This paper will explore the trope of the “bloodthirsty savage” in literary representations of slavery and revolt in Jamaica. Through a close reading of the sublime landscape in English novelist Charlotte Smith’s novel The Story of Henrietta (1800), the paper will stress the role of Gothic tropes in consolidating the Caribbean region as a geographical place in the mind of the nineteenth-century middle-class reader. The paper will argue that Gothic literary strategies of both ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ were used to give aesthetic form to revolutionary events on the island. Through these literary techniques, the Caribbean became a territory closely connected to the anxieties in Europe about the displacements of national identity, the fear of miscegenation, non-Christian belief systems, and of the moral consequences of slavery.
