• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Women Writing/Women WrittenThe Case of Oriental Women inEnglish Colonial Fiction
Hager Ben Driss
 Kairouan University, Tunisia
Reprinted from the
Middle East Studies Association Bulletin
,Winter 2001(with changes in orthography to HTML standards).Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
W
omen’s contribution to the building of the British Empire has become bynow undeniable. Standing at different vantage points, English womenarticulated, supported, and even innovated the colonial discourse. Thoughhighly masculine in its ideological core, the Empire is far from beingexclusively male in its rhetorical voice. Feminist postcolonial critics haveshown British women’s important participation in colonialism. McClintock,for example, claims that “white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers, privileged andrestricted, acted upon and acting” (6).Feminists have even traced back the origin of the novel to late seventeenth-century female authors. The advent of the novel, then, cannot be attributedto Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1720), for it was preceded by Aphra Behn’sOroonoko, written in 1688. Informed by postcolonial theories, the feministreading focuses on two points relevant to Behn’s narrative. First, the novelas a genre is the offspring of a woman writer. Second, Behn’s Oroonoko isan imperialist novel with a colonial setting, Surinam. According to Azim,Behn’s text is “an imperialist project, based on the forceful eradication andobliteration of the other” (37). In her analysis of Oroonoko, Azim stresseswomen writers’ involvement in imperialism and their adoption of masculinist strategies for eradicating the native female.A great number of women novelists wrote prolifically between the 1890sand the 1920s. In Rebel Women, Miller offers an interesting tableau of theliterary life in this period. However, Miller presents an incomplete scene for she excludes from her analysis colonial women writers who actively participated in the literature of this era. Miller’s omission of colonial textsmay be strategic, for she seeks “to introduce Edwardian novels aboutwomen and feminism into the literary history of the period from 1890 to1914 and, in so doing, to make a claim for the importance of feminism in thedevelopment of the modern novel” (2). Actually, feminism is equallyimportant in shaping the colonial discourse and developing the romance, a prevailing literary genre of this period.It is difficult to separate the texts written about the colonized periphery fromthe center. Hence, this essay studies the manifestations of feminism and theanti-feminist retaliations in some representative texts written at the turn of the nineteenth century. Starting from two main figures of feminine Anglo-Indian fiction, Flora Annie Steel and Maud Diver, I will try to trace colonialfeminist, as well as anti-feminist, anxieties in imperialist romance produced by women. The ultimate aim is to decode the female colonial discourse andlocate its points of convergence with and divergence from male’s discourse.
 
It is pertinent to investigate women writers’ degree of colonial involvement,that is, whether they are mere passive reproducers of colonial patriarchalstereotypes, or are really in possession of an enunciative position of a whitefeminine superiority.
Maud Diver: Stifling the Feminist Voice
The English literary scene of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies witnessed the thriving of fictional texts written by women aboutwomen. The ‘New Woman’ novel refers, often pejoratively, to narrativeschoosing emancipated women as their heroines. These texts challenge thetraditional image of the demure, calm, and passive Victorian lady. SarahGrand is credited with coining the term ‘New Woman’ in 1894. In addition,the term ‘feminism’ is a neologism imported from France in 1895 (Scott 12).The New Woman heroine is an activist, outspoken, militant feminist. Thethemes tackled in these novels turn around marriage problems, life of spinsters, and suffragette stories. The main innovation is a free talk aboutsexuality and uninhibited erotic fantasies as articulated, for instance, byElinor Glyn in her Three Weeks (1907) or by E. M. Hull in The Sheik (1919). Nevertheless, not all women novelists hailed the New Woman novel, whichwas resisted and scorned by most male writers. Motherhood, traditionalmarriage, and conservative sexual relationships were supported by womenwho placed themselves against the feminist stream. Anti-feminism andimperialism even coalesced in propagandist organizations such as the Girl’sFriendly Society and the Mother’s Union. Anti-feminists saw themselves asthe custodians of morality. They sought to uphold the disintegrating familystructures along with the whole imperial power. “Imperialism,” argues Scott,“was to pervade the eugenics and motherhood movements of the EdwardianEra: mothers of the Empire were to raise healthy sons to protect and expandthe empire” (10).Maud Diver was a hard anti-feminist. She “positioned herself againstfeminist agitation in the imperial metropolis and on the side of male masteryof insubordinate British women” (Deidre 161). She gave fullest expressionto her antagonism to the women’s movement and to her colonial convictionsin Lilamani (1910). Her novel echoes the majority of male texts of that period, where the