“Mind Is Revealed in the Countenance”: Subversive Laughter and Caricature in The Woman of Colour

Abstract

Throughout The Woman of Colour (1808), Olivia Fairfield, the Black mixed-race heroine, ridicules the “fair sex” bodies of white female characters who irrationally judge the heroine as inferior because of the colour of her skin. In this article, I extend Lyndon J. Dominique’s reading of Olivia’s subversive gaze and laughter found in Imoinda’s Shade (2012). In building on Dominique’s insights, I show how Olivia paradoxically uses caricatural tropes of fat versus thin and young versus old to envision caricature on her own terms: to challenge and resist anti-Black stereotypes. When the novel is examined within the context of contemporary visual caricatures that depict the Black female body as grotesque, one recognizes that Olivia’s defensive use of verbal caricature is a rhetorically strategic attempt to challenge England’s racial hierarchy, by reaffirming her own femininity and “fairness.”