1. Mr. ___________ Sharma
Area Rationale: Eighteenth-Century Female British Writers and Colonialism
May 2015: edits by Jeffrey P. Wasserboehr; Academic Editor at JPW
Agents of Empire: British Colonial Enterprise, 18th
Century Women’s Fiction…
In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft ingeniously
writes, “Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species,
like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when
principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man?” (157). While
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication predominantly addresses patriarchal oppression during her
time, the comparison of women to slaves indicates a full awareness of Britain’s Colonial
enterprise; her use of key terms like “sugar”, “blood”, “brutalize”, and “sweeten” evinces
a knowledge of sugar plantations in the West Indian colonies, the Atlantic slave trade,
and the financial profits from the sugar trade. To put it another way, Wollstonecraft’s
methodical association of women and slaves makes her an active participant in colonial
discourse. Yet much of the scholarship in this field overlooks the female perspective of
British colonialism and it appears as though women writers had little to say about the
topic.
Anne K. Mellor’s Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England,
1780-1830 verifies that female authors fully participated in and contributed to matters of
the “public sphere”. She contends that women writers did not relegate themselves to
conduct-books or the “private sphere” genre; instead, they saw themselves as fully
engaged in the broader public sphere. Mellor’s extensive discussion of Charlotte Smith
2. informs us of Smith’s desire to correct British misrepresentation of the French Revolution
and other British injustices in her novels. If women writers displayed a willingness to
discuss the politics of English-French relations, then they surely felt compelled to remark
on the highly debated and controversial British colonial expansion. Excluding canonical
works of writers like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
(1814), only a few scholars concentrate on the colonial discussion in novels of women
authors. Wollstonecraft demonstrates the deep impact of Britain’s global extension on its
female citizens. I feel women’s fiction deserves further attention because it expresses a
unique feminine viewpoint of empire and colonialism since it arises from an oppressed
class.; I hope to identify whether women’s social position within the patriarchy impacted
their view of the British Empire and it’s its encroachment into other nations. My first set
of inquiries looks broadly and more generally, from various disciplinary and
interdisciplinary angles to fully examine sociocultural reaction of female writers to their
rapidly changing colonial setting, mainly Post-colonial studies, History, and Women’s
Studies. These areas will allow me to study this topic in a complete view of eighteenth-
century women writers as authors, citizens, and observers of a rising empire.
As discussed in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) by Tobias Smollett,
British colonialism required British manpower. Of course, the entire country suffered
since colonial activity removed valuable human resources from the mother country, but I
believe this loss of men impacted women the most because their fathers, brothers, sons,
and husbands departed for the colonies. A number of novels I investigate comment on
this migration, often in a negative manner. Phebe Gibbes’s Hartely House, Calcutta
(1789) and Frances Brooke’s Emily Montague (1769), seemingly disparate texts in
3. content, affirm the dangers of leaving home, including the destruction of national
identity, moral corruption through contact with foreign cultures, and the dangers of
colonial money. The significance of home during British expansion unifies much of
women’s fiction during the eighteenth-century. Their novels make a very real effort to
reclaim British men, and sometimes, discourage them from going abroad altogether. Yes,
Ccolonialism offered men a chancethe opportunity to pursue fortune and economic
independence, but that meant they would have to leave their country. Frances Brooke’s
The History of Emily Montague (1769) provides one example of one female author’s
understanding of shipping manpower to the colonies:
England, however populous,” writes William Fermor, the military
patriarch who resides in Canada, “is undoubtedly, my Lord, too small to
afford very large supplies of people to her colonies: and her people are
also too useful, and of too much value, to be suffered to emigrate, if they
can be prevented, whilst there is sufficient employment for them at home.
It is not only our interest to have colonies; they are not only necessary to
our commerce, and our greatest and surest sources of wealth, but our very
being, as powerful commercial nation depends on them… It is however
equally our interest to support them at as little expense of our own
inhabitants as possible. (228-29)
Brooke takes a firm position within colonial politics by expressing the importance of
developing the colonies without the use of British labor. She values home, assuredly
mimicking the sentiment of many British women. Yet, Brooke’s name does not typically
appear with the likes Jonathan Swift or Tobias Smollett in regards to Britain’s colonial
4. dealings. Euphemia (1790) by Charlotte Lennox presents yet another case of a female
writer addressing migration to the colonies. Edward Harley, one of the secondary
characters in the novel, announces his decision to seek “fortune in the Indies” so that he
could lessen his father’s financial burden. The simple thought of going to the colonies
creates major anxiety throughout the novel and everyone tries to dissuade Edward from
following through with his plans. Euphemia, the titular heroine, also leaves England for
the colonies, but no one can rescue her because of her matrimonial duties; she must
follow her husband. Stopping Edward, on the other hand, occurs rather quickly. “Worthy
young man! You have saved my life,” declares Maria Harley’s uncle to Edward Harley,
“but if you would not embitter the remainder of it, think no more of your voyage to
India” (96). Though the main plot of Euphemia surrounds a British military officer’s wife
in New York, it seems worthwhile to studying the moments in the women’s fiction that
express a deep interest in not only retrieving Britons from the colonies, but also
promoting the home country while dispelling the conceit of economic prosperity.
