Imoinda in Berlin: Feminists and the Cultural Memory of Slavery After 1848

Abstract

This chapter discusses the intersection between the discourses of antislavery and of women’s rights in the aftermath of 1848. It discusses cases of women’s reception of antislavery history and cultural production in different cities: Rochester (New York), Paris, and Berlin. It aims to show two things. First, it discusses how women’s rights advocates drew inspiration from the transnational movement to abolish slavery, in which some of them were also personally involved. In light of developments in France, they used abolition to frame and draw attention to their own grievances. Second, I argue that women’s rights advocates used the transnational cultural memory of antislavery to redefine the significance of 1848 for their own purposes. As the chapter shows, these efforts of reception happened across different media, including tomes like German Luise Mühlbach’s historical novel Aphra Behn (1849); the periodicals and almanacs associated with French Jeanne Deroin (1848–1853); Lucretia Mott’s speeches; and British Quaker Anne Knight’s open letters to colleagues and dignitaries (1848–1852).

In 1848, news of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies reverberated across Europe and the Atlantic World. After the February Revolution, long-term abolitionists who had risen to prominence within the Republican Provisional Government, most notably Victor Schoelcher, pronounced the immediate abolition of slavery on 4 March, and universal manhood suffrage the following day. As described by Frederick Douglass, news of this development travelled like “a bolt of living thunder” through correspondence and print periodical networks, especially those of antislavery reformers.¹ Ostensibly, French abolition was immediate, an expression of the popular will and in line with Republican revolutionary ideals. In this guise, it held more appeal for the transatlantic community of reformers and abolitionists than the abolition scheme of the British, who had adopted a gradual scheme to end slavery (1833–1838), and the smaller-scale emancipation in Swedish Saint Barthélemy and the, then Danish-owned, Virgin Islands (1847–1848). In the short-lived era of liberal hope that followed 1848, liberal transformers transnationally hailed the French Revolution and subsequent abolition as an auspice of the progress of democratic and egalitarian principles.²

The eventual outcome of the waves of revolution of 1848 disappointed progressive commentators both in Europe and America and inaugurated a decade of conservative rule. Not least among the disappointed were those Forty-Eighters (and female quarante-huitardes³) who had hoped to see a revolutionary change in women’s rights. In several contexts, women used the opportunity to argue for the importance of women to the success of the revolution, and for their right to increased participation in the public sphere.⁴ Women’s clubs and periodicals were founded in Paris, Berlin, and Cologne over the course of 1848–1849. 1848 was also the year of the American Women’s Rights Congress at Seneca Falls.⁵ Like the international abolitionist movement, in the absence of popular support these women’s initiatives took a close interest in each other, spreading news about one another and maintaining correspondence across their small but tight network. This has led some historians to speak of a single, international, women’s rights movement which negotiated a shared “language of feminist demands.”⁶

This chapter will discuss the intersection between the discourses of these two, very different, emancipatory movements. It will discuss women’s reception of antislavery history and cultural production among women’s rights circles in different cities: Rochester (New York), Paris, and Berlin. It aims to show two things. Firstly, women’s rights advocates drew inspiration from the transnational movement to abolish slavery, in which some of them were also personally involved. In light of developments in France, they set out to use abolition to frame and draw attention to their own grievances. Secondly, I will argue that they used the transnational cultural memory of antislavery to redefine the significance of 1848 for their own purposes. They agitated across a variety of different media, running the gamut of historical novels such as German Luise Mühlbach’s Aphra Behn (1849); the periodicals and almanacs associated with French Jeanne Deroin (1848–1853); Lucretia Mott’s speeches; and British Quaker Anne Knight’s open letters to colleagues and dignitaries (1848–1852).

