Adventures in Domesticity: Gender and Colonial Adulteration in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Sharon Harrow

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MLR, I02. I, 2007 2I3 In a labyrinth, one 'crosses' many paths and, as the speaker has already told us, all of those paths entail suffering.The suffering suggested by 'crosses' is diametrically opposed to the joy implied by 'kiss': in this instance of syneciosis, suffering in love is cross-coupled with the joy one should feel in love. (p. I2 I) The strength ofBennett's book lies in detailed analysis, though readers may some times tend to feel that she labours the point, or cloaks an already clear effect in rhetorical verbiage. Though some of her readings are debatable, the parallels with male poets and the discussion of the relationship between sacred and secular poetry reveal useful insights.The book iswell furnishedwith scholarly and informativenotes but lacks the reader-friendly provision of a bibliography. Bennett's approach provides an invaluable complement to the broader perspec tive taken by a previous researcher,Elaine V. Beilen (Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of theEnglish Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I987)), who not only looks at additional writers but also considers more work by the three poets discussed here. An advantage of Bennett's microscopy is that it resembles how the poets would have been read in their own lifetimes. Itmarks progress towards what Bennett states as her final aim, 'both to broaden and narrow the context inwhich some earlymodern women's poetry is read [. . .] tobring intoplay an alternative (and perhaps traditional) approach to the textual analysis, historical synthesis and literary interpretation' (p. 255). UNIVERSITY OF ROEHAMPTON PAT PINSENT Adventures inDomesticity: Gender and Colonial Adulteration inEighteenth-Century British Literature. By SHARONHARROW. New York: AMS Press. 2004. vii+ 265 pp. $72.50. ISBN 978-o-404-63545-9. The titleof thisbook, Adventures inDomesticity, points to the paradox which it in vestigates. After all, thewhole point of successful domesticity, it isusually assumed, is that there should be no adventures in itssphere. The domestic is the launching-pad foradventures, and the haven towhich the exhausted adventurer returns.This is a simplified version ofwhat ismeant by saying that the domestic is the private realm to be contrasted with the public, and usually also the female in contrast with the male. On theback of this contrast has been erected the assumption that the domestic is outside politics. Sharon Harrow's book is a contribution to the large number of recent studies debunking this view. Her area of investigation isBritish literature of the eighteenth century, and the im pact on theconcept of thedomestic made by overseas ventures and adventures-trade, travel, the founding of colonies, and the running of slave plantations. All these tend to put theirprojectors intomorally tempting situations abroad, be theypolitical, com mercial, or sexual. The issues raised are thebehaviour of thewhite man abroad and thebourgeois fear thathewould behave with the freedom from sanction usually asso ciated with thearistocratic libertine. In the sexual sphere such aman might throw the guilt on to theblack woman, the 'cultural other'. The result is the increasing stress by theend of thecentury on thedomestic purity of thewhite female, leftdefending values which are not attributed to either theblack woman or, inmany cases, thewhite man. This book traces the impact of colonial excess on the idealogy of the domestic and its representative, thewhite woman at home. It does this inchapters on Defoe's Captain Singleton, Richard Cumberland's play The West Indian, Anna Maria Falcon bridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone in theYears I79I-I792, and two great canonical texts, Mansfield Park and Frankenstein. It isnoticeable that, 2I4 Reviews written in theUnited States, itgives most of its attention to theCaribbean. From the British perspective the eighteenth century was as much concerned with India, and, asWilliam Dalrymple has recently shown (WhiteMughals: Love and Betrayal inEighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002)), there the concept of a shared domesticity between white and black on foreign soil was more likely than in a context where relationships were grievously distorted by slavery.The theme of the book, however, isconcerned not somuch with what happens abroad aswith its impact back inBritain. The dilemma for those at home was tobalance the the desirability of money from abroad with the debauched values of thosewho obtained it.As Harrow...