“The breaking asunder” of Fanny Kemble:
Trauma and the Discourse of Hygiene in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian
Plantation in 1838-1839
Winter Jade Werner
“The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some
curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device… All our lives long we are more or less intent on
replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original shape: most of us die with the bits still
scattered round us—that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and
defaced beyond recognition, in the life process. The few very wise find and place them in a coherent
form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from the original
one…”1
The epigraph above comes from a letter written by the British actress Fanny Kemble in
November of 1832, roughly three months after first stepping foot on American soil. To Kemble, “the
event,” as she wryly referred to her arrival in the States, represented an economically necessary, but
horrifically traumatic break from her family and home country. Yet, rather than allowing the anguish of
leaving England to overawe her, Kemble displays in her letters a commitment to picking up the “bits”
of her old life and placing them in a new, yet “coherent form”—hence, strange experiences are
articulated in her writing through the lens of the already familiar, giving her a means to linguistically
and mentally cope with the alien. In Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839,
this discursive strategy appears particularly necessary to the fiercely abolitionist Kemble when she
finds herself (inadvertently) a slave-owner upon marrying the American Pierce Butler. If the institution
of slavery and prejudice against blacks were for Kemble “incomprehensible” previous to her marriage,
even more inconceivable must have been the revelation of her own participation in the system. 2 In
attempting to contend with the repellent position of “missis” to the master, Kemble echoes popular 19 th
century British discourses of health and sanitation. The values and beliefs embedded in these
discourses emotionally and intellectually constitute some of the “bright scattered fragments” of
Kemble’s earlier life in England and, ultimately, are re-“placed” by her to make sense of the
paradoxical position of abolitionist slaveholder she has come to occupy. By reducing unendurable
differences in power to a matter of dirt, hygiene and education, Kemble linguistically domesticates
what was for her the unacceptably foreign, bringing a British aesthetics to an intolerable American
reality.
Repeatedly, Kemble represents the entirety of her American voyage as the horrific upheaval
of her life. In her epistolary autobiography Records of a Girlhood, Kemble revealingly writes, “I was
leaving my mother, my brothers and sister, my friends and my country […] little imagining under what
gangrened, festering wounds brave life will still hold on its way, and urge to the hopeless end its
warfare with inconquerable sorrow.”3 Coming to the “strangest of countries” provoked in Kemble a
deep anxiety over how to maintain and articulate her old self in the harsh foreignness of the New
World.4 “What shall I say to you?” Kemble implores in a characteristic letter, “First of all, pray don’t
forget me […] You cannot imagine how strange [this] seem[s] me.”5 Kemble’s letters disclose that at
stake was not simply the compromise of her moral beliefs, but, even more, those moral beliefs as
particularly British, as cornerstones to an identity Kemble attempted to uphold while separated by
thousands of kilometers from her home country.
If there were two characteristics that to Kemble marked her a product of England and not the
U.S., they were her fierce opposition to slavery and her dedication to health and cleanliness. In her
opening letter in Journal of a Residence, Kemble proudly declares prior to departing for Georgia,
“Assuredly I am going prejudiced against slavery, for I am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of
such a prejudice would be disgraceful.”6 Kemble was, according to herself, not merely abolitionist, but
British; to her, discrimination against blacks together with slavery constituted a peculiarly American
institution from which she felt culturally (and comfortably) estranged. She relates in Records of a
Girlhood, “The prejudice against these unfortunate people is, of course, incomprehensible. On board
ship, Dall poured [a black man] a glass of wine […] whereupon the captain […] said, ‘Ah! One can tell
by that that you are not an American;’ which sort of thing makes one feel rather glad that one is not.” 7
In this way, Kemble’s letters demonstrate a persistent identification of her personal beliefs with
England, rather than with a particular transnational social movement. The fierceness with which she
asserts this trait to be British seems to indicate a desire for some communal, nationalistic continuity
with her home culture notwithstanding her actual, physical distance from it.
2
For Kemble, an ignorance of the most modern health practices also represented one of the
sharpest differences between herself as an Englishwoman and Americans in general. In a letter to Dr.
