Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832

A conference paper on talking about the violence of revolution
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Contents:

  • Steering Committee
  • Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832
  • Search form
  • Ian Haywood (Author of The Gordon Riots)
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  • Edited by Juliet John

    • Seller Inventory PX. More information about this seller Contact this seller. Book Description Palgrave Macmillan. Seller Inventory NEW Ships with Tracking Number! Buy with confidence, excellent customer service!. Seller Inventory Xn. Ian Haywood. Publisher: AIAA , This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis About this title This book is the first comprehensive study of the subject of spectacular violence in British Romantic literature and print culture.

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    Review : ' Bloody Romanticism refreshingly resituates Romanticism in the global theater of revolution, warfare and slavery from which it originally emerged. Buy New Learn more about this copy. About AbeBooks. Customers who bought this item also bought. To make this impact, writers had to mobilize the resources of spectacular violence: hyperbolic realism, sentimentality, the sublime and a whole repertoire of extraordinarily bloody crimes.

    As we shall see, some Romantic authors expressed strong reservations about the sensationalism of the displaying of the tortured slave body, but the bloody vignette remained a cornerstone of representations of slavery throughout the period.

    Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832

    This book studies the impact of violence on the writing of the Romantic period. The focus Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, Pp. xi+ (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment.

    Slavery was the guilty conscience of Romanticism, and it is significant that emancipation was also exactly coterminous with the Reform Bill, an event which conventionally marks the closure of 11 It is only the fatal destiny of the Negroes which doth not concern us. They are tyrannized, mutilated, burnt, and put to death, and yet we listen to these accounts coolly and without emotion. The horrors of slavery had to be brought closer to the reader.

    This was organized around a central rupture from an idealized African origin a place of sentiment to an infernal European subjection a place of sublime horror in which the teleology of the plantation is a grim and grisly travesty of the pastoral peace of Africa. The shift can be seen as early as the s in the pioneering abolitionist writings of Antony Benezet. The trope is also performing additional ideological work in transferring the idea of captivity from the white to the black sufferer. As Linda Colley has shown in her book Captives, the white slavery of Barbary pirates, a huge cultural embarrassment to Europeans, was conveniently erased by the rapid emergence of transatlantic chattel slavery as synonymous with slavery itself.

    There is potentially an awkward parallel between the medico-pornographic gaze of the surgeons and that of the disinterested reader who is also assessing this scene for its political and moral import. Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonising creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Following Benezet, the slave story begins with an unashamedly sentimental depiction of Africa. Clarkson admits that this scenario owes as much to literary artifice as it does to fact.

    He would sympathise with you in your distress. One of the most horrific and graphic scenes in this section of the narrative is an account of a seaman ordered to dispose of a sick female slave by throwing her into the sea, a theme which recalls in miniature the scandal of the Zong. The dehumanizing regime of the middle passage is painted with thick brush strokes. Clarkson shows that all attempts by the slaves to exert any control over their bodily destiny — through forms of self-harm such as suicide by drowning or hunger strikes, or through attempts to find a means to escape, or violent resistance — are met with fierce retaliation.

    One reading of this scene might be that it provides a voyeuristic, even homoerotic, fantasy, but this ignores the fact that a figure of tyrannical power is present within the vignette, and the reader is highly unlikely to identify with this perpetrator of atrocity.

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    For Clarkson and other writers, slave uprisings during the middle passage were motivated by honourable motives which put the European masters to shame. SAE, 4: 22 As Claude Rawson has shown, the use of gunpowder against the vulnerable native body was a hallmark of European colonial domination. Clarkson presents plantation life as a continuation not an amelioration of violent rule.

    It was particularly important for abolitionists to debunk plantocratic, paternalistic myths about happy, contented slaves enduring a benevolently despotic regime of work discipline. Clarkson is prepared to risk fuelling European paranoia about slave disloyalty in order to hammer home the point that violent rule breeds a violent response. In this regard, his analysis meshes with a wider radical analysis of the imitative, cyclical and carnivalesque violence of revolutions and popular justice.

    In terms of the timing of the Essay, his words could not have been more prophetic: within a year, the Bastille had fallen, and within three years the first successful slave revolution began in San Domingo.

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    It is of course impossible to answer these questions fully in a book of this length, but the argument of Bloody Romanticism is relatively straightforward if intentionally provocative. Explicit violence is not precluded, but it should not be glorified. According to a prefatory note, the poem was based on a local incident. Eberle, Roxanne, ed. Slaves were often hanged in twos and threes.

    Print culture is therefore caught in a double bind: Like other writers, Clarkson defends his use of hyperbolic language on mimetic grounds, as the only appropriate register for conveying the nightmare reality of slavery. Without this frisson, there is the danger that the reader will become desensitized to atrocity. Yet, a strict Aristotelian line would require an impossibly exhaustive inclusiveness and an overexposure to dehumanizing actions which could be counterproductive. Most writers had to negotiate this tension between mechanical repetitiveness and the effective, exemplary vignette.

    Understandably, few authors believed that the statistical catalogue would be as effective as narrative in moving the general public. The violent tableau became a conventional highlight of representations of slavery across a whole range of genres: pamphlet polemic, poetry, the public lecture, the slave autobiography, history and memoir, and reportage. The sentimental elevation of slave suffering went hand in hand with the European violation of the slave body. Scenes of hyperbolic violence became cultural shorthand for the evils of slavery.

