Women's History Review

ISSN: 0961-2025 (Print) 1747-583X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20

Domesticating ‘the heart of the wild’: female

[1]
personifications of the colonies, 1886-1940

Dominic David Alessio

To cite this article: Dominic David Alessio (1997) Domesticating ‘the heart of the wild’: female
[1]
personifications of the colonies, 1886-1940 , Women's History Review, 6:2, 239-270, DOI:
10.1080/09612029700200142

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029700200142

Published online: 19 Dec 2006.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2505

View related articles

Citing articles: 10 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rwhr20
Women’s History Review, Volume 6, Number
FEMALE2,PERSONIFICATIONS
1997 OF THE COLONIES

Domesticating ‘the Heart of the Wild’:

female personifications of the colonies,
1886-1940[1]

DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

ABSTRACT British imperial propaganda has generally been perceived as a

male arena which ignores the female presence in the empire story. This paper
argues that women were central to empire imagery, particularly when they
were used as symbols of the white colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand
and South Africa. Such female personifications represented a wide range of
meaning, and depending on how they were interpreted and by whom, became
ideal images for attracting both male and female emigrants. An examination of
such images additionally reflects the growing national prominence of women as
they evolved into imperial agents for preventing racial and moral decline.

On the biscuit tin lids, cigarette cards and tea packaging, and amidst the
pages of Boy’s Own, children’s books of derring-do, and other popular
propaganda disseminated by writers and artists of the British Empire at the
turn of the century, there was apparently little room for women. H. Rider
Haggard, when discussing his famous King Solomon’s Mines (1885), once
boasted that “There is not a petticoat in the whole history.”[2] Despite the
best efforts of some British feminists to claim a prominent place for
themselves in the imperial discourse,[3] women in general (as far as
traditional imperial history goes), seem to have been omitted from the
annals of empire. If they were included it was merely as an ornamental
appendage and in an inferior role similar to that of the trusted native.[4] On
occasion women might even be portrayed on the same base level as the
enemies of empire, as illustrated by the character of young Edith Harris in
Noel Coward’s Cavalcade (1931), who is told by the Marrybot boys that she
always has to take the role of the Boers when playing toy soldiers as she is a
girl. Empire, therefore, was seen to be a heroic demesne reserved solely for
men.
Yet this propaganda ignores an inherent contradiction in the masculine
empire myth, namely the vital role played by British women in the pageant

239
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

of empire. Quite simply, were it not for the ‘Mothers of Empire’, there would
be no sons, soldiers, sailors or settlers of empire. Historically too the
propaganda omits the leading parts played by such well-known figures as
Caroline Chisholm, Florence Nightingale and Josephine Butler, to name a
few, in the formation of empire policy. Even geographical place-names such
as Victoria, Queensland, Regina and Charlottetown indicate a female
presence in the story. And all of this at a time when Queen Victoria, whose
ceremonial role was growing increasingly important, was enjoying the
longest reign of any monarch in British history and continued to remain a
favourite subject of court painters such as Franz Xavier Winterhalter and Sir
Edwin Landseer.
However, in spite of the apparent masculine bias, there was one area
amidst the illustrated propaganda during the years of ‘popular imperialism’
from the late nineteenth century through to World War II, in which women
figured prominently.[5] When graphic artists wished to promote the
self-governing colonies with their already considerable proportion of
Anglo-Saxon immigrants for even further white settlement, they tended to
represent these geographical locations as women. Such personifications held
a plethora of meaning and, depending on how they were interpreted and by
whom, constituted an ideal means by which to attract both male and female
immigrants to colonies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South
Africa.

The Historical Origins of the Female Personification

The Classical and Medieval tradition of allegorising in female form ideal
concepts and divine abstractions (because of their feminine grammatical
gender), is one reason for empire artists personifying the colonies and their
cities in this way. In ancient Greece the notion of wisdom was personified as
Athena, as that particular quality fell under her sphere of influence, while in
Rome the notion of chastity was exemplified by the historical/mythological
figure of the Vestal Virgin Tuccia carrying her sieve. During the Christian
Middle Ages and High Renaissance this tradition of using women to
personify abstract ideals continued, despite the fact that Jesus Christ was a
male divinity. In Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s political frescoes at the Palazzo
Pubblico in Siena (1337-9) which celebrate the good government of the
Commune, ideal Christian concepts such as the Three Theological Virtues
(Faith, Hope, Charity) and the Four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence,
Temperance, Justice, Fortitude) are all allegorised as women. Such
politicised female allegories appear regularly in the history of art right
through to the modern age. Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Guiding the People’ (1830)
and New York’s ‘Statue of Liberty’ (1886) exemplify this trend, as does the
well-known allegory of Britannia, who appearing on British coins and stamps
armed with trident, helmet and shield, came to be identified with the power

