1One of the more provocative transatlanticisms in eighteenth-century literature was the emigration of the Man of Feeling from middle-class British drawing rooms to the Great Houses of Britain’s Caribbean sugar colonies. Critics like Moira Ferguson in Subject to Others and Markman Ellis in The Politics of Sensibility have noted the presence of the white man of feeling in abolitionist literature at mid-century, in particular his role as an ameliorating (and supposedly civilizing) force in novels like Sarah Scott’s History of Sir George Ellison and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigne. In these texts, the white man of feeling is identified by the compassion he exercises toward enslaved blacks, whose purpose in such works appears limited to highlighting white sensibility. This tradition holds true in proslavery discourse as well, particularly from mid-century on when slave owners are routinely portrayed by themselves and others as ‘men of sense, or of feeling’ whose ‘private interest depends upon the measure of [their] benevolence’ in treating slaves with compassion.1 Whether produced by anti- or proslavery writers, though, black people are presented in these works as unthreatening but highly necessary objects of white compassion.

2In this essay, however, I discuss two texts of the long eighteenth century in which sentimental conventions—specifically, the display and scrutiny of physical signs—are deployed to create an emergent literary type, what I call the black man of feeling. Aphra Behn’s now canonical novella Oronooko and William Earle’s lesser known Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack both feature black protagonists who counter Restoration and eighteenth-century notions of black insensibility, notions that informed proslavery discourse over the course of the long eighteenth century. Rather than depicting enslaved black men (and women) as unfeeling and/or brutish exotics, these texts— book-ending, as it were, beginning and ending of the long eighteenth century— present those who are ‘awake to feeling’, comparable in many ways to white heroes whose sufferings elicit delicious tears from sympathetic readers. Unlike their white counterparts, however, these men of feeling are unwilling participants in the most brutal institution of eighteenth-century imperialist culture, the West Indian slave trade. Their suffering, in other words, is not limited to the emotional pangs that rend the hearts of typical sentimental heroes, but arises from the material conditions of slavery to be compounded by their passionate sensibilities. Moreover, the emphasis on physical violence in these texts serves as a sharp reminder of the central contradiction of the literature of sensibility: the irresolvable tension between its idealization of abstract qualities like virtue and honor, and its simultaneous dependence on physical signs to mark those qualities.

3To begin, I read Aphra Behn’s 1688 hero not as a full-blown sentimental hero, but as a prototypical man of feeling. Oroonoko’s character owes much to Restoration dramaturgical convention, hardly surprising given Behn’s theatrical background. However, Oroonoko also displays certain physical signs that readers would come to identify by the mid-eighteenth-century with ‘sensibility’, the tendency to be strongly affected by emotional and physiological influences, a susceptibility believed to be rooted in the composition of the nervous system. In his Essays Moral and Political, David Hume described one aspect of this ‘Sensibility to Beauty and Deformity’ as a ‘Delicacy of Taste’ that ‘enlarges the Sphere both of our Happiness and Misery, and makes us sensible of Pains, as well as Pleasures, that escape the rest of Mankind’.2 Such delicacy first appears in Oroonoko’s courtship of Imoinda—whose ‘Looks and Sighs’ as well as beauty inspire his love. The lovers, moreover, converse not in spoken words, but in the ‘silent Language of new-born Love’, punctuated by sighs, tears, and blushes that replace speech. Clearly this language based on nonverbal cues anticipates the sentimental exchanges between heroes and heroines of sensibility that people the texts of later novels and that writers privileged over verbal communication. Mere words, it was argued, could not adequately express feelings recognizable only to ‘the sympathizing Heart’; ‘the Heart that has no Sympathy, is not capable ’of understanding what is ‘only to be felt’, what ‘escape [s] discussion’.3 The language of the heart depicted in sentimental texts, moreover, depended on a sympathetic reader who shared the ability to decipher nonlinguistic cues and who was thereby able to respond appropriately to the text.

