| Summary: | Creole women figures in nineteenth-century British fiction are often portrayed as threats to the stability and integrity of English domesticity in both the colony and the metropole. By virtue of the geography of their West Indian birth, these characters are closely associated with the practice of chattel slavery, and this association calls their moral integrity and domestic fitness into question. The fictional British West Indian creole woman represents, in texts written by
metropolitan English writers, the potential failures of English domestic cultural reproduction. My dissertation, "Good Education, Good Position, and Good Blood": Creole Women's Literature of the Nineteenth-Century British West Indies, examines how representations of creole women in texts written by creole women challenge and revise the stereotype of the culturally and morally degenerate female creole. I engage with the work of Ann Laura Stoler, Jenny Sharpe, Radhika Mohanram, and others
who delineate a mutually constitutive relationship between domestic culture and the project of European colonial imperialism, and who figure the woman's body as an especially important articulation of that relationship. By considering the work of creole women, my project expands these critical considerations of the intersections of gender, race, imperialism, and domestic culture to include the British Caribbean in the nineteenth century.
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