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.

Eighteenth-Century Women Writing About Women Writing

Our friend Aphra.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege to teach an upper-level English course at Stony Brook on a topic of my choice. Since the department was looking to run an upper-level course on poetry, I proposed (successfully) to teach a course on eighteenth-century women poets. It was an exhilarating experience in many ways, as the students were mostly unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature or culture. Together we explored the fabulous voices of female poets starting with Aphra Behn and Anne Finch and ending with Joanna Baillie and Mary Robinson.

One thing that particularly struck me was how often women wrote about writing, specifically, about being female poets and the challenges therein.

Elizabeth Thomas’s poetry is filled with the anger and frustration of being told (apparently) many times over that poetry was not “fit for women,” as in her poem, “On Sir J---- S---- saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode”:

Unhappy sex! how hard’s our fate,

by Custom’s tyranny confined

To foolish needlework and chat,

Or such like exercise as that,

Lady Mary Chudleigh

But still denied th’ improvement of our mind!

(1722)

In these lines, she reiterates, almost to the letter, the earlier complaints of Mary, Lady Chudleigh in “The Lady’s Defense”:

‘Tis hard we should be by the men despised,

Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;

Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,

And with the utmost industry bred fools;

Laughed out of reason, jested out of sense,

And nothing left but native innocence;

Then told we are incapable of wit,

And only for the meanest drudgeries fit

(1701)

Sarah Egerton’s “The Emulation” (1703), Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia” (1724), Mary Leapor’s “An Essay on Woman” [not an essay…a poem] (1746), and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of Woman” (c. 1795) elaborate similar themes of being withheld from knowledge and education all the while being told that, as women, they were silly, useless or incapable of bettering themselves.

Poems like Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” (1713?) and Esther Lewis’s “A Mirror for Detractors. Addressed to a Friend” (1748) more specifically discuss the problem of being a woman poet:

Anne Finch

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed

--From “The Introduction”

…when a woman dares indite,

And seek in print the public sight,

All tongues are presently in motion

About her person, mind, and portion;

And every blemish, every fault,

Unseen before, to light is brought

--From “A Mirror for Detractors”

For those of us who study the literary output of the ladies of the eighteenth century, such sentiments are probably expected from our literary foremothers. For my students, however, they were a wonderful illustration of the limited rights and position of women in the eighteenth century. Even for myself, the anguish, chagrin, frustration and outright anger of these women was palpable in these poems in a way that was immediate and unmediated, and I started using them in introductory women’s studies courses as a way of foregrounding later nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s right movements.

As usual, the past reasserts itself in the present, however, and I find these poems still illustrate the frustrations of women writers writing now. Countless articles have appeared lately about how women writers are constantly belittled and their output discounted by publishers and reviewers, as well as how women’s novels are often marketed with “softer” “more feminine” book covers. All this, despite the fact that women now edge out men in pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in the United Stated. We no longer lack the education, but we are still marginalized when it comes to reviews and marketing.

Similarly, the poetry of women is, in my experience, under-taught at the undergraduate level. When I mentioned to a colleague (a male Romanticist) that I was teaching a course on “eighteenth-century women poets,” he (half-) jokingly replied, “Oh, were there any?” If he looked at almost any general literary anthology, however, he might surmise that there certainly weren’t enough to make an entire course syllabus just on them alone. 

Ladies in Breeches: Hannah Snell

My primary research interest in the eighteenth century right now is the representation of cross-dressed women in the literature . One of my favorite characters is that of Hannah Snell, a real life female cross-dresser, whose story was written and published under the title, The Female Soldier, in 1747 in England.

One of the most popular images of Snell.

Hannah sailed the seas with the British marines, disguised as a man, and, according to her story (she was illiterate, so her story is told by a, seemingly male, narrator), her female sex was never discovered. Initially, she joins the army in order to find her husband, who abandoned her when she was pregnant. After she gives birth and her child dies, she decides to find him. She hears of his being pressed into service (this was common in the 18^th century as Britain waged many wars and conquests without the resource of a standing army; more about that when I discuss Peg Woffington and her turn as “The Female Volunteer” next week!) and decides to join up herself in search of him.

While on her travels, she sees the world, and eventually she fights at the Battle of Pondicherry, India, where she is wounded with a groin wound. She manages to escape being “discovered” by convincing a local woman (referred to in the text as a “Black,” though this designation applies to the Indians of India in the eighteenth-century) to give her some ointment for her wound.

As with many of the “passing women” of the eighteenth century, Hannah must prove herself with feats of strength—and flirtations with other women. She defends the honor of several women in port who may have otherwise fallen in with some of her fellow crewmen with evil intentions, and these women apparently find her version of masculinity quite appealing. 

A rather different image of Snell.

 

Upon her return, Hannah goes with her ship’s mates to the marine offices to prove that she indeed served aboard ship and to collect her pay—which she does, successfully. Afterwards, she appears in her uniform on stage at Sadler’s Wells, performing her military exercises for money.

While the text ends on a happy note, historians have found evidence that Snell eventually re-married (rather unhappily) and died alone and in poverty (not unusual for an interesting, independent woman of this period, unfortunately; the writer Aphra Behn also died in pain and in poverty despite penning many fantastic works of fiction, poetry and plays).

What I find fascinating about the actual text of Snell’s tale are the narrative contortions necessary to make Snell a virtuous woman but also a strong and valiant character. She’s good at disguising herself (lying to others), but it’s ok, because she’s doing it for a noble end. She’s deathly afraid of getting raped aboard ship, but she’s also one of the toughest and strongest crew members. Most interestingly for my research is the narrator’s insistence that we understand exactly how she passed despite being female-bodied. We never learn how she relieved herself aboard ship in front of fellow crew-members, or how she hid her monthly menses, but we get a blow by blow of how she dug out the bullet from her own groin at Pondicherry to avoid dealing with a surgeon. 

 

A less masculine version of Snell.

Similarly, when Snell is to be whipped shirtless in front of the company for disobeying orders, the narrator goes into detail about how she had small breasts, and how she wore a bandanna, and how she stood with her arms held up and facing the wall, so no one could tell she had breasts. Snell’s female-bodied-ness is central to the story, as it establishes the need to stay hidden, it illustrates how much she wishes to preserve her virtue, and it creates the central tension of the text. On the other hand, this need to keep her true sex hidden leads her to flirt with other women, women who, according to the text, seem to really, really like her. As a man. Or something. The ambiguity, the possibility of reading women like Snell from many different angles, is part of what makes the study of 18th-century female cross-dressers so fascinating.