4But whereas later sentimental authors could take for granted their readers’ willingness to identify with and fully appreciate the sensibility of their heroes and heroines, Behn must first address the physical fact of Oroonoko’s race and, in effect, subordinate it to more recognizable visceral markers of his delicacy. Early in the text, for example, the reader is assured that ‘’tis a very great Error’ to ‘laugh when one says, A Negro can change Colour: for I’— the narrator—‘have seen ’em as frequently blush, and look pale, and that as visibly as ever I saw in the most beautiful White’.4 Counted among the more privileged physical signs of sensibility, the blush not only signifies Oroonoko’s ability to ‘change Countenance’, that is, to register his sensibility, but it also tends to erase the most visible sign of his difference, his black skin. As with the narrator’s earlier description of Oroonoko—whose ‘Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat’, and whose mouth is ‘the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turn’d Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes’—her observation of his blushes and pale looks overrides the racialized sign of his skin color, even as she attempts to idealize its blackness. Oroonoko’s skin, she assures the reader, is not that ‘brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but... perfect Ebony, or polished Jett’ (8).

5But the text’s attempt to transcend race by emphasizing the European traits that qualify Oroonoko for the reader’s admiration is ultimately thwarted by the plot itself once the scene of action moves from Oroonoko’s African kingdom of Coramantia to the British slave colony of Surinam. Despite Oroonoko’s abstract qualities, the ‘greatness of [his] Soul’ that the narrator and, presumably her readers, value so highly, the idealized code that valorizes them has no currency in a setting defined by the institution of slavery. The text’s idealism, in other words, is undercut by its engagement with the colonial slave trade.

6The consequences of Oroonoko’s new role as defined by slavery are not immediately apparent, however. His royal status and noble bearing continue to distinguish him from the rest of the enslaved black population as does the privileged position he occupies in the text as teller of his own tale. In fact, the stories the narrator claims to receive ‘from the Mouth of the chief Actor in this History’ (1) and the privileged setting in which Oroonoko shares them with the women whose company he prefers to men’s anticipate the sentimental exchanges of history so common in later sentimental texts.5 But even as Oroonoko’s ‘sweet and diverting Conversation’ (7) forms the basis of his sympathetic relationship with the narrator, the terms of that relationship shift as the actualities of his situation are brought home. Tellingly, this shift is announced by the text’s revelation of another physical sign, one far different from the blushes and sighs that formed the silent language of love in the novel’s first half: Imoinda’s pregnancy. Whereas prior to this ‘new Accident ’ the two lovers ‘endured no more of the Slave but the Name’, once Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko realizes that his privileged position will not protect their child from becoming a slave, ‘for all the Breed is theirs to whom the Parents belong’ (45). Under these conditions, Oroonoko insists that the colonists fulfill their earlier promises of liberty, only to be ‘fed... from day to day with... Promises, and delays.... so that he began to suspect [the colonists] of Falshood’ (45). Just as Imoinda’s pregnant body—now valued by the colonists as a (re) producer of future slaves—provokes a reading different from that performed on later sentimental heroines like Clarissa Harlowe, whose physicality is at once idealized and eroticized, so too does Oroonoko’s insistent desire for liberty place him under a different kind of scrutiny than that applied in the Romance of the novella’s first half.6

7No longer read for signs of European delicacy, Oroonoko’s body comes under the watchful gaze of the colonists because ‘his Sullenness gave them some Jealousies of him’ (46). Like the blush in sentimental texts, the ‘sullen’ look of a slave in colonial writings was a potent marker, not of sensibility but of resistance. However it was expressed in literary depictions of enslaved blacks — whether by acts of suicide, like those committed by the ‘ever sullen’ slaves described in James Grainger’s epic poem The Sugar-Cane who ‘lament their [African] home’ and ‘will not, cannot work’ but ‘by suicide their being end’, and the sullen Ebo men described by Edward Long in his History of Jamaica who ‘often make away with themselves, rather than submit to any drudgery’; or by ‘Dumb sullen looks of wo’ that ‘announce despair’ and are accompanied by an anger that glares ‘thro’ dusky features’ as in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce—sullenness acted as an indicator of resistance to and rebellion against bondage.7