This analysis does not aim to give a comprehensive overview of women’s rights activism after 1848, but to showcase transnational memory dynamics in the nineteenth century. It conceptualises collective memory as the dynamic process by which agents make events, and other “sites of memory”,⁷ “matter” to social collectives.⁸ This conceptualisation moves away from the tacit assumption that collective memory only reshapes the past, to look instead at how it works to incorporate history unfolding in the present into the memory of a collective. It builds on Eviatar Zerubavel’s conception of collective memory as a shared “sociomental topography,” and his suggestion that “the social meaning of past events is essentially a function of the way they are structurally positioned in our minds vis-à-vis other events.”⁹

After briefly discussing the cultural memory of antislavery in nineteenth-century Europe, the chapter will move to its three case studies. Together, these examples show a fascinating nineteenth-century episode of what Michael Rothberg has termed multidirectional memory. With this concept, he refers to the “metaphorical and analogical appropriations” and “dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance.”¹⁰ In his eponymous book, he shows how, in the “globalizing world” (Nancy Fraser)¹¹ of the twentieth century, memories of the Holocaust could aid the articulation of the historical trauma of colonial violence, and vice versa. This analysis shows that multidirectional memory was also a powerful force in nineteenth-century activism.

The Cultural Memory of Antislavery

The origins of an organised abolitionist movement can be traced back to Anglo-American Quaker networks of the seventeenth century. By the 1840s, antislavery had become a consolidated popular movement in both the UK and the US. As we will see, it was culturally significant that women played an active part in this agitation, whether through their participation in petitions and sugar boycotts in Britain,¹² as organisers and fundraisers, or even, in the case of the Garrisonians, as orators for the cause.

The “‘Garrisonians,” followers of American reformer William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), were the most radical faction of antislavery advocates outside of the colonies. This grouping not only advocated for immediate rather than gradual abolition, framing the institution of slavery as a national sin, but also welcomed other fringe proposals for societal reform such as cross-denominational collaboration and the equal participation of women in society. Under Garrison’s leadership, this grouping profiled itself as a broad movement against different kinds of injustice and hypocrisy, of which the institution of slavery was the most egregious. Another important factor in their radical reputation was their “no-governmentism” as Garrison advocated civil disobedience and preferred moral suasion over compromises with lawmakers.

In Europe, abolition did not interest the general public until the 1850s. Organised antislavery remained small-scale and was often dependent on the work of Anglo-American agents. Moral suasion and mobilising public opinion were key components of antislavery in both the US and the UK, and advocates actively sought allies in Europe who might do the same. In nineteenth-century Europe then, representations of slavery were predominantly circulated in works that had antislavery themes or, sometimes, actively preached abolitionism. “Sentimental rhetoric” against slavery was developed across genres: from parliamentary speeches to first-hand testimony, to poetry.¹³ Moreover, powerful iconic images, such as Josiah Wedgewood’s medallion, Am I not a Man and a Brother (1787), were reproduced in Britain and beyond.¹⁴ Antislavery advocates also recirculated older materials such as Enlightenment criticisms of slavery and earlier artistic representations. For instance, in an 1808 pamphlet, French abolitionist Henri Grégoire mentioned Othello and Oroonoko among his examples of Black excellence. The fictional rebellious enslaved African prince Oroonoko was the main character of the well-known seventeenth-century eponymous novel by female English author Aphra Behn. The story had become quite popular over time, particularly in its theatrical adaptation by Thomas Southerne (1695). The appearance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s global bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1852, promoted a cultural fascination with plantation slavery and its horrors across Europe and America. Maartje Janse has shown how, in the Dutch context, this general mood also gave new impetus to antislavery campaigning, notably from women and young people.¹⁵

Even though most European commentators did not study real-world conditions of slavery, representations of slavery in the arts engaged many readers in the nineteenth century.¹⁶ Even stronger was the general European sense of pride in abolition, which was generally attributed entirely to Christian culture and to white abolitionists. Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, proclaimed abolition to be the greatest achievement of human civilisation and of Christianity.¹⁷ Both slavery and antislavery were thus part of the cultural memory and repertoire of many nineteenth-century Europeans and, particularly in the second half of the century, they were deeply narratively intertwined with one another.

It is important to note that while mediated representations of slavery in this period were generally antislavery in tone, whether part of their political programme or part of a more general vogue for sentimental themes, this did not mean that they promoted a sense of equal footing with the enslaved. As scholars like Saidiyah Hartman¹⁸ and Marcus Wood¹⁹ have concluded, central commonplaces of antislavery cultural production, like the voyeuristic interest in physical violence such as whippings and dog chases, and the representation of Black enslaved as helpless, simple, and grateful recipients of white benefactors’ efforts, contributed to the continued dehumanisation of people of African descent.

