Captive Subjects, Captive Audiences

The sky darkens outside the window while the light remains on in the conference room. Your eyes dart from the administrator's PowerPoint to the clock above the door, which has long since crept past your anticipated departure. Fidgeting with your phone under the table, you text the obligatory apology: "Sorry, hun, leaving soon. Tied up at work.""Tied up at work": it is a metaphor that comes so naturally that its implicit image—of a human being, bound against his will, forced to complete a task–barely registers. But if it was deployed not in the twenty-first century, well after the abolition of slavery, but amid the period that witnessed its rise, how might that same metaphor resonate?This is the question that Catherine Ingrassia explores in her insightful new book, Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750. Her goal is to take "the language of confinement, restraint, and subjection" that saturated this period's literary texts and reveal how it works "not (just) as metaphor but as a representation of material practices and cultural attitudes" (1). This language of captivity is the product of what she calls a "culture of captivity," that is, "a culture with a persistent awareness of and anxiety about the presence and possibility of captivity and confinement in various forms" (2). Living in such a culture meant that a phrase like "tied up at work" would do more than denote that you were busy; it would remind your audience that many of your fellow British subjects were, at that very moment, tied up in a very real way.Ingrassia focuses her project on the domestic captivity of British subjects, especially women, sketching out how this culture of captivity existed contrapuntally to this period's archetypal form of bondage: plantation slavery of transported Africans. Her goal is not to minimize slavery's significance—on the contrary, she repeatedly emphasizes how its brutality was often minimized or elided by the period's literary texts—but rather "to consider how the absence and inaccessibility of Black domesticity and, in turn, Black captivity, centrally shape (if in a kind of negative relief) the culture of captivity in England" (3). The enslaved African becomes the prototype on which, implicitly or explicitly, the British domestic captive is based.Ingrassia's book offers many contributions to eighteenth-century studies and the cultural history of slavery. For one, by focusing on the early years of Britain's institutional involvement with human bondage, Ingrassia demonstrates that the language of captivity permeated British popular culture from the beginning of the colonial period. "Popular" is the operative word here, for Ingrassia stresses that the texts she is studying were "among if not the most popular and culturally persistent" of her selected authors' repertoire. These authors—many of them fixtures of eighteenth-century literature, from Aphra Behn, to Richard Steele, to Eliza Haywood—are particularly illustrative, Ingrassia argues, because they each "had a connection in the material workings of the British colonial presence in the West Indies" (16). She also demonstrates that these authors laid the groundwork for the discourse of captivity that "subsequent, traditionally canonical prose fiction of the eighteenth century," from Defoe's novels, to Humphry Clinker, to Pride and Prejudice, will "almost casually draw upon" (18).For all that, Ingrassia surprises the reader in chapter 1 by beginning not with a highly visible literary work, but with the correspondence of a West Indian plantation owner, Martin Madan, and his wife, the poet Judith Cowper Madan, who inflect their financial discussions and even romantic flirtations with the metaphors of slavery and bondage. The implication behind this choice of text is clear: the impact of the slave economy on British minds and culture was so profound that even the intimate lives of its participants were contorted to its logic. Ingrassia then uses Judith's casual reference to being "first of Martin's slaves" as a window into seeing how women writers throughout this period relied on the language of captivity to express their own domestic bondage (35). From Mary Barber, to Mary Collier, to Sarah Fyge Egerton, these women writers "drew an explicit comparison with the condition of the enslaved, invoking the legal, economic, and cultural strictures of a patriarchal-imperial power structure that affected both women and the enslaved, albeit in very different ways" (46).From there, Ingrassia turns to one of the most famous writers of captivity of the late seventeenth century: Aphra Behn. But in line with her methodological focus, Ingrassia eschews a close reading of the novella Oronooko and offers instead a subtle reading of three of Behn's plays: The Young King, The Younger Brother, and The Emperor of the Moon. In Ingrassia's analysis, these works can be understood as aftershocks of Behn's experience in Surinam, registering her experience with plantation slavery without representing it directly. Despite their fantastical settings and farcical tones, these plays represent the essence of bondage in the minutest details. It is in the glossing of these details that Ingrassia's work really shines. She takes, for instance, a single reference in The Younger Brother to auctioning off the hero George Marteen into marriage "by Inch of Candle" and opens up to the reader the world of "candle auctions," in which slaves by lot would be sold to the highest bidder when a pin stuck into a burning candle finally fell out. By tracing Behn's exposure to slavery in Surinam to examples of bondage performed on the London stage, Ingrassia combines Behn's biography with her own close reading to make clear exactly how the language of captivity migrated from the colonial outskirts to the imperial center.Ingrassia deploys this template of biographical analysis and close reading throughout her book, and to great effect in chapter 3. Here, she takes a writer who never stepped foot in the West Indies—Richard Steele—and illuminates how his absentee ownership of a Barbadian plantation served as fodder not only for his version of Inkle and Yarico in The Spectator 11, but also for one the most popular plays of the eighteenth century, The Conscious Lovers. In Ingrassia's reading, Steele imports the logic of