8For early modern readers ‘sullen’ not only indicated an obstinate or refractory disposition, but carried racial overtones as well, the term referring in contemporary usage to something of a ‘sombre hue, or of a dark, or dull color’. Within the colonial context of the book’s second half neither Oroonoko’s ‘pale looks’ nor his perfect Ebony skin attracts the narrator’s notice so much as his dark and gloomy countenance, which leads her and the other colonists to observe that ‘he was not as well pleased of late, as he used to be’ (46). Oroonoko’s dissatisfaction, moreover, prompts the narrator to express her dissatisfaction with his behavior in a way that strains their sympathetic bond and, by extension, that between the reader and Oroonko:

[I] told him, I took it ill he shou’d suspect we wou’d break our Words with him.... He made me some Answers that shew’d a doubt in him, which made me ask, what advantage it would be to doubt? It would but give us a fear of him, and possibly compel us to treat him so as I should be very loth [sic] to behold: that is, it might occasion his Confinement. Perhaps this was not so luckily spoke of me, for I perceiv’d he resented that Word, which I strove to soften again in vain.... (46-47)

9The evidence of Oroonoko’s impatience alters both his position and the narrator’s. Like the other colonists with whom she now aligns herself, the narrator no longer thinks it ‘convenient to trust him much out of our view’. Not only does the narrator estrange herself from Oroonoko, but she also plots with the other colonists to prevent Oroonoko from spreading discontent among the slave population—a move that erases the distinctions so laboriously constructed in the text’s earlier scenes by suggesting that Oroonoko, like all slaves, needs to be viewed as a potentially rebellious subject.

10Oroonoko’s rebellious attitude, of course, is also and undeniably a product of his sensibility, of his heightened awareness of the injustice of his situation. When, for example, he reminds his fellow slaves of the ‘Miseries and Ignominies of Slavery’ in order to incite them to rebel, he argues that ‘their Toils and Sufferings’ are fit more ‘for Beasts than Men; [for] senseless Brutes, than human Souls. He told ’em... They suffer’d not like Men, but like Dogs, ... That they had lost the divine Quality of Men, and were become insensible Asses, fit only to bear’ (60). Pointing out the arbitrariness of the system that oppresses them, Oroonoko describes the ‘infamous Whip’ that is indiscriminately applied to all slaves, obedient or not, and the ‘sordid Stripes’ that are inflicted ‘till their Blood trickled from all Parts of their Body; Blood, whose every Drop ought to be revenged with a Life of some of those Tyrants that impose it’ (60-61). Oroonoko’s speech (temporarily) re-humanizes his listeners as they band together to leave the plantations and dishonorable slavery in an attempt to return to Africa. Once the colonists pursue, however, most of the slaves abandon Oroonoko and the pregnant Imoinda to resist capture in a scene that reaffirms Oroonoko’s superiority over his ‘countrymen’ and his status as hero.

11Ironically, however, the delicacy that earlier distinguished Oroonoko from the other slaves is in a way compromised when he is whipped ‘in a most deplorable and inhuman manner, rending the very Flesh from [his] Bones’. Despite the savagery of the punishment, Oroonoko is ‘not perceived to make any Moan, or to alter his Face, only to roll his Eyes... with Fierceness and Indignation;... [H] e pronounced a Woe and Revenge from his Eyes, that darted Fire, which was at once both awful and terrible to behold’ (67). Although whipped like a ‘common Slave’, Oroonoko proves his uncommon heroism by enacting the paradox confronting the black man of feeling who demonstrates sensibility but rejects passivity: here he must assume a kind of insensibility that appears to confirm racist beliefs that blacks could endure greater physical suffering than whites, while simultaneously relying on ‘speaking Eyes’ to convey his passions, as later sentimental heroes do.

12This scene anticipates the stoic silence Oroonoko maintains at his execution. Smoking a pipe ‘as if nothing... touch’d him’, he is castrated, dismembered, and burnt at the stake. Once dead, his body is quartered and distributed among the plantations as a warning sign to other slaves. Despite the narrator’s distress over her hero’s death, the ‘frightful Spectacle [...] of a mangled King’ is presented as the inevitable consequence of Oroonoko’s inability to accept his place in the new world order: an ignoble place he must reject in order to remain a hero, but one he cannot escape since the danger he represents as a rebellious subject outweighs any sympathy for the ‘great Man, worthy of a better Fate’ that Behn’s text ostensibly celebrates. In other words, the novella ultimately participates in the colonial refusal to read the black body in sentimental terms.

