Sentiment and Sexual Servitude: White Men of Feeling and The Woman of Colour.

This article analyzes the 1808 novel *The Woman of Colour*, focusing on its critique of white men of feeling—sentimental white men whose professed benevolence masks self-interest, hypocrisy, and sexual coercion toward women of colour. The novel’s biracial heroine, Olivia Fairfield, rejects the conventional marriage plot as a form of resistance aligned with Black women’s “culture of dissemblance,” a strategy of emotional privacy and disavowal of reproductive sexuality to evade sexual exploitation in a hostile white society. Through Olivia’s experiences with paternalistic white men, failed transatlantic marriages, and racialized sexual servitude, the novel exposes the moral and political inadequacies of white abolitionism and imperial masculinity. Ultimately, Olivia’s refusal of marriage and her return to the Caribbean highlight the limits of sentimentalism and the ongoing structural violence of slavery, suggesting that true justice requires more than the emotional appeals of white men of feeling.