THE BLACKENING OF HAPPINESS

Our attention to happiness in The Woman of Colour and Belle cannot be unfixed from negotiations of “erotic autonomy.” For M. Jacqui Alexander, from whom we draw this concept, erotic autonomy “signals danger to the heterosexual family and to the nation” and “brings with it the potential of undoing the nation entirely, a possible charge of irresponsible citizenship, or no responsibility at all.”¹⁴ Alexander’s erotic autonomy concatenates with Audre Lorde’s imagining of the erotic to cement community, endow capacities of feeling and joy, and mobilize a recognized self-empowerment that refuses to be tyrannized.¹⁵ With Alexander and Lorde as central interlocutors, we account for how what we call “unsettling happiness” participates in reframing the eighteenth-century novel’s commitment to a marriage plot that is exclusively about white hetero-domesticity. Unsettling happiness identifies how characters read as Black women endure and engender new parameters for understanding happiness in the long eighteenth century.

We see happiness as affect, a capacious term that signifies how emotion, feeling, and intersubjectivity are represented and simultaneously socialized and politicized. This chapter, in turn, converses with Nour Afara’s and M. A. Miller’s preceding chapters to offer the study of affect as one that can participate in anticolonial praxes of unsettling. Negative affects and their attendant (re)actions have garnered significant attention, for example, from Lorde, Sianne Ngai, Cathy Park Hong, and Sue J. Kim, and, in extension, we are interested in the myriad affective components of happiness, which are not strictly positive or utopian.¹⁶ Examining happiness as racialized, specifically Black or mixed-race, affect is a means to apprehend diverse emotionality that remains inextricably linked to politicized, intersectional identities.

Tyrone S. Palmer susses out the relationship between theories of Blackness and affect and observes that they are uneasy bedfellows that render Black affect an “unthinkability” given Blackness’s ostracism, at best, and expungement, at worst, alongside structures of onto-epistemological humanity.¹⁷ By reading for happiness as a Blackened affect within The Woman of Colour and Belle, we transhistorically unsettle happiness and refuse to accept such an affective metric as cursory, innocent, or universal. The promise of happiness, which in its concomitance with a white supremacy that insidiously persists today and is inherited from its eighteenth-century mobilization (see, for example, The Declaration of Independence or Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man), encodes a colonial politics dead set on maintaining differential affects and acceptability politics. We take seriously the emancipatory potential of racialized affect, epitomized here by happiness, to reject projections and totalizing appeals to happiness that only resituate supremacist values.¹⁸

The Blackening of happiness centralizes the experiences of mixed-race women who are read as Black, but it does not minimize how unsettling happiness might be lionized by other global majority identities. We employ Blackening in concert with Black feminist and queer of color traditions that detail how Blackness becomes constructed as a social index. In The Woman of Colour, Blackening accounts for the novel’s shifting contours of racial identification and the ways in which Olivia’s color and gender abut, confirm, and reject how she is read by other characters.¹⁹ Like Palmer, who has suggested that Black affect may be an impossibility that demarcates how Blackness as nonbeing (because of an enduring historio-socio-cultural anti-Blackness) is likewise excluded from frameworks of affect and emotion, we read the novel’s prescription of Olivia’s hetero-domestic happiness as an impossibility because she agentively refuses its normative structures of happiness.²⁰

To experience the Blackening of happiness in The Woman of Colour is to understand a differential, racialized affect that Olivia’s experience might uncover and to then imagine how the novel’s conclusive remarks on happiness can remake her encounters with domestic happiness. In a powerful farewell speech to Augustus, Olivia informs him that she will abjure him, for both of their sakes, and cites the Bible, “look[ing] forwards to that eternally happy state where there is neither ‘marrying nor giving in marriage.’ ”²¹ That Olivia returns to Jamaica (the site of her birth and her mother’s enslavement) at the novel’s end and is not affixed to any paternalist entity suggests that the Blackening of happiness accounts for racialized affects that are freighted with histories of enslavement, patriarchal ghosts, and the prospect of singledom. In Rebecca Anne Barr’s words, “The open-ended conclusion of The Woman of Colour confronts readers with the insufficiency of white sentiment to provide justice or to effect meaningful change.”²² The failures of white sentiment and the resulting differential affects endow Olivia with an erotic autonomy that successfully dislocates her from the hetero-domestic marriage plot.

Blackening happiness is, de facto, a political gesture; it recognizes how subaltern identities can forge their own pathways to happiness that are in conversation with but different than the whitewashed monolith. Xine Yao has recently turned to the prospect of unfeeling to uncover a dissident literary politics. Yao heralds disaffection to name and disavow the monolith and projection of white feelings on all persons and, within the long nineteenth century to which Yao turns, rejects whitewashed appeals to sentimentality.²³ The conceptual framework we pioneer here, like Yao’s, honors the work that Black feminist and queer intellectuals like Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, Jennifer Morgan, Jessica Marie Johnson, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Imani Perry have spearheaded by identifying how African diasporic and Black bodies remain, in perpetuity, outside of the realms of white acceptability.²⁴ Hortense Spillers’s Black vestibularity exemplifies this invocation: “The black person mirrored for the society around her what a human being was not.”²⁵ Systems of enslavement, which are channeled by The Woman of Colour and Belle, keep racialized bodies in abeyance from white acceptable modes of gender, sexuality, affect, and embodiment. As Yao succinctly prognosticates, “affect studies has a race problem” that Lauren Guilmette typifies as the “coloniality of the affects” and Michalinos Zembylas understands as the “invalidation of emotional expressions of peoples from non-White racialized groups.”²⁶ The Blackening of happiness recognizes these differential politics and upholds these differences to imagine alternative opportunities for politics, being, and affect.