240
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

of the British state. Even commercial advertisers promoting their

manufactured wares and the new inventions of the machine age adopted the
image as a promotional vehicle. American artist Maxfield Parrish used just
such a female personification in his ‘Spirit of the Night’ (1919) to symbolise
the benefits of General Electric’s new Mazda Lamps.
Another reason for turn-of-the-century graphic artists using women to
symbolise the colonies arose from the practice of the Arcadian/Cockaigne
tradition of associating the female form with land as a resource to be
penetrated and exploited.[6] Although figures such as Augustus Caesar’s
Italia from the Ara Pacis (13-9 BC) are very early instances of this, such
associations were given an increased impetus from the popular accounts of
early explorers to the New World. Amerigo Vespucci envisioned America as
a benevolent and fertile Mother Earth who with her cornucopia offered
untold wealth and riches to all.[7] Early visitors to Australia also imagined
that continent in a similar vein, drawing parallels of the land to “... a veiled,
seductive, exotic, unknown but desired maiden ... a passive, pliant virgin
awaiting consummation.”[8]
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Northern European
maritime powers also employed classical female imagery to represent early
imperial ideals. The city of Amsterdam in 1656 was allegorised on the west
pediment of the present Royal Palace as a young maiden. The Dutch
maritime capital was depicted as the central and raised figure in the relief
receiving the tributes of the four continents, who were also personified as
women but who were obviously of a more lowly stature on account of their
subservient posture. This Eurocentric “architecture of power” [9] depicting a
medial and dominant Western figure receiving offerings of gifts from
apparently subject colonial peripheries would later become commonplace to
nineteenth-century images. It also heralded an important developing theme
of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Hume and Kant, who came to
see Europeans on account of their having supposedly produced everything
“notable and ingenious in the arts and sciences”, as superior to other
peoples in the rest of the world.[10]
The existence of the nineteenth-century Perfect Lady stereotype in
Britain is another contributing factor that led to the use of women becoming
adopted as promotional images by artists publicising the colonies during this
time frame. This stereotype, once celebrated in 1854 by the poet Coventry
Patmore as “the angel in the house”, saturates the literature and art of the
mid- and late-Victorian period and appears in etiquette manuals, painting,
commercial advertisements, as well as poetry. The stereotype emerged in
direct response to middle-class concerns over social instability, exemplified
by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 in France and by Luddite and Chartist
disaffection in the first half of the century in Britain. The Perfect Lady image
was intended as a means to transcend class divisions by uniting and morally
regenerating the country around the ideology of motherhood, the sexual

241
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

restraint and moral order of which was believed to have immunised the
country from overwhelming civil strife. This ideal middle-class woman was
depicted by the artists and writers of the time as being devoutly Christian,
physically frail, non-intellectual and asexual. Although not supposed to enjoy
the physical act of sexual intercourse, the Perfect Lady was expected to give
birth to children. Marriage and motherhood were visualised as being the
highest achievements the Perfect Lady could aspire to reach. Consequently,
her mission in life was to be a good wife and mother by staying at home and
acting as companion and care-giver to her husband and children, helping the
former in particular to avoid potentially destabilising external temptations.
By looking after both the spiritual and physical well-being of her family and
by setting a high moral tone, the Perfect Lady would ensure the stability of
the nation and the continued strength of its industrial and military
might.[11]

The End of the Empire?

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century graphic artists associating the
female form with the colonies, drew upon these rich veins of Classical,
Medieval, Enlightenment and mid-Victorian inspiration and precedent. Yet
these very same artists were also affected by a number of other more
contemporary influences, the late nineteenth-century motherhood movement
being one of the most influential. The motherhood movement resulted from
the growing popularity of eugenicist ideas and a developing sense of
urgency over racial deterioration that accompanied the passing of the new
millennium. Falling birth rates, a perceived increase in infant mortality, an
imbalance in the male/female sex ratio in Britain and the colonies, and a
widespread concern over racial, military and industrial decline in the wake
of German, American and Japanese rivalry, made the need to propagate the
seeds of empire appear all the more dramatic. “Childbearing was becoming a
national duty ... it was the duty and destiny of women to be the ‘mothers of
the race.’”[12] Appeals were made by empire builders for women to help
preserve the Pax Britannica by encouraging them to emigrate to the
colonies to marry and to raise families, thus increasing the empire’s “reserve
of strength”.[13] Dora Gore Browne in her poem ‘To England’s Daughters’
(1904) invoked such patriotic sentiments for this very purpose by calling
upon the “future nursing mothers of the English race” to join their “kinsfolk
o’er the foam”.[14] The New Settlers League of Australia, proclaiming the
need to “Keep Australia White”, published dire warnings indicating that the
colony was coveted by hordes of “Colored People” waiting to invade unless
increased British settlement was introduced (Figure 1).[15]
The urgency of the situation was seemingly compounded by population
figures which revealed startling disparities in the male/female sex balance,
caused partly by youthful male emigration. In Britain between 1891 and

242
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

publications, and included the Women’s Emigration Society (1880), the

Colonial Emigration Society (1884), the British Women’s Emigration
Association (1884), the South African Colonisation Society (1902) and the
Colonial Intelligence League (1911). Between them these later societies
assisted some 20,000 women to settle overseas, although this number
constituted only a small percentage of total female emigrants.[22] The drive
for female emigrants to the colonies and the emphasis on woman’s racial
and class mission there, helped to make female images of these colonies all
the more conducive as a mode of representation.
Concerns over the destiny of empire and race aside, there were, of
course, more personal reasons for some women choosing to emigrate, such
as the quest for a suitable marriage partner and the possibility of finding
fulfilment and independence through well-paid employment. Lady Maud
Selbourne in 1906 recommended that potential English wives emigrate to
Johannesburg, South Africa, where they could find work and where “the
majority of men are ...”[23] The High Commissioner for Australia repeated
such justifications for women settling overseas, carefully reminding the
prospective settler that the “prospects of a good match are much brighter [in
Australia] than they are in an older land.”[24] Mrs Conyers Allston proposed
that unmarried women of good character settle in the colonies “where they
are wanted” and where they could experience a “full and complete life
...”[25] Some of these emigrants were not too successful in their search for
partners, however, as noted by one early Canadian commentator bound for
Britain by ship who remarked upon “a few elderly virgins ... returning
disaffected” to Scotland after having failed to find husbands.[26] The cover
pages of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century promotional
works reinforced such personal motives for emigration, urging female
emigration as a means of ensuring happy marriages, reliable employment
(particularly domestic work), freedom and a leisured lifestyle.[27] The cover
page of the 1922 pamphlet Australia Invites the Domestic Girl (Figure 2),
for example, depicting an image of a fashionable and affluent young lady,
insinuates that the same leisured and carefree existence is possible for all
women who work as domestics down under.[28] Likewise, the illustrated
cover of Mabel Durham’s Canada’s Call to Women (n.d.), shows three
healthy, happy and confident young women enjoying an afternoon in the
prairie sun, implying that such a satisfying lifestyle is available to all women
who emigrate to the Canadian far west.
Women’s personal affairs aside, concerns over prostitution, the spread
of venereal disease, and the demise of empire and race remained the leading
factors influencing the calls for emigration from the builders of empire. Such
concerns were the reasons for the introduction of the Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1885 that suppressed brothels.[29] Recruitment
difficulties and poor military performance in the Boer War, however, were
also seen by many to epitomise the extent of the nation’s physical decline

