Reading Slantwise: Dido in The Woman of Colour (1808)

Abstract:In this essay, I employ Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation to read The Woman of Colour as a fictional archive, which brings Dido, the enslaved maid of protagonist Olivia Fairfield, to the forefront of the novel. Critical fabulation requires listening for both the silences of the novel and the moments when Dido speaks out. Dido's insistence on claiming her presence within a variety of spaces—a ship, a London household, a large English estate—represents an ontological alternative to traditional notions of agency inherited from the European Enlightenment. Recognizing that our present moment exists within the time of slavery, Hartman's critical fabulation invites us to consider what radical ways of being are contained within Dido's words as well as the gaps and opacities of The Woman of Colour.