"Every day, as it takes me farther from Jamaica, as it brings me nearer to England, heightens my fears of the future, and makes my presaging heart sink within itself."
This quote from the opening page sets the context of the story. The narrator is the offspring of a slaveholder and one of his slaves. She is forced to leave for England in order to fulfill a contractual marriage upon which any hope for inheritance is predicated. The racial inconsistency with inheritance among a culture defined by class based on bloodline become the contentious point of dramatic tension which seeds the narrative with its artistic flourishes.
“Servitude, slavery, in its worst form, would be preferable to finding myself the wife of a man by whom I was not beloved.”
The trajectory of the novel from that point of departure is toward an arranged marriage deemed financially necessary not just to Olivia, but her family. The sinking heart she describes is not just a reference to leaving home for a strange and unfamiliar land, but leaving for an even stranger and unfamiliar territory: the realm of romance. This is a realm as foreign to Olivia as England and the resonance of marrying for a purpose other following her heart makes the deed even darker. The comparison to slavery is neither facile nor facetious; this a comparison made from experience.
“Prejudices imbibed in the nursery are frequently attached to the being of ripened years and to eradicate them as they appear, is a labor well worth the endeavor of the judicious preceptor.”
Augustus is the wealthy white British cousin who is Olivia’s “intended” but this quote is utilized for the purpose of exhibiting not the contents of the novel, but rather the means of transmission. By any standard of conventional measurement, the novel is a demonstration of a flourishing literary talent for rich and dense prose. Figurative language abounds; nearly every page features a memorably constructed metaphor or simile. Likewise, even in dialogue, the language and word choice is lofty. One is moved to inquire after reading a sentence like that above whether people ever really spoke like that. When faced with that potential obstruction to enjoyment, the reader would be well advised to ask themselves whether they’ve ever heard people like characters in a Tarantino movie or a David Mamet play. No, of course, not: hardly anyone anywhere at any time has ever actually spoken regularly like any of these three examples, but constructed reality in the form of fiction is just that. It is not documentarian realism. And with perhaps the exception of the last word in this case, most of the lofty expressions are common enough words which are easily enough understood.
“I am disappointed in England; I expected to meet with sensible, liberal, well-informed and rational people, and I have not found them; I see a compound of folly and dissimulation.”
Expectations being confounded is a common theme running throughout the novel. In fact, the upsetting of conventional expectations also applies to the reader. The story on its most superficial summary sounds like just another contribution to the popular genre of the time known as the “slave narrative.” This narrative, however, is about the offspring of a slaveholder/slave union looking to make good on her rights to legal inheritance. The British setting at times puts Olivia into a scene that might well be familiar to readers of Jane Austen, yet there is very little about those scenes could ever even remotely fit into an Austen narrative without sticking out like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That said, the disappointment Olivia experiences is hardly surprising.