Rochester: The “Law of Progress”

Among the Garrisonian abolitionists, advocacy for women’s rights and abolition had gone hand in hand.²⁰ From the faction’s origins in the 1830s onwards, prominent female antislavery orators, such as the Grimké sisters, Lucretia Mott, and Lucy Stone, had argued for women’s advancement as well as immediate abolition. Later, pioneers of women’s rights would claim that it was their exposure to the evils and injustices of slavery that had awoken them to public action, and their participation in the antislavery movement that made them realise the hypocrisy of their own subjected position. This is apparent, for instance, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s History of Woman Suffrage (1881), which dated the birth of the suffrage movement to the World’s Antislavery Convention held in London in 1840,²¹ and in Elizabeth Blackwell’s autobiography Pioneer Work (1895).

This connection became especially important in 1848. On 9 May 1848, Rochester saw a “Sympathy with France” meeting which resolved, as reported by antislavery and women’s rights advocate Frederick Douglass, “that by decreeing the abolition of Negro slavery, France has covered itself with higher honours than any war could give.”²² Antislavery and women’s rights further intertwined as organisers planned the Rochester Women’s Rights Convention, where the Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Convention was ratified, to coincide with Emancipation Day (1 August) celebrations.²³ Examples of the different ways in which the cause of women was actively related to that of the enslaved are found in veteran abolitionist Lucretia Mott’s address on the “law of progress” (9 May 1848). She discussed American “amalgamated” mixed-race celebrations of the “movements in regard to Freedom in the French colonies,” as one of the “evidences of progress,”²⁴ while subtly criticising the exclusion of women from equal participation in these gatherings in the same breath:

[…] it was an amalgamation meeting! (Great applause.) Was it by privilege, as women sometimes have the privilege to hold a kind of play meeting? (Laughter.) No, the white people of that large gathering left their own speakers, to go among the coloured crowd, and hear their speaker [1848].²⁵

At this crucial juncture of global antislavery, Mott also reiterated the importance of women to abolition, recalling that immediatism had originated with female British activist Elizabeth Heyrick: “it was the work of a woman to declare, that ‘Immediate, not Gradual Abolition’ was no less the duty of the master, than the right of the slave.”²⁶

For Garrisonians male and female, French abolition in 1848 became an optimistic augur of the broad, non-compromising reforms they hoped for, and a milestone of a world-wide democratic movement for universal emancipation.²⁷ Like abolition, women’s advancement was to be framed as a justice movement, which could be achieved through a passionate quest for hearts and minds and whose time would come. Moreover, like abolition, the significance of women’s advancement exceeded far beyond the confines of any national borders. As the History of Woman Suffrage attests, this narrative of syllogism would become increasingly important within the American women’s movement.²⁸ Cultural memories of women’s engagement in antislavery action would be used as a key argument in their claim to societal advancement, and in 1848, foundations for the consolidation of these ideas were being laid. This framing relied on the specific understanding of the historical progression of antislavery as a Christian movement of gradual progress. This progress narrative privileged the role played by white organisers, their speeches and congresses, while downplaying the role played by resistance and insurrection by the enslaved themselves.

It was the Garrisonian spirit of optimistic transnationalism that French women’s rights advocate Jeanne Deroin desperately turned to in 1851. From the St. Lazare prison in Paris, she, together with Pauline Roland, addressed a letter to the Worcester Women’s Rights Convention, expressing their regret that,

The darkness of reaction has obscured the sun of 1848, which seemed to rise so radiantly. Why? Because the revolutionary tempest, in overturning at the same time the throne and the scaffold, in breaking the chain of the black slave, forgot to break the chain of the most oppressed of all the pariahs of humanity.²⁹

Directly following the Revolution, Parisian feminists initially sought to frame their concerns as a rights issue; kindred to that of Frenchmen and the enslaved. When this frame had little success, they turned towards a more universalist, cosmopolitan approach, by connecting with transnational narratives.