COLORING CONTINGENT HAPPINESS

As The Woman of Colour opens, Olivia is on a ship bearing her northward to England. She contemplates the prospects dictated by her father’s will: marrying the cousin to whom she is affianced, Augustus Merton, or taking the risk of depending solely on his brother and sister-in-law. Despite the paternalism of her father that places her in this uneasy predicament, Olivia constantly worries for Augustus’s happiness and prioritizes it over her own. In Olivia’s efforts to honor her father’s “guardian spirit,” her happiness hinges on the will, desire, and happiness of paternalistic others.²⁷ Even with her £60,000 dowry, Olivia’s happiness remains contingent on a masculine protectorate that assures readers that a woman’s happiness relies on being shuttled from father to husband.

The novel, as mentioned, is organized as a series of letters, including dense packets sent by Olivia to Mrs. Milbanke in Jamaica and a few interpolated letters by Augustus and his family. Olivia’s letters often emerge in the novel as interrupted and continued narratives extended over several days and sent to Mrs. Milbanke in sheafs. At the close of her first epistle, Olivia questions why she must abandon Mrs. Milbanke in search of her cousin, only to quickly check this glimmer of authentic feeling by reminding herself that “it was the will of him who always studied the happiness of his child.”²⁸ The italicized “him” posthumously deifies her father, who arbitrates her past, present, and future. In “stud[ying] the happiness of his child,” Mr. Fairfield “cultivated” the best possible odds for Olivia’s happiness, attempting to insert her into a hetero-domestic marriage plot for which she is ill-fitted.²⁹ Throughout the first volume, Olivia articulates and puppets genres of contingent happiness—indeed, Ahmed identifies the etymologies of “contingent” and “happiness” as interwoven—that are predicated on and whitewashed by the eighteenth-century domestic novel.³⁰ Yet, Olivia’s placement within the epistolary novel ultimately allows her to upend the allegiances of the genre’s form by remaining unmarried at the novel’s end.

Whereas the introductory epistle locates Olivia’s happiness within the confines of her father’s wishes, at the start of the second sheaf of letters—with Olivia now introduced, albeit tumultuously, to the Mertons and married to Augustus—this paternalistic, contingent happiness transfers to Augustus. To Mrs. Milbanke, Olivia writes, “Yet, believe me, my beloved friend, I am happy; and the attention and indulgence of my husband exceeds my highest expectations.—And yet, I had formed high expectations of the character of Augustus Merton (Fairfield he is now become). If I can be instrumental to his happiness, I shall have reason to bless my father for my happy lot.”³¹ It is impossible to disregard the narrative similitude that opens the first and second packets of epistles. In the substitutive family romance of the second one, Augustus assumes the role of the father, even in name, likeness, and title (the £60,000 dowry is now his).³² That Augustus adopts the surname Fairfield upon marriage to Olivia demonstrates a further enlargement of the patriarchal will (and surrogacy), which positions him also as an enslaver in Jamaica (and retroactively positions Olivia’s mother, who is both his mother-in-law and aunt, as defunct property). The repeated use of an italicized “his” echoes the deification of the father, and like the father who bestows happiness on Olivia, readers understand Augustus as a similar, if not identical, paternal figure on whom Olivia’s happiness depends. The affirmation of “I am happy” accords a socialized statement in which the expectation of happiness accompanies marital bliss and “brutal,” as Barr notes, paternalistic oversight.³³ Olivia’s announcement performs a narrative conformity that is only short-lived.

Olivia’s private declaration of her instrumentality to Augustus’s happiness defines her happiness as a mixed-race woman as something that must be tokenized. “Token” here works in multitudes: first, etymologically, a token is a didactic sign that serves for instruction. Olivia as the hyperattentive wife instructs others how to achieve domestic bliss (which is upturned shortly after, and so the subversion of this domestic bliss remains a viable reading too) and thereby becomes a token of happiness for both readers’ and Augustus’s narcissistic pleasures. Second, the etymology of “token” likewise realizes an exchangeable good enfolded in commodification. Exogamy traditionally requires the exchange of women to institute social harmony and renders Olivia’s dowry and marriage to Augustus as primarily transactional in nature. Unbeknownst to readers in volume one, Augustus struggles to please his own father (paternalistic, contingent happiness returns) as he navigates the marriage economy, and Olivia assumes the form of his “political currency,” to borrow from Frank Wilderson, or, a token whose acceptance elevates Augustus’s station.³⁴ “Token” can, furthermore, be read alongside affective vertices in that it acknowledges how Augustus’s “attention” and “indulgence,” demonstrating his satisfaction, are the means by which Olivia’s happiness is forged. This exchange of emotion holds captive Olivia’s happiness, binding it to the economy of the marriage plot in which she is traded. Finally, in that Olivia’s contingent happiness is instrumental to her husband’s, we bear witness to a more contemporary understanding of tokenization in which she becomes a racialized token rent by her husband’s and father’s desires for domestic stability.

