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Women Writing/Women Written |
| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Winter 2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
| Women’s contribution to the building of the British Empire has become by now undeniable. Standing at different
vantage points, English women articulated, supported, and even innovated the colonial discourse. Though highly masculine in its ideological core, the Empire is far from being exclusively male in its rhetorical voice. Feminist postcolonial critics have shown British women’s important participation in colonialism. McClintock, for example, claims that “white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting”
(6). Feminists have even traced back the origin of the novel to late seventeenth-century female authors. The advent of the novel, then, cannot be attributed to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1720), for it was preceded by Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, written in 1688. Informed by postcolonial theories, the feminist reading focuses on two points relevant to Behn’s narrative. First, the novel as a genre is the offspring of a woman writer. Second, Behn’s Oroonoko is an imperialist novel with a colonial setting, Surinam. According to Azim, Behn’s text is “an imperialist project, based on the forceful eradication and obliteration of the other” (37). In her analysis of Oroonoko, Azim stresses women writers’ involvement in imperialism and their adoption of masculinist strategies for eradicating the native female. A great number of women novelists wrote prolifically between the 1890s and the 1920s. In Rebel Women, Miller offers an interesting tableau of the literary life in this period. However, Miller presents an incomplete scene for she excludes from her analysis colonial women writers who actively participated in the literature of this era. Miller’s omission of colonial texts may be strategic, for she seeks “to introduce Edwardian novels about women and feminism into the literary history of the period from 1890 to 1914 and, in so doing, to make a claim for the importance of feminism in the development of the modern novel” (2). Actually, feminism is equally important in shaping the colonial discourse and developing the romance, a prevailing literary genre of this period. It is difficult to separate the texts written about the colonized periphery from the center. Hence, this essay studies the manifestations of feminism and the anti-feminist retaliations in some representative texts written at the turn of the nineteenth century. Starting from two main figures of feminine Anglo-Indian fiction, Flora Annie Steel and Maud Diver, I will try to trace colonial feminist, as well as anti-feminist, anxieties in imperialist romance produced by women. The ultimate aim is to decode the female colonial discourse and locate its points of convergence with and divergence from male’s discourse. It is pertinent to investigate women writers’ degree of colonial involvement, that is, whether they are mere passive reproducers of colonial patriarchal stereotypes, or are really in possession of an enunciative position of a white feminine superiority. Maud Diver: Stifling the Feminist Voice The English literary scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the thriving of fictional texts written by women about women. The ‘New Woman’ novel refers, often pejoratively, to narratives choosing emancipated women as their heroines. These texts challenge the traditional image of the demure, calm, and passive Victorian lady. Sarah Grand is credited with coining the term ‘New Woman’ in 1894. In addition, the term ‘feminism’ is a neologism imported from France in 1895 (Scott 12). The New Woman heroine is an activist, outspoken, militant feminist. The themes tackled in these novels turn around marriage problems, life of spinsters, and suffragette stories. The main innovation is a free talk about sexuality and uninhibited erotic fantasies as articulated, for instance, by Elinor Glyn in her Three Weeks (1907) or by E. M. Hull in The Sheik (1919). Nevertheless, not all women novelists hailed the New Woman novel, which was resisted and scorned by most male writers. Motherhood, traditional marriage, and conservative sexual relationships were supported by women who placed themselves against the feminist stream. Anti-feminism and imperialism even coalesced in propagandist organizations such as the Girl’s Friendly Society and the Mother’s Union. Anti-feminists saw themselves as the custodians of morality. They sought to uphold the disintegrating family structures along with the whole imperial power. “Imperialism,” argues Scott, “was to pervade the eugenics and motherhood movements of the Edwardian Era: mothers of the Empire were to raise healthy sons to protect and expand the empire” (10). Maud Diver was a hard anti-feminist. She “positioned herself against feminist agitation in the imperial metropolis and on the side of male mastery of insubordinate British women” (Deidre 161). She gave fullest expression to her antagonism to the women’s movement and to her colonial convictions in Lilamani (1910). Her novel echoes the majority of