Paris: Women’s Rights as Human Rights

In Paris, especially for working-class proponents of women’s rights, 1848 proved a window of opportunity. They organised meetings and maintained several short-lived periodicals under increased repression. One of the most prominent voices in the debate was the seamstress Jeanne Deroin (1805–1894), who worked closely with radical British Quaker, Anne Knight (1786–1862). Jeanne Deroin had been active in women’s rights circles in the 1830s, while Anne Knight had been an active immediate abolitionist for years, touring France to give lectures and expand the network. She found herself in Paris at the time of the revolution and joined the efforts of women’s rights circles.

Critics of women’s social status both in France and abroad were quick to point out what they saw as the contradiction between the provisional government’s swift action regarding colonial slavery, and their lack of interest in changing women’s social position. Well-known literary figure and socialite, Delphine de Girardin, aired her view that the fact that republicans “freed the Negroes who are not yet civilised, while leaving women, those […] professors of civilisation, in slavery,” proved that they had not understood the true meaning of the republic.³⁰ American educational reformer Emma Willard addressed a letter to the head of the provisional government, reproaching him for his “oversight”: “The men of France are called upon to come forward, and by their representatives will thus be pledged to support. All the men are called. The slaves too are kindly remembered—but the women—they are forgotten!”³¹ The provisional government also received a letter from Elisabeth Sheridan Carey, an English poet living in Boulogne, asking for recognition of those female “Citizen[s] without the rights of Citizenship.”³²

As these examples show, the flurry of rights and citizenship discourse in Paris, 1848, became an important frame to voice women’s concerns. Anne Knight was among the chorus connecting women’s emancipation to that of the enslaved through equal rights discourse. She reported to a friend how, at dinner with fellow antislavery agents in London in 1848, she intervened when the topic turned to whether the abolition movement was finished in France. She seized the moment to bring the discussion to women’s rights:

The Blacks are free, but there is still a slavery of the Whites. The French took liberty for all the men and abandoned the rights of all their sisters. We feel that the rights of all human beings are equal; that women, being subject to all the burdens of the State in taxation and penalty of laws, had equal claim with men to vote for the legislators themselves, and having seen the frightful consequences of men’s actions alone, it was our endeavour to place at his side the helpmeet for him.³³

As Knight later reported, she thought her intervention was a success, and “rejoiced” at the table’s “reluctant assent to a great political truth; indeed, the logic of it, simply stated, is irresistible.”³⁴

In the run-up to the 1849 elections, Deroin presented herself as an electoral candidate. Though her candidature was never taken seriously, in the process, her circle cemented the framing of women’s social advancement as a rights issue connected with emancipation. During her campaign she repeatedly called for the “complete abolition of all privileges of sex, race, birth, caste, and fortune.”³⁵ This phrase echoed the Constitutional Assembly’s October constitution, which prescribed the abolition of “all distinctions of birth, class, or caste,” but Deroin pointed out it was incomplete; feminist reworking necessitating the addition of the privileges both of race and sex. Deroin, Knight, and others first used this summary of their demands in a public letter in 1848 and continued to repeat it throughout 1849. In a report on her campaign, Deroin explained:

The Constitution of 1848 has legally abolished the privileges of race, caste, and of fortune by the liberation of black slaves, by the forfeiting of noble titles, by the suppression of the income-based franchise. But the privilege of sex has been maintained in this Constitution, undermining it at its base, because it is the negation of the principles upon which it was founded.³⁶

The consistent privileging of the importance of abolition to the revolutionary legacy is noteworthy. Abolition had not been part of the public revolutionary drive, and other reforms more directly relevant to daily life in Paris, occupied the attention of the Parisian public in 1848. Key abolitionist Schoelcher’s reputation was lacklustre,³⁷ and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s study of French depictions of slavery and abolition during this period shows that the topic mostly drew ridicule in the press.³⁸ An examination of the keyword “abolition” in French newspapers also indicates that abolition was much less discussed in the early months of 1848, than other measures like the abolition of the death sentence for political crimes, or the abolition of bargaining (marchandage).³⁹ Women’s advocates sought not only to connect abolition to women’s emancipation, but also, in doing this, to change the understanding of the February revolution by privileging the importance of abolition as a key achievement of its legacy. Deroin would continue to do this well after the failure of the Republican aspirations of 1848 and, in 1857, she tried to convince fellow socialists in London to support the women’s cause by reminding them that “while the revolution had liberated the slaves, it had forgotten women.”⁴⁰