Furthermore, I hope to study how women writers reconciled the demand for British
citizens versus empire building and what opportunities, if any, they saw colonialism offer
them personally.
I ask, along with the writers I examine, the numerous ways women’s fiction
retrieves British men from the colonies or stops them from travelling there altogether.
Marriage, for example, seems like one instrument female writers employ to counter the
lure of colonial money and transculturation in their works. Some novels display mistrust
and fear towards colonial Britons. The texts imply that once a person leaves the mother
country, the immorality and savagery in the colonies infectsed them, perverting their
5. British identity. Matrimony as a social ritual within the novel attempts to recover the lost
Briton. The British wedding seems like a necessary step before one can fully
reacclimatize to his mother nation. Charlotte Sussman’s work on transculturation in the
American colonies notes that eighteenth-century British society perceived the gauntlet
British colonists endure as a way for native tribes to seize and alter white culture. For
Europeans these ritualistic tortures demonstrated a tribe’s capacity to preserve their
“social coherence” against the threat of colonizing invasion (600-601). The stories of
captivity in the colonies and a person absence from Britain for extended periods of time
tapped into the British trepidation over transculturation, and, among all of the fears
surrounding colonialism, the most severe involves losing a British citizen to the native
“savage” civilization. Colonial travellers that returned to England faced a suspicious
audience that accused them of going “native” or participating in the depravities of the
uncivilized world. Euphemia Neville, the main character of Charlotte Lennox’s
Euphemia informs her friend Maria Harley:
Our situation afforded us many opportunities of observing how fortune
and nature were at strife, when the lavish gifts bestowed by the one, could
not efface the despicable stamp impressed by the other. The Indian
plunderer, raised from the condition of a link-boy1
to princely affluence, in
the midst of this blaze of grandeur, looked like a robber going in mock
state to execution; and the forestalling trader enjoyed his clumsy
magnificence with the same aspect as when he had over-reached a less
cunning dealer in a bargain. Such were the observations of Mrs. Benson,
1
Link-boy: Someone, typically a boy, paid to carry a lantern for people in the street (OED). East-India Co.:
Incorporated in 1600, this company was a group of London merchants who carried on lucrative trade in the
East Indies (OED).
6. when these sons and daughters of sudden opulence rolled in unwieldy
state by our humble habitation. (98)
Such a negative depiction of new money delineates a clear distinction between British
nationals and British colonialists. Lennox attacks the rise of a bourgeoisie class that
blatantly disrespected Britain’s hierarchical system and unremittingly usesd their colonial
money to surreptitiously infiltrate the government and British social life. It appears that
marriage becomes the only means through which one can rescue a corrupt ed Britain and
re-establish their “true” (?) British identity. The desire to recover a Briton about to leave
his country exceeds mere philanthropy; it translates into an act of homogeny. The two
marriages in Euphemia illustrate colonial infiltration: Maria Harley’s marriage to her
cousin, Edward Harley, suffers less volatility than Euphemia’s marriage to Mr. Neville,
who procures employment as a British officer in the colonies. Among other problems,
Euphemia’s son gets kidnapped by Huron Indians, setting the book with a captivity
narrative. That Maria’s marriage partially rescues her cousin from a life as a
colonialistcolonial life and Euphemia’s matrimony takes her away from her home and
friends speaks volumes about anti-colonial sentiment and the very real threat of losing
loved ones to the colonies. I would like to investigate and ________ (analyze? or
something of the ilk)other tools and methods found in eighteenth century British
women’s fiction that attempted to prevent colonial travel and reclaim those lost to the
savagery of the colonies.
