The White Female as Effigy and the Black Female as Surrogate in Janet Schaw ’s Journal of a Lady of Quality and Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, debates over the propriety of the institution of slavery in the British Empire were at the forefront of Great Britain’s politics. Numerous cases had been heard in the high courts addressing the status of black individuals—whether free or enslaved—upon British soil. As Deirdre Coleman notes, the “British public’s fascination with complexion can be seen as symptomatic of the period’s fascination with a new identity and status for Afro-Britons following Lord Mansfield’s decision in the Somerset case (1772)” (169). Despite the fact that the institution of slavery and its by-products of material wealth and goods pervaded virtually all British social strata in some form or fashion, abolitionist efforts, especially among women, were on the rise. White females throughout the empire were becoming ever more aware of their complicity in the perpetuation of this inhumane system. As a means of elucidating the way the reality of Caribbean slavery permeated all areas of British society, it proves useful to look at the ways Janet Schaw and Jane Austen, two white female authors of the period, represented—or failed to overtly represent—within their writing the institution of slavery and particularly its psychological and physical effects on white females. From 1774–1776, Schaw, a wealthy, middle-aged, white, Scottish woman, sailed from Scotland to the British West Indies and North Carolina to visit her brothers and their families who had relocated to the New World. During her travels, she penned letters to a female friend of like social standing in which she described her journey. These letters were published posthumously as Journal of A Lady of Quality from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774–1776.1 Four decades after Schaw privately described her adventure, Austen published Mansfield Park, the plot of which centers around an English baronet, who owns property in Antigua, and his family in England. Employing Joseph Roach’s concept of the human effigy as presented in “Echoes in the Bone,” the second chapter of his book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, where he posits that “In an economy of slave-