Anne Knight appears to have been an important factor in emphasising the link between the two causes among women in Paris who, unlike their colleagues in the US, had no significant personal connections to antislavery. She advertised herself as an embodiment of the connection between the causes, and as a seasoned example for younger generations. In an open letter to French deputy Coquerel, she implored him to support the women’s cause, explaining that she had “fought against the oppression of slavery for twenty years; this question and that of the rights of woman are one and the same. I will support them both.”⁴¹ When the first of a series of short-lived women’s rights periodicals introduced “Miss Knight” to its readers, it gave further platform to Knight’s insistence that her women’s rights claims were inspired by her antislavery work: “A first idea guided her to another: the slavery of the negro and the slavery of woman approximate each other at more than one point.”⁴²

Knight was also instrumental in shifting the self-definition of the circle after the June Days uprising, when political auspices for social democratic causes darkened with the election and dictatorial coup of Napoleon III. In 1850, Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland were sentenced to six months in jail—during this time, Knight helped them to correspond with the outside world, including the American convention—and soon after her release, Deroin relocated to London. Even though the development of a universal rights frame had failed, she would invest even more energy into fostering her circle’s affiliation with the history of antislavery.

Between 1851 and 1854, aided by Knight, Deroin published three “women’s almanacs” (Almanach des femmes), which she sourced from and circulated among her, by now, transnational circle. They were meant to keep the flame alive under difficult circumstances, propagating “[…] those social truths that contain the prophecy of a better future.”⁴³ In these, she included several texts related to antislavery that presented the cause as intimately connected to that of women’s emancipation. Among the reprinted texts was Harriet Taylor Mill’s article, “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which had first appeared in the Westminster Review in July 1851, and emphasised the connections between organised antislavery and women’s advocacy⁴⁴; the “Reply of American Ladies to the Stafford House Memorial,” connected to discussions of the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin⁴⁵; and the Declaration of William Lloyd Garrison’s National Anti-Slavery Convention (1833, “L’abolition” 1851). Regarding the latter group, the editor remarked that the fact this group accepted women as equals among their ranks, “explained without doubt why the abolitionists felt so naturally attached to all works of independence and high morality.”⁴⁶

Through the recirculation of these texts, Deroin fostered the affiliation of her circle with the history of transnational efforts to end slavery. Moreover, whereas French feminist calls in 1848 had been quite nationally oriented—celebrating French achievements, petitioning specific dignitaries and engaging critically with new national policies—Deroin now imported into her circle a Garrisonian sense of internationalism and of the interdependence of multiple causes. The meaning of the February Revolution was transformed from a national, hopeful clarion call for justice, to a failure caused by dignitaries’ pig-headed refusal to listen to women. As Deroin explained:

humanity cannot walk with nature in the providential paths of progress and indefinite perfectibility until united work has guaranteed to each of the members of the human family, without distinction of sex or race, the complete development and free use of all of their moral, intellectual and physical faculties.⁴⁷

In a period of repression and abeyance, Deroin recognised the necessity of maintaining hope and active memory to prevent the splintering and increased isolation of her circle. During the same period, however, a lone voice was working on a pointed social novel which expressed existential frustration with the events of 1848: Luise Mühlbach.

Berlin: Women’s Disillusionment

In the 1840s, Clara Mundt (pen-name Luise Mühlbach, 1814–1873) moved in the liberal idealist circles of Young Germany as the wife of eminent liberal Theodor Mundt and host of a prominent Berlin literary salon.⁴⁸ In the 1860s she would become an internationally popular author of sentimental historical novels, but during this earlier period, she wrote minor social novels that expressed an ardent interest in women’s issues such as prostitution and marriages of convenience. In March 1848, she witnessed revolutionary events in Berlin, which saw several demonstrations for democratic reform as part of the wave of uprisings that followed the February revolt in Paris. Prussian king Frederick William IV unexpectedly granted the right to gather a Parliament at Frankfurt to explore possibilities for German unification and to produce a constitution. However, in April 1849 he rejected the outcomes of the parliament, and it was ultimately abandoned.

