Unchecked Animal Creation': Colonial Order and Disorder in Annie Fields's Diary of a West Indian Tour

Kathryn Wichelns also focuses on a little-read piece, this one by Annie Fields, the widow of an Atlantic Monthly editor and the longtime intimate partner of Sarah Orne Jewett. Fields was known in her own right as a genteel... [ view full abstract ]

Kathryn Wichelns also focuses on a little-read piece, this one by Annie Fields, the widow of an Atlantic Monthly editor and the longtime intimate partner of Sarah Orne Jewett. Fields was known in her own right as a genteel activist for women’s rights; her Boston home was a gathering place for artists and intellectuals from both America and Europe. In 1896, Fields kept a diary of a two-month tour of the Caribbean, in which she depicts what she describes as the equally “African” people of Jamaica and Haiti in surprisingly differential terms. Wichelns argues that Fields’s depictions of Jamaican “civility” and Haitian “barbarity” reflect her commitment to promoting Anglo-American cultural values—because of her numerous transatlantic correspondents and extensive private influence, her voice in this respect was arguably more authoritative than Jewett’s. Effectively skirting past the threatening fact of Haitian independence, Fields sees the difference between Jamaicans and Haitians through the lens of her own pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic sentiments. Her sketches of Jamaica and Haiti in part reflect intra-European prejudices; they also provide further insights into the correspondences between late-nineteenth-century eugenicist discourses and first-wave feminisms.