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READING WOMEN in COLONIAL TEXTS By SPLITTING THE STEREOTROPE: READING WOMEN IN COLONIAL TEXTS By: ELISSA VANN STRUTH . BA. (Hon), The University of Manitoba, 1995 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN STUDIES We accept this thesis as confonriing to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA AUGUST 2001 © Elissa Vann Struth, 2001 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date \Z/0<^l0l DE-6 (2/88) ii ABSTRACT Splitting the Stereotrope: Reading Women in Colonial Texts explores gendered communication through a process of discourse analysis. A historical reconstruction of the life of Maharani Baiza Bai (1784-1863) allows for investigating concepts of voice, agency, and hegemony of the colonial subject. Through use of a variety of textual materials, including travel narratives and government records, we are able to challenge certain assumptions surrounding the nature of colonial interaction on levels of gender, class, and race. The organizing doctrine of public and private spheres, the Self/Other schism central to theorizing Orientalism, and the colonizer/colonized framework for imperialist rhetoric are the specific themes that will be examined during the course of this thesis. Thus, the goals of this thesis are threefold. Firstly, to construct a history of the Maharani Baiza Bai that uses available texts from the period. Placing the Bai in time by providing brackets of fact and record will help to answer some of the following questions. Who was she? What did she do? What are the organizing tropes against which she is read? Does the historical record provide the opportunity to argue convincingly for evidence of her voice and agency? Secondly, this thesis will identify and theorize the female colonial narrators who record their meetings with Baiza Bai - specifically, Fanny Parks, Emily Eden and Fanny Eden. By directing the gaze back at the narrators we are able to interrogate our colonizing women , placing them witMn a postcolonial framework where the facts of empirical history and the theories of colonial discourse meet. This encompasses delving behind the screen oi purdah and exploring life in the ,%enana, particularly as recorded by the female colonial. Thirdly, this analysis will reexamine and evaluate the nature of imperialism and Orientalism from a gendered perspective. Questions surrounding the female figure as an icon of imperialism and as a sexualized metaphor central to Orientalism should be addressed. Does Orientalism differ 1 Margaret Jolly. "Colonizing women: The maternal body and empire" Feminism and The Politics of Difference. Sneja Gunew & Anna Yeatman, eds. (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1993), 103. iii when viewed from the female perspective? What theoretical extensions can be developed from this re-evaluation? The use of enduring binary categories to read and interpret historical texts as a series of dualities: Self/Other, Colonizer/Colonized, Brown/White, Ruler/Subaltern, Man/Woman, Public/Private, has imposed an artificially structured paradigm on an ambiguous series of subject positions. For the purpose of this thesis, the word "stereotrope" has been utilized in reference to these dualities. Stereotrope means a trope or allegory of understanding that has been overused to the point where it has become part of a fixed conceptual framework. Stereotrope extends beyond the notion of a stereotype by challenging not only the content of the metaphor but its inherent binary structure. Reading colonial era texts against themselves holds potential for splitting the stereotrope and provides fertile ground for a reinvigorated and inclusive post-colonial narrative. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT n TABLE OF CONTENTS iy ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v 1. SPLITTING THE STEREOTROPE 1 /./ THE FATE OF WOMEN AND MELONS . / 1.2 STEREOTROPES _____ 10 1.3 PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC SPHERES . , : 14 2. LIFE AND TIMES OF BAIZA BAI _____ 21 2.1 OVERVIEW _____ 21 2.2 PRINCELY STATES AND THE RAJ ___ . 22 2.3 GWAUOR : 28 2.4 THE SCINDIA DYNASTY 29 2.5 BAIZA BAI 31 2.6 POUTER . 34 3. I AM TOLD You DRESS A CAMEL BEAUTIFULLY 44 3.1 INTRODUCTION : 44 3.2 THE ROLE OF COLONIAL WOMEN ; 45 3.3 THE NARRATORS . 57 3.4 IN THE ZENANA 62 3.5 THE BODY POLITIC: A FINE FIGURE , 68 4. THE GENDERED IMPERATIVE : 72 4.1 INTRODUCTION . _72 4.2 GENDERING ORIENTALISM: IT CAME FROM WITHIN . 76 4.3 CONCLUSION . 