245
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

and became a subject of much anxiety about empire. At Manchester in 1899,

8000 out of 12,000 potential recruits for South Africa were rejected as
physically unfit.[30] Across the country that same year, an average 330
recruits were deemed inadequate out of every 1000.[31] The history of the
decline and fall of the Roman empire appeared now to stand as both model
and warning for Britain, and a concerted effort was made to reinvigorate the
empire by stopping the rot: “The majority of Fabians, together with the
leading Liberal imperialists, supported a programme to keep mothers at
home, educate them in motherhood, encourage ‘eugenic’ marriage, and
provide state inducements to procreation, nutrition and health.”[32]
To further protect the British master race, moves were made to
prevent miscegenation with the natives. Native women had originally
supplied the soldiers and administrators of empire with “a limitless pool of
potential concubines.”[33] In India senior military officers “often lived in
open concubinage of long standing with Indian women”.[34] Even
missionaries to Polynesian societies on islands such as Tahiti or New
Zealand had gone native and adopted local mistresses. In fact, entire and
distinct half-caste populations like the Métis of Western Canada, the product
of European hunters and trappers intermixing with Amerindian women, had
evolved from the interbreeding of colonised and coloniser. Yet in the wake
of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and fin de siècle concerns over race
degradation (epitomised by the increasing popularity of the ‘science’ of
eugenics and distorted notions of Darwinian evolution) such practices
became frowned upon. An unofficial policy of sexual apartheid gradually
evolved “under the combined attack of evangelical piety and racial
superiority.”[35] As a result, Englishwomen were exported to join their
husbands overseas, for “there seems to have been a widespread belief in the
innate superiority and refinement of Englishwomen over other nationalities
...”[36] The female emigrant was therefore to be encouraged in order to
develop “a better race”, [37] and in her hands were seen to lay “the destinies
of race and Empire.”[38] According to Frances Swiney’s The Awakening of
Woman (1899):
The Aryan woman, happily, has never stooped to the sexual degredation
of the Aryan man; and it is to the influence of the white woman in the
future, that we must look for the enforcement of that high and pure
morality, which will restrain the conquering white man from becoming
the progenitor of racial crossing with a lower and degraded type ...[39]
The transportation of these memsahibs to the colonies had been facilitated
by maritime and technological improvements such as the opening of the
Suez Canal in 1869 and the commencement of regular international
steamship services which considerably reduced travelling time.
Those female emigrants who chose to settle in the colonies were
expected to be not only mothers to the next generation of colonists (thus
increasing the numerical advantage of the British and ensuring that the

247
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

Anglo-Saxon bloodline was not tainted by supposedly inferior racial types)

but also the women responsible for keeping the menfolk overseas contented
and happy. A stable male workforce was equated with a stable empire. The
Perfect Lady whose role it was to refine and restrain her husband’s excesses
in the home country, was expected to repeat these requirements in the
colonies:
Everyone who knows the tropics is aware that they are full of dark
corners where a white man simply cannot live alone ... The average
European, exiled without a companion ... soon begins to feel a sense of
appalled isolation ... There is only one almost unfailing remedy. Give a
man a wife ... [she] can evoke the home atmosphere even amidst the
uttermost abominations ... They know their business: it is to get a house
into order, to domesticate the heart of the wild [my emphasis] ... women
are directly responsible for the stability of British administration ... [40]
Women in the colonies, therefore, were perceived of as a vital instrument in
the imperial grand design. They were “God’s Police”, to use the phrase that
Caroline Chisholm coined for them as an improving force upon the men.
Mrs Conyers Alston writing for The National Review (1917), echoed such
sentiments, praising women for not only having “civilized the world”, but
also for having kept it “from becoming decivilized”.[41] For this motive and
the others already mentioned, an effigy such as a female personification that
could range in its symbolism from personal welfare to national duty, became
an ideal image by which to promote colonial settlement.