The confirmation of domestic stability is further verified by Olivia when she notes in a subsequent letter, “I have got a fine Utopian scheme of domestic happiness in my head, and the country must be the birth-place of it.”³⁵ What follows Olivia’s admission is a list of duties, avocations, and outings that can subtend her “felicity,” and yet, the utopianism of her claim foreshadows the quick stillbirth of her scheme. We invoke stillbirth in correspondence with Olivia’s identification of the country as a primal scene of domestic happiness (later reinforced by Dido’s relationship with John in Belle), which prematurely perishes because of Augustus’s deceit and Olivia’s consequent rejection of their marriage. While utopianism incites fanciful and imaginative pleasures, its etymology reminds us that it is literally (and literarily) a “no/n place” and so too must be Olivia’s domestic happiness. Kerry Sinanan reads The Woman of Colour’s utopianism to situate how “the power of the novel, then, lies in the promise it holds to reach forward into a more multicultural future in which gender and race might not be such oppressive structures as they are in 1808.”³⁶ Our reading, however, like Kristina Huang’s and Jennifer Reed’s, considers utopianisms foreclosed rather than liberated: Olivia’s aspirations of domestic happiness are utopian in that they are stillborn and never fully realized because she ultimately rejects their immuring logic.³⁷ The Woman of Colour creates a path of agency for Olivia that is rarely allowed Black and mixed-race women in the novel of sentiment.

Eighteenth-century narrative domesticity recurrently corresponds with visions of the country as the paradigmatic site of conjugality. In The Woman of Colour, however, the country is not so much an originary point of connubial happiness as a geography that homes domestic happiness’s failures. Indeed, Dido, Olivia’s enslaved attendant (not to be confused with the Dido of Belle) wistfully parallels the country to the Fairfield plantation as she and Olivia describe their distaste for London life, foreshadowing the racism and deceit they experience in their idyllic abode. By figuring the country as the site of domestic happiness, Olivia aligns her own domestic happiness (and its contingency on an honest and good-intentioned husband/father) with the marriage plots that have preceded The Woman of Colour. In reading volumes one and two, distinct yet coordinated epistolary packets, we witness how the first volume consolidates the utopian imaginary of the hetero-domestic marriage plot, and the second volume revamps it.

Curiously, Olivia concludes the continuation of her epistle with a question rather than a statement—by our account, the only time this happens in the entire novel.³⁸ Upon thanking the Almighty as “bestower of such felicity,” Olivia concludes,

“Say, dear madam, is such a plan likely to be realized by your

OLIVIA FAIRFIELD?”³⁹

Olivia’s genre-breaking enjambed signature furthermore calls into question the utopianism of domestic felicity. The question mark functions as an epistolary cliffhanger and undermines the narrative of domestic happiness in which Olivia feels interpolated. The interrogative likewise pinpoints Olivia’s questioning of identity, her own as well as that of the others, such as Augustus, who assume the Fairfield surname as proprietary exchange. Political affects that undercut the law of the father scaffold the deployment of the question mark here. Jennifer DeVere Brody magnifies punctuation to argue that grammatical performances animate an archive of feeling that politicizes aesthetics and induces layers of textual embodiment.⁴⁰ Olivia’s question mark follows suit in that it espouses ways of being and reading that react to and fundamentally question the marriage plot.

OLIVIA’S BLACKENED HAPPINESS

At the conclusion of volume one, Olivia engineers a new metric of happiness that serves as a guiding framework for the remainder of the novel. Olivia writes, “Happy is it, when, with no overstrained fastidiousness, we can consent to take the world as we find it, when we endeavour to mend where it lies in our power, and firmly resolve not to make it worse by our example.”⁴¹ Her prophetic prose, while bordering on self-flagellatory, sparks a new design for happiness: a Blackened happiness reflective of her experiences as a mixed-race woman rather than beholden to generic (in terms of the novel as genre and with regard to the word genre’s etymological root, from which we also obtain “gender”) conventions that have so far restrained happiness’s possibilities. By consenting “to take the world as we find it,” Olivia telegraphs a shift in the contingent and formulaic experiences of happiness that colored her journey through volume one. Accepting the world as she experiences it—in a few short letters, she divulges to Mrs. Milbanke that with Augustus outed, she is now “your late happy Olivia”—our heroine inspires modes of reading happinesses otherwise.⁴²

Olivia discloses that Augustus had been clandestinely wed to Angelina (who has also borne him a child) and thus finds herself dependent on Mr. George Merton, Augustus’s brother. Such calamity, superficially, throws Olivia back into her precarious position as a young, unmarried (widowed or falsely married) mixed-race woman who relies on paternalistic guardianship. However, Olivia rejects this precarity and alchemizes her autonomy from the ashes of misfortune. As Huggins notes, “By claiming the status of widowed wife at the end of the novel, Olivia … use[s] this ambivalent position to advance [her] financial and social freedom.”⁴³ In attempting to reconcile her relationship with Augustus and Angelina, Olivia uses her newfound “mobility and freedom of the idealized, self-possessed individual” to gift Angelina “the jewels which had been presented to me on my marriage by Mr. Merton,” and twice wishes Augustus happiness:⁴⁴ “I feel not the slightest spark of resentment towards you; that I will fervently beseech Heaven for your future happiness, and pray that you may forget that there exists such a being as myself!” and “May heaven protect, and bless you all! May my fervent prayers be heard for your happiness!”⁴⁵ While Augustus identifies these martyr-like gestures as “unexampled magnanimity,” Olivia reveals two interconnected realizations: first, that happiness derives from her exemplary nature, as in the passage that concludes volume one, and second, that the happiness she wishes Augustus, Angelina, and their son (also Augustus) is unavailable and undesirable to her.⁴⁶ Such happiness is unwanted by Olivia because she does not wish to occupy “the role of plunderer,” as Sinanan suggests.⁴⁷ If in the previous packets of epistles, Olivia characterizes a genre of happiness that upholds domesticity, then in wishing the Mertons happiness, she suggests that the whitewashing of domestic felicity is something achievable to them: they are the target audience and vehicles for apprehending a domestic happiness bequeathed by the eighteenth-century marriage plot.

