“EMPIRE WITHOUT END”: CHARLOTTE SMITH AT THE LIMITS OF COSMOPOLITANISM

Abstract

Charlotte Smith's recurring fantasy of becoming a “female Prospero” opens up her cosmopolitan imagination to encountering its limits, and its Others, whether internal or external. Focusing on two of Smith's later texts, the Italian novel Montalbert (1795) and the Jamaican narrative “The Story of Henrietta” (1800), this essay explores the borderlands of late eighteenth-century Europe and its colonies to examine the intersections of cosmopolitanism, nationalism and race. Exploring how a committed cosmopolitan, Europhile and feminist like Charlotte Smith imagines the borders of Europe and its empires can contribute to the unfolding understanding of how “Europe's” internal fissures extended toward its colonies (not only from them) in Romantic literature, and how revolution-era feminist cosmopolitanism coped with its contradictions and exclusions, whether sexual, racial or religious. Beginning with Montalbert and its displacement of The Aeneid's imperial vision of transnational romance, and moving to “Henrietta”'s troubled vision of the intersection of colonial and gender oppression, the essay considers how Smith's interrogation of gender and national ideologies reveals at once the ideals of her feminist cosmopolitanism and its limits.