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.
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| 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,
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| Eighteenth-century Jamaican plantation. |
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.
I had never heard of Teresia Phillips before reading this post. What a fascinating story! Thank you!
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