Stepping out of the Frame: Re-visioning the Slave Narrative in David Dabydeen’s « A Harlot’s Progress » (1999)

Introduction

In A Harlot’s Progress, the Guyanese-born poet and novelist David Dabydeen reimagines William Hogarth’s 1732 series of engravings by making the little black boy depicted in the second plate—the young servant wearing a feathered turban and preparing to serve tea—both the narrator and protagonist of his novel. In Hogarth’s scene, the boy is a mere detail: a silent spectator of his mistress’s deception to distract her wealthy protector as her young lover escapes in the background. Sensitive to the spectral presence of black figures in 18th-century art, David Dabydeen gives this invisibilised character, named Mungo, a voice and a body through which to tell his story, presenting an ekphrastic reinterpretation of the conventions of the slave narrative.

By giving Mungo a voice, David Dabydeen allows him to step out of the frame of the engraving, where he was reduced to an exotic commodity, a symbol of colonial wealth positioned alongside a pet monkey, a mahogany table, and a porcelain tea set. Within Dabydeen’s narrative however, Mungo is subjected to similar reification, particularly by Lord and Lady Montague. Indeed, Lord Montague, who purchases Mungo at an auction sale in the hope of pleasing his wife, eventually regards the young man as nothing more than an item in his collection of exotic objects: “Lord Montague scrutinized him for any sign of familiar humanity, but he was as distant as an African mask or carving” (200). As for Lady Montague, she conflates Mungo with her deceased pet monkey, mourning its loss and declaring: “And give him Medusa’s silver collar. My poor monkey…” (204).

Yet David Dabydeen’s Mungo resists a linear reading, subverting the expectations of both the reader and Thomas Pringle, the abolitionist eager to record his confession. Metaphorically refusing to become Mr. Pringle’s “harlot”, Mungo asserts his agency through a polyphonic, circular narrative enriched by dreams, imagined alternative lives, and fantasies, which accumulate as contradictory layers in the form of a palimpsest. Far from delivering the testimony of suffering that Mr. Pringle hopes will evoke sympathy, Mungo’s account emphasises the constructed nature of memory and challenges the reduction of truth to a singular, simplified version of events. While Mr. Pringle demands, “A beginning, Mungo” (1), the protagonist later declares, “I had many beginnings” (27), rejecting the rigid structure of the pre-titled chapters Mr. Pringle wishes to impose upon his story, which is that of a Christian salvation narrative tracing Mungo’s journey from being “stained” by “sin and greed” “as a result of slavery” to his redemption, culminating in Chapter 9: “Redemption of Mungo by the Committee for the Abolition of Slavery” (6).

The very notion of “progress” is destabilised by the novel’s form as details from Hogarth's engravings are interspersed in the narrative at the beginning of each of the nine sections (which do not follow those recorded in Mr. Pringle’s notebook), inviting the reader to relate the text to its visual source material and to question the sequencing of events, as the details chosen do not follow the chronological order of Hogarth's series. Ultimately, David Dabydeen’s reimagining of the characters and objects in A Harlot’s Progress encourages reflection on the limitations of representation and the imaginative potential of fiction, seen as a means of reinventing the gaps of traumatic memory. It is the very notion of frame that is called into question in David Dabydeen’s rewriting of the slave narrative, the silent black figures from history painting escaping their respective frames, while frames multiply and overlap within the narrative, so that there is no single frame but rather a series of them from which both characters and story break free.

1. Deceiving Appearances: Resisting Visual Transparency and Simplification

Just as Mungo refuses to conform to the narrative structure that Mr. Pringle seeks to impose on his testimony, he also resists delivering a straightforward account of suffering. While Mungo’s inventive and multifaceted narrative is undoubtedly marked by trauma—particularly his sexual subjugation by Captain Thistlewood and the nightly abuses inflicted by Jane and the other servants in Lady Montague’s household—he remains a complex character who defies expectations. His testimony continually blends truth and fiction, and several contradictory versions of the same events coexist and are regularly invaded by voices other than his own. Refusing to be reduced to the status of victim, Mungo repeatedly reverses power dynamics, imagining himself as the one exerting power over those who are supposed to be his superiors. Mungo thus says of Betty, the maid who washes him in preparation for the sale, and who was initially very wary of Mungo’s intelligence and even attempted to drown him out of fear that he might be some sort of devil: “She has become like Captain Thistlewood, once stiff with authority, now servile before [Mungo], disorderly in her needs” (156). On another occasion, Jane herself appears to have become an enslaved black woman when beaten by her mother, and Mungo almost seems to feel pity for the young woman: “Jane don’t seem to feel or mind the blows, as if she is become Negro slave so born or used to hurt that there is no more hurt” (215).

