Antislavery Afterlives: Changing the Subject / Haunting the Poetess

Abstract

This chapter examines mid- to late-Victorian attempts at self-distancing from triumphalist (and literalist) early antislavery promises, focusing in particular on how the themes of haunting, displacement, and denial threaded through many later Victorians' patriotic invocations of liberating empire. Drawing on emerging pedagogical and scholarly revolutions in studies of nineteenth-century British relations to slavery, the chapter considers histories of disciplinary reticence dating back in part to the Victorians themselves. It also discusses the increasingly iconic histories of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention and J.M.W. Turner's painting Slave Ship as well as Elizabeth V. Spelman's Fruits of Sorrow and her notion of “changing the subject.” Finally, it explores the discipline termed “ethical refocalization” by turning to three parallel scenes of interrupted Poetess performance, in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy.