INTRODUCTION
In book 5 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596), Artegall, the Knight of Justice, is imprisoned, compelled to dress in women's clothes, and coerced into forced (and feminized) labor by the “proud Amazon” Radigund (5.4.29). The text makes clear the ignominy of this fate: “A sordid office for a mind so braue. / So hard it is to be a womans slaue” (5.5.23).Footnote 1 This arresting assertion immediately underscores the particular humility of this punishment: not just that Artegall's capture registers the “sordid office” of a state of enslavement, but that it is particularly “hard” to occupy that status as a “womans slaue.” The apparent misogyny of this claim—that what makes Artegall's enslavement particularly onerous is that fact that it is rendered to a woman—is clear; I also want to suggest that this articulation of slavery is deeply bound up not only with contemporary contexts of capture and forced servitude but also with a figure of white womanhood that acts as both agent and authorization for the work of English imperialism and enslavement. For white women, as I will discuss, are not just the authors of this violence; the business of enslavement also relies on the construction of white womanhood in order to underwrite it.
To speak of white womanhood is also to situate it within a long history of feminism and racism. And to point out that even as white women negotiate the conditions of their gendered subjugation, they benefit from—and often weaponize—their access to whiteness is surely to state the obvious. But as I will discuss in this essay, early modern England's relationship to the longer history of slavery marks a moment both when white women were implicated as the authors of that violence and when literary and cultural depictions of slavery began to rely on delineating white womanhood in order to justify those forms of violence. In ways that may seem familiar in light of contemporary uses of white womanhood, early modern cultural negotiations of white womanhood construct white women as the authors of harm, as possessing an agential capacity, and as a weaponized (and weaponizable) cultural and political force. And this strategic formation of white womanhood, I suggest, also exploited the contingencies of class and servitude in early modern England; it is therefore imbricated within, and demands, an intersectional framework of analysis.
It is a truth not quite universally acknowledged that white women today are the main beneficiaries of Global North so-called diversity initiatives, a symptom both of the investment in a putative diversification that continues to erase Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color and of the ways in which white women benefit from and leverage systems of white privilege even as they seem to seek gendered parity. My aim in this essay is to explore the genealogies of this double maneuver: the consolidation of white womanhood as a conceptual framework and operational strategy to shore up systems of enslavement and imperialism, and the recourse to and mobilization of those systems by white women themselves. I begin, therefore, with an anachronism. The months following the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016 saw an outpouring of shock and protest. Perhaps the largest and most coordinated protest event was planned for the day after the inauguration, in January 2017, in the form of a worldwide Women's March. In cities across the world, millions of people marched to protest the misogyny of the new administration's policies and politics. And in the days following this march, pictures of ingenious and timely posters and signs were widely shared and celebrated—including one that turned to Othello's Emilia to assert women's right to protest. In the last act of Othello, Emilia finally exposes the actions of her duplicitous husband Iago in defiance of his attempts to silence her: “No, I will speak as liberal as the north. / Let heaven, and men, and devils, let them all, / All, all cry shame against me, yet I'll speak” (5.2.214–16).Footnote 2 As quoted on signs borne by impassioned marchers, Emilia's words became a feminist—and anachronistic—rallying cry for those who felt moved to speak out.
Yet Emilia's “leave to speak” (5.2.190), which has been so frequently recuperated as female resistance to patriarchy—those patriarchal mandates both invoked and flouted in Emilia's statement that “’Tis proper I obey him, but not now” (5.2.191)—is also delimited by the racial assumptions on which it rests and relies. To “speak as liberal as the north” is a reference to the north wind, but it is also to traffic in ideas about a racialized North and South that reaffirm “a racial hierarchy on a global scale,” in early modern England as today.Footnote 3 The capacity to speak so “liberal[ly],” in other words, is not a right afforded to all.
Emilia's “liberal” speech—her capacity to speak and be heard—also stands in stark contrast to Othello's final instruction to “Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice” (5.2.335–36). What Othello asks for here is a narrative that recounts his story fairly, without “malice”; but it relies on a ventriloquized retelling of his story, over which he has little control. These final words have over the past four hundred years constituted the crux of Othello's legacy. Ian Smith reminds us that Hamlet similarly asks for a narrative legacy at the end of that play, as he instructs Horatio to “tell my story” (5.2.327).Footnote 4 But whereas Hamlet's call has come to be adopted toward the end of a universalizing impulse and as part of “the business of literary criticism,” Othello's instruction to “speak of me as I am” is, curiously, often overlooked.Footnote 5 And yet, Smith points out that speaking of Othello bears multiple registers, signaling not just speaking of Othello himself, but also, “because of Othello's blackness, speaking about race.”Footnote 6 This in turn has larger disciplinary consequences; per Smith: “the pertinence and urgency of Othello's request for us to tell his story must be restated as a major disciplinary concern . . . how might literary scholars responsibly tell Othello's story, or more broadly, speak and write reliably about race?”Footnote 7
Othello's request to “speak of me as I am” is one, then, that reverberates through the afterlives of Shakespeare's engagement with the history of race, as well as—as Ian Smith notes—through the state of the field today. But Emilia's instance of outspoken speech in Othello has more readily been understood and become available as a form of recuperable resistance. I want to suggest, however, that the recasting of Emilia's speech as a feminist rallying cry works to elide her earlier complicity with the forces of patriarchy. When she steals Desdemona's handkerchief in act 3, Emilia recognizes that her mistress will “run mad / When she shall lack it” (3.3.315–16)—but she nonetheless continues her participation in Iago's cruel plan, for “I nothing, but to please his fantasy” (3.3.297). Although this moment has been interpreted and performed in a number of different ways (Is Emilia afraid of her husband? A neglected wife vying for his love? A victim of intimate abuse? An active participant in what she imagines to be a game?), few critics have acknowledged the implications of her complicity, or the racial structure that organizes it.Footnote 8 Whatever the reason, however, Emilia's participation in the handkerchief plot takes place despite a stated acknowledgment of its potentially adverse consequences, and in collusion with a patriarchal imperative the reason for which she admits she does not even understand. It is not until Desdemona dies that Emilia speaks out, and she does so not only to expose, finally, Iago's role in the deception, but also to condemn Othello with her dying words: “Moor, she was chaste. She loved thee, cruel Moor. / So come my soul to bliss as I speak true; / So, speaking as I think, alas, I die” (5.2.243–45). What is striking about Emilia's words here is the sanguine conviction that her (overdue) candor and testimony have earned her redemption (“So come my soul to bliss as I speak true”). But notable, too, is the racial binary that is insistently reaffirmed even with Emilia's dying words, between the “chaste” white woman and the “cruel” Moor.