Olivia, in turn, proposes a novel framework of happiness that accounts for her experience as a mixed-race woman and rejects the hetero-domestic, whitewashed marriage plot. The penultimate epistle announces Olivia’s return to Jamaica to reunite with Mrs. Milbanke. The former writes:

YES! My beloved friend, I am coming to you. I wait but for you to suggest a scheme which my heart has long anticipated. Your letter is arrived and Dido is already packing up with avidity. We will revisit Jamaica. I shall come back to the scenes of my infantine happiness–of my youthful tranquility. I shall again zealously engage myself in ameliorating the situation, in instructing the minds–in mending the morals of our poor blacks. I shall again enjoy the society of my dear Mrs. Milbanke–I shall forget the lapse of time which has occurred since I parted from her, and shall again be happy! Eager to be with you once more, I almost count the tardy minutes as they move along.⁴⁸

Happiness appears twice here: first in an appeal to Jamaica, and second in the announcement of a reunion with Mrs. Milbanke. We focus on the former here.⁴⁹ Olivia identifies Jamaica as the site of “infantine happiness,” which may superficially be read as a sort of regression. This happiness also seems bound up in the “zealous” engagement with ameliorating the conditions of “our poor blacks.” Such a remark ostensibly aligns Olivia’s happiness with patrimonial modes that characterize volume one. While Olivia is not a faultless character (see the lack of detail about Dido’s uncertain manumission, for instance⁵⁰), to think of her happiness as regressive or ameliorationist, as Natalie Zacek contends, is to denounce both her progression as a character and her abolitionist sentiments throughout the novel. Zacek explains that the ameliorationist argument “proposed that, if planters could no longer purchase new labourers via the transatlantic slave trade, they would have to treat those they possessed with greater care.”⁵¹ Instead, understanding Jamaica as a place of Olivia’s alternative happiness (which she articulates in the first epistle)⁵² is to imagine how it embodies a site of transgressive Black geography, as Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods conceive of it, in which we “see place as the location of co-operation, stewardship, and social justice rather than just sites to be dominated, enclosed, commodified, exploited, and segregated.”⁵³

To read the return to Jamaica as a Black geography that might endow Blackened happiness, we recognize, is challenging because it requires that we juggle multiple readings of the novel and Olivia’s character at once alongside ongoing legacies of enslavement that cannot be romanticized. For Huggins, “Olivia’s return to Jamaica at the end of the novel can be read as an empowering move that rejects the patriarchal and imperialist powers that have dominated her life up until this point.”⁵⁴ We also recognize that Olivia will continue to benefit from her father’s wealth, potentially supporting Zacek’s contention that Olivia follows the ameliorationist argument. The novel’s ending makes murky Olivia’s complicity with enslavement, and this is made all the more uncertain by her precarious position as a woman of color and the inevitable limits of her agency therefrom. The promise of Jamaica for Olivia is, without question, one bound up in these convoluted textures, and while we are mindful of the shortcomings of her Edenic rhetoric, what remains is an opportunity for Olivia to leave England and the novel unmarried, on her own terms.

The Woman of Colour’s domestic marriage plot showcases generic innovation in which the return to Jamaica, as Black geography, “revisits” an experience of happiness in which Olivia is not pawned off as a transactional token to accede to the marriage plot. The concluding “Dialogue between the Editor and a Friend” outwardly rejects this rhetorical and material transaction, as Olivia does when she refuses a second marriage proposal by the milquetoast Honeywood. When the Friend questions why “you have not rewarded Olivia even with the usual need of virtue–a husband!,” the Editor counters, “Virtue, like Olivia Fairfield’s, may truly be said to be its own reward.”⁵⁵ Through her pursuit of a Blackened happiness, Olivia models experiences of happiness that are denuded from a marriage plot that primarily commodifies women.

BELLE AS FILMIC AFTERLIFE

This section turns to Amma Asante’s Belle (2013) as a future vision of The Woman of Colour that recasts some of the racialized affective tropes we have so far charted. Belle is not a filmic adaptation of The Woman of Colour; we consider it a filmic afterlife that networks racialized affects that are at once encoded and rewired given the book and film’s historical, audience, and generic differences. Theorizing this afterlife is a means to access myriad racial temporalities bound up in histories of enslavement—efforts that have been pioneered by Saidiya Hartman and Alys Eve Weinbaum.⁵⁶ A period piece derived from Misan Sagay’s screenplay, Belle imagines how the unsettling of happiness manifests through characters read as mixed-race or Black women in contemporary film.