The Classical Element

The conception of women as agents of civilisation, education and
equilibrium is evident by the inclusion of various Classical elements in
nearly all of the personifications, such as the figures representing Regina
(Figure 3)[42] and Zelandia (Figure 4).[43] The use of Classical devices in an
illustration proved an ideal tool by which to convey a sense of cultural
achievement since the Greco-Roman world at that time was perceived of as
the epitome of sophistication. For the viewer looking at the personifications,
accessories such as a toga, tunica, sandals, throne, dais, cornucopia, crown
of laurel leaves, helmet and/or triumphal arch, were intended to evoke
parallels between the enlightened achievements of the British and those of
the Greeks and Romans, creating an image of Britain as natural heir to the
ancient world. Such a comparison was also suggestive of an imperial conceit
that Britain’s reign as a world power and great coloniser would be as
successful and influential as was that of Athens or Rome. John Ruskin drew
such Classical associations in his The Queen of the Air, proclaiming Britain
to be a “New Athens”.[44] Similarly, colonial boosters in promotional
literature also liked to develop such Classical similarities, and one finds New
Zealand cities such as Auckland, Dunedin and Christchurch being constantly

249
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

Canada’s West towers over the Lilliputian explorers of the author’s

story.[47] Whilst pointing to the rising sun in the West and the infinite
possibilities awaiting emigrants there, her enormous form conjures up a
likeness to Phidias’s Statue of Athena Promachos from the Acropolis in
Athens, suggesting to the viewer the vast resources of the land.
Written inscriptions surrounding some of the personifications were
also derived from Classical precedent, namely Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a
late sixteenth-century treatise pertaining to personifications. Such
inscriptions were included along with or under an illustration and were
designed to convey in a blatant manner the message of the advertiser on the
off-chance that the symbolism being used to imply notions of success in a
picture was too obscure. Some instances of written inscriptions used in the
personifications include: the allegory depicting Regina (discussed previously)
with written confirmation on the triumphal arch behind the female figure,
indicating that Regina was a “City of Progress [and] Opportunity”; a printing
firm from Dunedin which added the boldly captioned word “Achievement”
underneath its seated female personification in order to show commercial
success [48]; and the Victoria League, a predominantly female organisation
founded during the Boer War for the purposes of supplying information
about the Dominions for settlement, which advertised its services with a
personification of a fully armed Britannia surrounded by a poetical
declaration urging the need for a greater imperial knowledge amongst the
citizens of Britain.[49]

The Racist Element

Despite the influence of the Perfect Lady stereotype, woman’s civilising
mission, which was emphasised by way of Classical pictorial association, did
not end with the men. The female imperial role was also extended to “all
those whose lesser race and lower morals marked them out as in need of
imperious maternity.”[50] As a consequence, women were expected to
ensure Christian and superior moral values not only amongst their own
British kind, but amongst “previously uncivilized and heathen peoples”
too.[51] The assumption that white women were both morally and physically
pre-eminent over black ones is readily recognisable in the empire
propaganda. Lori Anne Loeb in Consuming Angels alludes to the
significance of the presence of black servants in commercial illustrations of
the period, and using a Swan Soap advertisement from 1902 as an example,
she highlights the fact that the white woman always appears as the mistress
in such pictures and the black woman the slave or concubine.[52] Similarly,
John M. MacKenzie in Propaganda and Empire reproduces another soap
advertisement, this time for Cossage’s, in which a black face having being
scrubbed clean by the company’s product, comes out sparkling white. The

253
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

illustration from Cossage’s associates black with dirt and assumes that white
is not only healthier but is also more aesthetically pleasing.
These very same assumptions about white superiority appear in a
number of the personifications. In the picture of Zelandia from the New
Zealand Graphic of 1900 (Figure 6), a tall, beautiful and apparently very
strong white Zelandia, protects a darker, shorter and more submissive Maori
woman from the clutches of an ogre representing Australian federation. The
fact that Zelandia herself is dressed in a toga is meant to be indicative of her
civilised origins, the toga being expressive again of Britain’s Greco-Roman
heritage. Yet Zelandia, whilst making some cultural concessions towards
representing Maori interests, both by the grass shawl which she drapes
around her shoulder and by the fact that she patronisingly holds the Maori
woman’s hand, is still clearly intended not to be too closely associated with
the Maori representative. The superiority of white New Zealand is explicitly
demonstrated by various artistic devices, such as the emphasis on Zelandia’s
white skin, which is symbolic of purity, cleanliness and goodness (as in the
commercial soap advertisements), as well as the emphasis on her greater
height and strength, which was intended to act as further proof of British
physical superiority. Such European superiority in the colonial
personifications was necessary in order to attempt to justify the
expropriation of native lands.
In contrast to Zelandia cowers the passive and diminutive figure
representing Maori society. The latter’s physical and mental inferiority is
clearly alluded to by the fact that the personification of Maori society is
located physically behind Zelandia, thereby indicating the primitive,
cowardly and backward nature of her people. Similarly, her black skin
colour (black traditionally being associated with evil) implies servitude and
impropriety. Finally, the grass skirt and the absence of any top covering on
her body stands in direct contrast to the Classical garb of Zelandia and was
clearly intended to show a lack of civilisation and a subhuman mentality.
The semi-naked figure may even have been interpreted as a threat to the
Christian and racial stability of the Empire by being associated with sexual
immorality and miscegenation.
Similar racial themes are in evidence with other personifications of
nationhood, such as the cover page of the programme of the Colonial and
Indian Exhibition of 1886 (Figure 7).[53] In this image, Britannia, who has
been raised up on a throne or dais and is surrounded by a court of beautiful
women representing the colonies and their virtues, focuses her attention
directly on a shorter and darker foreground figure personifying India, the
only native woman in an otherwise white court and the only one whom
Britannia seems to command directly. The fact that Britannia is raised above
India and orders her about, highlights the inferior status of the Indian as
servant to white society. This personification of India, like that of Maoridom
in the New Zealand Graphic example, also appears to present a black sexual

