Jamaica is physically a country in the Caribbean and the birthplace of Olivia Fairfield, the heroine of this novel. More than its geographical location, I argue that Jamaica carries different interpretations as demonstrated throughout the text of The Woman of Colour: A Tale. The country represents Olivia’s home and those she is closest to, including Mrs. Milbanke and the fond memories of her mother and father. This keyword is important because it highlights that even though her father had good intentions with the instructions in his will, Olivia will never be completely comfortable in England as she would in Jamaica. Returning to her birth country is the end goal, whether or not Olivia realizes it.
Towards the end of the novel, Olivia, Dido (Olivia’s servant), and Caroline (a friend) are having a conversation after witnessing Olivia’s husband reunite with his first wife; “Oh, my dear Missee, we will go back to our own good country! – we will pray to a good God Almighty, to teach you and me to forget that we was ever set foot on England land! My poor Missee was happy in our own dear Jamaica” (87). The reader is clearly able to understand that although Dido and Olivia have been living in England for quite some time, neither consider this new country to be their home. This international move required that Olivia sacrifice everything, including her friendships and status in society. Olivia is mixed, leading to an interesting analysis of her role in Jamaica compared to England. She is a free person of color in Jamaica with privileges granted by private acts as she was born to a black woman and white man. Because Olivia’s father was a plantation owner, she witnessed more rights than others without such a status and title attached to their name, such as Dido. Arguably, Jamaica is a much more comfortably diverse society than England, meaning that Olivia will always be second to her mixed color. Dido clearly enunciates what Olivia is thinking and coming to desire, the opportunity to return to ‘home’.
Kathleen Lubey, from St. John’s University, discusses in her paper, “The Woman of Colour’s Counter-Domesticity”, how Olivia’s inability to conform to European society can be attributed directly to her conflicting blackness and whiteness. Her thesis reads,
“This verbalized consciousness, I argue, makes Olivia resistant to the dependency that characterized British wives in the cultural imagination. Sharply critical of white domestic femininity, the novel argues, I believe, that the colonial woman of color uniquely possesses a capacity to resist the narrowness of idealized British wifehood, and that it is in the woman of color that we should look for early forms of feminist consciousness” (113).
The two cultures that contribute to her mixed race are in constant disagreement with the other, whether it be the stereotyped role that white women and wives are expected to play in England (they are not people but merely objectified objects) or the abolition and African nobility buried deep in Olivia’s roots, she is destined to be an outcast (115-16). Lubey’s work relates to this particular keyword by eloquently demonstrating that Olivia will never properly fit into the marriage ideal in England and therefore her return to Jamaica is to be expected by readers.
Renee Bryzik argues in her article, “Friendship, Not Freedom: Dependent Friends in the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel”, notes that there is a tricky relationship between familial duty and friendships. Her thesis reads, “This article shows that although the dependent friend protagonist does not act without self-interest, in her ability to elicit sympathy and forge friendships with characters in more powerful positions, she provides opportunities to unravel gender and racial prejudices” (219). Olivia encounters this situation as she is expected to marry Augustus, in accordance to her father’s will, and in doing so the expectation falls on her to make friends with Mrs. Merton, Olivia’s sister-in-law, and the other women in the neighborhood. While Olivia attempts to fill this expectation, she finds friends elsewhere, including the Honeywoods and Mrs. Milbanke, which offers her enough emotional support to be comfortable in England while she lives there (232). However, it is this lack of true assimilation that contributes to her desire to return to Jamaica, especially once it is uncovered that Augustus’ first wife is still alive. Friendship is an important bond that unites marginalized women that allows them to fruitfully express their thoughts and feelings and people will gravitate toward where they can maintain the most honest of friendships and for Olivia this means Jamaica.
To relate this particular keyword to another primary text of this course, I take a specific look at Mary Seacole in her book. Mrs. Seacole travels the world and recounts her experiences, but very little is known about her origins and life while she lived in Jamaica. The introduction to this text reads, “The absence of Jamaica in Wonderful Adventures has been explained in a number of ways: Simon Gikandi suggests that Seacole disinvests herself of a Jamaican Creole identity in order to reconstruct herself as English…Other critics concur with his view that Seacole evades the problem of ‘race’ and lives in denial of her blackness” (xix). Both Mrs. Seacole and Olivia, identifying as mixed women, bring their stories together even though they both deal with navigating their race in a white society in very different manners. This quotation highlights the desire of many to ignore their blackness in an attempt to ‘fit-in’ with white European society, even though both exist in the native land of Jamaica for a large portion of their lives.
Jamaica offers more context in addition to being the birthplace of Olivia Fairfield, and Mary Seacole, albeit many do not explore the significance of this country in the ways black women were expected to live their lives.
Related Page Numbers in The Woman of Colour: 54, 59, 60, 61, 74, 78, 91, 106, 128, 138, 142, 180, 186, 187
Works Cited
Bryzik, Renee. “Friendship, Not Freedom: Dependent Friends in the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 51, no. 1, Mar. 2022, pp. 219–36.
Lubey, Kathleen. “The Woman of Colour’s Counter-Domesticity.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 61, no. 1, 2022, pp. 113–23.
Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole. [1857]. Ed. Sara Salih. Penguin Books, 2005. Print.
The Woman of Colour, A Tale. [1808]. Ed. Lyndon J. Dominique. Broadview, 2008. Print.