anxiety over the growing power of women is hidden behind an accentuated masculine domination of Oriental women.Audrey Hammond is given the role of the feminist in Diver’s Lilamani. Inspite of “her pluck, her single-mindedness, her unobtrusive strength” (13),she fails to appeal to the reader’s sympathy. Diver made it a point to render this missionary doctor a negative character. Audrey helps Lilamani, aseventeen-year-old Indian girl, escape her mother’s plan to marry her to anold man. Audrey proposes that Mr. Lackshman, Lilamani’s father, send hisdaughter to France to study medicine. Then, she can go back to India and“help those who were so pitifully unable to help themselves” (15). Actually,Audrey is not acting out of purely humanitarian compassion. She is depictedas an opportunist, fishing in dirty water: “it was then that Audrey had seenher chance of enlisting an eastern recruit. Why should the girl marry?” (15).The reader is given the impression that Lilamani is trapped in a diabolical plan of a hysterical feminist who wants to show that all women, evenOriental ones, can reject the traditional burden of womanhood.Audrey’s plan appeals at first to Lilamani, who is obsessed with escapingher marriage, though her journey outside India will result in pushing her outof her caste and religion. In addition, she soon realizes that she is notinterested in studying medicine: “all thought of study has been far from me.The book she [Audrey] lent me had ugly words in it, and in this loveliness
 
they seemed to hurt my mind, as an ink-blot on my sari would hurt my eyes”(16). Audrey’s feminist schemes fail to strip off Lilamani from her sensualfemininity symbolized by the sari. Her steady effort to transform the highlyfeminine Oriental girl into a New Woman—in both senses, that is, a differentas well as a feminist one—takes the shape of tyranny. Lilamani ends up byconfusing Audrey with her Mataaji-mother, a termagant representing lawand power: “For there be two autocrats in the Hindu home: the mother andthe family Guru—the holy man” (14).Audrey’s tyranny makes her take the place of both the mother and the Guru.This shift stresses the bisexual representation of the ‘odd woman’ who behaves like men while disliking them. Audrey fits perfectly “the popular image of the odd woman” which “conflated elements of the lesbian, theangular spinster, and the hysterical feminist” (Showalter, 23). A potentialspinster, if not already one by the norms of her age, the twenty-eight-year-old Audrey’s “pulse had never quickened for any man, nor, in her belief,ever would” (26). Without stressing it, Diver insinuates a sexually perversetype of love felt by Audrey towards her pupil.Audrey’s failure to convert Lilamani into a new woman is not the soledevice used by Diver to demonstrate the abortive mission of feminists. To punish Audrey further, she makes her fall in love with Nevil Sinclaire, theEnglish hero of her romance. Nevil is in love with Lilamani, however, andmarries her. Right from the beginning, he disapproves of Audrey’s “schemefor conjuring a lady doctor out of an Arabian Nights Princess” (3). Audreytakes on the image of a witch trying to transform the innocent princess byher black magic. Nevil’s friendly feelings towards Audrey are transformedlater into aversion and hostility after her attempts to put obstacles in front of their marriage. Audrey disappears from the narrative as soon as Lilamaniand Nevil get married, showing thus the triumph of femininity over feminism.Diver opts for an Oriental woman as the ideal of femininity. The Orient isnot spoiled by feminist ideologies of independence and equality. Accordingto Rajan, “the Hindu ‘good wife’ is constructed as patriarchy’s feminineideal: she is offered simultaneously as a model and as a signifier of absolutecultural otherness” (47). Consequently the Oriental woman is brought homeas a specimen to be imitated. This claim is asserted by the rather triumphanttone of the narrator, who interferes in the narrative to override Diver’s anti-feminist convictions: “Nature—who abhors equality as heartily and justly asshe abhors vacuum—framed the other [man] regarding woman for her owngreat ends: a fact more frankly recognized in the East than in the West, asAudrey has good reason to know” (116).Diver’s narrative is a celebration of these ‘great ends’ translated in the verystructure of her text. Indeed, the structure of the novel matches its content,for it is divided into three parts—“The Seed,” “The Blossoming,” and “TheFruit”—imitating thus the three steps of conceiving, bearing, and giving birth to a child. The author contrasts Lilamani’s fertility to Audrey’s sterilityas a feminist. Audrey fails to attract the attention of the man she loves andalso fails to affiliate Lilamani to her ideologies. According to Diver, thewoman’s great end is motherhood—to give birth, preferably to a son, whichis the ultimate goal of women.
Flora Annie Steel: Celebrating the New Woman
Diver’s stifling of the feminist voice in Lilamani seems to work as a counter-narrative to a text written ten years earlier by Flora Annie Steel, The Hostsof the Lord (1900). Indeed, Steel’s novel celebrates the work of feminists bymaking the ‘New Woman’ the model of womanhood. Steel was a member of the 1908 Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL), an intellectual militant
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...