It is not only the male “Moor” and his voice that Emilia's apparently resistant speech displaces. Before uttering her final words, Emilia ventriloquizes Desdemona's own in the folio text of Othello: “What did thy song bode, lady? / Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan / And die in music. [She sings.] ‘Willow, willow, willow.’” (5.2.240–42). The “willow song” is of course one which Desdemona invokes in act 4 of the play, as she remembers the elegiac love song of her mother's maidservant Barbary: “My mother had a maid called Barbary: / She was in love, and he she loved proved mad / And did forsake her. She had a song of ‘willow’: / An old thing ’twas, but it expressed her fortune, / And she died singing it” (4.3.25–29). Barbary, whose name “is not individual but generic,” might persuasively be read as a Black maidservant; as an absent figure, she is rendered merely a sympathetic vehicle for Desdemona in this moment, who readily appropriates her song.Footnote 9 But when Emilia in turn sings the willow song in the hour of her death, Barbary is elided altogether. Not only is “the original black voice . . . muffled and displaced by the white maid's ultimate devotion to Desdemona,” but the originator of the song is erased altogether in Emilia's reference to “thy song” (5.2.240).Footnote 10 This is a small but, I think, significant moment of elision that demonstrates clearly how Emilia's resistance to patriarchy is underwritten by its own racialized erasures and denotes a form of female solidarity predicated on whiteness. Emilia does not, in this moment, acknowledge the maidservant whose position is akin to her own, even as she co-opts her song.Footnote 11 Thus, in her last moments, even as she nominally challenges the play's gender hierarchies, Emilia's words reveal an undying and unchanged investment in its racial regimes.
Emilia's speech registers a mode not only of defiance but also of complicity with a racial hierarchy that structures even the resistance she appears to perform. But the contemporary desire to recuperate her words in protest is also striking. For, to return to the Women's March of January 2017, it was not only images of crowds and posters that emerged in the days and weeks that followed. Also in circulation were images of protestors themselves—often white women—chatting with law enforcement officers, sharing a laugh, taking photographs with them. These images underscored the way in which the disciplinary mechanisms of law enforcement, deployed over generations to police Black life, were suspended to serve and even celebrate white women. The ability, then, to ventriloquize Emilia's words, to render her words as protest, safely and effectively, was contingent, for many, on the racial privilege these protestors manifested and mobilized even as they marched against the forces of heteropatriarchy. And even Emilia's words themselves, as I have demonstrated, are implicated in a racial regime of whiteness. That reminder of the racial dynamics of white womanhood—and, as I will discuss, white feminism—was crucially registered in the words of the activist and commentator Angela Peoples's now-famous placard at the march in Washington, DC: “Don't forget,” it advised: “White women voted for Trump.”Footnote 12 In a photograph that quickly went viral on social media and beyond, Peoples and her arresting sign are juxtaposed with the three white women to her left, all of whom are clad in pink so-called pussy hats, one of them taking a picture on her phone.Footnote 13 Of course, the pink hats, which were ubiquitous in marches worldwide, tacitly affirmed not only a biologically essentialist view of womanhood (in the assumption that what characterized women was the body part the hat denoted) but also—as some wearily noted at the time—a presumptively white one.Footnote 14
The 2017 Women's March was thus emblematic of a particular notion of womanhood: one which defaults to and is thus tacitly centered on cis, white women; which derives its genealogical touchstones from apparently liberatory but actually contingent forms of female agency; and which, crucially, relies on an unmarked notion of white racial privilege at its center. I begin, somewhat anachronistically, with this moment because of the genealogies it itself derived from an early modern legacy of female resistance; not only was Othello's Emilia appropriated for apparently liberatory ends, as I have discussed, but multiple signs also claimed that their bearers “were the granddaughters of the witches you weren't able to burn,” tracing their defiance of patriarchy to a presumptively early modern provenance. It is the deliberate creation of these genealogies and their explicit invocation in contemporary contexts that suggest the availability of these ideologies, then as now. What events such as these reflect, I am suggesting, is an investment in the renaissance of white womanhood.
White womanhood is in the news, most recently and devastatingly in the numerous instances of white women choosing to weaponize their whiteness against Black people.Footnote 15 In recent years, however, we have also seen greater attention paid to the particular and peculiar operations of (what we often understand as) feminism as it underwrites a specifically white movement—a white feminism—in popular culture, and an accompanying attempt to grapple more broadly with the grammar of intersectional feminism.Footnote 16 Even as the work of Black and Women of Color feminists—from bell hooks to Audre Lorde to Cherrie Moraga to Barbara Smith—has frequently been elided in genealogies of feminism and women's liberation in both popular and academic contexts, there has recently been a renewed emphasis on intersectionality as a theoretical remedy to those histories of erasure.Footnote 17 Yet in several instances this language of intersectional feminism is mobilized not to engage but rather to evacuate its central focus on race.Footnote 18 Disciplinary work on early modern women and gender, meanwhile, continues to sidestep frameworks of race-making.Footnote 19 This is in part due to a persistent reluctance to acknowledge whiteness as racialized at all; whiteness remains an “unmarked property,” easily habitable and tacitly reaffirmed by its very invisibility.Footnote 20 In speaking of race, then, early modern studies frequently looks to somatic or epidermal markers of visible difference, searching for nonwhite bodies or representations that tacitly become the repositories of race, while at the same time overlooking the race-making embedded in that very methodology. Race becomes, in essence, something imported into formations of gender, rather than co-constitutive of it. This co-constitution—the “interlocking” nature—of race, gender, class, and sexuality lies precisely at the heart of intersectionality as a concept.Footnote 21
To overlook the crucial ways in which women both are constituted by whiteness and mobilize it to their advantage, then, is to participate in the project of rendering whiteness neutral, unmarked, and invisible.Footnote 22 The current essay therefore makes two central arguments. First, it contends that early modern English texts establish a form of womanhood specifically and explicitly marked (and unmarked) as white. It is not just that white women weaponize whiteness; it is also that womanhood is intrinsically white, and that gender is delimited by race, in early modern England as now. And secondly, this construction of white womanhood in turn underwrites the operations of violence and enslavement, both within and without the scope of white women's agential capacity, as I have already discussed. As forms of whiteness have been read through the framework of labor and class and as class markers, this essay makes a third, related argument: that the classed implications of whiteness are constructed through representations of women as well as men.Footnote 23
This essay moves across a range of texts in addressing these issues, from Shakespeare's Othello and Comedy of Errors to seventeenth-century domestic correspondence to royal portraits to Spenser's Faerie Queene, in order to underscore the different genres and contexts in which ideals of white womanhood are constructed, negotiated, and ratified. I have already suggested, in the first part of this essay, that the formation of white womanhood in early modern English literature and the service into which white womanhood—as a specifically racialized construction and ideal—is pressed constructs a genealogy of gendered whiteness. As sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England saw—and oversaw—new developments in enslaving and colonial practices, the central question I seek to address in this essay is this: what role did white womanhood play in the construction of early modern English slavery? In the next section of this essay, I will begin to address this question by turning to a number of texts that begin to limn the boundaries of white womanhood along the vectors of class and civility and to demonstrate the function of white womanhood as an authorizing trope and force in a global context. White womanhood, I am arguing, must be not only constructed but policed as it is mobilized toward operations of enslavement and imperialism.
