Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Riding the Transatlantic Wave
(on Laura Doyle's Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940 [Durham: Duke UP, 2008])
by Salita N. Seibert | ns 71-72
James Thomson's "Rule Britannia" (1740) claimed that the origin of the British nation as an imperial power was in the Briton's natural-born liberty. The poem predicted the future greatness and prosperity of Britain, realized through mastery of the sea. This mastery was achieved at the cost of ordinary citizens and written on the backs of African men and women, shipped to the West Indies and the American colonies to work sugar and cotton plantations. Those plantations and people formed the base of Britain's and Europe's modern wealth and the new global market economy. And these inequalities compose the backdrop to the principle ideals of Enlightenment, freedom, and democracy. In Freedom's Empire the contradictions of the Age of Enlightenment, established by Horkheimer and Adorno, Aimé Césaire, and W. E. B. DuBois, are reconstituted by Laura Doyle as the contradictions of modernity. The moment of modernity comes relatively early for Doyle. She claims that Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) signals a change from classic to modern literary genres, mercantilism to capitalism, and feudal to racialized identity.
Freedom's Empire also responds to several changes in the field of literary studies. One is the revision of the canon. In Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel the history of the novel is overwhelmingly populated by male characters and authors—Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Doyle does examine some better-known novels (Robinson Crusoe, Roxanna, Moll Flanders, Clarissa, The Scarlet Letter, and Billy Budd) but also examines lesser-known novels such as Our Nig, Wieland, and Charlotte Temple. She provides a more even-handed account: over half of the protagonist and authors are women. All of the novels undergo a considerable amount of analysis but the eighteenth-century novels are the central texts. They are the most historically situated and are, as Doyle calls them, "the founding fictions of liberty." The historical narrative of Freedom's Empire undergirds the choice of novels. In the last ten years, scholars like Doyle, Helene Woodard, Roxanne Wheeler, and Bridget Orr have responded to Watt. Their works shift the narrative from continuity between literary and cultural developments to an examination of the contradictory impulses evident in novels, the theatre, social treatises, and cultural practices. Doyle's work responds to many of the same concerns as Orr and Cynthia Lowenthal in seventeenth-century studies, Wheeler, Woodard, and Felicity Nussbaum in eighteenth-century studies, and Anne McClintock in nineteenth-century studies. They are all trying to understand how categories of race were established and deployed in relation to gender and sexuality in a specific period. Doyle's focus is also on the links between race, gender, and sexuality, but in a way that runs counter to traditional periodization.
There has been a flood of books in literary and cultural studies that have established the transatlantic as both a space and period. Joe Roach's Cities of Dead (1996), Ian Baucom's Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999) and Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005), and Clement Hawes' The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (2005) are part of this body of work. They privilege the identities and relationships made through movements of goods and people connected by the Atlantic, in part following Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Gilroy's book marked a shift away from what historian Marcus Rediker calls terra-centrism, the idea that land is where the "real" happens, where history takes place, and the sea is a void. According to historian David Armitage, "We are all Atlanticists now—or so it would seem from the explosion of interest in the Atlantic and the Atlantic world as subjects of study among historians....The Atlantic is even beginning to shape the study of literature, economics, and sociology on topics as diverse as theatrical performance, the early history of globalization, and the sociology of race" (11).
Freedom's Empire follows this Atlanticist work. It attempts to take on the literary and historical intersections of globalization, race, and political economy from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. It claims a genealogy of race that comes not out of the pseudo-sciences of the nineteenth century, but from the rhetorical strategies employed before and during the British Civil War in the seventeenth century. In Thomson's "Rule Britannia," Doyle finds "the deepest ideological (as opposed to economic) roots of what we now call whiteness, whose purported superiority rests on its racially inherited, mastering capacity for freedom" (3). The events that she examines reflect deliberate attempts to define the British and later the American nation through a balance between a predestined "great" future and an idealized past, made up of pure Anglo-Saxon men and women. The complex relationships between nationalism, racialism, and liberty are represented both literally and imaginatively through the Atlantic Ocean. The momentum of transatlantic studies has been towards complicating and historicizing the racialized "other," and Doyle takes this a step further, complicating, historicizing, and racializing Britain.
