The Woman of Colour: A Tale

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1808

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Letters 1-17

Letters 18-30

Letters 31-39

Letters 40-48

Letter 49-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Urban Life Versus Rural Life

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to enslavement.

Like many 19th-century English novels, The Woman of Colour takes place in a country whose landscape was being rapidly transformed by technology, industry, and commercial capitalism. The primary way these transformations make themselves visible is in the relationship between cities and rural or agricultural spaces. Olivia, who moves frequently between different types of landscapes, seems to have mixed feelings about city life but ultimately concludes that she prefers life in the country. In her descriptions, she assigns cities like London and Bristol characteristics that are commonly assigned to metropolitan spaces in novels from this period: To her, they are defined by strangeness and alienation, disorder, and lavish displays of material wealth.

When Olivia arrives in Bristol, a large port city, she immediately notices that there is a huge amount of activity even at “the still hour of evening” when the ship docks, and her natural self-confidence ebbs away as she realizes she is “entering into a world of strangers” (69). After she and Augustus marry and relocate to London, she seems to feel safer and more relaxed—perhaps because the question of whether she would marry at all has been answered—but still sees London as a slightly unsettling curiosity in which she does not wish to dwell too long. She describes it as full of “sights and spectacles without number” and a “wondrous pile of novelty” (95). She also takes care to distinguish between “places of public amusement and diversion” and places like Westminster Abbey that can offer her genuine spiritual nourishment (96). However, she emphasizes that she does not want to stay in London and notices that Augustus feels the same way. London life, she writes, “is not at all consonant to my taste; and the sooner we can leave it, the better I shall be pleased” (97-98). Her “fine Utopian scheme of domestic happiness” is a specifically rural one: she envisions living in the country, not entirely alienated from other people but surrounded only by family and carefully chosen friends (99). This is clearly not a dream that Olivia could realize in a place like early 19th-century London.

Olivia associates city life with immoral behavior and rural life with piety, modesty, and generosity. When describing how much she looks forward to leaving London, she connects her distaste for the city directly to her distaste for social performativity and ostentatious presentations of wealth: “[For] I am fatigued by the formal stiffness of Mr. Merton; for I am sick of the affectation and vanity of Mrs. Merton, and disgusted at her selfish and mercenary husband” (98). In the same letters, she associates London with dissipated living, a concept that generally refers to sexual debauchery, intemperance or drunkenness, and self-indulgent abandonment of morals. She says that, among other things, dissipation “enervates the mind; it unfits it for every rational and domestic enjoyment; it deadens the feelings […] and the principles are sacrificed” (98). Olivia ultimately sees city life as a challenge to her fundamental moral framework, a place where ephemeral material pleasures are given precedence over genuine self-improvement and care for others.

Inasmuch as her preference for rural life is indicative of her virtues, it is also linked to her growing up on a plantation in Jamaica. However well-treated the enslaved workers there were, they were still enslaved, and so rural life does not automatically signal a virtuous life in the broader scheme of the novel. Nor are ostentation and dissipation absent from the country—not when the extravagant “orientalist” Pagoda has such a prominent place in the social and geographic landscape. Thus, even as the novel explores binaries such as urban life versus rural life, it refuses to accept that they are simply binaries.

The Natural and the Authentic

Throughout The Woman of Colour, Olivia identifies being “natural” with being authentic. For example, as she becomes acquainted with the Mertons in Bristol, she decides to be more open with them—more herself: “I am naturally of a communicative, and, I hope, of a cheerful temper,” she says, and “I felt that I could gain nothing by silence and seeming stupidity” (75). Here, she also realizes that the Mertons would have assumptions about her “natural” character due to her physical appearance as a biracial woman—that, in other words, her appearance and their stereotypical assumptions could prevent the Mertons from appreciating who she is. She writes: “I knew that my first appearance could not have been very prepossessing, and by gently sliding into my natural character, I should show my new relatives what they might expect” (75). Thus, a “natural,” authentic self is not out of sync with a social identity—a naturally communicative person should behave that way with other people—although social expectations and prejudices could inhibit recognition of this “natural,” authentic self.