MAPPING THE BODY OF WHITE WOMANHOOD
Narratives of early modern English slavery, as decades of historiography have demonstrated, are both complicated and contested, the very existence of English slavery subject to both elision and debate: What was the status of enslaved people brought to England? Were there enslaved people in early modern England? And what was the connection of slavery to race?Footnote 24 Insofar as we have excavated and confronted this history, it emerges as a gendered one, and, often, as a story of supposedly great men who either explicitly built their legacy from slavery, like John Hawkins, or whose celebrated reputation must be revised in light of an acknowledgment of their enslaving practices, like Francis Drake. Hawkins and Drake, notorious early modern English enslavers, undertook several slaving voyages together, and Hawkins's resulting fortune as well as its source is attested by the grant of arms awarded to him in 1565, which features an enslaved person bound with cords, a clear and transparent reference to the chattel slavery that earned him this dubious honor (see fig. 1 for the 1571 augmented grant).Footnote 25 And although Drake is perhaps most celebrated for his role against the Armada, his voyages, and even his piracy, these ventures were also part of his slaving practices: as Jennifer L. Morgan reminds us, it was “during his 1577 circumnavigation” that “Drake captured an enslaved woman named Maria and an unnamed man from a Spanish ship”; when Maria became pregnant, she was abandoned, along with two Black men, on a deserted Indonesian island.Footnote 26 Morgan reads this incident as exemplary of the way in which the reproductive implications of the Black woman's body are conscripted in service of a colonizing logic, allowing Drake to “[claim] the island for the Crown” and thereby to transform Maria “from the category of sexual object to a commodified place-marker on the map of Drake's colonial ambitions.”Footnote 27 The enslavement of Maria—and the two men with whom she is abandoned—thus comprise part of the underbelly of Drake's vaulted seafaring adventures, and are intricately enmeshed in the colonial endeavors for which Drake would thereafter be celebrated.
Figure 1. College of Arms MS Misc. Grants 1, fol. 148v, 1571. Reproduced by permission of the Kings, Heralds and Pursuivants of Arms.
But there is a central figure standing behind both Hawkins and Drake, figuratively as well as financially: the state, writ large, exemplified by Elizabeth I herself, who had invested in Hawkins’s voyages and granted him the aforementioned coat of arms, and who had knighted Drake. Drake's unlikely, legendary success against the Spanish Armada is celebrated in the notable Armada portrait of Elizabeth I (fig. 2).Footnote 28 As the defeat of the Armada is staged in the background, the Queen sits with her hand resting on a globe, her fingers pointing to North America. For many critics, this aspect of the painting gestures to an “imperial claim” over America, particularly Virginia, and signals Elizabethan sovereignty.Footnote 29 The battle taking place behind Elizabeth both rehearses the English conquest of Spain but also, I propose, stands in for the different positions of England and Spain in the global slaving economy, and, given the complicity of English merchants with European slaving practices and Drake's own kidnapping of enslaved people from a Spanish ship, is closely tied to that slaving economy.
Figure 2. Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, English School, ca. 1588. From the Woburn Abbey Collection.
But I want also to attend to the “imperial hand” that Elizabeth extends in this portrait.Footnote 30 The visual lexicon of black and white is present throughout this image: in the contrast between the two scenes of the Armada, irradiated and powerful in the first, dark and defeated in the second; in the representation of Elizabeth's dress; in the juxtaposition of the dark curtain behind Elizabeth with her white head, crowned with pearls; and in the color scheme of the queen's clothing. There is also another pearl here, placed strategically over the queen's pudendum, and set off by a bow. As Elizabeth extends her grasp over North America and indeed the globe, the whiteness of this pearl, and the location and lightness of the bow, visually articulates an affinity between the queen's own virginity and the national expansion into the strategically named territory of Virginia. As critics such as Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall have demonstrated, portraits such as this one powerfully articulate a visual grammar of blackness and whiteness, instructing their viewers in the language and implications of epidermal race.Footnote 31 I want also to attend not only to the object of Elizabeth's (over)reaching hand but also to its composition and its complexion, and the clear contrast between the whiteness of the hand and the darkness of the globe it seeks to grasp, a contrast particularly present in the National Maritime Museum's version of this portrait (fig. 3), which depicts this whiteness “as a specific attribute of Englishness.”Footnote 32 The whiteness of this hand, I want to suggest, also metonymically denotes the workings of whiteness as such, as an operation of both power and property. As Cheryl I. Harris vitally noted nearly thirty years ago, whiteness is mobilized as a property interest.Footnote 33 In speaking, then, of the work of whiteness as it is articulated in this portrait, I am referring to a system of power and privilege, one which, in this context, emphasizes how the white hand—indeed, the hyperwhite hand, as registered in the visual lexicon of black and white in the painting—reaching out over the globe symbolizes the mobilization of whiteness in the interest of property, colony, and empire.Footnote 34 The visual grammar of light and dark in this portrait, that is, not only rehearses—and trains its viewers to learn—the semantic logics of black and white; it also represents, reaffirms, and ratifies the property interest of whiteness as it is simultaneously created and celebrated.