254
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

The British were not alone in treating their aboriginal subject peoples
in such a manner. American artists of the time depicting Western expansion
also pushed their native inhabitants to the periphery, imaging them as
symbols of the past and backwardness. John Gast in his 1872 work
American Progress, displays the technological forces associated with
American civilisation such as locomotives, wagons, coaches, ploughs and
pioneers, led by a flying angelic-like and white America, chasing the
primitive symbols of the country’s past, the red man and the buffalo, off the
plains.[58] Allegorical figures of white Classical goddesses or young blond
English-looking women remained constant symbols of America throughout
this period; seldom, if ever, was the nation’s ethnic diversity indicated by a
“mulatto Madonna with an Indian headdress”.[59]
The association of native peoples with the barbaric and even subhuman
served to justify European notions of progress and racial superiority. The
omission of native peoples in many of these illustrations and the assumption
that aboriginal peoples were either being gradually civilised or killed off,
merely reinforced such prejudices, allowing Europeans the luxury of
claiming that it was their “Manifest Destiny” to occupy the New World. The
exclusion of the native in the personifications may also have served another
more practical purpose. It may have helped put to rest prospective
immigrants’ fears about being eaten or scalped by the natives. Certainly
news about indigenous uprisings, whether in the colonies (such as the
Indian Mutiny) or in America (the Battle of the Little Bighorn), had received
a great deal of publicity back home, none of which would have been looked
upon as too favourable to their cause by advocates of emigration.

The Virtuous Woman

Because of the vital nature of white women’s mission in the colonies as
agents of civilisation, stability and procreation, the masters of empire wanted
to ensure that only “the right kind of woman should be encouraged to settle
...”[60] Only women of supposedly good character were induced to go
overseas. The careful screening of applicants by female emigration societies
was supposed to ensure that those with dubious histories were prevented
from leaving, whilst the presence of an accompanying matron along the way
was intended to further safeguard the woman’s reputation. Once the women
arrived at their final destination, they were also escorted to a private
women’s home where they were looked after until suitable employment in a
good home was found. Yet despite the screening and protection services, not
all the women arrived in the colonies untainted. Records from South Africa
reveal that some women became pregnant along the way, having been
seduced by sailors or other passengers, whilst a few others took up
alternative means of employment such as bar work on board ship.[61]

259
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

The illustrations promoting the colonies reflected these attempts to

attract the right kind of female emigrant. Youthfulness, dress and the
physical shape of the body all served to convey universally understood
meanings in a bourgeois code of respectability. The emphasis on a neat and
tidy appearance reflected the influence of physiognomy, a nineteenth-century
pseudo-science based on the idea that one’s mental and moral condition
could be judged by one’s physical condition, mens sana in corpore sano.
Proper hygiene, good health and sound character were instantly recognised
axioms relating to a person’s character and were denoted in the
advertisements by a variety of factors including clean and spotless white
togas, the healthy colour on the cheeks, the carefully groomed quality of the
hair, the whiteness of the skin, and the general youthfulness and beauty of
the maidens themselves. Moral respectability was further connoted by simple
dress and a lack of extravagant costume or jewellery as in the India example
[see Figure 7], which might have given the viewer the wrong impression
about a particular woman. The emphasis on the woman’s good physical
health which appeared towards the end of the century is in direct contrast to
the physical frailty of the Perfect Lady of mid-century, whose weakness was
intended to justify her remaining at home to look after the family. With
anxiety over racial decline, invalidism in female imagery had disappeared
and robustness became respectable.
The presence of bodily armour on or nearby the female form
represented the ultimate symbol of good character. The shield held by the
outstretched arm of the personification of Canada (with the prominent cross
of St George at the top),[62] or the one next to the personification of South
Africa (see Figure 8), acts as a form of cincture such as breastplates or
helmets (which appear regularly on other more well-known female figures
like Athena, Britannia or La République). The presence of this defensive
armour renders an image of sheathed and protected virginity, a suitable
symbol for the kind of women settlers desired in the colonies. Associations
with the goddess Athena were particularly conducive to the empire’s
promotional propaganda, for Athena, as depicted in Andrea Mantegna’s ‘The
Expulsion of the Vices from the Garden of the Virtues’ (1502), was the
champion of chastity. The use of armour in the images might also draw
associations with positive historical female role models, such as Boadicea,
whose qualities of courage and battle-readiness the empire builders would
like to have instilled amongst the British people as a whole.
Nevertheless, even a lack of armour in the illustrations did not always
detract from an image of moral purity. There are numerous examples in the
history of art of female subjects who appear without protective wear yet still
represent the virtue of chastity, including the Virgin Mary, St Cecilia and
England’s own Elizabeth I (who appeared in portraits of her time with such
emblems of continence as a sieve or an ermine). Viewers of these
illustrations, having been brought up on a diet of Biblical literature and

260
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

Classical history both in school and in church, would have been all too
familiar with such symbolism, and would have immediately drawn the
required analogy.