This ambivalence in Mungo’s character, who refuses to openly condemn those who abused him, is also reflected in his use of the imagery of crucifixion. By comparing himself to Christ crucified, Mungo places himself directly in the ambiguous position of both victim and martyr, atoning for the sins of humanity, but also distancing himself from his own human condition. Christian imagery is deployed by Mungo to rationalise the violence inflicted on him by Captain Thistlewood (“when he beats me, it is that I too must know the suffering of the Cross” (64)), and even to justify the violence endured by the people of his village, since, in a distorted manner, this introduction to religion also provides him with the justification for the guilt that gnaws at him for having been spared: “And yet they were not fully human, for none were baptized in the body of Christ, none received the sacraments from Captain Thistlewood’s, my father’s, mouth” (49). These discordant images of Christianity pervade the novel, suggesting Mungo’s reappropriation of his narrative and his complete subversion of Mr. Pringle’s expectations of “a sober testimony that will appeal to the Christian charity of an enlightened citizenry” (5): the enslaved man sold at auction becomes the Christ figure of Mantegna's Pietà, Christian forgiveness transforms into a justification for violence and death, Moll's dying body becomes that of “the Virgin Mother” (272) in Mungo’s arms, and Mr. Gideon—far from the lecherous merchant depicted in Hogarth’s engraving—emerges as a paragon of human empathy, as Mungo reflects: “But it was the Jew who sought out the tragedy of my people, who sacrificed his life to free us from hatred of the whiteman and the Christian” (272–273).

As Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl explain, David Dabydeen’s critical project of re-centring silent black figures intersects “with equally stereotypical representations of the Jew and the harlot”: “Seeking to protect Hogarth’s protagonists against voyeuristic appropriation, it is one of the achievements of Dabydeen’s text to complicate modes of representation” by endowing these stereotypical figures “with a full-blown, though far from transparent, subjectivity” (67). By challenging the very notion of visual transparency and simplistic characterisation in A Harlot’s Progress, David Dabydeen peoples his novel with morally ambiguous characters of complex psychology. He interrogates the imposition of identity—whether by Mr. Pringle, the conventions of the slave narrative, or art history itself—offering not one but multiple alternative readings of these characters. By destabilising stereotypes and representations, the novel becomes an echo chamber for the coexistence of multiple versions of events, thereby questioning the direct relationship between visualisation and the transparency of identity, and underlining the power of fiction to reinvent, or even transfigure, traumatic experience.

2. Navigating the Gaps of Memory or “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination”

For Mungo, the reconstruction of memory, which can find an echo in Wilson Harris’s lecture on “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” ((“The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” is the title of a lecture delivered by Wilson Harris at the University of Leeds in 1992, which David Dabydeen references in an interview with Lars Eckstein, to explain that he considers the memory of the past to be inherently creative and that he seeks to reinvent its multiple potentials, even if this act of remembering alters the course of events (2001, “Getting Back to the Idea of Art as Art - An Interview with David Dabydeen”).)), is intrinsically tied to a cathartic reinvention of narrative, once again echoing his resistance to being confined within any frame, whether physical or narrative. This reinvention is both a necessity, to fill the blank spaces left by trauma, and a deliberate choice by Mungo, for whom memory is not a constraint but a space of invention, particularly for the reimagining of his own identity: “Memory don’t bother me, that’s why I don’t tell Mr Pringle anything. I can change memory, like I can change my posture, fling the blanket away, spring out of bed, dance a step or two of a cotillion, and babble into his blank pages the most lively of syllables” (2). The exploration of the multiple potentials of the past, including possibilities that were never realised, becomes a means for Mungo to address a fractured narrative and the gaps in his recollection: “I remember nothing, but I pity Mr Pringle’s solicitousness, […] so I must create characters, endow them with traits and peculiarities, and sow dialogue between us to make luxuriant plots of the pages of his notebook” (67).