Although the film conceptualizes Dido’s unhappiness through the lack of belonging, its solution to her negative affect is to funnel her through the marriage economy. While the romantic tropes of eighteenth-century British aristocracy might be more digestible to modern audiences than the aristocracy’s contributions to the slave trade, The Woman of Colour’s attention to geographies of happiness (and retreat) for mixed-race women primes similar innovation in film. Dido Elizabeth Belle’s happiness channeled through patriarchal hetero-domesticity solidifies the supremacy of the marriage plot and contributes to the collective discouragement of alternative Blackened happinesses for mixed-race women. We magnify Dido’s failed and successful marriage proposals to better ascertain how filmic appeals to the marriage plot participate in racialized affects and are enmeshed with invocations of happiness.

As Dido (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) comes of age, she forges her way into circles that educate her about the slave trade and the 1781 murder of enslaved west Africans en route to Jamaica aboard the Zong. Whereas The Woman of Colour downplays West Indian enslavement, Belle centralizes the slave trade from the vantage point of England. Dido’s search for happiness—that is, in pursuit of erotic autonomy—radicalizes and effectively makes her a token of exchange for the debate leading up to the hearing on the Zong, presided over by her uncle, Lord Mansfield, chief justice of England (Tom Wilkinson). Her presence as a mixed-race woman in his household arouses suspicions of bias. She also serves as the mode of transport through which Lord Mansfield’s private documents on the case are communicated to her romantic interest, fellow abolitionist John Davinier, and the “radicals” advocating for the indictment of the shipping syndicate. Dido exists as a strategic pawn who triangulates political, romantic, and social spheres. She finds conclusive happiness as Davinier’s wife, yet only after she nearly falls victim to a condescending marriage offer by Oliver Ashford (James Norton), who is willing to “forgive” her melanin in pursuit of her dowry, a trope implicitly installed by The Woman of Colour. In this way, both Dido Elizabeth Belle and Olivia Fairfield narrowly escape the pitfalls of undesirable heteronormative marriage, but their eventual outcomes of happiness diverge.

While the word “happiness” and its semantic associations litter The Woman of Colour, they are noticeably absent from Belle, the word appearing only five times in the screenplay⁵⁷ and twice in the movie itself. Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson) voices both filmic utterances, underlining the racio-sexual tensions fraught in the Mansfields’ reluctance to allow Dido sexual autonomy by participating in the same marriage economy and courtship rituals as her white cousin, Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon). Before accepting an abrupt proposal by Oliver, Dido wavers under his pleading stare as her familial reputation, dowry, and distaste for his “forgiving” attitude toward her converge in a storm of conflicting emotions, resonating with Palmer’s statement that “incorporation into ‘citizenship’ and ‘personhood’ is predicated on a denial of the past—a disavowal of blackness itself.”⁵⁸ Dido, eager to marry and avoid a life of solitary housekeeping, silently realizes that her ticket to “citizenship” and “personhood” in aristocratic English society is to refuse her own Blackness alongside a man who denies it. She later proudly claims her maternal heritage, but in this pivotal moment, she hesitates because she does not fit the stereotypical molds of whiteness and femininity that characterize the ideal Georgian aristocratic wife. By contrast, Olivia avows her love for her mother and the gift of melanin from the novel’s start.

As the subject of a marital request from a white man who, along with her entire family, expects her to comply, Dido is “trapped in [an] interaction ritua[l] in which [she has] little power” and “experience[s] negative emotional energy, such as fear, anxiety, shame, and guilt,” as Ulla Berg and Ana Ramos-Zayas posit.⁵⁹ Emotional energy opens up a cornucopia of negative feelings to induce Dido’s “self-protective” interiority that, as Bynum contends, communicates “what and who matters” to her.⁶⁰ Some of her fear and anxiety undoubtedly stem from her knowledge that if she refuses the hand of the “only gentleman that will consider [her],” she will be forced to assume Lady Mary’s (Penelope Wilton) position of housekeeper at Kenwood, possessing the keys to the closed doors of the home, yet unmarried and longing for marriage forevermore.⁶¹ In other words, the alternative for Dido is to possess the keys to the house but not domestic happiness. Dido feels the prospective familial shame and guilt that would accompany her rejection of Oliver’s hand; to comport herself to Oliver’s happiness would signify a familial obligation that, like Olivia’s in The Woman of Colour, is contingent on paternalism. The film renders genres of happiness through obligations to familial and social structures from which Dido is precariously sidelined.

Dido experiences affect differently than her white counterparts, thereby reifying how “White European bourgeois understandings of affect” have “been used to justify racialization.”⁶² Her reaction to Oliver’s proposal is scrutinized, and her “Black affect becomes irrelevant and powerless as a result of colonial violence.”⁶³ Her feelings are dictated by Lady Mansfield, recasting the contingent happiness of the father as the contingent happiness of the surrogate white mother. Dido is powerless in the Georgian marriage economy, and her acquiescence to Oliver’s proposal is both expected and necessary to foster a future prescribed, whitewashed happiness that is seen as her sole opportunity to avoid domestic work.