Figure 3. Elizabeth I, 1533–1603 (The Armada Portrait). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Yet there is the additional and distinct semantic crosscurrent of whiteness at work here, in its operation as a specifically gendering mechanism. For whiteness can also function in a valorizing and feminizing mode, as mobilized to construct not only race but gender, too. The use of white cosmetics to construct a certain ideal of beauty was widespread, and reaffirmed by Elizabeth I herself.Footnote 35 But as Kim F. Hall has famously argued, “Frequently, ‘black’ in Renaissance discourses is opposed not to ‘white’ but to ‘beauty’ or ‘fairness,’ and these terms most often refer to the appearance or moral states of women . . . the terms acquire a special force when they are turned to women and . . . they are most frequently used in relation to women.”Footnote 36 Fairness, that is to say, not only assumes particular resonance in relation to women; it is on and through the figurations of women—white as well as Black—that frameworks of fairness and darkness are mapped, reaffirmed, and consolidated.
The metaphorical mapping of circuits of exchange, colonialism, traffic, and trade onto women's bodies is famously invoked in Dromio of Syracuse's anti-blazon of Nell in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. In the following passage, Dromio of Syracuse maps the world onto constituent parts of Nell's body:
Antipholus of Syracuse: What's her name?
Dromio of Syracuse: Nell, sir. But her name and three quarters—that's an ell and three quarters—will not measure her from hip to hip.
Antipholus of Syracuse: Then she bears some breadth?
Dromio of Syracuse: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.
Antipholus of Syracuse: In what part of her body stands Ireland?
Dromio of Syracuse: Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs.
Antipholus of Syracuse: Where Scotland?
Dromio of Syracuse: I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of the hand.
Antipholus of Syracuse: Where France?
Dromio of Syracuse: In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her hair.
Antipholus of Syracuse: Where England?
Dromio of Syracuse: I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
Antipholus of Syracuse: Where Spain?
Dromio of Syracuse: Faith, I saw it not, but I felt it hot in her breath.
Antipholus of Syracuse: Where America, the Indies?
Dromio of Syracuse: O sir, upon her nose, all o'er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks to be ballast at her nose. (3.2.109–38)Footnote 37
This infamous account of Nell's “spherical” body reconstitutes her as a “globe” on which Dromio of Syracuse not only situates but “find[s] out countries” (3.2.115–16). That is to say, Nell's body becomes a map, and the very act of charting it yokes together possession of the female body and imperial tropes of discovery in a familiar rhetorical and conceptual association, invoked perhaps most famously in Walter Raleigh's pronouncement that “Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead.”Footnote 38 As I will later suggest, this mapping of Nell's body also evokes another atomization and itemization of the female body, to quite different effect, in book 6 of The Faerie Queene. Bernadette Andrea importantly notes, furthermore, that Dromio of Syracuse “draw[s] on the new geographical knowledge, which was harnessed to the Western European drive for empire” as he links the parts of Nell's body “each with a European country roughly running from north to south.”Footnote 39 The description of Nell becomes not only a parodic mockery of blazons of female beauty but also an affirmation of the legibility and fixability of global travel and traffic. It is not just that territories like (the so-called) Guiana can be analogized to women waiting to be possessed; European women themselves become the metonymic sites of global exploration, discovery, and conquest. Thus, when Antipholus of Syracuse asks, “Where America, the Indies?” (3.2.134)—conflating two different, vast sites of imperial possibility and wealth—Dromio of Syracuse flippantly reads Nell's pimples and blemishes as “rubies, carbuncles, sapphires” (3.2.136).Footnote 40 The imperial trophies of “America, the Indies” are also pursued by Spain, Dromio's description suggests, gesturing to the battle for European supremacy in which England and Spain would continue to engage.Footnote 41 But the fact that these riches are analogized to blemishes and pustules renders these treasures of “America, the Indies” not only fixable but abundant, common, unexceptional, just as their location, both on the body of Nell and the land it evokes, is implicitly, incipiently devalued.
Meanwhile, a crucial moment in this exchange centers on the location of England. When Antipholus of Syracuse queries, “Where England?” (3.2.127), Dromio of Syracuse responds wryly, “I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them” (3.2.128–29). Although the “chalky cliffs,” in this instance, refer to the white cliffs of Dover and here should be located in Nell's teeth, what disqualifies them is their lack of “whiteness.” Dromio eventually “guess[es]” that England “stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it” (3.2.129–30), speculatively locating England by where it is not: France.
The fact that England can only reluctantly be found in Nell's form is significant and gestures in two different directions. Nell, it seems, is not quite white enough to stand in for the immediately recognizable landmark of the white cliffs of Dover, which themselves signify a natural and naturalized geological whiteness, a whiteness that is literally foundational to England. This is the exceptional whiteness—and Englishness—that Nell cannot embody. But the second implication here is that England does not itself need to be mapped—and where it is charted, it must only be in the context of an adequate whiteness. Nell's body, that is, offers a parodic version of the treasures of America and the Indies, but it is not white enough to stand in readily for England itself, which is exceptionalized beyond cartographical legibility.Footnote 42 Yet her body is white enough to register a limned boundary of whiteness, and indeed the very boundedness of whiteness. That is to say, Nell's body is not only a “globe” but also a canvas on which is charted the creation of boundaries of whiteness, forged in relation not just to gender but also to class. And Nell's sexual availability, it is suggested, only further compromises her potential for whiteness. That is, if whiteness is constructed through negotiated figurations of women, those depictions are also always subject to the contingencies of status.
