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Domesticating the Empire: Women Writers and Colonial Discourse in Late Eighteenth-Century British Literature

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Domesticating the Empire: Women Writers and Colonial Discourse in Late Eighteenth-Century British Literature DOMESTICATING THE EMPIRE: WOMEN WRITERS AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE ________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School At the University of Missouri ________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________________ By Angela Rehbein Dr. Devoney Looser, Director July 2011 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the Dissertation entitled DOMESTICATING THE EMPIRE: WOMEN WRITERS AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE Presented by Angela Rehbein A candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy And hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Dr. Devoney Looser, Director Dr. Elizabeth Chang Dr. George Justice Dr. Theodore Koditschek to Ed and Phyllis Rehbein with much love ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee—Dr. Devoney Looser, Dr. Elizabeth Chang, Dr. George Justice, and Dr. Theodore Koditschek—for their support of this project from its conception to its completion. I have benefited greatly from their generosity and expertise. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable mentorship of my director, Dr. Devoney Looser, who has taught me much about research, writing, and women writers, and who has challenged and encouraged me at every turn. I would also like to thank the Department of English at the University of Missouri for supporting me with a Dissertation Fellowship in the crucial stages of completing this project. I also benefited from a month’s residence at the Chawton House Library in the summer of 2010, where I was ably assisted by Jacqui Grainger and the other Library staff. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................... ii INTRODUCTION Empire, Domesticity, and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Literature.................. 1 CHAPTER ONE Anna Seward and the Domestication of Colonial Discourse ............................ 43 Civilization v. Savagery: Elegy on Captain Cook ................................ 46 Female Embodiment and Colonial Anxiety: Louisa ............................. 55 The “Poetical Novel” and Empire ......................................................... 64 CHAPTER TWO Jane West, the Domestic Ideal, and the Perils of Empire ................................. 84 The Morality of History: The Advantages of Education ....................... 89 Maternity and Empire: The Mother .................................................... 104 Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse: A Gossip’s Story ............ 113 CHAPTER THREE Elizabeth Inchbald, the Idea of Africa, and Progressive Imperialism ............ 133 “Man is born to Liberty”: Progressive Discourses of Freedom .......... 137 Nature and Art’s Colonial Utopia ....................................................... 154 Antislavery Colonization: Civilizing the “Savage” Continent ........... 165 CHAPTER FOUR Maria Edgeworth and the Sentimental Discourse of Empire.......................... 180 “The Grateful Negro” and the Peaceful Plantation ............................. 183 “The life and opinions of a Lady of Quality”: Belinda’s Critique of the Novel .......................................................... 192 Lady Percival and the Sentimental Empire ......................................... 211 CONCLUSION Rethinking Domesticity .................................................................................. 229 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................... 242 VITA ...............................................................................................................258 iii INTRODUCTION Empire, Domesticity, and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Literature This dissertation argues that much domestic fiction by women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries centrally engages with the British Empire, making it part of the everyday vision of life in this period. I refer to this process as domesticating colonial discourse. When using the term ―domestic fiction,‖ I am referring to texts set entirely in England that primarily feature courtship plots and discourse on female education. Previous scholarship has shown that the domestic novel was a highly politicized genre in the 1780s and 1790s; women writers in particular used it as a vehicle for entering political debates, including responding to the French Revolution. The family unit in this fiction is often read as a synecdoche for the British nation, with the father acting as a kind of monarch whose daughters are his subjects. ―Domestic,‖ then, has dual meanings: it describes both the household and the nation. What has gone largely unexplored is the role that this fiction played in imagining the British Empire and in troubling over its evolving moral character, despite the political significance that scholars have ascribed to this fiction. Moreover, we have not yet considered the correspondence between imperialism and the variety of political affiliations that women assumed at this time. I examine the fiction and poetry of Anna Seward, Jane West, Elizabeth Inchbald, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Maria Edgeworth, and demonstrate that despite what appear to be their exclusively English settings and political preoccupations, each text invokes the uneven power relationships between Great Britain and a colonial other—though not 1 always a directly colonized other—including the West Indies, India, the Far East, and Africa. These texts draw on the qualities commonly associated with colonial territories, such as savagery and licentiousness, in order to establish their characters‘ relative vice or virtue and/or to define gendered and national identities. I therefore argue that what we have often called simply conservative or progressive in these women‘s writings ought to be revisited, as such labels obscure a much more complex set of ideas about what it meant to be a British citizen in a global, imperialist age. Although they ostensibly take very different political stan ces, these women-authored texts promote the idea that Great Britain is more culturally advanced than the othered eighteenth-century world and, therefore, entitled to rule it. Moreover, I argue that they do so at a time when Great Britain‘s imperial identity was in flux. As the nation transitioned from the brutal mercantile Empire of the eighteenth century, with its reliance on the transatlantic slave trade, to the allegedly more benevolent and ―natural‖ Empire of the nineteenth century, women writers and the domestic novel played an important and unacknowledged role in representing that Empire to the reading public and in reinforcing the power that Great Britain assumed in its imperial pursuits. I have chosen to focus on women writers for several reasons. In the first place, women writers in this period were often understood as a group distinct from men and described in very polemical terms. The Rev. Richard Polwhele‘s The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (1798) illustrates this phenomenon. This poem divides women writers of the 1790s into two political camps: monstrous or ―unnatural‖ women, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and others; and, as Eleanor Ty puts it, ―mild and sweet models of 2 ‗female genius,‘‖ including Hannah More, Mary Wortley Montagu, Anna Seward, Frances Burney, and others.1 The Unsex’d Females expresses the anti-Jacobin Polwhele‘s horror at women writers weighing in on the ―rights of man‖ debates surrounding the French Revolution. The poem suggests that it is ―unnatural for women as the frail or gentle sex to harbour brutal thoughts, to want to be the equals of men, or to meddle in politics, all of which make them perverse or unacceptable examples of their kind.‖2 In particular, Polwhele is incensed by women advocating for their rights. The opening lines of the poem highlight what Polwhele perceived as the unnaturalness of ―radical‖ women like Wollstonecraft: ―Survey with me, what ne‘er our fathers saw, / A female band despising NATURE‘S law, / As ‗proud defiance‘ flashes from their arms, / And vengeance smothers all their softer charms.‖3 Polwhele opposes the ―softer charms‖ that women are supposed to possess with the ―vengeance‖ and ―defiance‖ of this charging female army. Moreover, Polwhele makes clear that this band of defiant women is unique to his age, a group that ―ne‘er our fathers saw.‖ The Unsex’d Females underscores the particular social urgency that Polwhele and his contemporaries attached to the role of the woman writer in the 1790s. In their advocacy for women‘s rights, women like Wollstonecraft threatened to undermine the patriarchal family, which Polwhele, Edmund Burke, and other anti-Jacobins considered the basic social unit; to undermine the patriarchal family was to undermine the very structure of society. Women writers were thus understood to play a crucial role in 1 Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 3. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Rev. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem, Addressed to the Author of The Pursuits of Literature [1798] (New York, 1800), lines 1-4. 3 defining (or defending) the nation. At this point in history, Great Britain‘s imperialism was an important part of the nation‘s identity. If,
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