Flagellating Females: Insense and Insensibility in Plantation Jamaica

This article examines the participation of white women in whipping enslaved individuals in the West Indies throughout the eighteenth century in both fiction and historical examples. While sensibility and sentimentality were growing in popularity in metropolitan England, white women in the West Indies encountered and participated in scenes of violence that shocked many metropolitan viewers. During the last decade of the eighteenth century, images appeared that seem to condemn the African Slave Trade and promote abolitionist rhetoric. While these scenes of suffering do portray the brutal reality of whipping in the West Indies, these depictions also emerge at a period in which flogging became more overtly sexualized. Examining the 1792 print ‘A Forcible Appeal for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ by Richard Newton, this article contextualizes the flagellation and sexual undertones of the white woman in the print. Comparing this print to the flagellation erotica, often sold in the same establishments as prints like Newton's, the sexual undertones in the print are complicated. Through the fetishization of the pain of enslaved women, metropolitan inhabitants of England could voyeuristically indulge in these scenes of misery without explicitly seeking out flagellation or pornographical works.