This admission aligns closely with David Dabydeen’s stated project in the preface to his long narrative poem Turner (1994), where he explains that his poem "focuses on the submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner’s painting. It has been drowned in Turner’s (and other artists’) sea for centuries. When it awakens, it can only partially recall the sources of its life, so it invents a body, a biography, and peoples an imagined landscape” (Dabydeen, 2010, 7). The act of giving voice to the forgotten figure in Hogarth’s painting is thus necessarily fragmented and, in a sense, incomplete, and fiction becomes the tool through which Mungo reclaims his story.

Throughout the narrative, Mungo continually reimagines the meaning of the TT mark on his forehead. Initially, he frames it as a distant memory of the passage of Greek civilisation through Africa: “Some germ of Greek civilization survived the suffocation of bush and blacks to flower on my forehead centuries later. I am certain that I am an imprint of a lost tribe of Greeks, for how else can I explain the sign of Pi inscribed on my forehead?” (33). Later, however, the mark is transformed into a symbol of possession, becoming the initials of Thomas Thistlewood, branded onto Mungo’s forehead as a signal to others that the boy “has been breached and made accustomed to men”, as Betty explains (123). It would seem, then, that in response to the trauma of Thistlewood’s violence, Mungo may have sought to reappropriate this mark of ownership, but a third interpretation casts doubt on the scar’s true nature when the advertisement for Mungo’s sale refers to it as “some slight tribal scarring on his forehead” (164). These contradictory interpretations coexist and overlap within the narrative, creating what Neumann and Rippl describe as “a new, multi-layered kind of visibility that is mediated through the allegorical otherness of poetic language and that retains traces of the opaque, forgotten and ambivalent” (63).

The deliberate ambiguity of Mungo’s narrative is both a sign of his resistance to the framing of his experience and a conscious decision to confront the reality of his memories while reinventing the fates of the spectres that haunt him. Indeed, his conversations with these ghosts reveal that “His duty is to write them into life” (256). By reimagining their stories, Mungo also confronts his own guilt and fulfills their request: “They trusted me with their expectations of alternative lives; lives which they did not live, but which were possible, for they could imagine the possibilities of them” (272).

3. Questioning the storyteller’s legitimacy and the limits of representation: “Who shall have control over the story?” (Rushdie, 360)

However, Mungo’s ability to become the spokesperson for these multiple stories is challenged by Ellar, who accuses him of censoring his narrative to accommodate the reader (256). Ellar is a scorned, unmarried woman, rejected by the men in the village because of her lame foot. Captured and imprisoned in the ship’s hold, she is beaten to death by the crew, and it is revealed that she was raped during and after her death. Enraged by her fate—not only in a village where she could never be seen as an attractive woman, but above all against those who killed her—she comes to embody a destructive, vengeful force that stands in contrast to Mungo’s less confrontational approach. Freed from the expectations of the living, Ellar operates with greater liberty and, according to Mungo, possesses “the clairvoyance of the dead” so that “[h]er own ambition is to live otherwise on the page, differently from the way she died on the soiled plank of a whiteman’s lap” (257). In contrast, Mungo (renamed Perseus by Lady Montague) struggles to fully free himself from the expectations of his readership, even as he resists conforming to the imposed framework:

Perseus is stilled by her outrage but he knows he cannot write it, for fear of alienating his readers.

‘Perhaps you should curse them outright as white devils, tell the story as it is and not bother with the consequences,’ Ellar says, sensing his anxiety. ‘What more can they do to you worse than slavery?’

‘They can refuse to buy my book, and I’ll starve,’ Perseus says quietly to himself. (256)

As Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace explains, Ellar’s voice grows increasingly prominent in the closing pages of the novel, undermining Mungo’s narrative by mocking his pretensions: “She functions as an image of the irrepressible: she is what any narrator struggles to control in the process of telling. As a potential source of the told, she is simultaneously the untelling, as she threatens to seize control and undo whatever order the narrator, under the guise of the told, provides” (250).