Power and Patriotism

The inclusion and emphasis on the weapons and armour, apart from
conveying ideals about a woman’s virtue, may also have served to remind
both colonists as well as other imperial powers, of the strength of the British
Empire. On the one hand the inclusion of warrior maidens could act as a
subtle warning to the settlers themselves, informing them of where their
loyalties should lie and cautioning them that another 1776 would not be
tolerated. After all, the very first image of Britannia had appeared on Roman
coins at the time of the Emperor Hadrian’s conquest of Britain and was a
symbol of a defeated nation.[63] Yet at the same time such symbols of
military readiness could also help ease the concerns of those colonists who
feared either a native uprising, such as had occurred in India in 1857, New
Zealand in the 1860s and Western Canada in 1885, or an external threat
from another foreign power like the USA, Germany or Japan. Certainly there
were a number of none too subtle symbols of loyalty and patriotism
underpinning many of the illustrations, such as the cross of St George and
the surrounding heraldic emblems in the Canada example,[64] the oversized
British flag flying to the right on the personification of Canada West (Figure
11),[65] and the draped New Zealand flag with the prominent Union Jack
motif cloaking Zelandia (see Figure 10), a particularly relevant symbol of
empire unity considering the threat posed by Japan during the Second
World War.

Arcadia
The emphasis on the purity of the women in the promotional images, apart
from being a reference to the kind of reputable female emigrant desired, was
also intended to be symptomatic of the Edenic-like qualities of the colony
itself. The colonies were visualised as rural idylls that were free of the taint
of the corrupted practices of the Old World. They were seen to be places of
innocence, cleanliness and beauty, places that the polluting tentacles of
soot-filled English factories and the crowded and disease-ridden urban slums
had not reached. They were perceived as a source of immeasurable natural
wealth, a paradise found that supplied all the possible wants of the settlers.
In such wild and unspoilt places middle-class British settlers concerned
about their own racial decay might be able to stop the decline taking place
by renewing themselves both physically and spiritually.
The presence of the cornucopia was an obvious Classical symbol of
such an Arcadian quality, exemplified in the Zelandia picture of 1913 (see

262
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

Figure 4). Behind her person is a resplendent setting sun, whilst to her right
and left are trees bearing fruit. Both the sun and the trees are indicative of a
land of perpetual summer and warmth that constantly produces a copious
bounty. The supreme symbol of the colony as Arcadia, however, is the great
goat horn itself which rests gently upon Zelandia’s lap while she looks up to
the side with apparent indifference. The cornucopia in the illustration is
spouting not only agricultural riches like apples, but industrial ones too,
namely machinery, steamships and smoking factories. The smoke in this
picture is not intended as a symbol of urban or industrial gloom but as one
of prosperity, indicating that manufacturing and industry are flourishing.
The way in which Zelandia seems so much at ease in the picture, her
attention directed away from the horn of plenty, gives one the impression
also that not much effort is required to bring about this wealth. One’s
presence in the colony would simply appear to be enough. The triumphal
crown of laurel leaves on Zelandia’s head, like the triumphal arch behind
Regina, signifies once more the success and prosperity of the colony.
Other such symbols of fertility, aside from ripe fruit trees or horns of
plenty, and ones traditionally associated with vitality and nourishment, are
female breasts. Breasts are associated with Mother Nature and present an
image of wholesomeness and munificence, thus appearing as ideal symbols
for the colonies. The artists of the illustrations, although covering the
bosoms of the personifications just enough so as not to give a controversial
image of sensuality or defiance as in Manet’s Olympia (1863), whose brazen
nudity raised tremendous controversy, did subtly draw the viewer’s attention
to their presence. The dresses of the personifications are, with a few
exceptions, either low cut, tight-fitting or have the slipped chiton effect
exposing the shoulder. Such inferences to a woman’s chest would not only
have drawn analogies with the nurturing qualities of this Arcadian New
World, but would have also reminded the colonists of the maternal role of
British women whose duty it was to suckle future soldiers of empire.

The Sexual Element

While references to white female breasts may have been intended to
symbolise fertility, and the introduction of exotic or foreign elements may
simply have been artistic images borrowed from popular painting and used
to convey a sense of the picturesque, the curious, or even racial superiority,
sex did, however, play a role in attracting settlers overseas. Male advertisers
were aware that “images of sexy women would sell products”[66] and images
of sensuous and semi-naked Tahitian vahines certainly contributed to the
success of Gauguin’s popularity amongst male collectors in Paris. As we
have seen already, a number of single women emigrated to the colonies in
search of husbands and sexual attraction would have played a part in this.
Yet despite attempts to curb white men mixing with native women, the

263
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

representations, particularly the Dunedin example, are not far off from the
bikini-clad women in today’s tourist brochures, and go some way in
supporting Ronald Hyam’s opinion that “sexual dynamics ... underpinned
the whole operation of British empire and Victorian expansion ...”[71]

Conclusion
Empire has traditionally been seen as a male arena with “no place for a
white woman.”[72] With a few exceptions, such as Queen Victoria and
perhaps Caroline Chisholm, British heroines (real or fictional) do not figure
prominently. They rarely appear amongst the postcards, commercial
packaging, school books or children’s stories, and as a result have been
presumed to be extraneous to the imperial propaganda. Yet women do
appear to take important places in some of the paraphernalia of empire,
particularly the odd commercial advertisement or emigration tract designed
intentionally for a female audience. Women also tend to hold a central
position in the oeuvre of artists generally, especially those
turn-of-the-century artists personifying Britain’s colonies in graphic or
painted form. Such a practice, which evolved from the Classical/Medieval
tradition of personifying women as a symbol of the land or a particular
virtue, also reflects a growing awareness of the vital role women were seen
to play in the empire process, an awareness which, according to Antoinette
Burton, British feminists were active in cultivating in order to justify female
suffrage.[73] With emerging concerns over class stability and the consequent
evolution of the Perfect Lady stereotype in the middle of the nineteenth
century, followed by later middle-class urban anxieties over racial decline,
the resulting popularity of eugenics, the development of the motherhood
movement, and the subsequent drive to expand the colonial settlement
process, women were assuming more significant national responsibilities.
Women’s emigration societies and their supporters, for example, associated
the very survival of the Empire with the successful transportation of suitable
wives and mothers to the colonies in order to prevent racial miscegenation
and foreign occupation, as well as with the preservation of British
civilisation and Christian religion in those outposts.
These female personifications reveal, therefore, a generally untapped
source of information that gives women, contrary to popular belief, a
starring role in the Empire’s propaganda story. Artists promoting the
colonies picked up on this new empowering role which women wielded, and
the traditional illustrated female personification was transformed to oblige
these myriad new motives. Although artists with masculine biases used
sultry or enticing images of both black and white women to attract greater
numbers of male migrants to the dependent territories, pictures of healthy
and beautiful white women were primarily used as role models for the
mothers and wives of the Empire, thereby ensuring a fit race of future