This contingency wields a trifold conditionality in what Ahmed calls “conditional happiness,” which embodies the widely accepted form of happiness striven for today.⁶⁴ Its stipulations are: first, such a happiness must implicate a “relationship of care and reciprocity,” and although Dido’s engagement to Oliver may give all appearances of fulfilling such an aspiration, the fact remains that Lord Ashford purchases Oliver a commission in the navy, indicating his eventual departure from Dido.⁶⁵ The bleeding ink of paternalism stains this marriage contract. It not only signals a similar career from which Dido’s father never returns but also means that Oliver will not be available to care for Dido should she need security, protection, and a caretaker of her physical health as the Mansfields believe she will. A second stipulation is that Dido’s reaction to Oliver’s offer and her subsequent questioning of Lady Mansfield and the prudence of her decision render the marriage contract’s “terms of conditionality unequal.”⁶⁶ The happiness of others precedes Dido’s, as it does for Olivia in The Woman of Colour. Third, Oliver introduces himself to Dido in this scene by subtly imploring her to express her reciprocated happiness in accepting his hand in marriage, indicating that his happiness is contingent on her consent. Dido is trapped in a web of conditionality in which she “can only be happy if they are happy.”⁶⁷

Dido knows that declining Oliver’s hand jeopardizes her social survival, for “the inability or refusal to engage in ‘proper’ affective performances often becomes a mark of social marginalization,” as Analiese Richard recognizes, especially in Dido’s constant state of hypervisibility as the sole (by the film’s purview) mixed-race woman in the English aristocracy.⁶⁸ “I cannot,” she begins, hesitating, “think of anything … more wonderful!”⁶⁹ Dido’s consent becomes an affective performance; she ventriloquizes white economies of affect. In the face of her whitewashed world, Dido’s Blackness, as Palmer might say, “overdetermines everything, rendering even ‘happiness’ illegible.”⁷⁰ The compound emotions and considerations she processes before her acceptance make happiness more unintelligible for her, and Dido ultimately transitions into a requisite heteronormativity.

SPATIAL HAPPINESSES

In contradiction to Dido’s forged happiness with Oliver, ensuing scenes of authentic happiness shared between Dido and John Davinier are notably set outdoors, where they freely walk the streets of London. Asante’s choice subtly transmits to viewers how Blackened happiness is a feeling born at the intersection of love, nature, and agency. Dido actively seeks pleasure in this way, “insist[ing] on [her] presence” in a tumultuous, racist political economy and making real the “very possibility of a deep, deep joy.”⁷¹ For Bynum, reading Black interiorities requires reading for pleasure and joy because “there is no way to truly read individual suffering without also asking questions about pleasure.”⁷² In their strolls, John visibly shares Dido’s happiness, and their interactions are much less rigid than the ones dictated by courtship etiquette. John welcomes Dido into masculinized circles of law, and as the film mounts to its climax in the courtroom, Dido becomes increasingly confident in discussing the Zong case and her position in Georgian society with Lord Mansfield. In an admittedly, though reframed, paternalistic fashion, John introduces Dido to the world from which Lord Mansfield previously sheltered her.⁷³

The standard marriage economy underserves Dido’s needs, just as it does for Olivia, and John is willing to diverge from etiquette norms to deliver himself and Dido toward, by the film’s purview, mutual happiness. His public pronouncement of his love for Dido following their clandestine liaisons paves the road to marriage. Augustus, quite oppositely, never publicly proclaims his affection for Olivia in this fashion. Olivia is aware, as Kathleen Lubey stresses, that marriage “does not guarantee affection and that her primary function is to transfer capital.”⁷⁴ Instead, Olivia’s aspirations to please Augustus, as well as her desire for confidence, dominate her utopic descriptions of happiness, even as he conceals secrets.

Charting these contrasts reveals that John and Augustus’s comparative trustworthiness ultimately determines the fate of their relationships. Dido cannot trust Oliver to embrace her fully, so John takes his place; Olivia, however, can trust neither Augustus nor Honeywood to satisfy her. Dido and Olivia together unsettle the white economies of affect by demanding trust in environments that are inherently hostile to them. As in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of abolition geography, Dido and Olivia “make freedom provisionally, imperatively, as they imagine home against … racial capitalism.”⁷⁵ Trusting the men with whom they choose to bond to promote their best interests is an indispensable part of that liberation. Both the pursuit of a desirable marriage (for Dido) and the decision to remain unmarried (as Olivia models) represent crosshatched representations of abolitionist Black geographies subversively located within the borders of colonization (at home and abroad).

When publicizing the film, Sagay wrote, “From the start I avoided all the clichés, like the black character who earns the acceptance of the white characters through superhuman feats of generosity and saintlike goodness.”⁷⁶ We cannot help but notice how Sagay’s statement aligns with the characterization of Olivia Fairfield; yet, Olivia builds on her innate goodness in an autonomous search for Blackened happiness away from the domestic sphere of the hetero-domestic marriage plot. Belle, however, makes a conscious choice to finalize happiness within the structures of heteronormative marriage to a white man. This romantic ending parallels—rather than diverges from—the romantic ideals of the Georgian era. Sagay’s desire to “write a love story” is translated by Asante as a commitment to the marriage plot.⁷⁷ Love and marriage (and the happiness they invoke) are inextricably sutured. Our concern remains though: the film’s perpetuation of white, heteronormative ideals of happiness, that Olivia outwardly rejects in The Woman of Colour, perhaps speaks to the film’s success in that such a clichéd ending is marketable to film-going audiences invested in such ideals.⁷⁸ Olivia’s story, on the other hand, “end[s] with freedom—from her father’s will, English society, financial constraint, marriage, and motherhood—freedom to be active.”⁷⁹ Assuredly, Dido’s happily-ever-after is free from financial constraint, but all of the aforementioned factors tug at her freedom in ways that Olivia disavows.