While Mungo’s capacity to recount his story and the story of the villagers is thus imperilled by the resurgence of these haunting voices, it raises broader questions about who has the authority to tell a story, how it can be told, or whether certain experiences simply cannot be told, and must necessarily be reinvented. The novel’s narrative structure invites readers to question the form of the slave narrative as, even though Mungo’s voice is unreliable and at times cryptic, it still allows him to reclaim a degree of agency.

Conversely, Mr. Pringle’s rewriting of his story becomes a final dispossession of Mungo’s identity—a commodification of his trauma shaped by the capitalist logic of an auction. The pervasive presence of Mr. Pringle, whose name echoes that of a secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society who recorded and adapted the testimony of Mary Prince (the first black woman to publish an autobiography of her experience as a slave), serves as a grim reminder that Mungo’s story is destined to be instrumentalised by the abolitionist movement. The movement’s aim to craft this narrative as one of Christian redemption, designed to elicit empathy from its readership, further underscores this exploitation. As Abigail Ward points out, Mungo’s subjection to subsequent rewriting or romanticisation of his fragmented story “intimates he is the ‘harlot’ of the novel’s title” (37), an idea suggested by Mungo himself when he declares: “He makes me feel like a strumpet whose performance is undeserving of his coin” (178). Mungo’s exploitation through the slave narrative culminates in a moment where he submits to Mr. Pringle’s objectification and presents himself as a gift to the reader: “I don’t know nothing, so let Mr Pringle tell it as he wants to, of Lord and Lady Montague, and I will shut my rambling mouth while he properize and give them pedigree, and make me present, and make of me a present to you, grateful reader” (186).

In a sense, Dabydeen’s novel is also an admission of failure. While Mungo’s subjectivity is constructed around absences, it remains constrained by prevailing representations and discourses about black subjects. His attempt to appropriate the narrative remains partial, as it is invaded by other voices, never quite free to condemn or forgive, circular and fragmented by nature, and Mungo’s ability to retain control over his story is continually undermined, so that the persistence of petrified imagery and Mungo’s inability to detach himself completely from Hogarth’s engraving always shine through in contrast. Even as Mungo transforms this representation into merely one version of his story within a polyphony of voices and interpretations, it seems that the spectre of the original engraving continues to haunt him: “I fear that I will forever be associated with the indecencies of merchants and whores, for Mr Hogarth’s prints will last forever” (273). Indeed, Dabydeen’s novel—drawing on Hogarth’s ‘Progress’, just as Mr. Pringle uses the second plate to frame Mungo’s story (4)—suggests that Mungo can never fully escape this representation. Yet, even as it acknowledges this failure, the novel is also imbued with optimism, insofar as Hogarth’s engravings ultimately become the foundation for a reinvention of Mungo’s memories and history.

Commented excerpt

Having recently entered the service of Lord and Lady Montague, Mungo is initially captivated by the house’s vast collection of precious objects collected by Lord Montague during his travels around the world. Among them, a maritime painting displayed on the walls of the residence catches his eye, stirring in him a peculiar sense of familiarity. Yet, as he lingers on the image, what begins as quiet contemplation soon turns into a deep immersion into dark, traumatic memories—memories that had, until then, remained repressed and concealed from his own narrative.

The contemplation of the painting—which unmistakably evokes Turner’s Slave Ship, a depiction of the 1781 massacre of 130 enslaved people thrown overboard the Zong and the inspiration for Dabydeen’s poem Turner—gives way to a surge of traumatic memories bubbling to the surface of Mungo’s consciousness. These recollections, until now suppressed from his narrative, resurface with harrowing clarity. Mungo, who has grown accustomed to the presence of the voices of the ghosts of the villagers, is surprised by the fact that only silence follows. The absence of the ghosts and his solitude are then linked to the villagers’ death by drowning, not thrown overboard as at other times in the narration, but instead trapped by their chains in the ship’s hold.