265
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

warriors and workers, and as symbols for the bounteous and pristine nature
of the New World. An emphasis on a neat and tidy Classical appearance
reflected the civilised standards with which British rule was associated,
thereby pacifying immigrant fears about coming to a wild or untamed land,
while white female superiority was constantly emphasised in order to justify
the appropriation of indigenous lands and the prevention of miscegenation
with the native population. Women, although still firmly coupled with the
mid-Victorian Cult of Domesticity, had by the late nineteenth century an
imperial maternal cause that by placing them at ‘the heart of the wild’, had
put them also at the heart of the empire.

Notes
[1] I am particularly indebted to the assistance of Terry Barringer at the Royal
Commonwealth Society Collections, University of Cambridge, in preparation of
this paper. All illustrations from the Royal Commonwealth Collections and the
Alexander Turnbull Library are included by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library and the National Library of New Zealand.
[2] H. Rider Haggard quoted in Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1992) White on Black,
p. 99 (London: Yale University Press).
[3] For a discussion of a recent path-breaking work that questions this
male-oriented focus on empire imagery and which identifies British feminists
firmly with the imperial cause, see Antoinette Burton (1994) Burdens of
History: British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture, 1865-1915
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
[4] Julia Bush (1994) ‘The right sort of woman’: female emigrators and emigration
to the British Empire, 1840-1910, Women’s History Review, 3, p. 387.
[5] John M. MacKenzie (1994) argues that popular imperialism did not cease with
the First World War. Instead, he states that “an implicit imperialism, partly
economic, partly moral” continued right through to the 1930s and was seen “as
a means of arresting national decline”. See Propaganda and Empire: the
manipulation of British public opinion, 1880-1960, pp. 2-3 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press).
[6] Both Arcadia and Cockaigne refer to varieties of ideal societies. Arcadia is a
reflection of the myth of the Golden Age or Garden of Eden. It assumes that a
harmonious condition exists between humanity and nature where the former’s
wants are limited but met by the land. Cockaigne, on the other hand, is
imagined as a world where anything and everything can be had simply for the
asking. It is a Bacchanalian world of luxury and idleness where rivers run with
wine, streets are paved with cakes, and where promiscuity is commonplace. For
a discussion of utopian genres refer to Krishan Kumar (1991) Utopianism
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press).
[7] Mario Klarer (1993) Woman and Arcadia: the impact of ancient Utopian thought
on the early image of America, Journal of American Studies, 27, p. 5.

266
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

[8] Kay Schaffer (1989) Women and the Bush: Australian national identity and
representations of the feminine, Working Paper No. 46, pp. 3-4. (Sir Robert
Menzies Centre for Australian Studies).
[9] Pieterse, White on Black, p. 22.
[10] David Theo Goldberg (1993) Racist Culture, p. 31 (Oxford: Blackwell).
[11] For a more detailed discussion of the Perfect Lady stereotype, now well
documented in the historical literature, see chapter 2 of Deirdre Beddoe (1993)
Discovering Women’s History: a practical guide to the sources of women’s
history 1800-1945 (London: Pandora), the introduction to Martha Vicinus (Ed.)
(1977) A Widening Sphere; changing roles of Victorian women (London:
Methuen), or refer to the discussion of domestic ideology in chapter 1 of Lynda
Nead’s (1988) Myths of Sexuality: representations of women in Victorian
Britain (Oxford: Blackwell).
[12] Anna Davin (1978) Imperialism and motherhood, History Workshop, 5, p. 13.
[13] Stanley C. Johnson (1913) A History of Emigration, p. 341 (London).
[14] Dora Gore Browne (1904) ‘To England’s Daughters’, in The Imperial Colonist,
III. Reproduced in James A. Hammerton (1979) Emigrant Gentlewomen, p. 133
(London: Croom Helm).
[15] The Big Brother Movement, c. 1925 (London), p. 13. (Royal Commonwealth
Collection. Cambridge University Library.
[16] Dominion Royal Commission (1914-16) Migration Report on the Distribution of
the Sexes, p. 102. (Royal Commonwealth Collection, Cambridge University
Library).
[17] Agnes Lout (c.1914) quoted in Canada for Women, p. 1 (London).
[18] Nead, Myths of Sexuality, p. 31.
[19] Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen, p. 47.
[20] Nead, Myths of Sexuality, p. 209. Female colonists had been shipped
deliberately to Jamestown, Virginia, Britain’s first permanent settlement in
America, in order to provide suitable partners for men as early as the beginning
of the seventeenth century.
[21] Bush, ‘The right sort of woman’, p. 400.
[22] Bush, ‘The right sort of woman’, p. 387.
[23] Quoted in Bush, ‘The right sort of woman’, p. 390.
[24] High Commissioner for Australia (1910) Australia for Domestic Servants, p. 13.
[25] Mrs Conyers Allston (1917) Women of the overseas Empire, The National
Review, p. 633.
[26] Eva-Marie Kroller (1987) Canadian Travellers in Europe 1851-1900, p. 43
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).
[27] For examples of such publications see: High Commissioner for Australia (1910)
Australia for Domestic Servants; New Zealand High Commissioner (1912)
Information about New Zealand for Domestic Servants (London); Canadian

