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Empire and Melancholy in Romantic India

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Empire and Melancholy in Romantic India “Doleful Records”: Empire and Melancholy in Romantic India by Tara McDonald A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Tara McDonald (2015) “Doleful Records”: Empire and Melancholy in Romantic India Tara McDonald Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation considers how the feelings unleashed by death – namely mourning and melancholy – were harnessed to understand, organize, and legitimate imperial power in India during the British Romantic period. The project examines the writing of women authors such as Mariana Starke, Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Sydney Owenson, and Emma Roberts alongside contemporary political debates to demonstrate how the affective strategies surrounding death were performing the labour of empire in the literary topography and psychogeography of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Faced with personal, political, and national losses on a grand scale, Britons had to reimagine grief as a force to be mobilized and deployed, rather than one acting upon them. The difficulty of dealing with death from the distance and difference of a foreign outpost, where the traditional networks of consolation could not be accessed, demanded new forms of sympathy, sociability, and a reconstitution of communal identity in response to losses that could not be confronted. While the bodies of the dead grounded the imperial project in India, the mobility of their printed afterlives reconnected them to a sympathetic national body at home. The first chapter of this dissertation demonstrates how Elizabeth Hamilton exploits melancholy as ii a rhetorical strategy that provides women with access to political discourse and posits mourning as an affective branch of the imperial project. Nineteenth-century writers converged around a controversial death ritual – sati, the Hindu practice of widow- burning – to organize the policies and feelings that constituted the British “civilizing mission” in India, and the second chapter examines how the writings of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, and Sydney Owenson engage with the figure of the dying and mourning “other” woman. The third chapter investigates the vision of Anglo-Indian community drawn in Emma Roberts’s travel writing to suggest that the morbid sociability she finds in India is, in fact, an ideological projection of Anglicist colonial administration. This dissertation provides new channels of inquiry into the transperipheral dynamics of imperialism from the 1780s to the 1830s, and demonstrates how the afterlife of British Romanticism continues to haunt our understanding of political subjectivity. iii Acknowledgments Writing about grief and death can be a rather gloomy experience, but I am fortunate to have been bolstered with the undying support of family, friends, and colleagues during this undertaking. I am thankful to Alan Bewell, whose generous supervision, collegial conversations, and enthusiastic support have influenced this project in many important ways. I also want to thank Daniel White, who introduced me to the wide world of research trips, and whose incisive comments have pushed my scholarship. My committee would not have been complete without Deidre Lynch’s exciting contributions, which always stimulated me to think in new ways about reading practices and affect. I am also grateful for Daniel O’Quinn’s engaged response to this dissertation, as well as for Karen Weisman and Lynne Magnusson’s thoughtful comments during the oral defense. My interest in melancholy was sparked by the intellectual generosity of Joel Faflak during an inspiring undergraduate seminar, and my development as a scholar is still informed by his warm spirit. Finally, I must thank the women of the English Department’s administrative staff – especially Clare Orchard, Sangeeta Panjwani, Marguerite Perry, and Tanuja Persaud – for all their help and patience over the years. This study is indebted to the funding of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program. I have had the opportunity to share various parts of this research at conferences by the North American Society for the iv Study of Romanticism and the International Conference on Romanticism, and the discussions those presentations fostered have been invaluable. I cannot imagine what my years at the University of Toronto would have been like without the witty company of GG(O)W (Miriam Novick, Laura Clarridge, Sundhya Walther, and Sarah Henderson), or without the inspiring solidarity of my fellow Feminist Killjoys. I am particularly happy to have shared my academic years with Dara Greaves and Scott Howard, both of whose brilliant scholarly insights and equally brilliant friendship have enriched my work and my life. Some friendship evolves into kinship over the years, and I am lucky to have my life coiled around the Ladysnakes (Sasha Miszczyk, Aimee Cutten, Emily Lorimer, and Xtina Bendall). There are no words to properly express my gratitude and love for my family. Jeff McDonald, your fun-loving wanderlust has always reminded me to take a break from the books. To Suzanne and David McDonald, I owe so very much. You imparted your own love of learning to me, and have never asked me to take my nose out of my books, whether they be Nancy Drew or Norton anthologies. Without your fierce love and support, this project would never have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank my partner and best friend, Chris Fischer. Thanks to the love, laughs, and adventures we share, my melancholy can stay safely relegated to the realm of scholarship. I would like to dedicate this work to my grandmothers, Viola McDonald and Jeannine Haslam. I strive to live by their examples of humour, independence, and love. v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ................................................................................................................. viii Introduction Moving Objects: The Melancholy of Imperial Mobility ................................ 1 “Melancholy Testimonies”: Cultural and Critical Contexts ........................................................ 5 Mariana Starke’s The Sword of Peace and the Imperial Will .................................................... 17 “Death again!”: A Reconsideration of Hartly House, Calcutta ................................................. 30 Chapter 1 Imperial Feelings and “Imaginary Sorrows” in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah ................................................................... 47 Imperial Hauntings and the Happy Ghost of Hastings .............................................................. 56 Dido’s Tears and the Death of Tipu Sultan: Mourning for Mysore and America ..................... 64 The “Friends of Percy” and the Limits of Transnational Sympathy .......................................... 76 Excess and Instruction: Teaching Feeling Through Charlotte’s Tears ...................................... 85 Mirrored Mourning and the Pall of Genre ................................................................................. 89 Chapter 2 The “Common Woe”: Sympathy, Sati, and the British Civilizing Mission in India .................................................................................................................................. 92 The Case of Sati: An Administrative and Affective Debate ...................................................... 99 Felicia Hemans and the “Gift of Grief” ................................................................................... 111 The Missionary: Sati, Subjecthood, and the Melancholy Empire ............................................ 128 “Ce triste empire de soi-même”; or the Sad Empire of the Self .............................................. 144 Chapter 3 “Death and absence differ but in name”: The Melancholy Sociability of Emma Roberts’s Anglo-Indians ................................................................................................. 146 Tigers, Ghosts, and Strangers: The Haunted Houses of Hindostan ......................................... 152 Necrotourism in “the grim dominion of Death”: Christian Cemeteries and the Taj Mahal .... 164 “Pale conquerors from the west”: Roberts’s Anglo-Indian Community ................................. 175 Corpse and Corpus: Embodied Work and the Recuperation of Empire .................................. 191 vi Coda “I stood beside thy lowly grave”: From Romantic Elegy to Selfies at Funerals .. 193 Works Consulted ............................................................................................................. 198 vii List of Figures 1. “Skeleton Group in the Rameswur, Caves of Ellora.” Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book. With Poetical Illustrations by L.E.L. London: Fisher, Son, and Jackson. 1832. viii Introduction Moving Objects: The Melancholy of Imperial Mobility And parted thus they rest, who play’d Beneath the same green tree; Whose voices mingled as they pray’d Around
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