Watchlist (59 page)

⁸
This negation of their mother's sexuality is an example of the male policing the children engage in to mediate any potentially disruptive female power.

⁹
An oblique reference to Percy as a dissolute alcoholic.

¹⁰
Yet another veiled barb as to Adela's sexual depravity, for since the success of Emperor Augustus's propaganda machine, Cleopatra has long been portrayed as oversexed.

¹¹
This trope was frequently used to denote a “wild child,” however in the context of the Byronic hero discourse, the children are referring to the acute chronic melancholy of Percy's ruttish dissipation.

¹²
Adela is revealing that, by bringing his agenda of disharmony upon her, Percy is threatening to dismantle her authenticity with his financial cacophony.

¹³
Such vernacular as “merry”-ness suggests that Adela's “merry” sexual misconduct has been enjoyed since birth.

¹⁴
Note the children's conception of Adela's bastardy approaches deformity.

¹⁵
Adela
, lighting the way for
Wuthering Heights
, is known to have thoroughly inspired Charlotte Brontë to pay homage in the creation of Heathcliff, the construction of Moor as man, allowing Brontë to position the subaltern as the vessel of violent agency.

¹⁶
This fluidity in their conception of race typically predates the nineteenth century and is most often found in the eighteenth century where skin color was a less fixed secondary identity marker. For a charming and oft incisive exploration of this, see Roxann Wheeler's
The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture
.

¹⁷
A Creole female, which Adela has now claimed as her identity, was commonly depicted in the discourse of white colonial domination as lascivious and unstable due to the West Indian heat.

¹⁸
This carries the connotation of Percy's animalistic virility astride Adela's noble savagery. See Dowd, whose
Barbarous Beasts, White Toys, and Hybrid Paternities: Considerations on Race and Sexuality in the Caribbean
examines these tensions.

¹⁹
This accusation hearkens to the seemingly fixed, misogynist association between West Indian women and black magic which was stereotypical during the period in which
Adela
was composed.

²⁰
In the first German translations, it is curious to note that “she” rather than “he” dies.