Although we acknowledge that Dido may have fewer geographies of retreat than Olivia, we still wonder: What might it mean to audiences if Dido refuses to condone the happinesses spoon-fed her and instead paths, to return to Ahmed’s creative denominalization discussed in the introduction, alongside Olivia? In what ways do our continued commitments to the marriage plot suggest that refusals to abide are ostensibly tragic in their own right? Can we instead read against the grain to view Belle as a tragedy of happiness, its contingencies, and our collective complicities in creating an echo chamber constructed by white economies of affect? How might we continue to imagine how regimes of affect and race are mutually constitutive?

To consider racialized affects and their correspondence with the hetero-domestic marriage plot is to refuse the whitewashed universality of happiness, which in its continued circulation is tantamount to coerced bootstrapping. What we have demonstrated here is that mixed-race women, who are read as Black, imagine alternative horizons for happiness that do not require their subjugation to domesticity. Olivia and Dido pioneer modes of Blackened happiness that are subversive, non-reductive, and non-commodifiable. How can we reduce the appeals to totalizing emotionality to better account for situated knowledges? Through unsettling happiness, we wish to rectify the whitewashed monolith of universal affects to witness other horizons that honor women of color in the eighteenth century and beyond.

NOTES

1. 1. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 55.

2. 2. Flavio Gregori, “Happiness (and Unhappiness) in Eighteenth-Century English Literature,” English Literature 2, no. 1 (July 2015): 5–16 (7).

3. 3. Melissa Adams-Campbell, New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 22–23.

4. 4. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Linda Bree (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 198.

5. 5. Adams-Campbell, New World Courtships, 4.

6. 6. Jeremy Bentham, Fragment on Government (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891), 93.

7. 7. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 55.

8. 8. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 12.

9. 9. Adams-Campbell, New World Courtships, 7.

10. 10. Tara A. Bynum, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023), 14.

11. 11. Scholars debate the attribution of the 1779 painting. Recent forensic and archival research conducted for BBC’s Fake or Fortune series 7, episode 4, “A Double Whoddunit,” suggests that Johann Zoffany was not the painter, as the frame label suggests, but rather David Martin. For a history of the portrait, see Jennifer Germann, “ ‘Other Women Were Present’: Seeing Black Women in Georgian London,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54, no. 3 (Spring 2021): 535–554.

12. 12. The portrait of the real-life Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Elizabeth Murray inspired Belle screenwriter Misan Sagay, who observed it at Scotland’s Scone Palace in 2004. It is speculated that the author of The Woman of Colour drew inspiration from this painting too.

13. 13. Sofia Prado Huggins, “Reading Slantwise: Dido in The Woman of Colour (1808),” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 1 (Winter 2023): 27–42 (28).

14. 14. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 22–23.

15. 15. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).

16. 16. Lorde, Sister Outsider; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2021); Sue J. Kim, On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).

17. 17. Tyrone S. Palmer, “ ‘What’s More than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 31–56 (33).

18. 18. Ulla Berg and Ana Ramos-Zayas contend that race cannot be delinked from affect (and vice versa) because of neoliberalism; to do so is only to play into white supremacist epistemologies that sideline racialization (from affect) or affective comportment (from constructions of identity). See Berg and Ramos-Zayas, “Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition,” Current Anthropology 56, no. 5 (October 2015): 654–677.

19. 19. Olivia identifies herself in The Woman of Colour as a “mulatto West Indian” (92) and “yellow” (79) or “olive” (53), respectively, in contrast to “black” like her attendant Dido (79). However, by her own epistolary account (as well as the other epistles enfolded in the narrative), she is exclusively read as Black by her English interlocutors, especially Augustus, who writes, “I beheld a skin approaching to the hue of a negro’s” (102) and Mrs. George Merton, who, with anti-Black repugnance, refers to Olivia as “Miss Blacky” (101). See Anonymous, The Woman of Colour: A Tale, ed. Lyndon J. Dominique (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2008).

20. 20. Tyrone Palmer, “Otherwise than Black: Feeling, World, Sublimation,” Qui Parle 29, no. 2 (December 2020): 247–283.

21. 21. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 154.

22. 22. Rebecca Anne Barr, “Sentiment and Sexual Servitude: White Men of Feeling and The Woman of Colour,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 1 (January 2023): 81–102 (102).

23. 23. Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

24. 24. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 9–89; Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

25. 25. Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 155.

26. 26. Yao, Disaffected, 9; Lauren Guilmette, “Unsettling the Coloniality of the Affects: Transcontinental Reverberations between Teresa Brennan and Sylvia Wynter,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (January 2019): 73–91; and Michalinos Zembylas, “Sylvia Wynter, Racialized Affects, and Minor Feelings: Unsettling the Coloniality of the Affects in Curriculum and Pedagogy,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 54, no. 3 (July 2022): 336–350 (337).

27. 27. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 68.

28. 28. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 53.

29. 29. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 53.

30. 30. Sara Ahmed identifies happiness as etymologically originating from the premise of contingency, which we see recast by Olivia’s characterization of her father. See Ahmed, “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” Signs 35, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 574. Nancy Armstrong characterizes the types of whitewashed domesticity, immanent in the eighteenth-century’s rise-of-the-novel discourses, that we see subverted by The Woman of Colour. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

31. 31. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 94.

32. 32. On first meeting Augustus, Olivia writes, “The likeness to [my father] is very strong, and his voice has the very tones which used to bless my ear!” (Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 72).

