Gender/Mutiny in Edwardian Fiction (original) (raw)
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Gender/mutiny in Edwardian fiction: Charles Pearce's fiction of 1857
2013
Analysis of fin-de-siecle or early 20th century gender representations in Britain is often done with reference to first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement that culminated in the achievement of the vote for women in 1928. This history shows the fraught and prolonged struggle to transform gender relations and gain personal and group rights and universal suffrage, which was marked not just by gender prejudices but also those of class. But what if we explore this topic of the representation of Edwardian women and their gender relations through an alternative lens? What if we explore it through the theme of Empire to see the connections between the representation of women in Britain and political events that took place in distant climes and far-off places? What sort of new meanings would emerge in this alternative view? Such an analysis would be valid because Britain’s empire had caused a skew in gender demographics since the Victorian period as its men left in large numbers to gove...
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The 'Loyal Indian Woman' in 'Mutiny Fiction'
"The Indian Historical Review," Vol 34, No.2, 2007, pp. 36-57, 2007
Most readings of the colonial literary productions generated by the Rebellion of 1857 have foregrounded the ‘mutilated memsahib’. This paper shifts the focus to a hitherto ignored trope, viz. that of the 'loyal Indian woman ' which appears recurrently in the literary discourse of the Rebellion in the nineteenth century. It examines this trope through the figure of the devoted ayah, the loyal dancing girl, the faithful concubine/wife, as well as inter-racial female friendship. This paper seeks to show how this figuration of gendered colonised loyalty constituted one of the important discursive strategies and was shaped and reinforced by the exigencies of empire and post-Rebellion insecurities.
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'The New Woman at Home and Abroad: Fiction, female identity and the British Empire'
At the height of the British Empire, England was in the midst of major social, economic and moral upheaval. Arising from this commotion was the figure of the late Victorian and Edwardian ‘New Woman.’ Her appearance on the domestic front provoked further confusion and ambiguity about gender that had repercussions for empire. Building on a previous article that explored how the many vitriolic attacks on the British New Woman in the popular press and in popular and bestselling fiction were linked to anxiety about the future of the Empire, this essay examines, not the threat to nation and empire represented by the British New Woman , but rather the New Woman in the colonial peripheries. It turns to two very different models of British colonialism – Ireland and Australia – and asks how differently the New Woman was presented to the general reading public at the end of the nineteenth- and beginning of the twentieth century. Was the colonial New Woman represented as less of a threat to the reading public than the British New Woman? Or vice versa? Was the presentation of an Irish and an Australian New Woman very different? Did they each signify an equally potent threat to the British Empire...or otherwise? This paper will argue that although there were important similarities in the fictional representations of each of these New Women, there were also significant differences and these differences were due, for the most part, to the respective positions of these countries on the imperial spectrum.
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Revolutions, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2019
This article aims to offer a limited panorama of the novels that compose the genre of Mutiny fiction and to analyse its mutations through time. By tracing the generic origins of the Mutiny novel and analysing how it variously draws on the chivalrous tradition, the Gothic, and other genres (adventure fiction, romance, and melodrama, among others), I would like to show that the various examples of the Mutiny novel genre have often been used to promote imperial values, or to criticise the Empire retrospectively, as Flaminia Nicora’s work has shown, but also that these novels have continuously responded to historical events. My contention is that the Mutiny motif has been instrumental in building a historical narrative of England and that its continued presence merits being studied.
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'Providential' Campaigns: Intertwining Thuggee and the Sepoy Mutiny in Colonial Fictions
Rupkatha, 2020
This article examines how some colonial fictions intertwine historically unconnected Thuggee and the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 to make sense of Indian resistance to British rule. This was done by only a few writers. The article tries to find out what led these colonial writers to link the two unconnected events. To do this, representations of Thuggee and the Mutiny in the works of Captain Meadows Taylor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Emilio Salgari are scrutinized. The article also considers other relevant works, like those by Sir George MacMunn, Hermann Goedsche, Jules Verne and Francisco Luis Gomes. It tries to ascertain whether a writer's nationality affected his conceptualization of the relationship between Thuggee and the Mutiny in any significant way. In doing so, it seeks to highlight how representations of Indian insurgency in colonial writings varied in accordance with the writer's nationality and outlook vis-à-vis British colonialism in India.
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