In her book Race and the Education of Desire, Ann Stoler indicates the ways in which literature lent itself to the construction of bourgeois identity. Echoing Edward Said, Stoler posits literature as a site of articulation of bourgeois norms and values. In fact, Stoler writes that British conduct books and novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “antedated the bourgeois way of life they represented” (Stoler 109). Thus, British literature of this time reflects the process of an active construction of bourgeois identity that was in flux and unstable, not hegemonic and established as we might have imagined. In citing British novels and guidebooks, Stoler wishes to emphasize that bourgeois identity was being continually reshaped and reimagined, notably by writers of this period.

 

Belinda is a sentimental novel by Maria Edgeworth that was published in 1801. Belinda is set in England, yet very much concerns itself with the colony of the West Indies. The novel was published on the heels of the American Revolution, at a time when there were numerous anxieties about control over the rest of the “American empire.” I argue that Belinda has as a central concern the role of the domestic woman in the construction of empire. In this novel, domesticity emerges as an all-important site upon which the homeland can be built around or, just as easily, be undermined. Much of my argument is indebted to Susan Greenfield’s analysis in her article “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda.” In it, Greenfield formulates how Belinda reflects that bourgeois English women’s sexuality needed to be controlled and diverted into the proper channels—namely,
heterosexual marriage with a white Englishman—in order to maintain national purity and household order.

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At the beginning of the novel, Belinda Portman, a young woman staying with the well-connected socialite Lady Delacour in order to become acquainted with London society and, tacitly, to find a suitable husband, notes the difference between Lady Delacour’s exuberant public life and miserable private one: “Abroad she appeared all life, spirit, and  good humour—at home, listless, fretful and melancholy; she seemed like a spoiled actress off the stage” (Edgeworth 10). In Greenfield’s reading, the reason for this unhappiness stems in part from Lady Delacour’s sexual ambiguity, which hinders her attainment of domestic tranquility. Harriet Freke, Lady Delacour’s cross-dressing “bosom friend” who fills the “aching void” left by her failure as a wife and mother, poses a direct threat to heterosexual domesticity in Belinda (Edgeworth 43). Under Harriet’s guidance, Lady Delacour dons masculine clothing and agrees to duel with her arch-rival, Mrs. Lutteridge. After Mrs. Lutteridge is too frightened to go through with the duel, the women instead decide to fire their pistols into the air. Lady Delacour sustains an injury to her breast caused by the recoil of the pistol and convinces herself that she has contracted breast cancer.
 

According to Greenfield, this moment can be read as punishment for Lady Delacour’s dissipated behavior. It is because of Harriet’s deviant homoerotic influence that Lady Delacour receives a blow to the breast and supposedly suffers from the resulting cancer. Lady Delacour must be cut off from Harriet’s corrupting influence to reemerge as a model of domesticity. Belinda is tasked with purging Lady Delacour of her aristocratic tendencies, namely wit and materiality, and her possible homosexual leanings. Belinda functions as a corrective counterweight to Freke’s homoerotic deviancy and steers Lady Delacour back towards domestic values such as the importance of motherhood.

 

Greenfield suggests that Lady Delacour’s breast injury and relationship with Harriet contribute to her sexual ambiguity and obscure her “true character,” one of essential femininity. Only after it is discovered that Lady Delacour’s breast is merely bruised, and not actually cancerous, can she reemerge as an ideal domestic woman. Her breast “stands for woman’s natural difference” because the surface is bruised, but the underlying organ remains internally pure (Greenfield 218). Despite all of Lady Delacour’s dissipated behavior, her non-cancerous breast proves that all along she contains an essential, feminine core. Lady Delacour is able to reconnect with her husband and child, and the danger Harriet poses is removed. By the end of the novel, Lady Delacour is transformed into a perfect wife and mother who has accepted responsibility for the rearing of future English citizens.

 

Once Lady Delacour has been purged of her homoerotic predilections, she is able to “settle [the] domestic futures of [other] colonial characters” (Greenfield 214). Just as there is a need to “define and secure” the “internal integrity” of Lady Delacour’s feminine essence, there is a need to define and secure the boundaries of race and nation (Greenfield 218). At the end of the novel, Lady Delacour guides Belinda to reject a Creole suitor and marry a white English landowner. In this way, the control of women’s sexuality is shown to directly come to bear on the control of national boundaries based on racial difference.