13This refusal, I believe, can be linked to the contradictions produced by the rise of early modern imperialism—central to which was the institution of American slavery—and to the emergent and seemingly antithetical Western culture of sensibility that defined those sentimental terms. Whereas in a middle-class European context Hume could distinguish between, for example, ‘Delicacy of Taste’ (a quality ‘much to be desir’d and cultivated’ by his middle-class readers) and ‘Delicacy of Passion’ (one ‘to be lamented, and to be remedied, if possible’), for the black man of feeling operating in a colonial setting dominated by slavery, such distinctions proved impossible to maintain. As discussed above, Oroonoko displays ample signs of delicacy of taste, from his ‘refined Notions’ of love and generosity to his affinity for Western ‘Morals, Language and Science’ that indicate the kind of aesthetic sensibility promoted by Hume. However, colonial slavery generates peculiar ‘Accidents of Life’ for the protagonist that provoke (and demand) responses different from those demanded of more typical heroes and heroines. Oroonoko’s acts of rebellion, for example, tie him more closely to one who possesses the less-privileged ‘Delicacy of Passion’. ‘When a Person, that has this Sensibility of Temper, meets with any Misfortune’, explains Hume, ‘his Sorrow or Resentment takes intire Possession of him.... Men of such lively Passions are apt to be transported beyond all Bounds of Prudence and Discretion, and take false Steps in the Conduct of Life, which are often irretrievable’ (2). Certainly the narrator reads Oroonoko’s final acts of resistance as imprudent and their consequences, as shown by his violent death, are irretrievable. But they also point up the inadequacy of sentimental responsiveness to the spectacularly violent conditions produced by the system of Caribbean slavery.

14The untenable position of the black man of feeling, defined by his dual role as sentimental hero and dangerous rebel, continued to generate textual ambivalence throughout the long eighteenth century. Despite this ambivalence, as a model of black masculinity it persisted, as evidenced by William Earle’s Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack, which in many ways is indebted to Behn’s text. Described on its title page as a ‘series of letters from a resident in Jamaica to his friend in England’, Obi tells the story of a historical figure, Jack Mansong, an escaped slave who, for a brief period in the 1780s, was the ‘terror of Jamaica’.8 Whereas Behn’s fiction helped establish the literary conventions of sensibility, by 1800 when Obi was published, they were fully developed and clearly recognizable. Indeed, from the last decades of the eighteenth century to emancipation, discourses of sensibility were routinely deployed in texts dealing with slavery, particularly abolitionist works like Thomas Days’ The Dying Negro and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Like them, Earle’s novel relies heavily on sentimental tropes, from the narrator’s enthusiastic apostrophe to his rich ‘tear of sensibility’ (133) to numerous tableaus of swooning and fainting bodies overcome with emotion. But like Oroonoko and unlike other sentimental texts, Obi is explicit in its violence. More importantly, although this violence is directly tied to the text’s abolitionist message it does not, as do most abolitionist texts, describe only violence directed at slaves. In other words, Jack is not simply an object of violence and therefore of compassion. Rather he perpetrates violence against Europeans and thus becomes an object of terror.

15In celebrating Jack’s story, then, Earle’s narrator, George Stanford, is forced to reconcile his text’s sentimental, sympathetic, abolitionist portrayal with the anxieties generated by the figure of the rebellious slave. He repeatedly insists, for example, that Jack’s history demands nothing less than rebellion:

Jack was a man! The precepts of his country were instilled into his heart, and he did no wrong. Conscience smote him not; he knew it not. He was not hardened, for he was awake to feeling. He would do no harm to woman, child, or any defenceless being. He was not dead to the ties of nature, for he loved his mother. He was not dishonourable, for he would not lift up his hand against a son of Africa. He loved his countrymen, and the stream of consanguinity flowed warmly to his heart. The men of Europe were his foes, and he would hunt the world to revenge himself on the sanguinary sons of the white cliffs. From this short sketch I would have you say with me:
Jack was a Man!!
Jack was a Hero!!! (133-34)

