Adopted Colors: Domesticity and Foreign Nationalism in Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot
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ADOPTED COLORS: DOMESTICITY AND FOREIGN NATIONALISM IN ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND GEORGE ELIOT A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Hyowon Kim August 2007 ©2007 Hyowon Kim ADOPTED COLORS: DOMESTICITY AND FOREIGN NATIONALISM IN ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND GEORGE ELIOT Hyowon Kim, Ph.D. Cornell University 2007 The dissertation explores the trope of lost and recovered children in the narratives of nationalism by Victorian women writers excluded from political participation. Bringing together the narratives of fragmented family and divided allegiance, my project focuses on how women writers constructed an imagined connection with other people's nationalism by subverting deracinated fantasy to explore the tensions between the individual and racial inheritance. Examining the cultural construction of Italians, Gypsies, and Jews in the British nineteenth century, this dissertation investigates the "timeless" fantasies of artistic freedom, liberation, and tolerance associated with landless "dark Others" that contrast with their historical marginalization in England. What appeal to Barrett Browning and Eliot, are not escape from racial inheritance, but the pressing duties of the lost child to preserve history and identity, as she negotiates a role of political leadership that constrains her private choices. Inspired by the struggle of her adopted country to overthrow Austrian rule, Elizabeth Barrett Browning envisioned a national future of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows. Following the fictionalized travel writing of Anna Jameson and Arthur Hugh Clough that attempts to avoid politics in favor of art, I argue that by constructing kinship through Anglo-Italian literary tradition, Barrett Browning advocates the Italian revolutions of 1848 as liberal politics demanding English sympathy through spiritual inheritance. Conversely, Gypsies shed their “spiritual appeal” to become racial figures, through the rise of Gypsy ethnography, popularized by George Borrow and later the Gyspy Lore Society, who mapped the linguistic and racial origins of the English Romany. The claim to race and history provides no solution for survival in Eliot’s long poem The Spanish Gypsy. Although Fedalma’s interstitial role does not bridge Gypsy and Spain, in Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda, the adopted child's claim to racial memory depends on the disinherited daughter. Deronda's origins are legitimized through his reunion with his mother, but the process of inheriting Judaism rests on the tradition of Jewish women writers such as Grace Aguilar, who argued for women's religious education. The "exotic Jewess" Mirah resists conversion and reconstructs racial identity through the memory of her mother's spiritual instruction. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Hyowon Kim was born and raised in Seoul, with a brief stopover in Los Angeles that marked her beginnings as a third culture kid. After an Erasmus exchange year at Leiden University, the Netherlands, she finished her undergraduate work in English at Yonsei University, South Korea (1999). With a scholarship from Fulbright and the KAEC, she began her graduate work at Cornell University, where she received her MA (2003) and Ph.D. (2007). She lives in Leiden. iii To my mother and father, iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The unexpected result of my own wandering in graduate school, in search of my ever-elusive project, was that all three of my committee members, in turns, have chaired my committee. Jim Adams, Dorothy Mermin, and Harry Shaw: I have benefited greatly from their generosity and support, in times of great muddiness and frequent vagueness. They reminded me time and again why we were here in the first place: the love of reading, which I often lost sight of when there was so much of it, and less for enjoyment. I am happy to say that on finishing my graduate work I have found it again. Harry Shaw’s seminar on the nineteenth-century novel has been a touchstone for my own reading and teaching, and his feedback has been invaluable in shaping my understanding of nationalism. As an added bonus, I discovered the joy of Scott. I will always be grateful to Dorothy Mermin for her wry sense of humor, her encouragement, her common sense and stability in times of frantic graduate student worry, and her kindness. She has been a careful, patient reader who helped me tease out connections, and pushed me onward with a good dose of encouragement. My chair, Jim Adams, guided this dissertation from a variety of different ideas and readings, and gave a focused direction to its itinerary and scope, and helped me see what I was doing before I did. His advice in wrangling it into thematic coherence, at the end of each section, each