Thursday, September 24, 2015

The Black Widow of Jamaica

BIGAMIST AND BLACK WIDOW, BUT NEVER A NOVELIST:
Teresia Constantia Phillips (1709-65)
A Guest Post by Amanda L. Johnson, Rice University

“We hope you will consider Mrs. Muilman as an Historian, and not a Novelist; and therefore obliged to tell Facts as they were, and not as they might have been.” So begins An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. T.C. Phillips, a “scandal memoir” by a woman born Teresia Constantia Phillips, who in the text keeps her married name “Muilman,” despite her husband’s estrangement. Calling her narrative “An Apology,” Phillips presents what the ancient Greeks called an apologia, or statement of justification for her scandalous life. Throughout the text, Phillips refers to herself (“Mrs. Muilman”) as an “Apologist” and also an “Historian,” but never a “Novelist,” though the events of her life, can read like the stuff of fiction.
Teresia and her "history."
Abandoned by her father on his second marriage, Phillips was at thirteen attacked by Philip Stanhope, nephew to the Earl of Chesterfield.1 After living as Stanhope’s mistress for a while, Phillips was on her own, and quickly accumulating debt. Desperate, she then got married, knowing that any property—as well as any debt—a woman had in her name would become her husband’s upon their marriage. Phillips’ chosen groom, a Mr. Delafield, was already married, and as a professional bigamist, was paid to “marry” women to divert aggressive debt collectors. Thus free of creditors, Phillips was also still free to marry her true love, a Dutch merchant named Muilman, and their marriage was a happy one until Phillips’ father-in-law learned of her first nuptial ceremony and demanded that his son leave her or be disinherited.
            Phillips relates these events in her Apology with striking boldness, making clear that her encounter with Stanhope was a rape, not a “seduction.” She also freely admits that she accepted financial support from Stanhope for some time thereafter—what was she to do, she asks the reader, living without any parental support and with younger family members to provide for? As a woman who also felt confident expressing her own sexual desire as she got older, Phillips would later go on to have a series of consensual relationships with powerful men, relationships that took her around Europe and even to the American colonies. In this respect, Phillips came to resemble Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), a heroine who, left penniless, adopts the life of a “kept woman” and accumulates a fortune from her companions.
An illustration of Roxana in her "turkish habit."
            Phillips’ calculating flirtation with bigamy also brings to mind Defoe’s more famous heroine, Moll Flanders, a woman who, in her travels, marries several times, once to her own half-brother! Apology, she is not ashamed to state what she thinks she is owed.
Like Roxana, Moll also ends up comfortably wealthy near the end of her tale. Phillips was not as lucky with her finances, as she continued to support her sister and her sister’s children throughout her life. As she herself enjoyed the finer things in life, money was spent as soon as it was collected, and Phillips’ male companions, it seemed, would abandon her capriciously. She laments she did not even receive any financial support for a child that she bore with one of her lovers, and claims that for this reason, the child, denied medical care, only lived to be five. As a woman, Phillips’ options were limited, and her powerful, wealthy lovers knew that—for this reason, Phillips, says in her
It is this level of resolve, once more, that kept Phillips going as her marriage to Muilman unraveled. For years, Phillips and Muilman lived estranged, though Phillips steadfastly maintained that she was Muilman’s lawful wife and thus deserved his financial support. Muilman, for his part, alternated between trying to bully her physically into dropping her suit, and begging her to live with him as his mistress. (Phillips strongly implies, furthermore, that she occasionally gave into his demands for sex, as her lawyers told her that, in order to support her own claims that their marriage was legitimate, she would have to concede her husband’s “right” to her body.) Phillips began publishing her Apology serially in London newspapers, while her legal battle with Muilman was still ongoing, in part to shame her former lovers, including Stanhope, into helping her in her time of need. Phillips’ description of her paramours’ behavior often provoked written counter-accusations to circulate in the press, but her style of publishing enabled Phillips to counter these charges and also update readers on the proceedings of her legal troubles, thus giving the reader the experience of following the events of Phillips’ life as they occurred.
And what a life it was! Partially to escape infamy in Europe, Phillips sailed to Jamaica, a colony of the British Empire and its leading sugar-producer. The majority of Jamaica’s inhabitants were black and enslaved, and a small white planter elite controlled the colony. These elites were notorious for their personal excess, and it seems that Phillips’ scandalous reputation actually enhanced her popularity on the island. She made friends with members of the colonial government,
Eighteenth-century Jamaican plantation.
who then appointed her “Mistress of the Revels.” This semi-official position entailed presiding over street festivals held in Spanish Town, and she also approved all of the plays performed in Jamaican playhouses. The “anything goes” attitude of elite colonial society evidently agreed with her, and indeed, Phillips even recalled watching two planter gentlemen duel for her favor. In Jamaica, Phillips married or cohabitated with several men, many of whom died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Phillips inherited considerable property from them, and became known as one of several “Black Widows” in the colony. Phillips thus maintained high visibility throughout her life in the Caribbean, even as her flamboyant lifestyle caused her to die penniless there in 1765.
250 years after her death, Teresia Constantia Phillips Muilman remains a fascinating, complicated figure. While contemporaries called her a liar and a bigamist, a generation later, philosopher Jeremy Bentham would cite her troubles as reasons for juridical reform. In her Apology, she presents a problem that remains urgent: what kinds of concession does a woman have to make to survive in a culture structured by the coercive power of money and pervasive sexual violence? That said, modern readers are often disappointed that Phillips, when in Jamaica, fails to consider her predicament as a woman in the context of the plight of the enslaved.
Phillips inspires a mixed reaction among readers, and even the structure of her memoir has problems. Publishing serially over the years before finally assembling her memoir into a three-volume set, Phillips maintained that her account of her “marriage” to Mr. Delafield was accurate. When readers or enemies spotted problems with her account, Phillips gave increasingly elaborate explanations to maintain her initial story. For instance, she not only denied having any further contact with the professional bigamist, Mr. Delafield, after their “marriage,” but later she also claimed that she knew for certain that Mr. Delafield was murdered, and therefore could not be a witness for her legal case. Her Apology abounds with such elaborations, all oriented toward making her story appear true, but with a rate of consistency that strains probability.
The fact that Phillips felt driven to address these disputations at all, however, still indicates the degree to which women in eighteenth-century England suffered from not being able to generate wealth, own property, or maintain sovereignty over their own bodies—as historian Kathleen Wilson notes, even Phillips’ belief that she would be able to represent her own interests in court seemed extraordinary. Nonetheless, she felt her story needed to be told, and it needed to be believed. The sensational events of her life might sound like a work of fiction, but as she insisted, her story is a “history,” and not a “novel.”


The best detailed, scholarly account of the life and work of Teresia Constantia Phillips is a chapter entitled “The Black Widow: Gender race and performance in England and Jamaica,” in Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2002), 129-68.