UC Davis

This dissertation identifies a trope from slave narrative, the trope of the British brute, and tracks it through nineteenth-century British fiction to show how Black intellectual thought influenced British writers in the nineteenth century. Because race-based chattel slavery theorized the enslaved as both human beings and animal property, the assertion of personhood was an essential component of slave narrative. The genre, following Ottobah Cugoano’s 1787 Thoughts and Sentiments, contrasted the humanity and personhood of the enslaved against the brutality of the slaver. While the dominant narrative of the brute relies on identity markers such as race, class, physicality, exposure, and labor, the British brute is made brutish by his behavior. This dissertation starts by examining the emergence of the trope in slave narrative and then looks at two specific examples, Wuthering Heights and Black Beauty, to show how the trope entered fiction and changed and was changed by it. Though the trope was reclaimed in service of white supremacy in fin de siècle transformation novels, it served to destabilize the hierarchy of British humanity in the nineteenth century.