George Combe (a renowned doctor in England and also Kemble’s brother-in-law), Kemble expresses
hope that his lecture series in America will dissipate “the absence of any thing like general & adequate
knowledge which exists here.”8 The sentiments evinced here resonate with Kemble’s observations in
Journal of a Residence where she complains of the American penchant for warming oneself in a
“crowded,” “deleterious” atmosphere, ignoring “facts which the merest tyro in physiological science
knows, and the utter disregard of which on the part of the Americans renders them the amazement of
every traveler from countries where the preservation of health is considered worth the care of a rational
creature.”9 In her analysis of Kemble’s letters from America, Hiller mildly notes that one of Kemble’s
central theses appears to be “that the majority of Americans are divorced from their own bodies.”10 In
contrast, Kemble herself demonstrates what could be called a hypersensivity to her own body and its
cleanliness. Bathing, says Kemble, is a “ceremony never omitted night or morning,” and her idea of
heaven is a place with “plenty of water to wash in,” a feature distinctly lacking in most American
hotels and abodes.11 The two characteristics of egalitarianism and attention to personal hygiene, both
self-identified by Kemble as belonging to British sensibilities, compose a system of signification that
continuously aids her in maintaining a sense of self, of an English rootedness, in their continuous
resistance to the threat of change posed by a lengthy exposure to American customs, American
ideologies and American dirt.
No wonder then that upon arriving at the Georgian plantation, finding herself both a
slaveholder and far from civilization, in a house “more devoid of the conveniences […] of modern
existence than anything […] before,” Kemble suffers a severe identity crisis.12 She writes, “Oh, if you
could imagine how this title ‘Missis,’ addressed to me and to my children, shocks all my feelings!” 13
However, in trying to overcome this shock and be recognized as the person she considers herself to be
—an abolitionist, a religious woman who holds “[slave] ownership sinful”—Kemble is only met by her
slaves’ “stupid amazement” and their refusal to “comprehend” her.14 After two years of maintaining a
Britishness founded upon a belief in egalitarianism and a fervid dedication to cleanliness and health,
Kemble is placed in a situation that challenges the effective practice of either.
In his critical attempt to locate a Lacanian subjectivity, Bruce Fink asserts that if such a
subjectivity exists for Lacan, it is necessarily predicated on the imposition of that subject’s symbolic
order upon “the real.” Even if no positive conception of the Lacanian subject can be fully defined, he is
at least “overwritten/overridden by language”—that is, his entire unconscious is both a product and
function of language.15 In the case of trauma, writes Fink, there is a “fixation or blockage” in the
process of transforming the “real” to the “symbolic.”16 More specifically, trauma is “what is repressed
in the real” on the order of the “unsayable, unspeakable, the impossible.”17 The traumatic could then be
described as an inarticulable rent in the real; a part of the real that cannot itself be integrated into the
symbolic order, but that then incites symbolic superfluity at its edges in trying to make up for the hole
by building around. Where the “indescribable,” the “inconceivable,” or the “impossible” exists is in its
palpable not-there-ness—a provoking thing for a symbolic that always tries to subject the real entirely
to its totalizing processes. Caruth notes that in Freud, trauma is “borne by an act of departure,” thus
non-signifying in that it exists only as a no-longer-there, a break that marks a profound “discontinuity”
in one’s subjectivity.18
For Kemble, that break is slow and torturous: first, a reluctant departure from her home
country; next, the death of a beloved aunt; last, a marriage that rendered what should have been a
temporary stay in the U.S. a permanent relocation. Meeting the slaves, seeing and hearing them greet
her as “missis! Oh! lily missis!,” somehow makes substantive the past life Kemble has lost. The force
of this encounter overwhelms her; it is as though the unspeakable trauma of years passed in America
has been realized in material, synchronic form. She writes:
“The strangeness of the whole scene, its wildness […] the rapid retrospect which
my mind hurried through of the past few years of my life; the singular contrasts which they