chapter, at its first draft and its revisions, has been invaluable. Thank you. For their generous support in funding my first two years at Cornell, and opening doors to begin my academic work, I am grateful to the IIE and the Fulbright Program in the United States and the KAEC in South Korea. Practical help in terms of money came with the generous intangible support v from the people involved, especially the Seoul KAEC office, director Dr. Horace Underwood and executive director Shim Jai-Ok, Mrs. Im Bu-Hui, and the staff. Academic community fostered the individual chapters of this dissertation in various stages of its development. Cornell Graduate School’s funding for a research travel grant in 2002-3 started me on the road of Italian nationalism in the British Library, as did their support for conference travel each year. I am grateful to the people I met at Napoli conference in 2003, in particular Angela Leighton for her insight on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Annamaria Lamarra for reading the first drafts of The Spanish Gypsy chapter, and preparing it for publication. I am indebted to the Department of English at Cornell, for the Sage fellowship that gave me a year of writing, and for the Falkenau fellowship that helped me shape my interests in fictional travel writing into a freshman writing seminar. I’ve always bounced and clarified ideas with my students at Cornell. To my funny, smart, hard-working, and enthusiastic students in “Women and Other Monsters” and “The Lonely Planet: Writing about Travel”: I’ve learned as much from you as I hope you have in class. Thanks! To own my teachers, professors Choi Jong-Chul, Moon Sang- yong at Yonsei University, and Joke Kardux at Leiden University, thank you, not only for encouraging my earliest work, but welcoming me back during my years of graduate work, and continuing to offer sage advice. For guiding and supporting me on the rocky and rewarding path of teaching, I thank my mentors, Catherine Burroughs of Wells College, Laura Brown, and Kate McCullough at Cornell. I am, as ever, amazed, impressed, and grateful to the people who can keep order, and help others in this quest: Shelley Weaver at the graduate vi school who sorted through my convoluted mess of status, paperwork, forms; Brendan O’Brien and the International Students who made sense of my complicated visa papers and entry dates; graduate thesis advisors, Minnie Empson and Pattie Plaice, who patiently and carefully answered my many and overlapping questions on format and filing, and helping the dissertation toward its final shape. The staff at the Cornell English Department are my heroes. To Vicky Brevetti, Robin Doxtater, Heather Gowe, Michelle Manella, and Darlene Flint, thank you for those occasions too many, and frankly too embarrassing, to recount. To my friends, cohorts, co-conspirators at Cornell: you’ve made graduate school more than “life in school.” Kudos to the Victorian reading group: Sarah J Heidt, Zubair Amir, Katherine Terrell, Andrea Rehn, and Esther Hu. Thanks for all the Trollope and Hardy, no thanks for Bulwer-Lytton, but the amazing baked goods and late-night discussions were my mainstay. Special love and thanks to Alice TePunga Somerville, Kimberly Snyder, Nadine Attewell, Yoshiaki Mihara, and Mimi Yu, who found better thinking through eating, and helped tease out ideas and arguments, readings and connections, in a wide range of texts and contexts. To my teaching buddies, Sunjay Sharma, Michael Nieto Garcia, Kim Zarins, thank you for those discussions on pedagogy, for trading handouts and writing exercises, and “teaching collaboration.” And beyond Cornell, my Korean friends who’ve kept me grounded: Youngjie Rim, Choi Kwui-hyang, Kim Kun-yong, Suh Yunjung, and Lee Seunghee. My creative writing friends helped me recover from the dissertation writing blocks by letting it loose in our mad wild stories. Takeshi Konomi and Kubo Tite helped. vii Not least is the selfless effort of friends who came through and helped me file this dissertation, as I write these acknowledgements across the Atlantic in the Netherlands: Mike Garcia, and as always Roger Fujii, who’s the most dependable and hard-working person I know. This, literally, could not have been done without you. To my family, for your faith, for your encouragement, for the long conversations over the phone, and for keeping me stylish in Ithaca NY, I can never thank you enough: Mom and Dad, this one’s for you. And thanks to my other parents, Chris and May Lew, who let me forget all about graduate school in the DC suburbs and recharge over the summers. And above all, Mike Lew. You get everything else after this one. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Table of Contents xi Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: The Romance of the Tourist and the Italian Risorgimento 16 1. The Past is a Foreign Coutnry 22 2. Death and the Maiden: Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyee and the Dangers of Byron’s Italy 26 3.