267
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

Pacific Railway (c.1914) Canada for Women; and Florence B. Low (1920)
Openings for British Women in Canada (London).
[28] Australia Invites the Domestic Girl (1922), cover (Royal Commonwealth
Collection, Cambridge University Library).
[29] Ronald Hyam (1992) Empire and Sexuality, p. 12 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press).
[30] Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, p. 74.
[31] Davin, ‘Imperialism and motherhood’, p. 15.
[32] MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 159.
[33] Rosalind Miles (1989) The rod of empire, in The Woman’s History of the World,
p. 212 (London: Paladin).
[34] Philip Mason (1986) A Matter of Honour, p. 176 (London: Macmillan).
[35] Mason, A Matter of Honour, p. 177.
[36] Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen, pp. 45-46.
[37] Gladys Pott (1924) Migration of women within the Empire, United Empire, XV,
p. 228.
[38] Pott, ‘Migration of women’, p. 220.
[39] As quoted in Burton, Burdens of History, p. 85.
[40] Arthur Grimble (1922) Women as empire builders, United Empire, XIII,
pp. 196-197.
[41] Alston, ‘Women of the overseas Empire’, p. 635.
[42] T. W. Sheffield (1912) A Vital Question, p. 33 (Regina) (Royal Commonwealth
Collection, Cambridge University Library).
[43] Auckland Industrial, Agricultural & Mining Exhibition, official catalogue and
guide (1913), cover (Special Collections, Victoria University of Wellington
Library).
[44] John Ruskin (1869) The Queen of the Air; quoted in Marina Warner (1985)
Monuments and Maidens: the allegory of the female form, p. 125 (London:
Vintage).
[45] Dominic Alessio (1992) Coloured Views: images of the New Zealand city and
town, 1880-1930, pp. 46-50 (PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington).
[46] Lori Anne Loeb (1994) Consuming Angels: advertising and Victorian women,
p. 175 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
[47] Anson A. Gard (1907) The Last West, cover (Royal Commonwealth Collection,
Cambridge University Library).
[48] Advertisement for Coulls Somerville Wilkie Ltd, Stationers, Printers and
Lithographers, L. S. Fanning (Ed.) (1925) New Zealand To-day, no page
(Dunedin).
[49] Card from the Victoria League (c.1916) in the Royal Commonwealth Collection,
Cambridge University Library. For more information on the Victoria League see
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, pp. 152-153.

268
 FEMALE PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE COLONIES

[50] Bush, ‘The right sort of woman’, p. 386.

[51] Neal, Myths of sexuality, p. 83.
[52] Loeb, Consuming Angels, p. 64.
[53] Reproduced in MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 96.
[54] Loeb, Consuming Angels, pp. 67-68.
[55] Historical Sketch & Description of Pageant Held at Cape Town (1910), cover
(Royal Commonwealth Collection, Cambridge University Library).
[56] Reproduced in Shirley Maddock (1988) A Pictorial History of New Zealand,
p. xii (Auckland: Heinemann Reed and David Bateman Ltd).
[57] David Hamer (1990) Centralization and nationalism, in Keith Sinclair (Ed.) The
Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, p. 146 (Auckland: Oxford University
Press).
[58] Reproduced in William H. Truettner (Ed.) (1991) The West as America.
Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier,1820-1920, p. 135 (London: The
Smithsonian Institute Press).
[59] Werner Sollors (1994) National identity and ethnic diversity: ‘Of Plymouth Rock
and Jamestown and Ellis Island’; or, ethnic literature and some redefinitions of
‘America’, in Genevieve Fabre & Robert O’Meally (Eds) History and Memory in
African-American Culture, p. 94 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
[60] Florence B. Low (1920) Openings for British Women in Canada, p. 10
(London).
[61] Bush, ‘The right sort of woman’, p. 397.
[62] The Canadian Illustrated News (14 August 1880) (London). (Public Archives of
Canada C-75551).
[63] Warner, Monuments and Maidens, p. 45.
[64] See note 51.
[65] Charles Stewart (1923) Canada West, title (Ottawa) (Royal Commonwealth
Collection, Cambridge University Library.
[66] Loeb, Consuming Angels, p. 57.
[67] Peterson & Guy (1930) New Zealand: the wonderland of the Pacific, p. 30.
(C 16302) Alexander Turnbull Library).
[68] New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (28 September- 23 October, 1903), p. 87.
[69] Klarer, ‘Woman and arcadia’, p. 15.
[70] Souvenir of the Visit to Dunedin, ‘The City Beautiful’, by the American Fleet
(1925), p. 39.
[71] Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, p. 1.
[72] Quoted in Burton, Burdens of History, p. 19.
[73] Burton, Burdens of History, p. 3.

269
DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO

DOMINIC DAVID ALESSIO is Lecturer in History at Trinity College,

Carmarthen, SA31 3EP, United Kingdom, where he also directs the Centre
for CANZ (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) Studies. He has published
various articles on American and Commonwealth history and is currently
editing The Art of Empire, a compilation of papers focusing on the
relationship between art and imperial politics amongst the former British
dominions.

270