presented to my memory; the affectionate shouts of welcome of the poor people, who
seemed to hail us as descending divinities, affected me so much that I burst into tears” 19
What goes unsaid in this passage is exactly what links the “past few years” of “singular contrasts” with
“the welcome of poor people”—an admixture that causes Kemble to “burst into tears.” The trauma of
Kemble’s life—her anxiety of being forgotten, the loss of loved ones and a home country—is precisely
what is not written; memory is collapsed into the shouts of slaves, and Kemble bursts into tears in a
confusion of “strangeness” and unarticulated “contrasts.” Why though does the appearance of the slave
stimulate this unspeakable, rapid rush of memory? Looking at Kemble’s maintenance of a British
3
identity, her insistence upon egalitarianism and her robust belief in health and cleanliness, it seems that
the body of the slave symbolically bears the brunt of delineating where Kemble refuses most to
reconcile with being American. No wonder then Kemble again and again refers to the slave as
“impossible to conceive,” as “inconceivable.”20 He materializes to Kemble, both in his physicality and
in his relationality to herself, as a recurring symptom of the “inconceivable” trauma of her situation,
challenging exactly those discourses she employs to maintain a self-identificatory Britishness, a
discursive illusion of connectedness with the home country. Thus, Kemble’s legal mastery over the
slave body belies her real fear that the slave shall, in a sense, master her, render her impotent, void of
subjectivity and self-control in the negation his existence represents to her most firmly held beliefs.
Faced directly with this “the return of repressed”—the embodiment of Kemble’s fears in
having to accept an unwanted new home, an unwanted new culture, an irremediable severance from
family and English soil—Kemble must take the step of somehow signifying, making sense of the
unsignifiable. For every moment she finds something “indescribable” or “inconceivable,” she has an
equally fervid moment of declaring, “I must tell,” “describe,” or “explain.” 21 Ragland notes that in the
face of trauma, “an artifact, archive, painting, narrative or poem often […] cover[s] over the real of its
suffering with images and words which seem to tame it.”22 In other words, a signifying discourse other
than one that appropriately recognizes the trauma is adopted. One could call this a substitutive
discourse that gives the illusion of wholeness, of continuity, where there is a traumatic break. Thus, this
substitution must both be familiar and almost totalizing—familiar, because in the attempt to make
sense of the inconceivable, the already-known is the first discourse drawn upon; and, more or less
totalizing so to accomplish a continuous, therefore enabling narrative by which the subject can
continue to productively act in the wake of trauma.
By engaging with the trope of sanitation, Kemble takes a discourse she has used to define
herself in order to “cover” or “tame” (to use Ragland’s words) the traumatic break the slave
symptomizes. By imposing a form of her interiority onto the threatening exterior world, Kemble
exhibits a desire to subsume that exteriority into herself, to bring the slave body under cognitive control
by making it an extension of, rather than a threat against, her British identity. When she first encounters
her slaves she describes them, notably, as “dingy dependants.” 23 The use of the word “dingy” suggests
that the color of the slave’s skin is understood by Kemble to be, at least in part, a function of griminess
or dirtiness; this discursive act foreshadows then the strategy Kemble later adopts in reconciling her
slaveholding with her firm abolitionist beliefs. Going into “their miserable hovels,” which “exhibited
the most deplorable consequence of ignorance and an abject condition,” Kemble “endeavor[s] to
awaken a new perception, that of cleanliness.”24 She writes, as it turns out too optimistically, “It may be
that, the two being incompatible, improvement may yet expel slavery […] It cannot be but, from my
words and actions, some revelations should reach these poor people […] I shall teach.” 25 Starting from
the invocation of “cleanliness,” Kemble is able to construct a logical chain that leads her, unexpectedly,
to justifying her place of authority over her slaves. She will “teach” them out of their “ignorance,”
assume the role of caregiver, of enlightener, of teacher, through her greater familiarity with sanitary
practices, through virtue of her superior cleanliness.
