ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Fatima's relation to Emma's public performances which she made at once with an African woman and as an African woman as a way of illustrating the role race played in constructing and commenting on the Emma-Nelson myth. Fatima's own appearance in the Hamilton household in the later 1790s, then, provided at least a double signification: first, by acting as an aesthetic contrast to Emma's whiteness; and second, by providing another proof of Emma's ties to Nelson and to his victory at the Battle of the Nile. Like Emma Hamilton, Fatima lived a life that explicitly turned on the link between service and performance. Her experience as a black African purchased as a gift recalled Emma's own days as the mistress of Sir Charles Greville, where Emma was first farmed out by Greville to local painters and later explicitly given to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, when he wanted to improve his prospects of marriage.