Edward Said’s chapter “Jane Austen and Empire” in Culture and Imperialism
explores the correlation between the British manor home and colonial plantation in
Mansfield Park, (1118-20). Said recognizes that Mansfield Park acknowledges “the
7. importance of an empire to the situation at home” (89). However, when Sir Thomas
Bertram departs for his sugar plantation in the Caribbean, which provides financial
support for the British manor, Said criticizes Austen for the absence of details referencing
the Caribbean; he claims that Austen falls victim to “esthetic silence.” Said’s reading of
Mansfield Park implies that Austen ignores the other slave-run estate while treating the
colonies not as autonomous countries, but as convenient farmland for British production
(1120). He correctly asserts that Austen’s novel barely mentions the colonies, T but the
brevity of colonial discourse or the absence of an explicit colonial discussion, I hope to
argue, does not diminish her viewpoint on colonialism.
(I made it a separate paragraph because it feel distinct; but work on this transition,
dawg) The first portion of Suvendrini Perera’s thesis in Reaches of Empire: The English
Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens demonstrates that empire exists in the “vocabulary,
image, character, place, plot, narrative” of even those novels that do not “confront
imperial experience directly” (x). I want to extend upon Parera’s work , which primarily
focuses on nineteenth-century British novels; and in doing so I hope, to show
demonstrate that the “silence” in women’s fiction regarding colonialism is symptomatic
of the “conduct-book” genre that aimed, as Samuel Richardson puts it while in his
discussion ofng Pamela (1740), to “promote the cause of religion and virtue”. With
edification, morality, and religion as the pillars of the eighteenth-century novel, topics
like British imperialism occur in moments rather than long, drawn-out discussionsin
much-needed discourse, particularly in women’s fiction. In other words, in women’s
“conduct-book” fiction colonial discourse usually exists in the background, serving a
secondary or tertiary purposes. However, empire does exist in Mansfield Park and other
8. works by women authors. Rather than making the assumptione that Austen’s work
evades a deep colonial discussion, I wish to explore the upheaval that takes place during
Sir Thomas’s absence. While Sir Thomas manages his colonial estate, his family falls
apart at home in the motherland, which suggests ing the importance of a male figure to
family structure; and how colonialism acts as an agent that disrupts that the traditional
familial structure by removing the head of the household. Prolonged absence from the
home country did not bode well for colonial figures because (it was assumed) the longer
they strayed from Britain, the more their British identity deteriorated. Because of such
instances, Said’s reading undermines women’s experiences in colonial Britain. I find
these moments greatly useful and hope to analyze them further to uncover the feminine
voice concerning the Empire and her colonies.
I will begin with the preliminary consideration that novels by female writers
engaged with, helped articulate, and at times questioned the politics of colonialism.
Admittedly, the idea of studying British women within the Empire is not new or unique;
Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English
Narratives (1995) by Felicity A. Nussbaum and Leanne Maunu’s Women Writing the
Nation: National Identity, Female Community, And the British-French Connection,
1770-1820 (2007), for example, cover the impact of colonial expansion on women’s
sexuality and national identity, respectively. But my interests lie in exploring the
particular ways colonialism permeates into women’s fiction and colonial Britain from
their point of view. Specifically, I wish to discover the ways in which women writers
understood and negotiated with the rapid shifts within the European power structure;
which manifested as , an increase in women’s readership, the an influx of foreign culture,
9. the a challenge to the traditional economic system, and a reinforcement of colonial
stereotypes. Laura Brown meditates Meditating on women during this era: , “The female
figure,” –writes Laura Brownshe writes, while writing focusing on the emerging colonial
economy and women’s place in this particular economy, —“through its simultaneous
connections with commodification and trade on the one hand, and violence and
difference on the other, plays a central role in the constitution of this mercantile capitalist
ideology” (3). Accumulating, then, hopefully an array of representative texts by women
published during the long eighteenth century that in one way or another reflect British
colonialism, I aim to discover female writers’ sentiments, pro, con, or ambivalent,
towards colonialism. I suggest, in fact, that women writers of the eighteenth century
actively participated in, as Laura Brown classifies, “Operations of Empire” (3)2
, making
them agents of empire.
One aspect of women’s writing of particular curiosity to me involves the presence
of two specific colonial figures in women’s fiction: the British creole and the nabob.
These two figures owed their success entirely to Britain’s colonial expansion; they
executed the Empire’s colonial plans and championed the colonialism cause. In return
they achieved financial prosperity. At home, however, the existence of British creoles
and the nabobs sparked controversy and debate. White creoles, according to David
Lambert’s White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity During the Age of Abolition, “were
non-indigenous people… born or naturalized” in the West Indian and American colonies.
