but also an effigy of his royal vessel, including its flag. Phillips (ungallantly outed as the author by the printer when he was taken to task by an outraged House of Assembly) declared this action “a most atrocious mark of their ingratitude to his majesty, as well as a very impudent insult upon the gentlemen of the Navy.”122
Thus, Phillips adopted the role of grand English lady, albeit one of dubious reputation, bringing English culture and English standards of behavior to less culturally advanced creoles. Her promotion of theatre was part of her educative mission in Jamaica: to transform the colony into a place where English values could flourish and where unlearned creoles could be exposed to English cosmopolitan manners. That seems to have been her intention as Mistress of the Revels. In particular, her oversight of elaborate gubernatorial “performances” was designed to enhance the authority of executive office by implanting in Jamaica the symbols and practices that linked politics with theatre. She was not averse to lecturing Jamaicans about their lack of patriotism and to pronounce against Scots and Irish merchants, whom she thought were in a perpetual power struggle to dispossess English landed gentlemen from their rightful place as rulers of the island.123
In England, Phillips was a symbol of the dangerous and rebellious woman, as willing to sleep with Catholics as with Protestants and entirely removed from the maternal realm. In Jamaica, she was a symbol of a different kind, one usually associated with free women of color in the historical literature, rather than with white women. She was especially resourceful, even though reliant on female charm rather than inherited advantage to make her way in the world, declaring in her memoir that “My Beauty, while it lasted, amply supplied the Deficiencies of my Fortune.”124 As Wilson comments, “her extravagant lifestyle, proclivity for vulgar display, recurrent overwhelming debts and lavish attention to her own natural resources made it clear that she had taken the laws of imperial mercantile capitalism to heart … [she was] an excessively consuming female” with a “taste for the sensual, the sensational and the luxurious.”125 These were the types of terms in which writers like Long and Moreau deplored the lifestyles of free women of color. The towns of Jamaica, like towns and cities in France and Britain, offered opportunities, social and economic, for those women enterprising enough to challenge social conventions and willing to accept the risks that independence brought. That was as true for white women as it was a fact for free women of color. White women in Jamaica did not necessarily lead as cloistered lives as Long and other defenders of patriarchal order imagined.126
Despite Phillips’s rackety private life and unusual public career, some aspects of her sui generis Jamaican experience illuminate the workings of gender in the colony. In this respect, the most salient fact about her was that she was childless. White women in Jamaica were not defined by maternity. Few women had children, and even fewer had surviving children. Most marriages were short and were interrupted by the sudden death of one partner. For many women, such childlessness and the experience of fragile marriages was undoubtedly a tragedy, especially if they needed to eke out an uncertain living in fickle urban economies. But some women, such as Teresia Phillips, developed personas that fit well with the frenetic hedonism and risk-taking character of Jamaican and Dominguan society.127
Phillips was no simpering, uneducated, and passive white woman in thrall to African vices like those Edward Long denigrated. She was indeed a “consuming” woman, but her consumption—of goods, ideas, and new modes of behavior—was active rather than passive and marked her out as a principal agent in fashioning slave societies into new and disturbing places where traditional gender roles came under considerable stress and sometimes alteration. What Teresia Phillips resembled most was the popular characterization of the alluring free colored woman—the mulâtresse, usually depicted by travel writers and colonial authors as avaricious, alluring, sensuous, and highly disruptive.128
If the reality of white women’s lives in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue was more varied than the stereotype put forward by commentators like Long and Moreau, so too was the stereotype of free colored women at variance with the lives they actually lived. As we have seen, for observers in both societies, the hypersexuality of women of color, free and enslaved, was one of the most enduring tropes of colonial life. This trope was especially well expressed in accounts of the urban environment, where the overwhelmingly male colonial population plus the thousands of European sailors and soldiers based in its cities created a lively sexual marketplace. Enslaved prostitutes earned money for their masters and mistresses—and male colonists sought free or enslaved women of color as housekeepers, a position that was widely considered to involve sexual services. In 1776 Hilliard d’Auberteuil estimated that of 23,100 free people living in Saint-Domingue’s cities, there were two thousand married white women and one thousand married free mulatto or black women. He also noted a slightly larger population of thirty-two hundred “prostitutes or women living as concubines” comprising twelve hundred whites and two thousand free mulattos or blacks.129 These numbers may not be accurate, but they reveal the highly charged sexual atmosphere of Saint-Domingue’s towns.
Yet this sexualized image of free women of color is incorrect, for they occupied a variety of economic niches besides sex work. Surviving leases, receipts, and inventories reveal that free women managed slaves and business interests; they built networks of patronage and affection with whites that did not involve sex, as business clients, neighbors, landlords, tenants, employers, and employees. Because many free women of color never married, especially those in the cities, some were able to escape male control and direct their own business interests.130 Being a housekeeper or concubine to a male colonial was often just one stage of a woman’s life. Many women used these positions to acquire real estate and slaves, which they then used in their own businesses. Although white male colonists created a narrative in which they used and discarded women of color as objects of pleasure, there is ample evidence that such men formed valuable partnerships and emotional relationships with concubines and mistresses, as well as with free colored neighbors, business partners, and friends.131
Saint-Domingue’s lively theater scene, the area of colonial life in which Phillips made her mark in Jamaica, illustrates how free women of color operated in spaces in which they were a sometimes conspicuous minority. Besides Freemasonry, theater was Saint-Domingue’s other distinctive urban institution. In Bordeaux and Paris in the 1780s, the ratio of theater seats to city residents was one to forty-six. In Saint-Domingue, Lauren Clay calculates, the comparable ratio was one to seventeen, including whites and free people of color. She also notes that colonials in the parterre paid five times what Frenchmen in the provinces would have paid; free colored theatergoers paid twice the price they would have paid in French provincial cities for equivalent seats.132 Cap Français and Port-au-Prince alone had more than twelve hundred theatrical and musical performances in the 1780s, according to surviving newspaper accounts.133 Actors and touring groups from Europe arrived regularly. Like theaters in provincial French cities, these colonial playhouses received many of the most popular plays from Paris soon after their premiers. In 1765, for example, after the Seven Years’ War, Saint-Domingue’s governor arranged for the patriotic play The Siege of Calais to be performed in Saint-Domingue, just four months after it debuted at the Comédie Française.134 Although there were performances in creole, and companies sometimes adapted European scenes to colonial settings, performances in Cap Français remained closely aligned with French metropolitan styles.135
Like Freemasonry, theatrical performances provided an occasion for socializing in an urban society marked by individualism and a scramble for wealth. For Moreau de Saint-Méry, “one cannot miss a show at Cap Français, especially since [attending] has become the custom. There is little social life in this city and [at the theater] we are at least assembled if not united.”136 Unsurprisingly, the board of directors of the Cap Français Comédie touted the business advantages this sociability created for the colony: “A harmony of minds and an agreeable ease of conducting business, the custom of seeing and talking to one another prevents and dissipates personality [clashes] and often gives rise to new projects and new business which favors the growth of the country and the advantage of its residents.”137
The
