Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes
Caribbean colonies by 1842, only four years prior to the novel’s publication. Orderson was clear about his nostalgia for a time in which the enslaved were “happier” in their bondage than in freedom.41 The consequences for Polgreen’s historical reproduction are clear, as Melanie Newton notes in her critical reading of the novel:
In the post-slavery era, as had been the case during slavery, stereotyped and sexualized representations of women of color, especially the “mulatto” woman, often served as the means through which white reactionaries expressed both anti-black sentiment and fear of racial “amalgamation.”42
Acknowledging the pro-slavery project constituent to such representations raises questions about how to use a text like Creoleana as a primary source for Polgreen’s historical “reality.” This is not to dismiss entirely the novel’s potential to historically inform readers or scholars, but rather to offer insight into its distorting representations of Polgreen. At the moment when the British and North American anti-slavery movements were storming across the Atlantic and into the Caribbean, Orderson articulated his pro-slavery beliefs while condemning the “perversion” of inter-racial sex.43 In a pamphlet published in 1816, Orderson responded to British Parliamentary debates concerning the illicit international trade in Africans and the gradual abolition of slavery in their colonies, but his remarks center specifically on the growth of the free population of color in Bridgetown. Using less symbolic language than the novel to describe his abhorrence of inter-racial sex and unions, Orderson explicitly expressed his opinions guided by his own “moral” ideologies. Beyond even his disapprobation for the public display of interracial coupling between military men and women of color, he remarks on the moral decline of white society through this “licentious intercourse” with women of color:
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