Abstract
One of the reasons to associate Maria Edgeworth with Jane Austen is the importance of the former as a main source of inspiration for Austen’s domestic plots. Interestingly, both colonialism and gender studies have turned their eyes to Edgeworth’s and Austen’s approach to slavery. Nevertheless, the specific connection between Belinda and Emma in this regard has been overlooked while, indeed, there are many reasons to relate both works since both deal with women’s submission and emotional dependence from others in many ways. This article analyses two secondary characters in Edgeworth’s Belinda and Austen’s Emma. After examining the similarities of the status of blacks and women in late eighteenth-century England, I maintain that these works can be seen as two studies of gratitude and that they offer a new version of Edgeworth’s familiar theme of the grateful negro, though in this case it applies to woman’s surrogate social position. The ideas of Homi K. Bhabha on colonial discourse help to examine the relationship between gender and race in Belinda and Emma, as well as the lack of a fixed identity and unfulfilled desire of independence that was common to blacks and women. It is precisely this feature that adds some darkness and social critique to Edgeworth’s and Austen’s otherwise rather predictable plots.
Highlights
One of the reasons to associate Maria Edgeworth with Jane Austen is the importance of the former as a main source of inspiration for Austen’s domestic plots
Tsosmondo traced echoes of Cowper’s “Negro Complaint” in Austen: “in Cowper’s poem, the speaker, the slave, lauds as a means of resistance the very faculty that Jane sees as the potential agency of her subjection”
I shall deal with the relationship between the protagonists and secondary characters in the specific context of the early nineteenth century, foregrounding the mentality of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy we find in Edgeworth and that of the English gentry in Austen
Summary
A black person had no intellect, and, if they were ever considered, it was in terms of their visibility, which was neither socially nor legally acknowledged Both abolitionism and feminism gained strength at the turn of the nineteenth century when the fate of women and black people were related. In a revealing blog about black women in Britain, Montaz Marche (2019) comments on a remarkable gender difference between black men and black women While the former were socially integrated, black women assimilated, since they did not embrace cultural norms which could place them in a scandalous position that would otherwise endanger them: “Black women, as social chameleons, uniquely adopted the desired characteristics of British civility, becoming undistinguishable from their neighbours and successfully assimilating into communities in Britain, their home” More white skin, was so important in domestic literature that it became a fetish similar to female virtue, which marked and determined one’s social value
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