SUBJECT OF I MPERIALIS M : THE RHETORIC OF S ELF IN THE LIFE AND WORKOF FLORAANNIE STEEL Rebecca J. Sutcliffe M.A., Dalhousie University, 1990 THESISSUBMI?TED IN PARTIALFULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Docro~OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department d English O Rebecca J. Sutcliffe 1995 SIMONFRASER UNIVERSITY August 1995 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy, or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL Name: Rebecca J. Sutcliffe Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Title of Dissertation: THESUBJECT OF IMPERIALISM: THERHETORIC OF SELFIN THE LIFE AND WORKOF FLORAANNIE STEEL Examining Committee: Chair: Paul Budra Paul Matthew St. Pierre Assistant Professor of English Senior Supervisor June Sturrock Associate Professor of English Jery Zaslove Joint Professor of English and Humanities Marj Lynn Stewart Chair, Women's Studies, and ~rofesso~fzhory Internal te "al Examiner Peter Hafnetty Professor Emeritus History and Asian Studies The University of British Columbia External Examiner Date Approved: PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser Universi the right to lend my thesis, pro'ect or extended essay (the title oB which is shown below) to users o2 the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of Thesis/Project/Extended Essay Author:- (signature) 24 4ualcs-t 1443' (date) ABSTRACT By categorizing Flora Annie Steel as a mjnor, popular, <-gkA'iim- and by concentrating primarily on her literary work, studies of this nineteenth-century imperial subject have continued to position her, and the wider study of imperialism, within hierarchical, imperialist frameworks. I problematize and attempt to move beyond such frameworks by examining the ways in which Flora Steel's authority was constructed through and around her autobiographical and professional writing. I examine the production of subjectivity in genealogy through a meta-biographical investigation of Steel's memoir, The Garden of Fidelity. I then develop a rhetorical analysis of Flora Steel's reports as Inspector of Schools in Punjab to investigate the strategies she employed to position herself as both a woman and a government official in the context of arguments over what constitutes an educated Indian woman. Although Steel's literary career was predicated on her supposed "knowledge" of India and especially of Indian women, that career was established in late-nineteenth-century Britain, where imperial subjectivity was overdetermined by complex forces, including rapidly-changing relationships governing text-production. Moving beyond purely literary views of subjectivity and authorship, I examine the rhetorical strategies Steel used to negotiate these complex forces. Finally, I re-read one of Steel's short stories as part of an ongoing debate between East and West, and I eudewith suggestions.for taJcFng-1 -I_,__-.- .- - - aectivity beyond such familiar polarities. --------/----4- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Support for this project was generously provided by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a President's Research Stipend and Research Fellowship from Simon Fraser University. Special thanks are due to Michael Hodgson, of SSHRCC, for his encouragement. Many fine people and organizations helped me with this project, and I am grateful. I wish especially to thank my senior supervisor, Dr. Paul Matthew St. Pierre, for his superior judgment and support. I would also like to thank committee members Dr. Jery Zaslove, and Dr. June Sturrock for their helpful comments on drafts of this project. Kathryn Lindquist, Stephanie Richardson, Susan Kohler, and Brenton Faber at the University of Utah also read and commented on early drafts. Dr. Marjorie Stone at Dalhousie University provided inspiration in the early stages. Many librarians and curators assisted me in my search for primary sources on Flora Steel. I would like to thank Catherine Henderson of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, Mark Spivey of the Maniott Library at the University of Utah, and Dr. Richard J. Bingle of the Oriental and Indian Collection of the British Library, London. I am also grateful to Robert N. Smart of the University of St. Andrews Library, Fife, Mark Purcell of the Bodleian Library, Christopher Sheppard of the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University Library, Jean Rose at Reed Book Services, Northants, Graham Baker and Roger Beacham of the Gloucestershire County Council, Dr. Peter McNiven of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, the staff of the Fawcett Library, London, and the staff of the Old Town Hall, Richmond. I am indebted to people who came forward with private information about Flora Steel. Among them, Lady Violet Powell, Anne Maxwell, and the members of the Clee Hill Women's Institute, deserve special thanks. Mrs. Mary Chanel de Channel, widow of ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (cont'd.) Britain's former Special Envoy to China, helped me to understand the life of civil servant's spouse when I visited her in Cornwall. Finally, special thanks go to Brent, whose advice, encouragement, expertise, and solid good sense ma& this project possible. Any errors are purely my own. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv 1 GENEALOGYAND THE WlUlTEN SELF: FLORA ANNIE STEEL'S THE GARDENOF FIDELJTY POSTSCRIPT :ENCOUNTERING GENEALOGY INDIAN EXPERIENCE: FLORA STEEL'S CONSTRUCTION OF A PROFESSIONAL SELF IN HER OFFICIAL REPORTS AS INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS, PUNJAB INDIAN AUTHOR(ITY) : FLORA STEEL's PROFESSIONAL LITE3L4RY WRITING CONCLUSION:NEW DIRECTIONSFOR SUBJECTSOF IMPERIALISM WORKS ClTED This study concerns the life and work of Flora Annie Steel, a Victorian woman who --- -.. lived in India as part of the-- Brjushruling elite from 1868 to 1889. Initially she_pl&.the --- --I_IC * - role of conventional me-birth to children and managing a household as she .. ------I_______^c --- followed her husband .&xwgk-m^i~Z?e"e in drehdian.Ciyil-Service. In the 1UOs, however, discovering (or deciding) that she would have no more children, and apparently growing restless, she entered public discourse first as an educator and then as a storyteller and historian. In her time she was known as the "eRudyardKipling," -- but while Kipling's life and work are still discussed and read, Flora Steel's life and work have been largely forgotten. In recent years, with the surge of interest in the British "Raj" and in women's participation in imperialism, Flora Steel has begun to enter public discourse again. Daya Patwardhan's A Star of India (1963) and Violet Powell's Flora Annie Steel (1981) have reclaimed Flora Steel for the romance of Anglo-India mostly from her own memoirs and from the reminiscences of friends. The results have been largely laudatory, although Patwardhan's book includes useful lists of book reviews in the popular press of Steel's time. Some studies have sought to reclaim Flora Steel for her supposed heritage as in Alex M. Cain's The Cornchest For Scotland: Scots in India (1986) in which Steel's life and work are held up with other "Scots contributions" to education and medicine. Other critics have perceived her and her work as morally inferior to more "sensitive" (and therefore more "literary") authors like E. M. Forster (Parry 100-30), or as morally inferior to "more feminist" women in India like Annie Besant (Paxton 158-76). Yet Flora Steel's entry into public discourse cannot be reduced to her supposed identity as an Anglo- Indian, a Scot, an author, or a woman. Situated as it was between Britain and "India" in the nineteenth century, that public discourse cannot be seen apart from the wider discursive field of European imperialism. Before I discuss Steel, therefore, I will sketch the broad outlines of a phenomenon that has been produced within and as part of the Western discursive field of which any study of Flora Steel, including this one is necessarily also a part. 1. fIolding the Fort: Imperial Studies From the Centre Imperialism, as Edward Said, Gayam Spivak, and other commentators have described it, is a mapping of cultural and geographical temtory employing an ideology of possession and control. Viewed historically, its modem dimensions are commonly seen as extending roughly from Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas to the nationalist liberatory politics of the pre- and post-WWII nation-state configuration. In influence and sheer acquisitiveness, Britain is seen to have played the largest role. Whether decolonization has marked some sort of end to imperialism and the closely related phenomenon of colonialism, so that imperialism can be consigned to history from a "post-colonial" position, is open to debate. Nevertheless, it seems clear that "history" marks the present, and that the impulse to imperialism has found different ways to produce the same effects. Geographical and cultural imperialism and colonialism may still be very much alive in the transnational corporatism described by Masao Miyoshi ("Borderless" 1993) or in the maximizing, extractive, "separating, dominating and reactive" tendencies which continue to structure Western concepts and practices of knowledge production (Said C&I 39). Indeed, studies of imperialism have tended to reproduce the very structures of domination they have sought to describe. The formal study of the British Empire is supposed to date from 1883 when J. R. Seeley published his Cambridge lectures on The Expansion of England. The lectures attempt to construct the empire as something which, in that infamous phrase, England has acquired "in a fit of absence of mindM(lO)in addition to something which has been imposed on the English by the overwhelming force of history, and can simultaneously be controlled through comprehensive knowledge of "Greater BritainU(l1).