Even though her husband actively involved himself in local liberal politics, Mühlbach quickly became thoroughly disillusioned with revolution. Her experiences are captured in correspondence from May-December 1848. In this correspondence, she expresses her frustrations with what she considered the “raging, blowing, gurgling […] Babylonian confusion” of revolutionary democratic politics (29 August),⁴⁹ and the lack of regard for revolutionary women or women’s issues: “Yes, when men are sitting in their clubs and electoral assemblies all day, women, who have of course with true male short-sightedness [‘Männerdunkel’] been excluded from all clubs, have to try to render a makeshift account!” (May 6).⁵⁰ She lamented the mediocre leadership of “day-old Greats” in both France and Prussia and wrote that she’d rather “howl with the wolves in the jungle, than with the republicans of the day in Berlin” (14 August).⁵¹

Though interested in their progress,⁵² Mühlbach did not seek to connect with better-known German women’s rights voices of the period, such as Mathilde Anneke and Louise Aston. Instead, she worked out her own frustrations in her “historical tendenzroman” Aphra Behn (1849).⁵³ The work is clearly influenced by the nineteenth-century cultural memory of antislavery and offers insight into the importance of the creative force of multidirectional memory to sustain individual actors. Through her interpretation of seventeenth-century English author Aphra Behn, Mühlbach uses commonplaces of sentimental antislavery literature to express women’s social subordination and to develop a thematic web of historical analogies between the emancipation of the enslaved, women, and people under tyranny. In her story about Restoration England, she frames the disappointments of 1848 as having been due, in large part, to male revolutionaries’ refusal to follow natural leaders or listen to women. As will become clear, through the story of Aphra Behn, Mühlbach presented a strong case for the political importance of women’s writing.

Aphra Behn tells the story of its eponymous heroine in three volumes. The first volume is, essentially, a creative rewriting of Oroonoko (1688). It describes Behn’s time in Surinam, where she suffers unrequited love for the enslaved African prince, Oroonoko, and supports his instigation of a slave rebellion. When this effort fails and Oroonoko is murdered, a deeply disillusioned Behn travels back to London and eventually becomes a courtier. Volumes 2 and 3 describe how she attempts to influence the corrupt King Charles II, and ultimately becomes the world’s first professional novelist.

Though Mühlbach emphasised its historical accuracy, and included her sources in footnotes, the novel takes many creative liberties. A key one is that she makes Behn’s novel about a slave revolt in Surinam, Oroonoko (1688), the first novel of Behn’s career. In reality, Behn was primarily a comic playwright, and she published this short novel at the end of her career. This inversion, however, was key to Mühlbach’s portrayal; she reinterpreted the historical figure as an early antislavery heroine and women’s rights advocate, whose efforts were tragically doomed to fail.

The influence of nineteenth-century antislavery motifs is clearly felt in the novel. Mühlbach introduced numerous new elements into her retelling of Oroonoko, including her emphasis on the importance of song to slave life,⁵⁴on the use of dogs against fugitives,⁵⁵ and on the frequent brutal practice of corporal punishment by whipping.⁵⁶ On various occasions, Behn becomes the vehicle for antislavery rhetoric, like when she berates the plantation owner, on the eve of insurrection:

I am telling you, that God’s patience has finally run out, and that he is using these blacks to punish you for your vile, cruel crimes! Because you are a criminal! You have audaciously dared to degrade people to the level of animals, and as you stepped on their worth and rights you blasphemed against God and his most beautiful and holiest creations! Judgement Day has come!⁵⁷

The character’s invocation of religion, emphasising the sinfulness of slavery and aspirations for divine justice, are typical motifs of antislavery discourse and the text includes the characteristic erasure of black agency. Throughout the narrative, Mühlbach maximises the contrast between Oroonoko’s courage and natural leadership, and the passivity of the other enslaved who are presented as cowardly, “poor and trusting.”⁵⁸ A striking example of this departure from the original story is found in Mühlbach’s reimagining of the revolt. Whereas, in the original, the slaves fight and whip their white pursuers, in Mühlbach’s version, they are used as comic relief, as they “become slaves again! […] [they] howled with trembling knees, and here and there some were seen throwing themselves to the ground, others flinging their knives away, here and there some quietly crept away or climbed the tall trees to seek protection.”⁵⁹

