undoing.23 Conversation pieces, like diaries, represented the intertwining of the public and private contexts that enabled “the emergence of a new identity as a public person of taste and refinement.”24

  To understand the relationship between slavery and the culture of taste, however, one must question, qualify, and complicate the structural relationship between the private realm, carefully cultivated to represent the ideals of the cultured subject, and the public site of presentation, the scene of the world picture, as it were.25 This kind of interrogation is necessary because often the form of representing modern life as both private and public, as was the case with diaries, portraits, and conversation pieces, was intended to erase the difference between the picture and its referents or, rather, to make the picture an idealized stand-in for social life. Artists like Hogarth operated under the knowledge that their wealthy pa
trons wanted them to represent domestic life as orderly and ordered even when it was quite apparent that social life in the modern world was often more disordered than the symmetrical mandate of the portrait or conversation piece suggested. The challenge for artists, then, was to represent this complex and sometimes-chaotic world as a set of stable images of cultural well-being. Inevitably, the resulting images, like the reigning discourses of the age, promoted a set of values that were often at odds with the materiality of modern life. The aesthetic ideology of the eighteenth century emphasized an order of “exacted thoughtful conduct, clear intellect and organised design,” one whose correlatives were “political and religious balance instead of frenzy, efficient style and idea instead of complexity, discipline of vision instead of spasmodic tentativeness.”26 But outside this vision of Augustan order was to be found the most aggressive and successful maritime economy of modern times. The consequence of this was that at its center, British identity was characterized and informed by a critical dichotomy between the ideal of commerce as part of the civilizing process and the actual conditions of commercial growth in the imperial zone. More significantly for my discussion here, the projection of an Augustan order based on politeness, good taste, and manners was at odds with the logic of economic development in the reaches of empire, which demanded total control and brutal governance—and slave labor.27