16In this short sketch, the ambivalence surrounding the black man of feeling is articulated through a preponderance of negatives: he did no wrong; he was not hardened, not dead to the ties of nature. Jack, like Oroonoko, is all too sensible of the injustices of the colonial system and feels them keenly. But that sensibility does not enervate him (as it does sentimental heroes like Laurence Sterne’s Yorick and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple); rather it invigorates him, as seen by his attempts to overturn the system that labels him a criminal. Moreover, Stanford’s repeated assertion that ‘Jack was a man’ differ markedly from the question posed by the kneeling and fetter’d slave depicted on Josiah Wedgewood’s seal for the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, who asks: ‘Am I Not a Man?’

17The admiration expressed for Jack’s masculinity, like the admiration that Behn’s narrator reveals for Oroonoko, however, is tempered with fear, particularly when Stanford must acknowledge that ‘numbers of innocents fell beneath [Jack’s] rapacious sword’ (213). Tutored by his mother Amri ‘how to hate the white man’, after escaping slavery Jack terrorizes the white inhabitants of Jamaica, exacting revenge for the betrayal and enslavement of his African parents, the death of his father during the middle passage, and the execution of his grandfather Feruarue, an obeah practitioner who is burnt alive for having, ‘by hidden means, spirited up the negroes to rebellion’ (83) when Jack was a child. But as explicit as Earle is about the violence of the two deaths—and the punishments that precede them—he gives no details about the form Jack’s vengeance takes and instead ‘passes over the unheard-of-cruelties’ he commits.

18Despite this omission—arising from the text’s desire to please abolitionist readers willing to pity the victims of violence and the competing desire to emphasize Jack’s heroic (hyper) masculinity, which demands action rather than resignation—The History of Three-Fingered Jack relies heavily on the physical display of the feeling and/or suffering body. However, in Earle’s novel there is a counter-emphasis on invisibility, on the spectral as well as the spectacle. This supernatural element is introduced with the very title of the book, Obi. Obi, or obeah, refers both to the practice of African sorcery among the slaves of the West Indies, and to the various artifacts of that practice, like the goat’s horn filled with a magical compound that Jack wears around his neck. The power of obeah men (and women) was often noted by West Indian historians and commentators, who described the fear and respect they commanded among slaves. This power was also evident in the various legislative decrees outlawing the practice of obeah because of its role in slave rebellions.

19Although not, like Feruarue, an obeah practitioner himself, Jack gains the reputation of invincibility because of the powerful obi given him by Bashra, one of the most feared men on the island. Bashra, explains Stanford, is ‘one of those deserted negroes’ who, affected by yaws (a highly contagious skin disease that ravaged slave populations), are ‘compelled to fly from the plantation on which they are engaged, and seek a retreat in the woods, where, unassisted, they are left to die or recover, at the will of Providence.... These are the beings, who, in their seclusion, most frequently practice Obi. The more they are deformed, the more they are venerated, and their charm credited as the strongest’ (136). The marks of disease, in other words, confer and measure the transcendent power of the obeah.