Throughout, Mühlbach plays with analogies between women, the enslaved, and people living in a tyrannical state. The first scene of discussion between Behn and her black maidservant Imoinda, Oroonoko’s love interest, exemplifies this. Imoinda and Behn compare their misfortunes, and Imoinda explains:

At least you are free, your soul is not bound to the fate of bondage, you are not humiliated in your holiest human rights, you are not a slave! […] Not even you can loosen the bonds on my soul, which my awareness of my slavery has bound around it, and cannot take the chains off my feet, which I invisibly drag with me, and which chafe my soul to death.⁶⁰

This scene is a moment of significant dramatic irony; Imoinda’s complaints sound very similar to the ones Behn will later make when she has been trapped in an unhappy marriage. She then laments, for instance, that “Everything has been taken from us women, even our right to spiritual creation! We are only allowed to be the slaves of our husbands, and carry their children […] I no longer want to be a woman, but just a free, feeling, thinking, and acting human creature!”⁶¹ These are some of the many linguistically imbricated critiques of slavery and women’s subjection in the novel. An especially complex example is when the fate of England under Charles II is compared to the slave status of a married woman: “royal bride Britannia adorns her head, before you [Charles] make her your wife, which is to say, your slave.”⁶²

Behn’s regret over Oroonoko’s fate is a recurrent plot point, as she seeks to convince the king to oppose slavery and to legalise divorce. In Mühlbach’s reimagining, Behn’s authorship is closely connected to her sensibility and her passion for Oroonoko.⁶³ Her reading of Oroonoko at court is so powerful that it moves the corrupt king to a momentary reflection: “We are barbarians and vandals, we white men against these black heroes!”⁶⁴ Mühlbach’s imagining of the power of literature as a tool of moral reform, and the importance of women’s voices to the moral conscience of the nation, echo nineteenth-century antislavery motifs.

Ultimately, the novel is bleak and pessimistic. The courtiers in the novel fail to heed Behn’s calls for reform, like the enslaved Surinamese failed to follow Oroonoko into battle. The different plotlines of Aphra Behn all end in disillusionment. By describing the cruelties of the plantation and the corruption of the Restoration court, Mühlbach’s novel reflects on her disappointment in 1848. In Mühlbach’s account, the “day-old Greats” had squandered the year’s revolutionary potential by squabbling over details, rather than addressing structural injustices. However, through its interweaving of antislavery discourse with calls for women’s rights, the book becomes more than just a pessimistic coda to the year’s events. Mühlbach also made a forceful case for the dire societal consequences of the unjust treatment of women, and especially of women writers, like Aphra Behn, and herself.

Reflection

Women’s right advocates engaged with the cultural memory of antislavery across various national contexts during the feminist flare-up of 1848. After the historic moment of French abolition, reflection on slavery and abolition, and the role played by women in it, allowed these women to utilise the revolutionary events of 1848 for their own devices. French abolition was framed in various ways: in the context of the Rochester convention it was interpreted as an augur of future global progress, in Paris it became a watershed moment for human rights which demanded similar advancements in women’s legal situation, while, as seen with Mühlbach, it could also signify a doomed effort in the absence of true moral leadership. However, these heterogeneous voices all relied on similar features of antislavery memory, including the powerlessness of the enslaved themselves, and the insistence on (white) women’s role in the struggle for abolition. This analysis has suggested that multidirectional memory is a structural feature of justice movements, not only in the twentieth century, but in the nineteenth as well. It affects mobilisation at both the interpersonal level, and in the context of transnational movements. These cases also show how multidirectional remembrance can be highly selective, and heavily culturally mediated, even when actors demonstrate genuine solidarity, as in the case of Lucretia Mott and Anne Knight. The needs and demands of the advocates attempting to promote the recall of these cultural memories influenced their representation of slavery and abolition. The cultural memory work of the nineteenth century’s many interlocking social movements is a rich terrain for a better understanding of how citizens, new citizens, and hopefuls begin to formulate their relationship to the histories that surround them.