On the Edge of Chaos: Space and Power in Maria Edgeworth's "The Grateful Negro" (1804)

Abstract

‘The Grateful Negro’ (1804) is one of Maria Edgeworth’s less well-known children’s stories. Set on a Jamaican plantation, it concerns the differing attitudes of two white plantation owners, Mr Edwards and Mr Jefferies, towards enslaved people and a rebellion provoked by Mr Jefferies’s cruelty, later averted by Mr Edwards’s apparent kindness. The tensions among the characters are made legible through spatiality. We identify the origins of the text in Edgeworth’s involvement in debates about the transatlantic slave trade and, particularly, her visit to a slave ship while living in Bristol. However, her story shows ambivalence and avoids condemnation, something that may contribute to scholars’ lack of interest in the tale. Drawing on discussions of power and space in children’s literature, this essay examines the ways that space encodes, reflects, and problematizes power in ‘The Grateful Negro’. We consider the text in its political and historical context and draw on Bradford’s work on liminality in postcolonial theory, and Stephens and McCallum’s theory of borders as liminal spaces between meanings to frame our comparison of Ireland and Jamaica in the 1790s, and especially the Edwards and Edgeworth plantations that stood on the threshold between order and rebellion. We argue that while the Jefferies’s house initially appears as a clear site of power and the slave cabins a clear site of powerlessness within the text, this binary is complicated by the presence of the forest—a locus for magic, rebellion, and alternative might—and by the spectre of Britain, the centre of colonial, imperial, and administrative authority that haunts the narrative. Edgeworth puts these spaces in uncomfortable proximity, creating a textual landscape that teeters on the edge of chaos.