The Woman of Colour: A Tale

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to enslavement and discusses scenes from the source text that include racist sentiments and language.

The Pagoda, the home of the Ingot family, represents the indiscriminate appropriation of Eastern cultures by white British colonizers. The structure itself is a hodgepodge of several different architectural styles. According to Olivia, it lacks “the bells which usually decorate the Chinese buildings, from whence its name is derived” (108), but otherwise resembles an actual pagoda, which is odd, considering that the Ingots were in India, not China. Olivia calls Sir Marmaduke the “eastern nabob” (108)—that is, someone who returned from India with a fortune—and he appears to be quite determined to show it off through the ostentatious exoticism of a building that does not at all fit the English countryside. That, however, does not appear to trouble Sir Marmaduke, whose scheme to change the route of the turnpike shows his willingness to alter the landscape according to his wishes and tastes, much as colonizers did throughout the British Empire.

Olivia’s calling the Pagoda “the temple of folly” (108) suggests several related ways to read the structure. One is in terms of an architectural “folly,” a building that is intended to decorate a garden and yet is so extravagant as to become a focus in itself.