In keeping with her religious beliefs, Olivia’s understanding of what is “natural” involves a moral judgment, an idea about how things should be and how people should behave. Characters such as the Singletons who try to be other than what they are—namely, youthful in their case—are “unnatural," which the irony of Mrs. Singleton’s appearance as a rural shepherdess underscores. The moral dimension of “natural” behavior extends to relationships, as when Olivia says of George and Augustus that “the confidence, which is usually and naturally induced from their relative affinity, is, from a total disparity of character, entirely done away with” (97). Although she does not use the word “natural,” she notes a similar dynamic between George and Letitia: “There appears none of that sympathy or disposition and sentiment between him and his wife which we look for in the connubial state” (97). In other words, Olivia believes that it is “natural” for relationships between siblings and spouses to be good. In identifying what is most unnatural about the social dynamics of the people around her, Olivia identifies what is natural about the people involved in those dynamics—their unique, individual ways of thinking and behaving, which might simply make them incompatible.

Movement, Stillness, and Femininity

In her descriptions of the people around her, Olivia often focuses on bodies, particularly the bodies of other women and how they are moving (if they are dynamic) and how they are positioned (if they are still). Her descriptions of women’s bodies contribute to the novel’s larger representation of gender and how gender is expressed in both individuals and in the collective social world of early 19th-century England. The ways a woman moves her body—or does not move it—might reflect her class status and personal health history, but for Olivia, the most important thing it reflects is the state of her mental and spiritual life: Women who keep their bodies still are more likely to be manipulative, spoiled, and morally lax, while women who consciously engage in physical activity are calm, compassionate, and intellectually cultivated.

In one of her first descriptions of Letitia Merton, Olivia claims that Letitia is so inactive that she might not even know what the landscape of southern England looks like: “[With] regard to the use for which she has made of them during the few days I have been here, a casual observer might have been led to inquire, whether she had any legs; for she certainly seems to derive no manner of assistance from them!” (82). Olivia contrasts Letitia’s habits to her own, writing to her former governess, “You taught me activity, both mental and bodily, my beloved friend,” and adding that while living in Jamaica, she often felt “surprise” and “disgust” at the “languid affectation and supine manners” of some West Indian people (82). Olivia uses the same language when she describes Letitia dancing at the ball soon thereafter: Letitia “languishes, or rather glides, down a dance in the most careless and indifferent manner you can imagine” (86). Thus, even when Letitia is moving, her body language conveys an attitude of laziness, ambivalence, and lethargy.

Later in the novel, Olivia observes the same dynamic between languid body positioning and corrupted morals during a dinner party at the Ingots’ home. Lady Ingot describes to several guests, including Olivia and Mr. Waller, her method of teaching Frederic how to sit: “Ease and elegance are, in my opinion, terms nearly synonymous; hence I have made a point of letting him lounge, and loll, and curvet, in every interesting and careless attitude, from his cradle to the present period” (118). Immediately after Lady Ingot makes this observation, Frederic tries to trip the elderly Mr. Bellfield, and when Mr. Waller scolds him—pointing out Frederic’s “lazy and disgraceful posture”—Frederic smiles and walks away, seemingly immune to any correction (119). This scene allows the novel to further develop its claim that there is a clear correlation between curved, serpentine bodily positions and intentional acts of harm toward others. Importantly, this correlation extends beyond the text’s female characters: While Frederic is a teenage boy, the novel frequently codes him as feminine, emphasizing not only his languid body, but his frailty, tendency to lisp, and obsession with wealth and luxury. Moreover, other women in the novel, including Olivia, Caroline Lumley, and (it is implied) Mrs. Milbanke, are physically active, so not all women have this negative character attribute. Ultimately, women in novel’s world seem more susceptible to inactivity, and when inactivity spread to male characters, they become imbued with a kind of toxic femininity that makes them increasingly spoiled, cruel, and spiritually vacant.