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I NUI MAYNOOTH 0 11 sco i I na h£ireann Mä Nuad IN RUIN UNRECONCILED Women Writers and the End of the British Empire Bernadette Trehy Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy Department of English, NUI Maynooth Head of Department: Professor Chris Morash Dissertation Supervisor: Professor Joe Cleary November, 2011 CONTENTS Page No. Acknowledgements i Sum m ary iii Introduction 1 Chapter One: ‘As though the house had spent a day in the tropics’: The Art of Avoidance and the End of Empire in Elizabeth Bowen’s The L a st Septem ber 42 Chapter Two: A Narrative of Imperial Retreat: Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus 96 Chapter Three: ‘A Passion for Alteration’ R um er G odden’s Breakfast with the Nikolides 148 Chapter Four: ‘The Waste Lands of a Dying Colonialism’: Racial Desire and Racial Terror in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing 200 Chapter Five: The Limits of Liberalism in Nadine Gordimer’s The L ying Days 249 C onclusion 299 Bibliography 309 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to an outstanding supervisor, Professor Joe Cleary, whose unwavering support and inspirational belief in this project have kept me grounded throughout the years spent on it. The many hours Professor Cleary spent reading the dissertation and discussing it with me have been far beyond the call of duty and his rigorous approach to my work has earned him my profound gratitude and appreciation. I would also like to extend my thanks to the English Department at Maynooth, especially Professor Chris Morash for his support and help at a crucial time in my research. I also owe grateful thanks to Dr. Conor McCarthy for allowing me to attend his Masters seminar on Doris Lessing and for his support throughout the project, especially during our telephone conversations in the closing stages. Appreciation is also due to Dr. ide Corley for her help in pointing me towards contemporary African writers and for her continued interest in my research. A very special word of thanks is due to Dr. Michael Cronin and Dr. Sharon Tighe-Mooney for their friendship and the time they spent painstakingly proof-reading the chapters. Grateful thanks are also due to my good friend at Maastricht University, Dr. Michael Geary, who also read the dissertation. I would also like to express my appreciation to my friend and fellow researcher, Siobhan O’Donnell, whose companionship on our travels to Maynooth I have thoroughly enjoyed. Many thanks to Dr. Jason King of Limerick University for his help with my research on Elizabeth Bowen. Professor Margaret Kelleher of An Foras Feasa provided friendship and encouragement throughout my years of study in Maynooth, for which I will always be thankful. A big ‘thank you’ is also due the library staff at Maynooth, especially Bernadette Gardiner, who never failed to answer my emails with patience and helpful advice. The archivist at the University of East Anglia has been most generous in supplying me with copies of Doris Lessing’s personal wartime correspondence, while Rumer Godden’s daughter, Jane Murray Flutter, has also taken time to express her interest in my research into her mother’s novels. Finally, I would like to express my love and gratitude to my family for their support and patience in seeing me through the long years of study, especially during the rocky periods. SUMMARY Drawing on recent feminist cultural and historical scholarship on the roles of women in colonial societies in the twentieth century, this dissertation examines the works of four women writers who wrote important novels that reflect on the wider historical condition of British imperial contraction and late colonial settler crisis. The women writers in question are from Ireland, India and southern Africa, and thus their works deal with some of the key sites of British imperial crisis and collapse in the last century. Beginning with Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, a novel which reflects on the condition of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy against the backdrop of World War One and the Irish War of Independence, the dissertation then moves on to examine two mid century novels by Anglo-Indian writer Rumer Godden, namely, Black Narcissus and Breakfast with the Nikolides. Both novels deal with the anxieties of the English community in India in the context of World War Two and an increasingly assertive Indian nationalist movement. The later chapters in the study deal respectively with Doris L essing’s The Grass is Singing and with Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days, novels that engage in diverse ways with the mentalities and predicaments of English-affiliated settler communities in Africa in the post-World War Two era as the British Empire entered its final and closing phase. Deploying a broadly psychoanalytic mode of analysis informed by the scholarship of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as well as by that of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, the dissertation argues that the novels in question are deeply conflicted narratives that seem overtly to offer fairly conservative colonial settler views of the world, but which nonetheless also suggest a restive sense of impatience and frustration with the restrictions imposed on women by the colonial and imperial order of things. The source of these narrative tensions, elaborated in diverse ways in each writer, may be traced to the historically-conflicted condition of colonial women generally in the twentieth century. This was a period in which colonial women were compelled as white subjects to witness the collapse of the colonial worlds in which they had come of age, but in which as female subjects they were also drawn to the advances for women made possible by the women’s movement in this period. The thesis concentrates in particular on the ways in which the novels mentioned above deal with houses and landscapes as crucial tropes that register a sense of domestic colonial crisis and with inter-racial interactions of various sorts as a means to explore the limits of the possible as one historical dispensation came to an end and a new one opened up. INTRODUCTION I By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Empire covered one- fifth of the world’s land surface and exercised authority over one quarter of its population.1 Attempting to identify the precise moment when the empire began to decline is a somewhat fruitless undertaking, but it was undoubtedly the changing world order brought about by the devastation of World War One that gave impetus to growing independence movements throughout the British colonies.2 Following the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 marked the first fissure to manifest itself within the British Empire.3 With the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, Ireland joined South Africa to become the earliest colonies to break with the empire since the thirteen American colonies had gained their independence to become the United States of America in 1776. Egypt, a British Protectorate since the outbreak of war in 1914, gained its independence in 1922, while the Mandate of Iraq, granted to Britain by the League of Nations in 1920, ended in 1932. The loss of South East Asia to Japan during World War Two represented a devastating blow to British prestige in Asia, and accelerated a wider shift of global power to the United States and the Soviet Union in the postwar world, a transition that reduced both Britain and France, the two leading imperial states of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to second- order powers. In 1947, when Britain lost its most precious possession, India, there was a ceremonial handing over of sovereignty, following which the British 'Robert H. McDonald, The Language of Empire : Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 2. 2See J.G. Darwin, ‘The Fear of Falling: British Politics of Imperial Decline Since 1900’, Transactions o f the Royal H istorical Society, 5. 36 (1986), pp. 27-43: 27. 3See Leonard Thompson, A History o f South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 141-143. 1 administration simply withdrew, leaving behind, as had earlier happened in Ireland, a partitioned country. Britain granted independence to the Federation of Malaya, within the Commonwealth, in 1957. In Africa, all of Britain’s former colonies except Rhodesia and Namibia had achieved independence by the end of the 1960s. Britain withdrew fully from the Middle East when it left Aden in 1967 and Bahrain in 1971. However, the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand did not finally sever legal links with England until the years between 1982 and 1986. Likewise, Rhodesia did not gain independence until 1980 and although many Europeans had already fled the country, mostly to South Africa, the colonizers were allowed to remain, should they so wish, as citizens of the new Zimbabwe. Namibia became free in 1990, but some smaller regions continue to be the subject of dispute — Britain retains fourteen territories under the 2002 Overseas Territories Act — but for most people the loss of Hong Kong to China in 1997 represented the closing chapter in the long saga of the demise of the British Empire.4 Though it has to date received relatively little scholarly attention, this long decline of the British Empire generated a rich and varied corpus of writing, much of it written by women and men who had been bom in the colonies at a time when that empire was still a powerful and prestigious entity. The memoirs, letters, novels and stories written in the sunset century of the empire constitute an invaluable historical archive and a rich and complex record of the sentiments of those who were bom into an imperial world that was continuously contracting throughout their adult lives.

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