In a sense, this passage is a missing piece of the puzzle of the narrative, as it sheds light on the reference at the beginning of the novel to the kabuti birds. Mungo explained then that as children, Saba and he would amuse themselves by trapping the kabuti with bird-lime, as the birds would then produce sublime melodies (13). Mungo here seems to play on the expression of the “swan song”, replacing the European bird with its more Africanised counterpart, while similarly implying that it is in dying that one produces one’s greatest work. Since Mungo presents himself at the beginning of the novel as very old, it thus seems that he is implying that this novel itself is his finest musical and narrative production and that the breaking of silence is, in fact, synonymous with death. Moreover, kabuti, a derivative form of kaputi, means either “daydream” or “a corpse, a dead person” in Swahili, and this dual meaning also suggests a connection between the birds and the villagers chained in the hold of Captain Thistlewood’s ship.

But the depiction of horror is counterbalanced by an aestheticisation of the suffocated lives of the slaves, as the bubbles formed by their drowning are compared to notes on a musical score. The aestheticisation of violent death here appears to be used as a means of contrast to denounce even more forcefully the inhumane treatment of the slaves. The passage also offers a metafictional reflection on storytelling itself as the interplay between music and silence is symptomatic of the challenge of putting traumatic experience into words, of breaking the silence, also significant in the hyphenation of a number of words within the passage, notably “quiet-quiet”, which suggests both the fragmentation of the narrative and the notion that the true story of these chained slaves is to be found in these gaps, in these silences, and in Mungo’s fragmented memories.

Bibliography

CASTEEL, Sarah Phillips. 2019. "David Dabydeen's Hogarth: Blacks, Jews, and Postcolonial Ekphrasis", in Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman (eds.), Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp.113-134.

DABYDEEN, David. 2000 (1999). A Harlot's Progress. London: Vintage.

---. 2010 (1995). Turner: New and Selected Poems. Leeds: Peepal Tree.

ECKSTEIN, Lars. 2005. "Ekphrastic Memory in David Dabydeen's A Harlot’s Progress and the Politics of Aestheticist Transfiguration", in Judith Misrahi-Barak (ed.), Revisiting Slave Narratives. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, pp.327-348.

HOGARTH, William. 17th-18th century. A Harlot's Progress: Plate II. Etching and engraving, 31.5 x 38 cm. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. URL: jstor.org/stable/community.15027382.

MARTINIÈRE, Nathalie. 2020. "Re-Imagining Slavery in David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress", in Lawrence Aje and Nicolas Gachon (eds.), Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World. New York, London: Routledge, pp.267-280.

NEUMANN, Birgit and RIPPL, Gabriele. 2020. "Renegotiating Frames and Visibility in David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress", in Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature: Intermedial Aesthetics. New York, London: Routledge, pp.60-84.

RUSHDIE, Salman. 2012. Joseph Anton. New York: Random House.

WALLACE, Elizabeth Kowaleski. 2000. "Telling Untold Stories: Philippa Gregory's 'A Respectable Trade' and David Dabydeen's 'A Harlot’s Progress'" NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, volume 33, n°2, pp.235-252. URL: doi.org/10.2307/1346081.

WARD, Abigail. 2007. "David Dabydeen's A Harlot’s Progress: Re-presenting the Slave Narrative Genre", Journal of Postcolonial Writing, volume 43, n°1, pp. 32-44.

Further Reading

DABYDEEN, David. 1987 (1985). Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Athens: University of Georgia Press (see specifically pp. 101-132 for his analysis of Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress).

D'AGUIAR, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. 1999 (1997). Hopewell: The Ecco Press.

LEVY, Andrea. 2010. The Long Song. London: Headline Review.

PHILLIPS, Caryl. 1992 (1991). Cambridge. New York: Knopf.

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Élise Tendron, Stepping out of the Frame: Re-visioning the Slave Narrative in David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999), La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), juin 2025. Consulté le 13/06/2025. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/litterature-postcoloniale/stepping-out-of-the-frame-re-visioning-the-slave-narrative-in-david-dabydeen-s-a-harlot-s-progress-1999