 

When it seems that Belinda’s true love, Clarence Harvey, is bound to another woman, Belinda becomes interested in Mr. Vincent, a wealthy West Indian who migrates to England in order to be educated. In late eighteenth-century England, racialized others of mixed-blood and Creole origin were treated with suspicion, and it was often unclear how they should fit into the social order. The novel ultimately frames Mr. Vincent as a threat to Belinda’s sexual virtue and England’s racial purity. In Belinda, Creoles and colonial subjects of mixed-blood origin are invaders of the body politic. Though Mr. Vincent is well-bred and well-to-do, he does not meet the racial standard of bourgeois civility. Whatever claims Mr. Vincent may have to such “ambiguous evaluations” as “breeding, cultivation, and moral essence,” he remains fundamentally excluded in racial terms (Stoler 134).

 

What ultimately allows Belinda to reject Mr. Vincent is his gambling addiction, which is explicitly linked to his blackness and origin. When he lived in the West Indies, Mr. Vincent picked up the habit of gambling by playing “with eagerness, at games of chance, with his negroes” (Edgeworth 422). Furthermore, Mr. Vincent’s gambling habit is conceived of as fundamentally incurable. Edward Said writes in Orientalism, “[t]he very possibility of development, transformation, human movement—in the deepest sense of the word—is denied the Orient and the Oriental” (Said 208). Mr. Vincent is denied the possibility that he will ever break his gambling habit because he is boxed into a characterization of a static male other. Mr. Vincent is made out to be degenerate given the extended period time he’s spent in the West Indies among black people. Even if a Creole was of European ancestry, merely being born in a colony was seen as dangerous because of the possibility of being “contaminated” by becoming too familiar with a savage culture.

 

Belinda, touting rational, Enlightenment principles, ends up wedding the rakish Clarence Hervey and is charged with keeping his behavior in check with the stabilizing forces of domesticity and marriage. Stoler writes that “[b]ourgeois women in colony and metropole were cast as the custodians of morality, of their vulnerable men, and of national character” (Stoler 135). Belinda, now with the aid of the reformed Lady Delacour, assumes the important ideological construction of the domestic bourgeois wife and mother. By wedding a suitable white English landowner, Belinda is able emerge as a defender of colonial boundaries, performing the “national service” of motherhood (Stoler 132). English mothers were essential to populating the empire and propagating domestic values. The proper sexual practices for an English bourgeois woman were both “nation-building and race affirming” (Stoler 134-135). Both homosexuality and miscegenation are so dangerous in Belinda because they threaten European maternity and the production of bourgeois identity along racial lines. Belinda itself links Harriet Freke and Mr. Vincent as parallel threats with their sights set on the corruption of white English motherhood: “It is somewhat singular that Lady Delacour’s faithful friend, Harriet Freke, should be the cause of Mr. Vincent’s first fixing his favourable attention on Miss Portman” (Edgeworth 219). Lady Delacour’s possible homosexuality and Mr. Vincent and Belinda’s possible union are analogous dangers to nationalism.

 

However, Edgeworth herself was Irish, not British. Kathryn Kirkpatrick argues in her article “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda” that Edgeworth expressed sympathy for the West Indian characters in Belinda because she too was subjected to British colonialization as an Irish woman. Kirkpatrick writes that the novel “attacks established notions of racial purity and patriarchal authority” by depicting Belinda and Mr. Vincent’s courtship and the marriage of Juba—Mr. Vincent’s black servant—and a white English farm girl (Kirkpatrick 332). To bolster this reading, Kirkpatrick analyzes a later edition of Belinda in which Edgeworth censors these relationships at the urging of critics and her father. While it’s true that the richness of Belinda and Mr. Vincent’s relationship is significantly edited out and the marriage between Juba and the farm girl never takes place in this 1810 edition, Kirkpatrick is mistaken in reading this marriage as an attempt by Edgeworth to subvert the English bourgeois order in the novel. In the first edition, Edgeworth tellingly condemns Mr. Vincent as a irredeemable gambler and emphasizes his blackness, preventing his courtship with Belinda from ever going farther. And throughout the novel, Mr. Vincent seems to be more of a distraction for Belinda than anything else, someone to take her mind off of Clarence. When Belinda finally realizes that Mr. Vincent is taking aim at her affections, she is uneasy and immediately thinks of Clarence: “Why do I feel this alarm at the discovery of Mr. Vincent’s views? Why do I compare him with one whom I thought I had forgotten? ... Am I to blame for perceiving superiority?” (Edgeworth 238).
 