captivity from Britain's colonial enterprises to his sentimental comedy while all but entirely erasing references to plantation slavery from the play. Instead, Steele's work "displaces the experience of objectification, captivity, and dehumanization onto the younger white female characters" (102). The life of captivity endured by Indiana, for instance, who is abducted by a French privateer and saved from debtors' prison by Bevil Jr., mirrors that of the enslaved Africans whom her long-lost father, Mr. Sealand, is presumed to own—but with a difference, for Indiana is ultimately redeemed by the very fortune sustained by the play's absent slaves. Still, while Indiana's experience is categorically different from that of enslaved Africans, both are contrasted to the experience of libertine freedom that the play's male characters enjoy. Even when the plantation is nowhere in sight, British women back home still bear the brunt of a world organized between the bound and the free.Plantation slavery was not, of course, the only form of captivity in the period, and in chapter 4, Ingrassia turns to Barbary captivity and the popular narratives it inspired. Here, she argues that the novelist Penelope Aubin deploys exotic captivity narratives in her novel The Noble Slaves in order to emphasize the very real bondage that women suffer in the British domestic sphere. "For Aubin's fictional female subjects," Ingrassia explains, "being held in Barbary captivity reproduces foundational elements of their condition of domestic disempowerment; that context (for both Aubin's reader and her fictional subjects) newly reveals to them the constraints in which they live when 'free' " (119). Ingrassia's argument challenges dismissals of Aubin as "a moralistic novelist" whose works project a "conformist ideology and a simplistic worldview," pointing out how the novel's persistent representation of domestic bondage far outweighs the narrator's half-hearted moral commentary (131). Once again, Ingrassia digs deep into the text and archive to mine nuggets of information and insight. After describing Aubin's family's experience with Barbary captivity in depth, Ingrassia devotes seven pages to explaining and contextualizing just the novel's preface and opening line. Still, while much of Ingrassia's analysis is rewarding, her careful attention to the smallest detail can sometimes overpromise. Take her explication of the novel's concluding passage, which praises the novel's women for being willing to go to great lengths to preserve their "Virtues," comparing them to the "Nuns of Glastenbury sic, who parted with their Noses and Lips to preserve their Chastity" (quoted in 154, sic in the original). By attributing the origin of these nuns to the mythical site of King Arthur's tomb (instead of Coldingham, the correct location), "perhaps," Ingrassia posits, "Aubin is slyly suggesting that in her own age women of such determined chastity are as mythical as the figures in the Arthurian legend." She also imagines "the savvy reader" would catch, in the image of these nuns cutting off their noses and lips, an allusion to Behn's self-mutilating hero Oronooko. While such a counterintuitive reading is not impossible, it is hard to imagine Aubin being so fortunate as to have readers as savvy as Ingrassia.The final chapter shifts to a different form of captivity and to a different captive group: from the captivity of British women along the Barbary coast, to the indentured servitude of British men in the American colonies. This chapter explores Eliza Haywood's Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman and Edward Kimber's The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson, two novels based on allegedly true stories of young boys unlawfully kidnapped in the British isles and sent to labor on the American continent. Haywood and Kimber, Ingrassia argues, imagine their male protagonists, both "destined for inheritance and lives in the gentry or aristocracy," returning to England with their British masculinity intact, unsullied by the corrupted plantation owners of the American colonies. This image of innate nobility surviving, and even thriving, abroad would have assuaged readers worried "about the potential erosion of male British identity" that the colonial enterprise threatened (158). Ingrassia then adds a postscript that leaps ahead to the mention in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice of the flogging of a militiaman, reiterating once more how the language of captivity lies just barely under the surface of the most "domestic" of British literary texts.Ingrassia's work, for all its strengths, leaves the reader wanting more in at least a couple of areas. For one, she raises but never explores the significance of "spiritual captivity," the ensnarement of humans in sin, which she notes was widely understood in the popular discourse by "all Christians" who would have "heard about the state of spiritual captives every Sunday" (129). How such a prominent trope of captivity was inflected or even replaced by the captivity of plantation slavery would be a useful addition to Ingrassia's analysis. Furthermore, she repeatedly emphasizes that the authors in her study, "despite an awareness of the horrors of slavery, do not condemn enslavement as a global practice underpinning now-institutionalized economic practices" (159). While this statement is certainly true, Ingrassia's critique of these authors' politics would have benefited from Christopher Brown's concept of "antislavery without abolitionism," which offers a more fine-grained method for distinguishing between various antislavery positions.Still, Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750 offers a rich portrait of the entanglement between the material and metaphoric forms of captivity that defined the British Atlantic world and its representation in popular culture. By deftly weaving biography with literary analysis, Catherine Ingrassia traces in great detail how the experience of indentured servitude, Barbary captivity, and plantation slavery in the colonial hinterlands provided a language of bondage that not only inspired a range of popular works but also gave female subjects back home, restricted by marital law and cultural norms, a language for explaining and resisting Britain's culture of domestic captivity.