87 BIBLIOGRAPHY 90 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A thesis is a funny thing. While my name is listed as author, this publication would not have been completed without the input and assistance of many people. I would like to thank my advisor Laurence Preston, for introducing me to Baiza Bai and having the patience to bear with me throughout this process. I am indebted to the Goel Foundation for their generous support. I am also grateful to Mina Wong and Enid Graham for their help in negotiating the aclministrative side of completing a Master's degree. Six years is an eternity when measured in thesis units, and my family has alternately supported, nagged, edited, debated, and begged me to finish throughout this time. I would especially like to thank my parents - Carole and Cameron Osier - and my grandparents — Zena and Walter Wolfson — for being so terrific. Most of all, I am grateful for the patience and encouragement of my darling husband and baby - Jamie and Lukas. How did I get so lucky? SPLITTING THE STEREOTROPE I 1. SPLITTING THE STEREOTROPE 1.1 THE FA TE OF WOMEN AND MELONS Early in the second volume of her memoirs, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, intrepid traveler Fanny Parks relates a conversation she has with her good friend, the former Maharani of Gwalior, Baiza Bai. The fate of women and of melons is alike. "Whether the melon falls on the knife or the knife on the melon, the melon is the sufferer." We spoke of the severity of the laws of England with respect to married women, how completely by law they are the slaves of their husbands, and how little hope there is of redress. You might as well "Twist a rope of sand," or "Beg a husband of a widow," as urge the men to emancipate the white slaves of England. "Who made the laws?" said her Highness. I looked at her with surprise, knowing she could not be ignorant on the subject. "The men," said I; "Why did the Maharaj ask the question?" "I doubted it," said the Bai, with an arch smile, "since they only allow themselves one wife." "England is so small," I replied, "in comparison with your Highness's Gwalior; if every man were allowed four wives and obliged to keep them separate, the little island could never contain them; they would be obliged to keep the women in vessels off the shore."1 This journal entry, recorded 6 April 1835 in Fathighar, weaves together strands of Orientalism and imperialism to create an intriguingly ambiguous scene in the colonial narrative in readings of gender, race, and class. The binary tropes that are so frequendy used to explain and understand colonial-era texts, which place them in a properly referential historical framework, exist within this conversation, yet in a curiously skewed manner. The organizing doctrines of the public and private spheres, the Self/Other schism central to theorizing Orientalism, and the colonizer/colonized framework for imperialist rhetoric are the 1 Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, During Four-and-Twenty Years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana. Volume II. (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) (originally published 1850), 8-9. SPLITTING THE STEREOTROPE 2 themes that will be examined during the course of this thesis. These themes have become so pervasively embedded in current readings of history that I have utilized the word "stereotrope" in reference to them. Stereotrope means a trope or allegory of understanding that has been overused to the point where it has become part of a fixed conceptual framework, applied in analysis by many without due consideration. Stereotrope extends beyond the notion of a stereotype by challenging not only the content of the metaphor but its inherent binary structure. While there is certainly much of value to be derived from utilizing these explanatory themes when deconstructing texts, academia has ceased to question the value of these concepts at the root — i.e., as contrasted against primary materials. Instead, the trend has been towards building ever more convoluted arguments concerning secondary and tertiary points of theory that ignore the very subject material under examination. This thesis is an attempt to return to the foundation of theory, i.e., to primary materials, and by challenging these binary stereotropial pairs — what I have referred to as "splitting the stereotrope" — add some further insight to the current reading of Orientalism and imperialism from a feminist, post-colonial perspective. The Narrator The full tide of Mrs. Parks' pubhshing effort, Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in search of the Picturesque, duringfour-and-twentyyears in the Hast; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana, neatly sums up her Orientalist agenda. Fanny Parks, the wife of a customs collector, sailed for India in 1826. She did so with the understanding that she would spend the next twenty-two years of her life in voluntary exile from England for the sake of her husband's career and financial well-being.
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