    Moreover, it was Recent criticism by Henry Louis Gates Jr. It is worth a reminder that the average profit for a slaving ship was 9 per cent per journey: the escalating horrors of the middle passage went hand in hand with the conversion of the human cargo into escalating profits. Newton was a reformed ex-slaver who had given evidence to Clarkson.

    His account therefore carried the authority of an eyewitness, though he makes clear whether true or not that he did not participate in the atrocities. Possibly motivated by the desire to exorcise the demons of his previous career, Newton depicts an excessively sadistic regime on board the ship. The rape of slave women, which Newton also focuses on, can therefore be interpreted politically as a ritualization of abjection,21 and not simply a perk of the job for a sex-starved crew: When the Women and Girls are taken on board a ship, naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue and hunger, they The poor creatures cannot understand the language they hear, but the looks and manner of the speakers are sufficiently intelligible.

    In imagination, the prey is divided, upon the spot, and only reserved till opportunity offers. Where resistance, or refusal, would be utterly in vain, even the solicitation of consent is seldom thought of. But I forbear — This is not a subject for declamation. This is a punitive fantasy which, as will be seen later in this chapter, some writers were not averse to deploying, but which finds its most terrible expression in the nemesis of slave rebellion.

    Newton may simply want to have his rhetorical cake and eat it, but his words are a reminder of that central tension within hyperbolic realism between authenticity and incredulity. In his account of the middle passage, Equiano famously After a period of freedom, he is re-enslaved and from his ironically enlightened and elevated point of view he now witnesses the routine rape of women and children on a slave ship. Another mechanism of terror is the forcing of male slaves to beat their own wives Enforced collaboration, like enforced spectatorship, was a form of humiliation and impotence which often resulted in despair and suicide.

    But it is through the appropriation of radical political discourse that he can most effectively sum up the systemic evils of slavery, and appeal to a wide spectrum of abolitionist readers.

    Ian Haywood (Author of The Gordon Riots)

    The parallels between The alternative is the perpetuation of fear and loathing. This dire warning is given a suitably epic gravitas by citing a passage from Paradise Lost. The debate, it is important to remember, is about whether or not to mount another rebellion. The silence is broken briefly when Equiano returns to Jamaica and witnesses hangings and burnings. A detailed account of a slave atrocity occupied more sheer space in a poem than in a longer prose narrative.

    The major advantage of the poem over the longer prose polemic He answers! Two slaves Jumba and Adoma lead an uprising in Jamaica after one of them has been whipped for defending his wife and baby against the lash.

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    SAE, 4: 35, original emphasis Think on his fate — six long days to survive! Such powerful and resonant literary qualities may explain why the gibbeted slave was a particularly powerful vignette of spectacular violence. Voltaire included the figure in Candide to point out the difference between the attractions of the Utopian El Dorado and the horrors of colonial Surinam. The slave has been partly consumed by birds: No sooner were the birds flown than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood.

    I stood motionless, involuntary, contemplating the fate of this Negro in all its dismal latitude.

    Syndication

    In the fourth eclogue, however, we are presented with a rather Rushton could draw on a number of earlier poems written from the point of view of the rebellious slave or native. The historical inspiration for these poems was probably the Coramantee revolt of Tacky in Jamaica in , an event which received considerable media attention. The most subversive aspect of these poems is perhaps the vocalization of slave defiance. However, until this revolt fused Jacobinism and slavery together, slave violence was usually constructed in literature as a heroic act of individual vengeance and self-sacrifice rather than collective and ideologically motivated political resistance.

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    The slave execution was a spectacular refutation of any notion that Britain was moving away, pace Foucault, from the spectacle of violent public punishment. Representations of slavery brought the body of the suffering slave into the heart of British culture and made it the responsibility of that culture.

    A slave atrocity in the Caribbean was a slave atrocity on British territory — literally, culturally, emotionally and psychically. One of the aims of the anti-slavery campaign was to terrorize the reader and to make abolition the only form of respite for both the slave and the reader. Without reform, slavery would continue to torture both parties. The inhumanity of the slave trade: Bristol and anti-slavery This point can be illustrated by looking at a number of texts which emanated from Bristol writers.

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    Two forms of spectatorship are integral components of this scene. The challenge for the reader is to realize that violent spectacle However, the solution to this lapse of true Christian values is Christian renewal and regeneration for all parties. The poem specifically denies that the unredeemed slave can be dignified with the status of a martyr. The real question mark hangs over the precarious spiritual integrity of the European.

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    Shrieking, sickening, fainting, dying, Dead of shame for Britons brave! If the stakes are high, the rewards are sublime. They both made full use of the cannibalism metaphors which had become rhetorical centrepieces of the mass campaign for a sugar boycott. As the bristling propaganda made clear, few readers or listeners could escape the horrifying logic of guilt by association: to consume sugar was to consume the slave. Emblem of woe, and fruitless moans, Of mangled limbs, and dying groans! Despite the fact that women were prominent in the sugar boycott, luxury and consumption were still troped as feminine forms of behaviour.

    Probably the most sensational twist given to the trope was to compare sugar consumption to the Christian communion.