The role of status in constructing whiteness is one that remains part of the still somewhat understudied nexus of race and class in early modern studies, despite recent work by Patricia Akhimie, which has brilliantly demonstrated how central the classed considerations of conduct are to forms of early modern race-making, and a long history of intersectionality—within and without early modern studies—that stresses the centrality of class positionality and praxis to its enquiry.Footnote 43 I therefore turn next to a seventeenth-century domestic incident which evinces an attempt to both create and police the boundaries of whiteness in concert with class. In 1668, Mary Helsby wrote a letter to her husband about her management of her household, emphasizing in particular the misbehavior of her maid and her manservant and the different forms of discipline to which she subsequently subjected them:
Doll Janion tother night was again out uery late with a young man from Helsby, & for her disobedience I whippt her well ouer my lapp, but onely with my hande, & tho 19 she cried like a childe, & did often call out Madam I begg pardon, o do pardon me, Madam odo, odo, odo, she hath been uery good euer since, I am much afraid the wench will come to naughte, ffor she hath lately growne quite like a woman & is plumpe & white, but uery silly enough to take up by turns with 2 or 3 youthes of no great good & much belowe her euery waie. I fear me she will in this wise giue me as much trouble as I hear she hath giuen to her mother, she hath so often offended I haue at last tried not vainly to shame & amende her into better behauiour, as gentle wordes & warneings all went for nothing. I sent worde to her to come to my closett & after talking to her awhile bade her prepare herselfe for her discipline with the rodd, but she begged so on her knees that I promisd its remission, & twould haue hurt her pittyfully she hath so fine a skinn, John got behinde some tapestrie & heard my sermon to her & then went belowe & for mischeife sent up Joe the new seruant, which I found listening & he had pept through the keyhole. He is a tall lath of a ladd of 17 or 18, & I gaue him a quiet firme lessone on his disorderlie conduct & then whipt him also till he cryed like a babe. I was secretely much insensed, but me thinkes by his present behauiour, that he must need a cushion in stead of a saddel for some time & that I shall be putt to no more trouble with neither such as Mrs Rutter telleth me she hath been put unto by some of her maides & youthes. But she sheweth so much of her passion, that it is no great maruell & hath not the arte & controul enough to giue them resonable knowledge of their faults, but hastilly strippeth them with her owne hands. Methinkes my seruants do loue me much more than any mistresse is loued here aboutes.Footnote 44
Throughout this passage, Helsby describes her sense of herself as a quasi-parent in relation to her servant, with a clear pastoral charge. Doll Janion, Helsby says, has caused her mother “much trouble,” and as a result Helsby must attempt to “amende her into better behauiour.” The timing of these attempts is particularly important, for Janion has been associating with “2 or 3 youthes” who are, Helsby asserts, completely unsuitable for her. What is striking, however, is how Helsby describes this particular moment of Janion's own development; for, she states, she “hath lately growne quite like a woman & is plumpe & white.” At nineteen, Janion is coming into a new stage of womanhood, one specifically marked in the register of whiteness.
Doll Janion's whiteness and her incipient growth to be “quite like a woman” are therefore yoked together. Janion, that is to say, is becoming not just a woman, but a specifically white one, and must accordingly be disciplined into white womanhood's codes of conduct and behavior. This discipline takes the form of a whipping, but “onely with [her mistress's] hande”; for Helsby's reluctance to use the “rodd” for this punishment is due in part to the fact that “twould haue hurt [Janion] pittyfully she hath so fine a skinn.” The word “fine” here might well suggest that Janion's “skinn” is delicate, but also signals its quality which, paired with her description as “white,” suggests that Helsby does not wish to mar Janion's “perfect, pure” white skin.Footnote 45 Helsby appears to have far fewer qualms about her punishment of the manservant Joe; she “whipt him also till he cryed like a babe,” to the extent that, Helsby suggests somewhat chillingly, “he must need a cushion in stead of a saddel for some time.” What is striking here is both the reluctance to mar Janion's “fine” white skin and that what necessitates Janion's punishment is her association with “youths of no great good” who are, significantly, “much belowe her euery waie.” Whereas the sexually available figure of Nell is depicted as an unstable site for the location of English whiteness, Doll Janion is depicted as a work in progress, a repository of white womanhood whose potential must be disciplined into compliance. And that compliance seems to center on upholding both status distinctions—and therefore punishing Janion for her association with “youths” who are below her station—and, it is implied, (the appearance of) Janion's chastity.
Helsby's willingness to mark Joe's skin but not Janion's is striking; as Patricia Akhimie has argued, disciplinary marks on skin serve as somatic markers of the racialized capacity for cultivation.Footnote 46 Helsby's reluctance to mark Janion's “fine” skin, then, underscores the maid's very capacity for whiteness, as well as a larger mandate to protect it. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Helsby believes that “my seruants do loue me much more than any mistresse is loued here aboutes,” as she actively upholds the disciplinary structures that forge and reaffirm white womanhood.Footnote 47
This delineation and disciplining of whiteness lies at the heart of the weaponization of white womanhood in service of strategies of imperial violence and enslavement, as I will discuss in the next and final section of this essay. I will turn to the role of white women—as figures and ideological formations—as they were used to underpin the logics of colonial expansion and enslavement, with particular attention to Spenser's Faerie Queene. At the same time, I want to remain attentive to the stakes of considering the culpability of white womanhood in discourses and justifications of slavery and settler colonialism. My aim here is not to gloss over or excuse the very real operations of patriarchy, nor to hold women accountable for the actions of white patriarchy, to which they are, after all, also subject. Rather, my argument is twofold. First, I want to underscore the complicity of white womanhood in the operations of colonialism and enslavement, to unfold how whiteness interacts and intersects with gender and emerges as an organizing logic and interest. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I suggest that a particular articulation of white womanhood becomes central in authorizing and legitimating these very operations. That is, early modern writers conscript the formation of white womanhood into the service of imperial claims and the work of chattel slavery.
FORMATIONS OF WOMANHOOD AND STRATEGIES OF WHITENESS IN THE FAERIE QUEENE
What, then, is the role of white womanhood in the construction of early modern slavery? To explore this question, I turn to Spenser, whose role in English colonial projects is both well established and documented and extensively discussed.Footnote 48 Although it is A View of the Present State of Ireland that has been the subject of greatest critical scrutiny for its representation of colonial violence, The Faerie Queene must also be viewed in light of its imbrication in the very contemporary projects (as I have suggested) of chattel slavery.Footnote 49 Book 6 of The Faerie Queene depicts perhaps most explicitly the trade in enslaved persons, but in this third and final section of this essay I want also to explore the constitution of slavery by and through both gender and whiteness by attending to the Radigund episode in book 5. I argue that in its representation of a female enslaver, this episode reflects on the creation of non-white and white womanhood alike through the coarticulation of race, gender, and sexuality, and depicts the dangers of failing to secure the boundaries of whiteness. Although the Radigund episode invokes the specter of early modern Turkish and North African captivity, it does so, I argue, in order ultimately to authorize a gendered and racialized subjection that anticipates the logics of Atlantic slavery. Thus, I suggest that as we excavate the histories of early modern servitude and slavery, we must think about not only the construction but also the complicity of white womanhood with the English national projects of slavery, imperialism, and white supremacy.