20On the surface the text’s concern with obi appears to run counter to the concerns of sentimental, and even abolitionist, literature. But I suggest that its presence indicates a parallel system of physical signs and displays. Just as the abstract qualities of Jack’s sensibility are manifested physically—by his tears and by his expressive countenance, which reveals the ‘transports of his heart’, for example—Bashra’s wrinkled deformities signal the metaphysical powers of his obi, which Jack wears around his neck for everyone to see. More importantly, as the title of Earle’s novel suggests, Jack’s identity becomes inseparable from it. Earle, like most contemporary West Indian commentators, emphasizes the delusional power of obeah as they affected the black population of the island. However, the very texts that deride the superstition and gullibility of obeah believers express both horror and revulsion. In the scene in which Jack receives the obi from Bashra, for example, Earle footnotes Benjamin Moseley’s Treatise on Sugar, one of the source texts for his novel: ‘I’, says Moseley, ‘saw the Obi of the famous Negro robber, Three-fingered Jack, the terror of Jamaica.... It consisted of a goat’s horn filled with a compound of grave dirt, ashes, the blood of a black cat, and human fat, all mixed into a kind of paste. A cat’s foot, a dried toad, a pig’s tail, a slip of virgin parchment, of kid’s skin, with characters marked in blood on it, were also in his Obiah-bag’ (99n). Like the slaves who ‘tremble at the name of Three-fingered Jack’, Moseley appears impressed by this highly-charged symbol of Jack’s resistance, as is Earle. And the colonial authorities described by Earle, like their historical counterparts, are not dismissive when Amri informs them that her son ‘possesses an Obi, [that] shall sink you all to very nothingness’. ‘They well knew’, confides Stanford, ‘what a panic the science had occasioned for many years among the slaves, and to be thus revived’ by Jack ‘was to fill the Island with fresh terrors’ (138-39).

21The clearest precedent to the terror aroused by Jack and his obeah, both in Earle’s fictional account and in historical actuality was Tacky’s revolt of 1760, in which over 60 whites and 400 to 500 rebels were killed. Among the leaders of this uprising were several obeah practitioners and Tacky himself was believed to possess supernatural powers like those that Bashra bestows upon Jack. The uprising, which began on April 7, 1760, and spread throughout Jamaica, was not completely suppressed until October 1761. Moreover, this ‘victory’, as Michael Craton observes, was not the product of British military or diplomatic prowess, but largely due to the death of Tacky, who was shot by a Scotts Hall Maroon; few of the rebels surrendered unconditionally, and those who were not killed in fighting either committed suicide or were executed or transported.9 Earle’s familiarity with the history of Tacky’s revolt can be seen in his depiction of the execution of Feruarue, whose death resembles accounts of the colonial response to the rebellion: one obeahman was burnt to death, while two others were hung up in iron cages on the Kingston parade and left to starve. More importantly for my discussion, neither Jack’s obi nor his sensibility can save him from the system he resists. Even as the rumours of his invincibility circulate throughout the island, representatives of the Crown issue a royal proclamation commanding all ‘loving subjects’ to ‘pursue and apprehend, or cause to be apprehended, the body of the said Negro-man named Three-fingered Jack’. A resolution published and distributed by the Jamaican Assembly, reprinted by Earle in his novel, is even more specific, offering freedom to any slave who ‘will kill the said Three-fingered Jack, and bring in his head and hand wanting the two fingers’ (225-26)—the fingers he lost in an earlier fight with Quashee, the maroon tracker who eventually kills Jack and claims the reward. Like Oroonoko, Jack Mansong meets a violent end: he is ambushed and killed in a bloody battle with Quashee, his head and three-fingered hand severed from his body with a cutlass and carried in a pail of rum to the colonial authorities.

22In accounts of Tacky’s rebellion as in Earle’s novel the provocation (obeah and insurgency) and response (colonial displays of mutilated slave bodies) represent the simultaneous acceptance and rejection by whites of the power of obeah, and illustrates the various points of intersection between two sign systems, the abstract/supernatural and the physical. On one level, these intersections reveal—as do most sentimental texts—the problematic conditions necessary to the culture of sensibility, the idealization of abstract qualities like virtue and honor and the reliance on physical signs to reveal those qualities. Nowhere is this vexed relationship so powerfully dramatized, however, as in those sentimental texts that feature the rebel slave whose ‘greatness of Soul’ compels him to rail against the material conditions of enslavement. But even as such resistance is expected, because it is too threatening, it must be contained within the Eurocentric cultural codes that work to preserve white hegemony. Thus, whereas sentimental heroes like Fielding’s David Simple, Sterne’s Yorick, and Mackenzie’s Harley die in placid resignation, Oroonoko and Jack Mansong die as violently and spectacularly. The death of the black man of feeling, in other words, is as violent as the system he rebels against, and the body of the black man of feeling—as it simultaneously registers sensibility and rage—becomes a mark: both sign and target of slavery’s brutality and the inadequacy of a sentimental idealistic response to it.