Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration in British women’s letters from India

Gust, Onni

Abstract

This essay focuses on ideas of the body in the published and unpublished letters of four British women – Jane Smart, Jemima Kindersley, Eliza Fay and Catherine Mackintosh – who wrote from India between 1742 and 1812. Situating these elite, British women’s letters in the context of Enlightenment debates about the meaning of bodily difference, I show how their letters engaged with Enlightenment theories about human variation to make sense of the alterity that surrounded them. Unlike published works of philosophy and natural history, letters provide an insight into the ambivalences, uncertainties, and internal contradictions of emergent racial schemas. Focusing on the discourse of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’, I show how these women letter-writers configured their own identities by making meaning out of the bodily differences among the Indian and Anglo-Indian people around them. I argue that although each writer understood human variation in a range of ways, they all conflated feminine virtue and beauty with whiteness, and immorality and ugliness with blackness. In doing so, they contributed to hardening ideas of blackness and whiteness that formed a critical part of emergent ideas of ‘race’.

Citation

Gust, O. (2023). Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration in British women’s letters from India. In S. Goldsmith, S. Haggerty, & K. Harvey (Eds.), Letters and the Body, 1700–1830: Writing and Embodiment (122-142). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003027256

• Online Publication Date: Jul 4, 2023
• Publication Date: Jul 4, 2023
• Deposit Date: Sep 28, 2023
• Pages: 122-142
• Book Title: Letters and the Body, 1700–1830: Writing and Embodiment
• Chapter Number: 6
• ISBN: 9780367461515
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003027256
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/25383324
• Related Public URLs: https://www.routledge.com/Letters-and-the-Body-17001830-Writing-and-Embodiment/Goldsmith-Haggerty-Harvey/p/book/9780367461515
• Contract Date: Feb 1, 2023