Furthermore, the marriage of Juba and the farm girl depicted in the first edition of Belinda actually does more to strengthen the bourgeois order than undermine it. Though this interracial marriage may at first seem subversive on Edgeworth’s part, it too reinforces bourgeois boundaries, for the vision of English racial purity was one that excluded the lower classes. In fact, the poor and working classes in Europe were themselves viewed as “alien race.” As Stoler writes, “the regulatory mechanisms of the colonial state were directed not only at the colonized, but as forcefully at ‘internal enemies’ within the heterogenous population that comprised the category of Europeans themselves” (Stoler 96). In other words, the discourse on race and slavery was deeply linked to the discourse on class. Representations of peasants as uncivilized and savage were abundant, and bourgeois civility was brought into relief by both race and class. Middle-class bourgeois life was defined against both the racial, colonial Other and the poor, white member of the working class. Thus, the marriage between Juba and the farm girl is sanctioned because the lower classes and the working poor did not have the same standards for racial purity. In the form of this marriage, Edgeworth represents an explicit linking of “the ‘others’ of empire with the ‘others’ within Europe itself” (Stoler 128).
 

Stoler argues that colonialism was a central part of the construction of bourgeois identity, not merely an effect or offshoot. Nineteenth-century bourgeois sexuality cannot be studied without considering colonialism and empire. Stoler writes: “the discursive and practical field in which nineteenth-century bourgeois sexuality emerged was situated on an imperial landscape where the cultural accoutrements of bourgeois distinction were partially shaped through contrasts forged in the politics and language of race” (Stoler 5). Mr. Vincent in Belinda exemplifies the role of modes of representation in the construction of the European self and colonized other. Stoler describes how the colonized Other was represented as a racially divergent, abnormal, and external threat to the European social order. In the novel, Mr. Vincent as a racialized Other acts as a counterpoint to the ideal bourgeois self.

 

Thus, Belinda—originally titled “Abroad and At Home”—is an exemplification of the ways in which late eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality overlap with discourses on empire and race. Domestic values women are expected to hold in Belinda are shown to further English colonial interests. Race and sexuality were parallel “ordering mechanisms” for the “cultivation of nineteenth-century bourgeois self” (Stoler 8-9). Moreover, the text of Belinda exemplifies that the domestic bourgeois sphere of the metropole drew its boundaries not only in relation to colonial enterprises elsewhere, but also relative to internal enemies such as the working poor. In Belinda, Edgeworth concludes that poor whites, wealthy Creoles, and sexually deviant individuals do not belong in the British bourgeois social order. While novels such as Edgeworth’s often laid out moral prescriptions and modes of conduct in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is unclear whether Edgeworth personally endorses this vision of bourgeois civility, especially given British colonial history in her native Ireland. While I disagree with Kirkpatrick’s reading that the marriage of Juba and the farm girl reveals an attempt by Edgeworth at undermining the bourgeois order in the novel, I understand her basic motivation to ascribe to Belinda some subversive potential. Perhaps, instead, we can look to the final scene of the novel for a possible critique. In this scene, domestic modes are revealed
to be just as constructed and artificial as aristocratic ones. Lady Delacour poses the several happily-paired couples in a sort of tableau vivant and exclaims: “...let me place you all in proper attitudes for stage effect. What signifies being happy, unless we appear so?...There! quite pretty and natural” (Edgeworth 478). We might find here, then, a critique of the bourgeois project as predicated on empty performance—though Edgeworth doesn’t seem to have much to say about the real, material consequences for those excluded from this order.