When the reader first hears of the “proud Amazon” (5.4.29) Radigund, we learn that it is unrequited love that fuels her “hatred.” The “Knights” she “subdue[s]” (5.4.31) are subject to a very particular form of punishment:
The punishment to which the knights are subject is of course a specifically gendered one: they must wear women's clothes, they engage in the gendered labor of spinning and washing, and they are weakened—“disabled”—by being denied sustenance. Should anyone protest “through stout disdaine of manly mind” (5.4.32), the penalty is death. Drawing on the work of Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Jeffrey Griswold compellingly argues in his reading of consent in book 5 that the wearing of women's clothing constitutes an attempt to “condition” the men to their new roles, and their new clothing remakes their character.Footnote 50 But it also, I propose, threatens a racial degeneration.
For the representation of the Amazon queen Radigund as suggestively foreign and generically Eastern, Turkish, or North African is both striking and significant. As numerous critics have argued, the early modern Amazon embodies both a kind of racial and gender instability. Kathryn Schwarz, referring to their “quality of uncertainty,” observes that Amazons are “variously imagined as Asian, African, American, and Northern European, as black and white, as divinely, monstrously, and parthenogetically conceived.”Footnote 51 Early modern commentators strove to situate these confounding and fascinating figures cartographically; thus, Walter Raleigh, in The discouerie of the large, rich, and bewtifull empire of Guiana (1596), suggests that these “like” “cruell and bloodthirsty” “women are verie ancient as well in Africa as in Asia.”Footnote 52 Amazons are therefore suggestively foreign, located elsewhere, constructed as monstrous—and, notably yet crucially in terms of their racialization, difficult to secure in terms of their gender. Sydnee Wagner, drawing on Hortense Spillers's theory of “ungendering,” observes that “within a white nationalist paradigm, the gendering of people of color is inherently non-normative,” and as scholars such as C. Riley Snorton have vitally argued, the construction of gender is a racialized endeavor.Footnote 53 Wagner's insightful argument reminds us of the coimbrication of gender—and, I will suggest, sexuality—in the construction of race. It is thus worth pausing on the way Radigund is described in preparation for her battle with Artegall:
Radigund here is represented in the terms of elaborate ornamentation, and of both scopic and material sumptuousness. The fact that she bears a “Cemitare,” so often associated with Ottoman or “Moorish” figures, suggestively portrays her within quite specifically identifiable racial and religious terms: as Islamic, “Moorish,” and, in its phallic register, not-quite-woman, the nonnormative gendering intersecting with Radigund's Islamic and Ottoman associations to cement a specific construction of racialized womanhood. Kim F. Hall reminds us, however, that when Ottoman figures are shown bearing scimitars, those depictions can gesture in two different directions: the scimitar can either operate as a phallic symbol, and evoke the threat of penetration and conversion, or, conversely, it can signal castration.Footnote 54 Thus, as Valerie Traub notes, following Louis Montrose and Kathryn Schwarz, early modern Amazons could be seen as “a repository of male castration anxiety” due to their “agency and hostility to men.”Footnote 55 But the association with castration is also invoked with regard to the imagined figure of the Amazon herself, who, as John Florio notes, “in Greek signifies, without a dug, or teat or pap-less.”Footnote 56 Raleigh, however, disagrees: “that they cut of the right dug of the brest I do not finde to be true.”Footnote 57 Even the very confusion around the removal of the breast registers a fascination with determining and trying to secure the racially unfixable and uncertain body according to the legibility of the gender of the Amazon.
The racial indeterminacy of the Amazon is therefore constituted in part by gender trouble—that is, by the gendered indeterminacy of her body. And the root of the Radigund problem, I argue, lies in the fact that Artegall mistakes that body—Radigund's body—for one of a white woman. After “disarm[ing]” Radigund of her shield, “He to her lept with deadly dreadfull looke, / And her sunshynie helmet soone vnlaced, / Thinking at once both head and helmet to haue raced” (5.5.11). The term raced here denotes, of course, erased, but suggestively gestures toward the race-making in progress at this moment:
This passage is often read to suggest that Artegall is struck by Radigund's beauty, by her face that is “a miracle of natures goodly grace.” But it is, or it is taken to be, I suggest, a particular kind of beauty: a “faire,” implicitly white female beauty. What Artegall sees—or thinks he sees—is a “faire visage voide of ornament,” in contrast to the quite ornamented spectacle Radigund earlier seemed to present, one he explicitly assumes and deems “faire.” The last two lines of this passage, however, suggest his error: although Radigund's face appears like the moon on a cloudy night, “darkned” by blood and sweat, which cannot quite conceal the “feature[s] excellent” that lie beneath, Radigund is precisely not a “faire” woman. For as Radigund appears “bath'd in bloud,” we recall Walter Raleigh's description of the “cruell and bloodthirsty” Amazon women.Footnote 58
Indeed, the next lines underscore Artegall's mistake:
Artegall throws away his sharp sword because of the regret he feels at marring Radigund's image—but the fairness he attributes to Radigund is, as we have seen, wrongly indexed as whiteness even as the marring he laments in fact accurately reveals Radigund's lack of fairness. Ironically, it is because Artegall's heart is “empierced” that he discards his sword; yet the word “empierced” reminds us that Radigund carries a scimitar, that this scimitar denotes the threat of both sexual penetration and religious and racial conversion, and that in the poem's economy of racial construction Radigund is merely confused for fair.
