Performing Sensibility, Proving Virtue?: Masking the Englishwomans Oriental Fantasy in The Female Captive

Abstract

This paper examines how the performance of refined sensibility allows Elizabeth Marsh to navigate through cultural obsessions that require the female body to become a repository of virtue and national merit in The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756. As the first captivity narrative published by an English-woman, The Female Captive has been read as a textual performance calculated to protect Marshs own reputation and prove her English female virtue intact. Yet such readings neglect how Marshs narration often deviates from her textual persona of the virtue-in-distress, revealing a desire for the Moroccan prince that oversteps English norms of sexual modesty and class boundaries. I note how such textual performance both masks and marks such desires she comes to harbor in the cultural contact zone. When Marsh adopts the language of sensibility to veil and disguise her oriental fantasies, the excess of sentiment produced by this performance also reveals the undercurrent of Marshs deviant desire. Marsh does not completely censor these moments which reveal her oriental fantasies but leaves them unexplained and ambivalent in her narrative, creating a gap between her performance of sensibility and her desiring body. This paper reads such spaces where Marshs own desire becomes visible. Through Marshs despondence, the possibility of the Englishwoman turning Moorish bride haunts the narrative almost to the very end—a possibility that ostensibly frightens Marsh, but lies at the center of her oriental fantasy where she is courted as a lady by an attractive foreign prince. Reading Marshs desire within The Female Captive thus complicates the moral narrative of a chaste English female who successfully escapes an Oriental despot. Marshs desiring, performing, and self-consciously desponding body show that, in the contact zone, the supposedly coherent signs of virtue can be destabilized and employed as masks that disguise the female captives oriental fantasy.