Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Debbie Lee
models used to analyze yellow fever—the most deadly and widespread disease for British seamen on slave voyages. In this sense, the diseases of slavery were brought intimately home to the British body, just as the guilt of slavery was brought home to the British psyche. But discussion of fever within the discourse of slavery and discussion of slavery within the discourse of yellow fever also address a wider question: with this new proximity of cultures, could Britain establish a social system free from the diseases of tyranny and guilt?
II
When reading Coleridge’s various writings, one has the sense that he could actually imagine a process where British self and foreign other could unite in harmony. He certainly contemplated the philosophic working out of such a process. In his Marginalia, for instance, he wrote that “the copula” of “identity” and “alterity” meant the self would “lose itself in another form by loving the self of another as another” (CM 1:680). It was in the context of British masters and African slaves, however, where the concepts of “identity” and “alterity” took on a blatant, material reality, and where “losing self in another” by taking on the alterity of that other had complex consequences for both British and African subjectivity. If “The Ancient Mariner” is read through the lens of this potent topic, it must be viewed as a process where the mariner tries to reconcile identity and alterity in a political, as well as a philosophical, way.15
In both medical literature and abolitionist poetry, the intersection of slavery and disease nearly always ended in a rethinking of philosophical definitions of identity and alterity. The work of Julia Kristeva provides some help in understanding this aspect of the distanced imagination.16 Taken together, Kristeva’s discussions of the abject in Powers of Horror and of foreigners in Strangers to Ourselves and Nations Without Nationalism offer a compelling theory linking bodily disease and foreign travel through the category of alterity.
Kristeva’s writings revolve around a fundamental distinction between “self” and “not-self.” Everything that is horrifying, everything that signals our possible inhumanity, everything that reminds us of our mortality, is not-self. As Kristeva has it, the diseased, decaying body (the yellow fever victim’s black vomit and bleeding orifices, for example) is the most potent form of the not-self, or what she calls “the abject.” And the abject itself, because it is the ultimate expression of the flesh, is an explicit manifestation of sin (at least from the perspective of dominant culture). Blood, urine, excrement, and the human corpse, these are the raw materials of the abject:
corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border…. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything.17
We constitute ourselves, according to Kristeva, through abjection by excluding what is not-self. Yet the abject is always part of us, even though it must constantly be ignored, buried, or thrown over the edge of consciousness. The abject is, in this way, the cornerstone of personal subjectivity.
The process by which an individual constitutes personal subjectivity is, for Kristeva, also worked out on a national level. Just as the individual tries to evade death as symbolized in the corpse, so national character shies away from that which is foreign to it:
Hatred of those others who do not share my origins … affront me personally, economically, and culturally: I then move back among “my own,” I stick to an archaic, primitive “common denominator,” the one of my frailest childhood, my closest relatives, hoping they will be more trustworthy than “foreigners.”18
Foreigners, like Coleridge’s mariner, who transgress borders and break taboos, who identify with and touch otherness, are culturally abject. Kristeva maintains a distinctly Coleridgean position by arguing that the unity of the self, though impossible, may be glimpsed by realizing we are all, in some sense, “strangers to ourselves.” Her view of the encounter with foreigners is similar to Coleridge’s notion of “losing self in another,” a process that involves self-alteration and loss of direction:
Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container, the memory of experiences which I had abandoned overwhelm me, I lose my composure. I feel “lost,” “indistinct,” “hazy.”19
Throughout her writings, Kristeva describes the marriage of identity and alterity as a boundary-dissolving process, whether those boundaries are individual or national, material or metaphysical.
If nineteenth-century systems of medicine and slavery were about anything, they were about boundaries, or boundary-dissolving processes. In fact, it might be said that these systems of medicine and slavery were designed to reestablish borders that were in the process of dissolving with the increased foreign travel that the slave trade instigated. Dissolving both personal and national borders, after all, is how yellow fever first gained attention. Medical writers who warned that epidemics in the Caribbean could spread throughout Europe conjured up images of the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, which wiped out one-third of the European population.20 In the meantime, European heads of state put doctors in the service of deflecting national panic. Dr. Gilbert Blane reported in 1819 that Britain, Russia, and Prussia had actually held conferences to dispel the public and medical fear of “importation of this pestilential epidemic [yellow fever], which in the end of last century, and beginning of this, had so afflicted the West Indies, North America, and Spain.”21 In 1797, Dr. Trotter had likewise assured a potentially panicky British audience that there was no danger whatsoever of yellow fever “becoming active on this side of the Atlantic.”22
The presence of yellow fever could not only disintegrate national borders, it could also redefine political alliances. Dr. Blane recounted an example of French warships that had captured British frigates carrying crews seized with yellow fever. The epidemic spread quickly among the French crews who were then quarantined with British prisoners, despite their status as French enemies.23 In times of epidemic, it seemed, national identity was as unreliable as the body itself. Unlucky victims were the embodiment of alterity, no matter what their skin color or national status. Not surprisingly, slaves in the Caribbean were even more aware of fever’s ability to cross boundaries and render Europeans powerless. In 1799, the traveler Robert Renny recalled being greeted on the shore of Jamaica by a canoe full of slave women sarcastically chanting:
New come buckra,
He get sick,
He tak fever,
He be die,
He be die, &etc.24
Yellow fever often killed European individuals who were involved in the slave trade, but what seemed worse to legislators and plantation owners was the imminent death of the slave system itself. With increased pressure from abolitionists like Southey and Coleridge, British culture faced the possibility of a social system that no longer divided itself neatly into masters and slaves. This heightened national anxiety about economic consequences existed most vocally among Caribbean proprietors, many of whom owned failing plantations as it was. Underneath this fiscal fear lay a deeper worry over how the change in the status of African slaves—from foreigners to citizens—would not only infect Europeans, but deplete any differences between the races. Coleridge would later confront this fear in his planned lecture on the “Origins of the Human Race.” In this lecture, he opposed the implications being proposed by race theorists, such as Lord Monboddo, that Africans resembled orangutans (SWF, 1:1409–10).25 But this changing view of the slave from inferior to moral equal threatened to dissolve the fragile border of the British self. For there was nothing quite like the abjection of the African slave against which British national character defined itself in the early part of the nineteenth century.
In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Coleridge merges the fear of racial equality with the fear of fever.