Indeed, dirt and sanitation seem to come to Kemble’s aid whenever words fail her in depicting
slavery. Recounting her visit to the slave infirmary, she writes to the imagined recipient of her letter,
“How shall I describe to you the spectacle?” 26 And yet, Kemble is able to describe the spectacle—and
the description she applies to the sight before her notably identifies dirt with “disorder” and “misery.” 27
“Half the casements,” she writes, “were obscured with dirt, almost as much as the other windowless
ones were darkened by the dingy shutters […] In all, filth, disorder, and misery abounded.”28 The
shutters, like the slaves, are “dingy,” and what is more, filth, disorder and misery appear inextricably
linked, co-determining. As linked, Kemble decides she can reduce “misery” by cleaning and
organizing; she writes, “I addressed old Rose the midwife […] bidding her open the shutters of such
windows as were glazed, and let in the light [and I] forthwith began making Rose tidy up the miserable
apartment, removing all the filth and rubbish from the floor that could be removed.” 29 This is a task
Kemble can handle; this is a discourse appropriated from life in England applied pathetically, almost
ineffectually, to a reality otherwise non-signifiable, one that barely can be described.
Discourses advocating the manifold virtues of personal hygiene were in heavy circulation in
England at the time, and perhaps two of its greatest proponents were the doctors Andrew and George
Combe. In Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life, David notes one of Kemble’s most formative experiences
was her early exposure to “all matters of public interest […] from the most liberal and enlightened
point of view.”30 She goes on to observe that perhaps the most prominent of the intelligentsia who
visited the Kemble family was “George and Andrew Combe, [the former known as] a lawyer and
phrenologist who was later consulted by Prince Albert with regard to the royal children [and the latter,]
a physician whose writings on physiology, hygiene and physical education were influential during the
4
Victorian period.”31 The renown of both doctors in educated circles cannot be overestimated. Upon
Andrew Combe’s death an obituary appeared in The Manchester Times and Gazette noting his two
primary claims to fame: first, that he “was a younger brother of Mr. George Combe, author of the wellknown works ‘The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects,’ ‘A System of
Phrenology,’” and second, that his own book “has gone through twelve editions, and has probably
communicated to the world a greater amount of practical information on the constitution of the human
frame, and the preservation of health than any other treatise ever published on the subject.” 32 These
brothers’ writings, so celebrated and well-circulated in England, unsurprisingly represented to Kemble
the best, most progressive and enlightened specimens of British thought.
Kemble maintained a constant stream of correspondence with these two doctors prior to and
during her stay in America. In Records, she effuses, “[Andrew Combe’s] works upon physiology,
hygiene, and the physical education of children are of such universal value and importance that no
parent or trainer of youth should be unfamiliar with them.” 33 Moreover, in writing about George, she
admits that though she has some distaste for the “craniological theory which he made the foundation of
all his works […] His writings are all upon subjects of the greatest importance and universal interest,
and full of the soundest moral philosophy and the most enlightened humanity.” 34 Looking further at
George Combe’s writings on moral philosophy and humanity, similarities crop up between his words
and the words adopted by Kemble while at Butler Island. In an essay upon the causes and cures of
“pauperism,” published in Daily News, Combe asserts “We shall advance towards removing the causes
of pauperism […]:”
“[But] Before the people can be expected to act on a knowledge of the order of
God’s secular providence, supposing it to be taught to them in youth, their external
condition must be such as to admit of their doing so. They must possess not only knowledge
of their duties, but strong limbs and resolute wills […] How can these advantages be
conferred on them? Bodily health and mental vigour depend on breathing pure air, on
obtaining a sufficiency of wholesome food and comfortable clothing, on cleanliness and
regular exertion”35
Kemble, in ordering Rose to “open the shutters,” in petitioning Butler that the slaves be given a “better
arrangement” of clothing, in expressing outrage that they are forced to labor “hard all day upon two
meals of Indian hominy,” and most of all, in exhorting the slaves to embrace some level of cleanliness,
exactly echoes Combe’s prescriptions for how to alleviate pauperism. 36 Indeed, Kemble’s mode of
ameliorating the lives of her slaves, “conjur[ing] them […] to better their condition by bettering it as