33. 33. Rebecca Anne Barr, “From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour,” Studies in Religion and Enlightenment 2, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 41–44 (42).

34. 34. Frank B. Wilderson muses over Saidiya Hartman’s case for the absence of “consent as a possession of the slave” in Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2021), 191. He argues that “Black people are political currency, not political subjects” in the context of the electoral college (198).

35. 35. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 99.

36. 36. Kerry Sinanan, “Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 39.

37. 37. Kristina Huang, “ ‘Ameliorating the Situation’ of Empire: Slavery and Abolition in The Woman of Colour,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 167–186; and Jennifer Reed, “Moving Fortunes: Caribbean Women’s Marriage, Mobility, and Money in the Novel of Sentiment,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 509–528.

38. 38. Olivia concludes four letters with exclamation points, but no others with question marks.

39. 39. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 99.

40. 40. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

41. 41. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 125.

42. 42. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 136.

43. 43. Huggins, “Reading Slantwise,” 32.

44. 44. Huggins, “Reading Slantwise,” 32; Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 149.

45. 45. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 152, 155.

46. 46. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 153.

47. 47. Kerry Sinanan, “ ‘The Wealth of Worlds’: Gender, Race, and Property in The Woman of Colour,” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 53–56 (56).

48. 48. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 188.

49. 49. Were additional space afforded, we would speak to the reunion between Olivia and Mrs. Milbanke, which underscores a type of queer interracial kinship that is characterized as “happy” by Olivia.

50. 50. Nicole N. Aljoe, Kerry Sinanan, and Mariam Wassif note in the Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 1 (Winter 2023), that Dido is still legally enslaved until, should she live beyond the novel’s end, the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Notably, however, “Olivia is not Dido’s owner” (10), although the lack of discussion on the subject leads us to believe that Dido is still legally considered the property of the Fairfield family.

51. 51. Natalie Zacek, “Favoured Isles: Selfishness and Sacrifice in the Capital of Capital,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 1 (Winter 2023): 113–132 (131).

52. 52. Olivia writes, “I sometimes think, that had my dear parent left me a decent competence, I could have placed myself in some tranquil nook of my native island, and have been happily and usefully employed in meliorating the sorrows of the poor slaves who came within my reach, and in pouring into their bruised souls the sweet consolations of religious hope! But my father willed it otherwise—Lie still, then, rebellious and repining heart!” (Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 55–56).

53. 53. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2007), 1–11 (6).

54. 54. Huggins, “Reading Slantwise,” 40.

55. 55. Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, 189.

56. 56. See Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and Alys Eve Weinbaum, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s History of Philosophy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

57. 57. Misan Sagay, Belle, “Best Original Screenplay.” Film, DJ Films Limited (2012): 31, 46, 61, 63, 83.

58. 58. Palmer, “ ‘What’s More than Feeling?,’ ” 48.

59. 59. Berg and Ramos-Zayas, “Racializing Affect,” 663.

60. 60. Berg and Ramos-Zayas, “Racializing Affect,” 663; Bynum, Reading Pleasures, 13.

61. 61. Sagay, Belle, “Best Original Screenplay,” 85.

62. 62. Zembylas, “Sylvia Wynter, Racialized Affects, and Minor Feelings,” 337.

63. 63. Zembylas, “Sylvia Wynter, Racialized Affects, and Minor Feelings,” 341.

64. 64. Ahmed, “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” 578.

65. 65. Ahmed, “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” 578.

66. 66. Ahmed, “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” 578.

67. 67. Ahmed, “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” 579.

68. 68. Analiese Richard, “Commentary on Berg and Ramos-Zayas, ‘Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition,’ ” Current Anthropology 56, no. 5 (October 2015): 670.

69. 69. Sagay, Belle, “Best Original Screenplay,” 62.

70. 70. Palmer, “ ‘What’s More than Feeling?,’ ” 46.

71. 71. Bynum, Reading Pleasures, 15–16.

72. 72. Bynum, Reading Pleasures, 15–16.

73. 73. Dido’s increasing agency and character growth corresponds with Steven Wise’s claim that the real-life Dido occasionally worked as Lord Mansfield’s amanuensis, indicating an unusually high level of trust in Black women at the time. See Steven Wise, Though the HeavensMay Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (Paris: Hachette, 2005).

74. 74. Kathleen Lubey, “The Woman of Colour’s Counter-Domesticity,” Studies in Romanticism 61, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 113–123 (114).

75. 75. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), 224–241 (238).

76. 76. Misan Sagay, “Bringing Slavery into the Heart of Jane Austen,” HuffPost, July 2, 2014, https://www .huffpost .com /entry /bringing -slavery -into -the -heart -of -jane -austen _b _5255127.

77. 77. Sagay, “Bringing Slavery into the Heart of Jane Austen.”

78. 78. Asante admits that “this is an unashamedly commercial movie” that she “wanted to tell … through the lens of a Jane Austen world.” Amma Asante, “Interview [Part 4]: Amma Asante, Director, ‘Belle.’ ” By Scott Myers, May 1, 2014, https://gointothestory .blcklst .com /interview -part -4 -amma -asante -director -belle -594c45f9d3db.

79. 79. Lyndon J. Dominique, “Introduction,” The Woman of Colour: A Tale, ed. Lyndon J. Dominique (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2007), 11–42 (39).