Although scholars such as Melissa Sanchez have importantly explored the contingencies of consent and subjection in this episode, I suggest that what Artegall pays for with his subjection to Radigund is his failure to identify and properly secure the borders of whiteness.Footnote 59 It may be the case that “He wilfull lost, that he before attayned,” but it is nonetheless now his lot “To be her thrall, and seruice her afford” (5.5.17). Because of his inability to police properly the boundaries of whiteness,
As the last line of this passage asks us to unpack the condition of being “a woman's slave,” it immediately evokes a sense of Petrarchan subjection as well as a form of gendered humility. The labor and even the bondage depicted here, Maureen Quilligan suggests, may ultimately be actually appropriate for women, but in “plac[ing] him most low,” Radigund also subjects Artegall to a demotion of status, recalling the centrality of class to race-making.Footnote 60 This demotion will later be corrected by Britomart, but the very correctability of this “sordid” state suggests, as I will discuss, a racialized (capacity for) recuperability. For Artegall's servitude is, like that of his fellow knights, explicitly gendered:
Instead of his knight's armor, Artegall is dressed in “womans weedes,” with a “napron white” to underscore his servility. Although “dight” means “dressed,” the term also carries sexual resonances, a register also implicit in Radigund's scimitar and its potential to either castrate or convert.Footnote 61 And in a suggestively queer dynamic that also racializes the Amazonian women, both Radigund and Clarinda fall in love with an Artegall dressed in these “womans weedes.”Footnote 62 But Artegall's servitude also explicitly recalls sixteenth- and seventeenth-century captivity narratives and so-called Turk plays, which often speak to the danger of sexual domination and violence. Repeatedly, these texts discuss the danger for the renegade Englishmen of “turning Turk” or even being circumcised or castrated, while captured English people were—in these narratives of kidnap and piracy—in constant danger of sexual violence.Footnote 63 As early as the mid- to late sixteenth century, English men and women were being captured and pressed into servitude as galley slaves and traded in the marketplace by French, Spanish, Turkish, and North African captors—and one of the ways of signaling servitude was through the change in clothing. As Michael Guasco reminds us, “the stripping and reclothing of new bondmen was . . . a way to break the man and make the slave,” and in Richard Hakluyt's account of John Fox in the late sixteenth century, for instance, some Christian captives are represented as nearly naked, “onely a short linen paire of breeches to cover their privities,” in an analogue, perhaps, to the “napron white” that Artegall must wear.Footnote 64
This white apron also suggestively gestures toward the danger of racial degeneration surrounding Artegall, both as it signals his debasement and as its whiteness substitutes for its wearer's absolute claim to his former “manly hew.” The narrator in canto 6 expresses sympathy for Artegall's predicament—“For neuer yet was wight so well aware, / But he at first or last was trapt in womens snare” (5.6.1)—but when Britomart receives the “sight, / Of men disguiz'd in womanishe attire” (5.7.37) she registers it as “lothly vncouth” (5.7.37) and “her owne Loue” as “no lesse deformed” by this “disguize” (5.7.38). As she asks him, “Could ought on earth so wondrous change haue wrought, / As to haue robde you of that manly hew?” (5.7.40), we understand this “hew”—particularly in light of Francesca Royster's work on the racialized and epidermal affordances of hue—to resonate in the terms of whiteness, a whiteness thankfully only temporarily “robde.”Footnote 65
For Britomart is able to restore Artegall to his former status: she “causd him those vncomely weedes vndight; / And in their steede for other rayment sought” (5.7.41), the word “vndight” reversing the sexual register of Radigund's enslavement of Artegall and simultaneously foreclosing its potential for racial and religious conversion. And when Britomart “him anew had clad, / She was reuiu'd, and ioyd much in his semblance glad” (5.7.41). What we see here, that is, is not only a restoration of Artegall's former attire—a setting to rights of both his status and his gender—but also a reaffirmation of his racial status. If Artegall's bound position recalls the dangerous vulnerability of Christian captives, as I have noted, Michael Guasco argues that even when they were captured in the contexts of Mediterranean slavery, English men were seen as possessing a kind of innate liberty.Footnote 66 As Britomart frets about Artegall's “blotted honour”—the term blotted, as I've suggested elsewhere, signaling the threat of somatic markings—the narrator assures the reader there is no slight to Artegall's honor, and just to make sure, Artegall recovers his prior “semblance glad.” What we see here, then, in the rescue and redemption of these captured knights by Britomart is, I argue, an English ability to pass in and out of slavery, even its most demeaning kinds, without being permanently marked by that bondage. Early modern English captivity narratives, taken broadly, are at the very same time asserting on the one hand the violence of the bondage to which English men and women are being subject—and on the other their ability not to be “blotted” by that bondage. It is this recuperability that contributes to the formation of an English racial whiteness.Footnote 67
Moreover, once the knights have been liberated, Britomart “afterwards remained . . . her late woundes to heale” (5.7.42). But she also implements far-reaching changes during this time:
The “women” whose “liberty” Britomart “did repeale” are, as I have already suggested, constructed as explicitly racialized. In other words, it is not just that Britomart “restor[es]” these women to “mens subjection”—the word “restoring” (5.7.42) deliberately constructing an authorizing provenance—but that she subjugates these women, who have already been framed explicitly as non-white women, to white men. As if to drive the point home, the narrator reminds us that “those Knights” whom Britomart “did from thraldome free” had been “shrowded” in “captiue shade” but are now “free” from that allegorically darkened state to “great liuing and large fee,” in return for fealty to Artegall.
I wish to underscore this moment in order to suggest the significance of this “repeale” of women's liberty—a “repeale” that is, I have argued, racialized as well as gendered. For thirty years before the printing of these verses, Elizabeth I had been requesting licenses to redeem English men kidnapped and held captive as galley slaves. But Elizabeth had also been engaging in and helping to finance the trade in enslaved African people, by investing in the slaving voyages of John Hawkins and others, while her infamous “Edicts of Expulsion,” as Emily Weissbourd has demonstrated, attest to an involvement in the Spanish trade in enslaved Black subjects.Footnote 68 I emphasize this history not only to place this moment within the history of English involvement in chattel slavery but also to underscore how the demarcation of whiteness, and the construction of white womanhood in particular, is instrumental to these logics. The figure of Radigund, I have argued, points in two directions: on the one hand, she is foreign and monstrous, and it is Artegall's mistaken recognition of her “fairness” that leads to his own punishment and imprisonment. And so, this episode warns about the dangers of misrecognizing—or failing to secure properly—the borders not only of gender but also and inevitably of race, even as it invokes the threat of Mediterranean, Ottoman, and North African captivity. On the other hand, however, I suggest that Artegall's submission, once he espies Radigund's fair beauty, not only adheres to the trope of gendered subjection which Petrarchan conventions dictate but also suggestively portends the legibility—the thinkability, the acceptability, even the desirability—of a female enslaver who is actually and properly fair. I want to underscore that my aim is not simply to point to the slaving endeavors and investments of a singular white woman, Elizabeth I, but to suggest that the construction of white womanhood is implicated in, and indeed complicit with, these national projects of slavery, imperialism, and supremacy. After all, as Kim F. Hall and Gustav Ungerer remind us, English women—not to mention European women—as well as men held enslaved Black people.Footnote 69 And in book 6, which contains the poem's most explicit invocation of slavery, I argue that we also see in the figure of the “faire Pastorella” a form of exceptionalized white womanhood.
