The stereotype that black people were sexually and orally indulgent quickly gained traction.42 By the early seventeenth century, the perception that Africans freely gratified their animal appetites was expressed by some of the most elite members of English high society.43 The celebrated statesman and author Francis Bacon issued a two-part condemnation of African appearance and character that incorporated these two stereotypes, among others. In it, Bacon parroted the view, also popular in the Low Countries, that “Ethiopians,” as he called them, were “little, foul, and ugly.” He added to this the now familiar English view that black people were libidinous, writing that they embodied the very “Spirit of Fornication.”44
Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, that in seventeenth-century England, as in the Low Countries, as blackness was linked to unattractiveness so was whiteness increasingly linked to beauty. Turn-of-the-century England, known as the Golden Age of English art, philosophy, and culture, was distinct in the tenacity of these color-based associations. For starters, while whiteness had long been associated with purity, goodness, and beauty in the country, the reign of the virgin queen, praised for her glowing alabaster skin, codified the association for the citizenry.45 Poets produced song and verse in homage to their Christian ruler, such as the following:
Her hand as white as whale’s bone
Her finger tipt with Cassidone
Her bosom, sleek as Paris plaster
Held up two bowls of Alabaster.46
If the queen’s skin was indeed “white as whale’s bone,” it wasn’t attributable so much to God as to the milk-colored lead paint she was known to be fond of applying to her face and arms.47 Nevertheless, the whiteness of her skin, even if owing to cosmetics, elicited positive feelings among her countrymen. The praise surrounding her eventually reached cult status. Historians have shown that her whiteness was a focus for her subjects’ sentiments.48
There was a second reason that the fetish for whiteness reached a fever pitch in seventeenth-century England. Artistic representations had been severely restricted in the country as a result of the Protestant Reformation a century earlier. As a result, images that did not appear to accurately reproduce biblical lore, including those featuring black people, were forbidden and in some instances destroyed.49 The pigeonholing of visual imagery effectively stunted the growth of British painting until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.50 For this reason, representations of black people by domestic painters were nearly nonexistent for the country’s first century of involvement in the slave trade. When they did make appearances prior to 1660, it was less in the visual arts than in official court records, poetry, literature, and court masques.51 The first black women in the court record, for example, arrived as maids in the retinue of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. Catherine appeared on official business, an arranged marriage to the English Prince Arthur. Very little information survives about her cortege, but we do know that her black female servants were ridiculed by Sir Thomas More, key counselor to Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, as “hunchbacked, undersized, and barefoot Pygmies of Ethiopia.”52
Sir Thomas More’s evaluation of black women as small and deformed was a prelude to the linking of black femininity and the grotesque in Elizabethan art and literature. William Shakespeare often featured tortured black characters in his plays. In Othello, the title character despaired over being treated as a “lascivious Moor.”53 Less frequently, however, have scholars commented on Shakespeare’s dismissal of black femininity, as appears in his famed Midsummer Night’s Dream.54 In the play, Hermia is spurned by her suitor, Lysander, who rejects her in favor of the fair Helena. In the aftermath, Helena and Lysander attack Hermia. Lysander demands that she take her leave, yelling, “Away you Ethiope!” and “Out tawny, tartar, Out!” When Hermia still refuses to leave, the trio have the following exchange:
HELENA
O, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
HERMIA
“Little” again! nothing but “low” and “little”!
Why will you suffer her to flout me thus?
Let me come to her.
LYSANDER
Get you gone, you dwarf;
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn.55
In a neat jumble, Shakespeare makes Hermia at once a “vixen,” capable since a young age of luring men with her sexual charms, as well as a grotesque and “low” dwarf. For her sexual and physical transgressions, she is discarded. Helena, Lysander’s newly chosen lover, is by contrast depicted as tall, white, and slim, like a “painted maypole.”
English ladies weren’t only painting themselves white to enhance their beauty. They were also painting themselves black to reveal, through contrast, the alleged hideousness of black women. In 1605, shortly after the death of Elizabeth, an infamous court masque known as The Masque of Blackness was presented by Jacob I’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and her court. The Masque of Blackness, by Ben Jonson, presented the tale of King Niger and his twelve daughters. While the king tries to convince his daughters that they are beautiful, they despise their black skin. An oracle (Aethiope) tells the girls that if they wish to remove their blackness, they should go to the land with the name ending in -TANIA (that is, Britannia), also known as “Albion the Fair.”
The twelve daughters were played by Queen Anne and her ladies in blackface. Their faces and their arms up to the elbows were painted black, leading the English art collector Sir Carleton, who once sat for a portrait by Rubens, to cringe, claiming the “lean-cheeked Moors” they invented to be a “loathsome sight” indeed.56 Neither Sir Carleton nor the twelve painted black ladies were to find any relief until Ben Jonson finished the sequel, which was performed in 1608. At that time, they arrive at the Throne of Beauty in Britannia, where they bask in the sun’s (less scorching) glow while chanting, “Yield night, then to the light, as blackness hath to beauty.”57
Such was the double signification of fairness in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. After the Restoration, black women were seldom represented in painting, and when they did appear, they were not miraculously re-christened in England as the beauties they had been in other places at other times. Being commonly retained as pages and sexual conveniences for men from the rising world powers, they remained in the popular imagination as little, base, and licentious.
* * *
The rise of the slave trade also had a direct impact on changing ideas about the good qualities associated with being fat among the English people. Perishable goods reaped from slave labor began arriving from the colonies that would forever change the English way of life, one of which would go on to have a curious impact on the English diet and body size: sugar. Sugar production had been developing at breakneck speed in late sixteenth-century Brazil, then a colony of Portugal. In the 1620s the Dutch Republic attempted a hostile takeover of the northernmost Brazilian territories. The war that ensued was fought in a series of skirmishes in which the Dutch captured a key port in 1630, only to lose it again in 1654.58 In the meantime, sugar production in Brazil dropped precipitously, a shift that allowed the British and their colony of Barbados to step into the void.59
The mind-boggling profits the English reaped from sugar plantations were one obvious benefit of this trade. Another was the widespread availability of a commodity once deemed so rare and enticing that it was dubbed “white gold.” In 1660 England imported 1,200 barrels of sugar from Barbados and other key West Indian holdings. By 1700, that amount had jumped to 50,000 barrels. When it came to the sheer volume of sugar sent to the mother country, the British were rivaled only by the Dutch.60 As sugar imports soared, prices plummeted, making what was formerly a luxury item readily available to the average citizen of England and Holland.61 Teahouses and coffeehouses sprang up on fashionable