In the first section, "Race and Liberty in the Atlantic Economy," Doyle shows how collective memory is flexible, selective, and imaginative. Freedom is linked to a radical Anglo-Saxon historiography that was used by Charles I to establish divine right and then redeployed by a variety of politically-active individuals and groups such as radical religious sects. Doyle uses "Rule Britannia" repeatedly to show that the trope of the sea was important, the ways in which a racial history was compelling, and where the overlap between histories and the literary were most obvious. Doyle establishes a shared vision of racialized liberty between historiography and poetry: "if his story expresses a people's growth towards liberty, revived by a racial soil after ruinous blight, then art and literature (as eighteenth-century theorists concluded) are its flowering" (79). Thus historians such as James Harrington, Mercy Otis Warren, John Smith, and David Hume, and poets like William Wordsworth, Hugh Blair, and Walt Whitman all form the rhetorical base of liberty.
In section two, "Founding Fictions of Liberty," all of the eighteenth-century novels have motifs—literal or figurative—of rape, seduction, incest, and/or homoeroticism in an Atlantic context. The three final divisions in the book also take up these themes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American novels. Doyle discusses how the Atlantic passing was established as a symbolic form of rebirth. As she remarks, "within all these narratives, the trope of an Atlantic crossing correlates with what I call a swoon moment—the phoenix fall—involving a bodily 'undoing' or 'ruin' that is often sexual or coded as feminine" (6). The Atlantic crossing is the space for the body's refashioning—a refashioning that is complete at the end of the journey. The characters are no longer who and where they were before, "only to reawaken, uprooted and yet newly racialized, 'born again' from [their] own ashes" (7). These desires and experiences are connected through the Atlantic as either a space where direct action is staged or an implied place offstage. In some cases the Atlantic crossing is primary and the sexual impulses are secondary; Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe travel to America, Roxanna travels most of Europe, and Oroonoko and Equiano experience the Middle Passage. At other times the Atlantic crossing is hidden or offstage and the sexual contacts are moved to center stage in novels like Clarissa, The Monk, The Scarlet Letter, and Daniel Deronda.
Later sections consist of close readings of gothic (The Monk), race (Our Nig), and queer novels (Virginia Woolf's entire body of work). After the analysis of social, economic, and political concerns in the first two sections, it is somewhat disconcerting to suddenly confront what are standard close reading practices. The dizzying array of dates and people that span genre, continent, and time laid out in the beginning is supposed to translate into a portable concept for looking at the novels. So the Anglo-Saxon narrative of freedom as an essentially flexible rhetorical strategy connects the gothic, queer, and race novel—written by white and black authors in different times and places. Richardson and Haywood are not the father and mother of the novel but part of a transatlantic experience and identity alongside Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen that is about race and class and gender. Those categories deploy the concept of freedom in ways that demonstrate its genealogy (Anglo-Saxon) and malleability (deployed by enslaver and enslaved). For instance, in Doyle's analysis of Oroonoko, Oroonoko serves as a symbol of the right of Charles I's rule but his violent acts of resistance align him with "the transgressive activity that brought down those kings" (105). However, this novel can also be understood as a critique of black enslavement and the way in which the new economic order made right into wrong and wrong into right.
Freedom's Empire reflects what is both the strength and the weakness of transatlantic work: its breadth. There are arguably five centuries and four continents worth of histories, cultural objects, and social apparatus to put together in different and informative ways. For instance, Robinson Crusoe, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, and Billy Budd are grouped together as middle-passage plots. The transatlantic voyages of these very different characters are linked together through their shared experience of violence and victimization. This linking is possible because of the geographic and historic span of the transatlantic field. Most transatlantic studies cover a lot of historical ground, but Doyle's book is one of the biggest and most ambitious. Three hundred years of novels are mapped onto one very specific moment, the British Civil War. In the end, that one moment is stretched too thin and the history of the novel collapses under its own weight.
Work Cited
Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World 1500-1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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