much as they could themselves—enforc[ing] the virtue of washing themselves and all belonging to
them,” is infused with the ethos shared by both Combes that teaching the “ignorant” the basics of
“physiology, hygiene, and physical education” has the power to assuage suffering.37
Yet, even while Kemble derives “comfort” from the slaves’ appearance of having adopted
some meager measures of cleanliness and personal hygiene, the reader and, at times, Kemble too,
recognize that taking such an approach to ameliorating the slave’s condition is ultimately futile.38 Such
a split in consciousness raises questions which are worth pursuing in understanding the construction of
identity in the face of the traumatic foreign. Critic John Plotz has argued that for British citizens
abroad “certain objects and cultural practices became repositories of mobile memory [and] portability
emerged as a new way of imagining community, national identity, and even liberal selfhood on the
move”39 Bringing Kemble into the critical dialogue of Victorian travel and expatriatism introduces a
new paradigm to Plotz’s work: namely, the paradigm of trauma and its effect on how the “mobile
memory” contained in portable practices is subsequently deployed. For Kemble, the “portable” British
discourse of hygiene and cleanliness not only provided an imagined link to her homeland, but also
played a crucial role in at once making her self-conception vulnerable to a “breaking asunder” and then
providing a (somewhat slipshod) covering-over of that shattered identity. By taking trauma into
account, we can begin to make sense of why certain nationalist strategies, practically and rhetorically,
were so fiercely upheld and maintained by well-educated, money expatriates despite their recognition
of such strategies’ limited effectivity. What is more, the consideration of trauma theory within the
understanding of the expatriate or the traveler, can provide some insight as to how such a traumatic
break perhaps can be confronted appropriately and thoroughly.
For Kemble, it was only with time, after a long, painful divorce, that she would put her words
to effective use. In finally publishing her journal, she finds that other “curious, beautiful, and mystical
pattern” by which she reconstructs her identity. Bringing together British sensibilities with an intimate
knowledge of American life, Kemble lent a strong, unique voice to the transatlantic experience, one
that would prove crucial in rallying England’s support for the abolition of slavery in America.
1
F Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1884, p. 557.
ibid., p. 543.
3
ibid., pp. 532-33.
4
Kemble qtd. in A Hiller, ‘ ‘This Strangest of Countries’: Fanny Kemble’s Letters from America’, Literary Imagination
10.3, 2008, p. 304.
5
Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, p. 536.
6
F Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, J Scott (ed), University of Georgia Press,
Athens, 1984, p. 11.
7
Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, p. 543.
8
Kemble qtd. in Hiller, p. 310.
9
Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p. 13.
10
Hiller, p. 310.
11
Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p. 45; Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, p. 536.
12
Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p. 63.
13
ibid., p. 60.
14
ibid., p. 60.
15
B Fink, The Lacanian Subject, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, p. 12.
16
ibid., p. 26.
17
E Ragland, ‘The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, the Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da!
Paradigm’, Postmodern Culture 11.2, 2001, p. 4; emphasis mine.
18
C Caruth, ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’, Yale French Studies 79.Literature and the
Ethical Question, 1991, p. 190, 184.
19
Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p. 48; emphasis mine.
20
ibid., pp. 40, 41.
21
See, for example, pp. 41, 128, 224, 308; 93, 125, 148, 194, 200, 313; 61, 79, 92, 184; 69, 115, 131, 330; 79, 298, 333.
22
Ragland, p. 13.
23
Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p. 50.
24
ibid., pp. 68, 69.
25
ibid., p. 69.
26
ibid., p. 69.
27
ibid., p. 69.
28
ibid., p. 69, 71.
29
ibid., p. 71.
30
D David, Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2007, p. 34.
31
ibid., 34.
32
‘The Late Dr. Andrew Combe’, The Manchester Times and Gazette, Tues. August 17, 1847, p. 5.
33
Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, pp. 154-55.
34
ibid., 151.
35
G Combe, ‘Mr. George Combe on Pauperism’, Daily News, Fri. June 22, 1849, pp. 2.
36
Kemble, Journal of a Residence, pp. 99, 88.
37
ibid,., p. 88; David, p. 34.
38
Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p. 158.
39
J Plotz, ‘The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Victorian Greater Britain’, Victorian Studies, 49.4 2007, p.
660.
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