Sentiment and Sexual Servitude: White Men of Feeling and The Woman of Colour

Abstract

The Woman of Colour (1808) refuses to provide its biracial heroine with “the usual meed of virtue— a husband !” This article argues that the novel’s dismissal of the marriage plot results from its scathing critique of white men of feeling. Olivia’s rejection of marriage acts as a Romantic-era version of Black women’s “culture of dissemblance”: a deliberate cultivation of privacy and dis-avowal of reproductive sexuality that is designed to evade the threat of sexual violation in a hostile society. Rather than abolitionist allies, sentimental men are shown to be self-serving and hypocritical: deploying benevolence, moral duty, and emotion to abuse and coerce. Sentimental paternalism entails white women’s conjugal misery, as the transatlantic marriage market secures British colonial networks at the expense of women’s happiness. Olivia’s white father facilitates his daughter’s exploitation at the hands of emotionally incontinent, self-absorbed, and sexually threatening white men of feeling whose behaviour discredits the authority of imperial masculinity and forces readers to evaluate the moral and political inadequacies of white abolitionism.