Many Britons denied White creoles their British existence because “their politics and
identity were shaped by slavery” (38). On the other hand, the nabob encompassed British
2
For the context of this essay, participating in Empire includes criticizing colonialism like Mary
Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman as well promoting it as Frances Brooke does in The
History of Emily Montague.
10. employees of the East India Company and or the Empire who accrued wealth in South
Asia and returned to brandish it at home (Nechtman11-13). AdditionallyFurthermore,
exposure to the sun and new environments darkened their skin, which, arguably, further
even more so removeding them from their British countenance (I don’t know; figure this
sentence out. Too much and then and then and then accumulation of momentum going on
here with the successive sentences). Both cases exemplify “new money” or the rise of a
new social class that relied on colonial business for wealth instead of the traditional
patrilineal inheritance structure. Many people, including those in positions of power, like
Horace Walpole, criticized these colonial capitalists because they feared that their own
newfound fortunes would allow them to purchase influence in upon the government, ,
and therbyefore swaying politicians and policies (Nechtman 12-13). Due in large part to
their critics, British creoles and nabobs faced anxiety and suspicion at home. British
citizens grew weary of their money, and more importantly, their ability to corrupt British
identity by implementing “Asiatic principles of government” (Nechtman 12). Tillman W.
Nechtman’s comprehensive Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
examines the emergence and presence of the nabob in British culture. Outside of Frances
Burney’s The Wanderer, Nechtman predominantly covers works by male authors.
Evidently, Burney’s The Wanderer is one text novel among many novels from the
period in which the nabob or the creole makes an appearance. Furthermore, Nechtman’s
argument centers on the role of the nabob as a corruptor of domestic British values or as a
justifier of Britain’s Asian occupation. He assembles and investigates textual, visual, and
material representations of the nabob, b. But his work does not offer any detailed
explanation of the nabob in women’s fiction n or the purpose they serve within these
11. texts. Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain demonstrates that
British citizens perceived nabobs and White creoles as “destructive,” but their cameos in
women’s fiction represents them in a positive light. Sidney Bidulph, the protagonist of
Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), embodies a woman
victimized by the severe disadvantages of eighteenth-century economic laws.; Sshe
experiences abject poverty because her husband mismanages their money and, as a
woman, she cannot inheritassume money any monetary inheritance from her mother. She
suffers a great deal until, suddenly, a champion comes to save her from total financial
ruin. Sidney’s rescuer materializes in the form of a long lost, wealthy nabob uncle. This
caricature of a nabob consistently appears in British fiction and he almost always saves
the heroine by supporting her financially or by bringing relief in other ways. In The
Wanderer the nabob uncle swoops in deux at the last minuteex machina and provides a
letter that restores the protagonist’s identity and honor. In both novels, the gentry and
people of the middle and lower classes treat the protagonists harshly and problematize
her economic situation, both of, which further complicates the colonialists’ presence in
novels.
In Her Bread To Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen Mona
Scheuermann shows that the “ubiquitous concern in these novels is money” (3). Although
she does not directly address colonial money, Scheuermann’sn work on economy and
marriage offers a foundation on which I could hope to/will build my research on the
infusion of colonial wealth and explore how it either helped or harmed the female
characters in women’s fiction. With colonial money permeating British economy, how
did female writers experience it and in what ways did it infiltrate their writings? Novels
12. by women offer an alternative conception of Britain’s colonialists. I ask why female
writers presented the nabob and the White creole as guardian or benevolent figure while
so much controversy surrounded him in reality. In other words, why does colonial money
offer succor to female protagonists instead of the traditional method, marriage or
inheritance? Why does the nabob, a displaced Briton, emerge in this role instead of a
British national? Did women’s place in the social strata, which Wollstonecraft illuminates
vociferously, impact their view of colonial money? Perhaps the representation of the
colonial businessman as a savior-like figure in women’s fiction alludes to colonialism as
a perceived opportunity for upward social mobility. The line between British colonialist
as a corruption personified and as a colonialist as anwho is an eccentric yet generous
being seems undefined and oscillating. I hope to bridge the gap in women’s fiction
between the two polar viewpoints of these colonial entities and the power of their wealth
in women’s texts.
For this area, I wish to explore the different ways colonial expansion in the
eighteenth century impacted women as writers and citizens, while also surveying how
their works investigate Britain’s global interaction with new people and cultures. At
Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World by Catherine Hall
and Sonya O. Rose informs us that empire, “lived across everyday practices [and]
everyday lives were infused with an imperial presence” (3). The pervasiveness of empire
as explained by authors in At Home with the Empire supports the notion that women’s
fiction tried to articulate the major social and cultural metamorphosis that took place
during their time. Reactions to these monumental cultural changes appear in women’s
fiction and a reassessment of female writers seems imperative to re-gain the female voice
13. of an Empire and examine their attitudes towards British colonialism.