I want to end, therefore, by thinking about the operations of slavery and whiteness in book 6 at greater length, attending both to the kidnap of Pastorella in cantos 10–11 and to the description of Serena's encounter with the “saluage nation” in canto 8. Not unlike the brigands who will appear later in book 6, the “saluage nation” “liue / Of stealth and spoile, and making nightly rode / Into their neighbours borders” (6.8.35) and refuse either to steward the land they plunder or to engage in profitable mercantilism:
The “saluage nation,” in other words, is purely extractive, refusing to labor honestly in ways that might be legible or profitable to an English economy: through agriculture or by mercantile “aduentur[ing].” These “saluage” traits, as Melissa Sanchez notes, link them “with the barbarity of the Irish and New World inhabitants.”Footnote 70 Most strikingly, these men “vsde one most accursed order, / To eate the flesh of men” (6.8.36), their cannibalism affirming their barbarity as well as their fitness for enslavement.Footnote 71 And this cannibalistic impulse is tellingly directed toward the hyperwhite body of Serena, the description of which might recall the parodic blazon of Nell's body in The Comedy of Errors discussed earlier—but to very different effect:
As Melissa Sanchez notes, Serena's body parts—her “necke,” “brest,” “paps,” “sides,” “bellie”—are described only in terms of their whiteness, and her violation (and near escape from the threat of rape, ritual sacrifice, and cannibalism) serves as a mandate to civility which “discipline[s] White women in order to reproduce a fantasy of Whiteness as naturally superior to and dominant over its others.”Footnote 72 Serena, like Mary Helsby's servant Doll Janion, might need to be disciplined into white womanhood's codes of conduct, but I would suggest that the consistent and coherent whiteness of her body—unlike Nell's—also indexes the way in which white women were becoming not just the agents of but also the imprimatur for the operations of English slavery.Footnote 73
And so I turn, finally, to the Pastorella episode at the end of book 6. As opposed to the parodic blazon of Nell and the atomized articulation of Serena, “fayrest Pastorella” (6.9.9) is not only “full fayre of face” but also
Pastorella, then, whose name invokes the pastoral, is not only intimately associated with a presumptively green and pleasant land but also represents a coherent and exemplary whiteness as she is repeatedly—indeed insistently—described as “faire.” No longer atomized like the wanton Nell or the erring Serena, Pastorella is white and “well shapt in euery lim,” full of “grace,” a model of white womanhood.
The emphasis on Pastorella's “fairness” also insistently rehearses a whiteness repeatedly contrasted to the allegorical darkness of the Brigants’ “little Island,” a place described as barren, dark, and unpopulated:
As opposed to the green space Pastorella inhabits and embodies, the Brigants’ home is subterranean, literally and allegorically “hollow,” marked by “darkenesse dred and daily night,” and likened by the captured Pastorella to “hell, / Where with such damned fiends she should be darknesse dwell” (6.10.43).Footnote 74 And these “fiends” engage explicitly in an economy of chattel slavery, kidnapping Pastorella and her compatriots “For slaues to sell them, for no small reward, / To merchants, which them kept in bondage hard, / Or sold againe” (6.10.43).Footnote 75 As they traffick with “merchants” seeking “bondslaues,” the Brigants resemble not just the “salvage men” but those who engaged in circuits of kidnap and capture in the Mediterranean world. And indeed, like some European women in early modern so-called Turk plays, Pastorella is depicted as exceptional: the Captain of the Brigants falls in love with Pastorella and refuses to sell her as a “bondslaue” (6.11.10), even when the “marchants” refuse to purchase any captives without her. Yet Pastorella is not, in fact, an unwitting savior of her captured comrades; rather, when the Captain's colleagues attack him for his economic betrayal, the resulting battle results in the death of many of her fellow “captiues,” who are killed “Least they should ioyne against the weaker side, / Or rise against the remnant at their will” (6.11.18). Pastorella, however, is both protected by and thus—however inadvertently—allied with her attacker:
What is striking about this passage is the suggestion of a corporeal conjoining of Pastorella and the Captain; the wound that kills the Captain both strikes and saves Pastorella. And although his love for Pastorella arguably redeems the Captain, it is not redemptive for her fellow captives. The figure of Pastorella, in other words, simultaneously underscores the violence of the Brigants, provides a form of redemption for their Captain, and is exceptionalized through the deaths of so many of her countrymen, which are in turn arguably justified by her very survival. The figure of Pastorella, I therefore suggest, does not present an uncomplicated condemnation of the operations of slavery writ large; rather, it underscores the way in which white womanhood can be constructed through slavery, and how the violence of imperial extraction is authorized for some, but not others. For when Calidore rescues Pastorella, who survives many of her comrades, he also undertakes a form of violent (yet now implicitly sanctioned) extraction. Having slain most of the Brigants—who are compared to (implicitly black) “flyes in whottest sommers day” (6.11.48), while Calidore is “Like as a Lion mongst an heard of dere” (6.11.49)—Calidore then proceeds to revive Pastorella.Footnote 76
What Calidore achieves here is a kind of restitution, returning to Coridon the “flockes” that had been “reft” from the now deceased Meliboe. But this restitution also accompanies a more explicit kind of theft: the taking of “spoyles and threasure” which the Brigants had themselves stolen and kept in their “theeuish dens,” but which “fortune now the victors meed did make.” What justifies this theft, it seems, is both “the victors meed” as well as the fact that Pastorella is figured as the pinnacle of those “threasures”: “Of which the best he did his loue betake.” What is therefore at work here, I suggest, is the logic of imperialism and supremacy, bolstered by the alibi of protecting, redeeming, and rescuing white womanhood.
The figure of Pastorella, I have suggested, is used to authorize the work of imperial extraction; the white womanhood she symbolizes is mobilized to forge the operations of slavery and imperial violence, and in so doing comes to underwrite them. I want to end, therefore, by gesturing very briefly to the afterlives of these logics of whiteness, gender, and slavery, and in particular to the ways in which white womanhood becomes complicit in these national projects of imperialism, slavery, and supremacy. In They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Stephanie Jones-Rogers traces a history of female enslaving—in a later and quite different context—as a function of property.Footnote 77 In so doing, Jones-Rogers reveals and refuses the elisions that have obscured the role of white women as full participants in the violence of slavery. And although Jones-Rogers's book explores the nineteenth-century American operations of female enslaving, the seeds of white womanhood's crucial role in the construction and authorization of slavery, I have been suggesting, were planted much earlier, in the literary and cultural contexts of early modern England. As we think through the formations of early modern slavery, we must attend not only to the construction of racialized gender but also, as it pertains to white womanhood, to its full complicity in the property interest and the violence of white supremacy. And we must also confront its devastating afterlives.
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