ABSTRACT
Maria Edgeworth implies that the threat that Harriet Freke's gender-bending antics pose to the social order represented by the English family is in some sense parallel to the threat posed by the black obeah woman to white English colonial order in the West Indies. In Belinda, Edgeworth exposes how a society based on white male privilege views both women and non-whites as 'others' whose potential to disrupt social, economic, and domestic English structures must be contained. Edgeworth's views on Irish-English relations underline her critique of colonial structures and their race and gender categories in Belinda. Edgeworth also associates Lady Delacour with the West Indies through the thematic echoes in Lady Delacour's life of obeah and its effects. In Belinda, Edgeworth interrupts the moralistic structure in which exemplary and deviant women apparently serve as good and bad types of English femininity through aligning these women with figures of the Creole and the slave.