I conclude by suggesting once more that looking at the novels of this time period
in terms of empire and colonial representations can be fruitful; indeed, they offer key
insights into colonial expansion from an oft-ignored viewpoint. Not only do female
novelists engage with the imperial discourse through their representations of empire, but
they also, as studies of Felicity A. Nussbaum clarify, often in their texts both reveal the
horrors of colonial expansion and narratively endorse the ideological and cultural
significance of possessing colonies. In the tradition of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688),
for instance, we might think also of The Unca Eliza’s3
Female American; or, The
Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the
Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), both of which explore in equal depth measure the
psyche of the subjugated in order to attempt to give them a voice. The fact that both of
these novels are actually set in the colonies, rather than in the mother country, further
reveals the female perspective on empire and on the cultural changes as experienced by
women. This kind of analysis would mean thinking through, among other things, not only
the particulars of colonial economics trade and trade economics, but also British
nationalism and criticism of the Empire during and after social movements like the
British abolitionist crusade. I will also look critically at Leanne Maunu’s works in terms
of British identity. Though she concentrates on the French revolution, her work on
Burney’s The Wanderer and other lesser known female writers seems worth exploring,
for I believe she presents what appears as to be a divide in women’s fiction; while some
writers use failure and terror to invoke national pride, while others defend the ideals of
the French Revolution. It appears that a similar pattern occurs regarding colonial
3
The anonymous author uses Unca Eliza, the protagonist of the novel, also as a pseudonym.
14. discourse; some a handful of female writers laud colonialism and promote British
nationalism, and yet, others show demonstrate their anxiety and protestations by
questioning its benefits.
While the primary texts I have selected appear similar, because due to their being
they of come out of the “conduct book” genre, they are disparate in their representation of
larger social issues associated with colonialism. In many of these texts, the female
protagonists deal with colonialism beyond morality and economy. In fact, fiction by
female authors complicates colonial discourse because these womeny offer a perspective
not of the dominant patriarchaly, but of a socially oppressed groupminority. Reading
these texts means thinking about women’s literature as simultaneously as an engagement
with and a reflection of colonial politics of the era, and of a longer historical trajectory. It
means exploring how authors represented their particular relationships with the
complexities of empire building—often commending expansion while disparaging the
unknown, and, sometimes illuminating the insidious consequences of expansion—and
how we might come to understand women’s reactions to their colonial environment
through representations of these issues in their novels. Finally, Mona Scheuermann
highlights something I not only agree with, but also hope to accomplistaccomplish:. She
writes, “Much recent criticism has chosen to shunt aside the text, preferring to theorize
about rather than to read closely the constructs given to readers by authors” (11). My
study will follow Scheuermann’s model and attempt to discover the women’s voice in
eighteenth-century colonial Britain by primarily relying primarily on the fictive (?)
literature. My goal will bise to return the focus toward the text and, as Scheuermann
urges, “reverse recent trends towards marginalizing the texts themselves” (11).
15. NOTES:
- overall, work on your language. This is a copyedit here, and I noticed two things:
1) inconsistency with language registers; one of which is pulling clean from
academia (good) and one which mixes in a yo-I’m-your-brotha kind of casualness
(not good). Read through and eliminate instances of the latter. 2) I would
advocate, throughout, for more consistently strong language. Instead of basic
adjectives and adverbs, use some stronger verbage. Don’t say “one” for “one
example”; say something more specific toward your area of focus or thesis.
“Marriage seems to function as the quintessential instrument…”
- one thing I admire about this is one thing I admire about our colleague, Mike S.
It’s well-written overall because it IS easy to understand. You’ve reached your
audience. I’ve read many area exams and dissertations, and yours is VERY
MUCH digestible. I think you should be happy with this as a draft.
- Macro concern: Organization of this piece. Paragraphs need clearer cohesiveness,
and more connective tissue between paragraphs, leading readers from one idea to
another.
- Another Macro concern: You need to better exemplify your claims. You mention
quite often things you’d like to explore in the broad sense, but there is little
qualification of these ideas because you do not make them concrete through
example. I would pull more examples from the texts you intend to use for primary
sources. Not necessarily quotes, but HARD EVIDENCE.
