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Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901

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Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901 Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901 by Alisha Renee Walters A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy English Department University of Toronto © Copyright by Alisha Renee Walters 2014 Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901 Alisha Renee Walters Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2014 Abstract This dissertation uniquely uncovers how fictional depictions of the racial hybrid came to impact how facets of British identity were imagined in the nineteenth century. The burgeoning Victorian science of racialism, which was obsessed with ideas of racial hybridity, was allied closely to theories of British national identity in the nineteenth century. This thesis scrutinises the intertwined development of the scientific discourse of racial hybridity, on the one hand, and the emergence of a modern idea of heterogeneous Britishness, on the other, during the Victorian era. I specifically investigate the relationship between fiction and scientific ideologies of race mixing, and I position the novel as an active contributor to a broader discussion regarding “in-between” modalities of British identity. In this project, I place the Victorian racial hybrid—sometimes called the “mulatto,” or the “half-caste,” and so on—as she or he appears in literature into a history of the construction of aspects of Victorian identity. I begin by examining the complex, and often antithetical, sets of emotive responses that Victorian fiction stages in reaction to hybridized difference. As I read works by Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling, and others, I explore how descriptions of bodily hybridity intersect with imaginings of British nationalism, which was viewed frequently as a more complex identificatory category in the context of the empire. In my ii discussion of Craik’s writing, for instance, I examine the ties between literary affect, “mixed” bodies, and British nationality. I trace how her fiction inculcates affective reactions to racial mixing, while her texts simultaneously position reader responses to hybridity in relation to more complex ideas about British race. Furthermore, I investigate how depictions of domesticity and hybridity intertwine in the Victorian novel, such that mixed-race figures—frequently imagined as the insider-outsiders of domestic fiction—index literature’s complicated psychical and physical negotiations between empire, race, and the English home. I then consider early twentieth-century representations of imperial whiteness, and I examine how this racial identity might be read in the direct light of the nineteenth century’s earlier theories of racially mixed bodies. My work, for the first time, situates the mixed-race figure of Victorian literature within an affective genealogy of heterogeneous British identity. iii Acknowledgments Writing this thesis has not been an easy or a short process, and I have incurred many debts throughout the years. Of course, I must thank my wonderful committee members. My supervisor, Jill Matus, has offered me research advice and tissues when they were both needed. Her gracious guidance and moral support have helped me to persevere many times during this long endeavour. I also must thank Sara Salih for her amazing attention to detail; her intelligent recommendations have certainly made this thesis a better work than it would have been, otherwise. I thank Christine Bolus-Reichert for her invaluable suggestions over the years and for her compassion; with consistency, she has helped me to relate my research to the broader field of Victorian studies. I also am grateful to Pamela Gilbert who, as an external reader, helped to reframe my thinking about this project in many important ways. I would not have had the physical or mental strength to finish this project without the continued emotional and financial support of my loving parents, Earl and Lystra. To them, I owe a debt that cannot be expressed in words. I also thank my dear fiancé, David, who, quite literally, has helped to keep me sane during the process of earning my doctorate. I also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), whose Canada Graduate Scholarship helped to fund the research in this project in part. A modified version of chapter 2 of this dissertation appeared in the Journal Women’s Writing; I thank Taylor & Francis for the permission to include some of that work here. There are many others to whom I am grateful. Many of my friends and family members have been encouraging and understanding during this process. I thank you all for your support, both visible and invisible. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................. v Chapter 1 – Introduction: An “admixture, comparatively stable”: Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism, 1850-1901 ............................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2 – Olive, The Half-Caste, and Dinah Craik’s Mixed-Race Nationalism ........................ 46 Chapter 3 – Wilkie Collins: Armadale, The Moonstone, and the Development of a Hybridized Ontology ................................................................................................................................... 98 Chapter 4 – Kim, Kipling, and late Victorian Nationalism ......................................................... 141 Conclusion: Mary Seacole and the legacy of Victorian ideas of Mixed Race ............................ 185 Works Consulted ......................................................................................................................... 203 v Chapter 1 – Introduction: An “admixture, comparatively stable”: Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism, 1850-1901 In 1907, just a few years after the end of the Victorian era, writer Ford Madox Ford described what he deemed “the peculiar psychology of the Englishman,” which he attributed to an “odd mixture of every kind of foreigner [forming] … the Anglo-Saxon race.”1 Ford could invoke fairly easily the motleyed, or patchwork, image of the mixed English subject at the beginning of the twentieth century; but his conviction that the nation was a heterogeneous group, or “an admixture, comparatively stable” (53), nonetheless was born out of a longer, and often contentious, tradition of theorizing English and British racial hybridity throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century. In language that seems prescient given contemporary, postcolonial theorisations regarding Britishness’ engrained “sense of fluidity,” Ford asserted that “the whole of Anglo-Saxondom [was not] …a matter of race but one, quite simply, of place… and of spirit” (43).2 “Race,” and even “Anglo-Saxon,” are deployed as signifiers that are plastic, fluid, and startlingly unsettled in Ford’s early-twentieth-century narrative of nationality. “We are not Teutons; we are not Latins; we are not Celts or Anglo-Saxons in the sense of being descendants of Jutes or Angles,” he declares. Instead, Ford pronounces, “[w]e are all passengers together…and we all vaguely hope as a nation to … get somewhere” (43). This fluctuant racial model of English national identity is visualised as a changing landscape, peopled 1Ford Madox [Hueffer] Ford, The Spirit of the People (London: Duckworth & Co., 1907) xii. Future references to this edition will be made parenthetically, within the body of the text. Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), a novelist, critic, and editor, was born Ford Hermann Hueffer, which he later changed to Ford. Ford published The Soul of London in 1905, which was succeeded by two other volumes that formed a trilogy, called England and the English (1907). The final instalment was The Sprit of the People (1907). 2 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995) 2. Ian Baucom discusses The Spirit of the People, and opines that Ford “refuses to believe…that Englishness has a [pure] racial essence.” Rather, argues Baucom, English “place” for Ford “reforms the identities of all those, whatever their ancestry or place of birth, who are exposed to it.” Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999) 18. 1 2 by different groups and races synchronically, at Ford’s specific juncture in space, and also diachronically, over a longer period of historical time. Englishness, in this remarkably modern visualization of national identity, is deemed a malleable racial category, a “road, [and] a means to an end, not an end in itself” (47). Ford’s prose is striking for the ways in which it highlights the constitutive position of the racial “Other” within this composite national model. His construction of the nation is one in which English identity necessitates racial alterity in order to maintain its recognisable form as Englishness. His descriptions in this way seem to presage much later depictions of an English nation that is “driven by desire for the cultural other”; but Ford’s ideas are also immediately derived from the nineteenth century’s broad theorizations of race mixing and nationalism.3 In his parable of the Welsh Sheep, for instance, Ford uses the synecdoche of English livestock to stand in for the existing, racially-mixed English identity that he perceives
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