Droit du Seigneur, Slavery, and Nation in the Poetry of Edward Rushton

Abstract

THE WEST INDIAN ECLOGUES, EDWARD RUSHTON'S FIRST MAJOR POEM, was published in 1787, one among a spate of other poems designed to rouse moral outrage at Adantic slave trade in English public. Rushton's Eclogues are set in Jamaica and spoken by enslaved Africans taken from their native land. Rushton had personal knowledge of subject: a former sailor in slave trade, he resided several years in West-Indies, and claimed his poems to be painted from actual observation. (1) After contracting ophthalmia while attending to enslaved on a ship and becoming blind in 1770s, Rushton spent rest of his life as a journalist and writer advocating republican and abolitionist beliefs, and agitating for sailors' rights and Irish autonomy. (2) His Eclogues fit into late 1780s political and poetic trends, expressing abolitionist sentiment through revived ancient form of eclogue. They also echoed and significantly amplified a theme broached by young poet: revenge of enslaved. Revenge was an essential theme in early abolitionist poetry, yet it was generally treated indirectly, with varying levels of discomfort. Rushton's poem--in particular fourth and final eclogue--stands out for its comparatively direct treatment of topic of slave revenge, but also for peculiar way in which it ties theme specifically to matter of enslaved women's sexual abuse at hands of slave owners. Rushton would go on to evoke rape in Briton, and Negro Slave in his 1806 Poems, also from point of view of victims' husbands. On this theme, his poetry is connected to a complex network of racialized representations of rape in English, and more broadly, Western literature. Indeed, late eighteenth century saw development of a principally French continental literary trend that invoked droit du seigneur or jus prima noctis--the mythical aristocratic privilege by which a lord could lay sexual claim on any new vassal bride on her wedding night--in order to challenge Ancien Regime social and political hierarchies. Rushton's treatment of rape in his poetry reveals that while much like French droit du seigneur literature it is rooted in a long tradition tying violation of women to collective politics, it also expresses deep unease with which even most progressive European abolitionists considered possibility of black agency in New World. Black resistance was morally justified, but could a responsible white Briton support black revolution? Through Rushton's poetry, I will explore ways in which abolitionists put literary faces on this conundrum, before they had to face it literally in revolution in French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791. Rushton's West Indian Eclogues owe much to Thomas Chatterton's introduction of classical form to abolitionist debate in his African Eclogues of 1770. (3) The form originated in Virgil's Eclogues, itself a dark elaboration on Ancient Greek bucolic genre. Virgil's poem is permeated through and through with portrayals of human infelicity, catastrophic loss, and emotional turbulence reflecting intense social and political turmoil of last years of Roman Republic. (4) Chatterton's African Eclogues emulate Virgil's somber musings, simultaneously operating a drastic shift in focus: whereas Virgil reflected on social upheaval internal to Rome, Chatterton portrays the preying of civilization upon innocent denizens of paradise. (5) Rushton's poems--especially final one in this collection--in turn echo Chatterton's formally and thematically in their focus on people of African descent wronged by Europeans, though he transposes action to a Caribbean locale. In evoking desire for revenge on part of victims of European slave traders, West Indian Eclogues particularly resonate with Chatterton's Heccar and Gaira: An African Eclogue. Chatterton's African warriors are shown recovering from a bloody battle with European enslavers whom they did not manage to stop from abducting their kin, including Gaira's wife Cawna and their children. …