male texts of that period, where the anxiety over the growing power of women is hidden behind an accentuated masculine domination of Oriental women. Audrey Hammond is given the role of the feminist in Diver’s Lilamani. In spite of “her pluck, her single-mindedness, her unobtrusive strength” (13), she fails to appeal to the reader’s sympathy. Diver made it a point to render this missionary doctor a negative character. Audrey helps Lilamani, a seventeen-year-old Indian girl, escape her mother’s plan to marry her to an old man. Audrey proposes that Mr. Lackshman, Lilamani’s father, send his daughter to France to study medicine. Then, she can go back to India and “help those who were so pitifully unable to help themselves” (15). Actually, Audrey is not acting out of purely humanitarian compassion. She is depicted as an opportunist, fishing in dirty water: “it was then that Audrey had seen her chance of enlisting an eastern recruit. Why should the girl marry?” (15). The reader is given the impression that Lilamani is trapped in a diabolical plan of a hysterical feminist who wants to show that all women, even Oriental ones, can reject the traditional burden of womanhood. Audrey’s plan appeals at first to Lilamani, who is obsessed with escaping her marriage, though her journey outside India will result in pushing her out of her caste and religion. In addition, she soon realizes that she is not interested in studying medicine: “all thought of study has been far from me. The book she [Audrey] lent me had ugly words in it, and in this loveliness they seemed to hurt my mind, as an ink-blot on my sari would hurt my eyes” (16). Audrey’s feminist schemes fail to strip off Lilamani from her sensual femininity symbolized by the sari. Her steady effort to transform the highly feminine Oriental girl into a New Woman—in both senses, that is, a different as well as a feminist one—takes the shape of tyranny. Lilamani ends up by confusing Audrey with her Mataaji-mother, a termagant representing law and power: “For there be two autocrats in the Hindu home: the mother and the family Guru—the holy man” (14). Audrey’s tyranny makes her take the place of both the mother and the Guru. This shift stresses the bisexual representation of the ‘odd woman’ who behaves like men while disliking them. Audrey fits perfectly “the popular image of the odd woman” which “conflated elements of the lesbian, the angular spinster, and the hysterical feminist” (Showalter, 23). A potential spinster, if not already one by the norms of her age, the twenty-eight-year-old Audrey’s “pulse had never quickened for any man, nor, in her belief, ever would” (26). Without stressing it, Diver insinuates a sexually perverse type of love felt by Audrey towards her pupil. Audrey’s failure to convert Lilamani into a new woman is not the sole device used by Diver to demonstrate the abortive mission of feminists. To punish Audrey further, she makes her fall in love with Nevil Sinclaire, the English hero of her romance. Nevil is in love with Lilamani, however, and marries her. Right from the beginning, he disapproves of Audrey’s “scheme for conjuring a lady doctor out of an Arabian Nights Princess” (3). Audrey takes on the image of a witch trying to transform the innocent princess by her black magic. Nevil’s friendly feelings towards Audrey are transformed later into aversion and hostility after her attempts to put obstacles in front of their marriage. Audrey disappears from the narrative as soon as Lilamani and Nevil get married, showing thus the triumph of femininity over feminism. Diver opts for an Oriental woman as the ideal of femininity. The Orient is not spoiled by feminist ideologies of independence and equality. According to Rajan, “the Hindu ‘good wife’ is constructed as patriarchy’s feminine ideal: she is offered simultaneously as a model and as a signifier of absolute cultural otherness” (47). Consequently the Oriental woman is brought home as a specimen to be imitated. This claim is asserted by the rather triumphant tone of the narrator, who interferes in the narrative to override Diver’s anti-feminist convictions: “Nature—who abhors equality as heartily and justly as she abhors vacuum—framed the other [man] regarding woman for her own great ends: a fact more frankly recognized in the East than in the West, as Audrey has good reason to know” (116). Diver’s narrative is a celebration of these ‘great ends’ translated in the very structure of her text. Indeed, the structure of the novel matches its content, for it is divided into three parts—“The Seed,” “The Blossoming,” and “The Fruit”—imitating thus the three steps of conceiving, bearing, and giving birth to a child. The author contrasts Lilamani’s fertility to Audrey’s sterility as a feminist. Audrey fails to attract the attention of the man she loves and also fails to affiliate Lilamani to her ideologies. According to Diver, the woman’s great end is motherhood—to give birth, preferably to a son, which is the ultimate goal of women. Flora Annie Steel: Celebrating the New Woman Diver’s stifling of the feminist voice in Lilamani seems to work as a counter-narrative to a text written ten years earlier by Flora Annie Steel, The Hosts of the Lord (1900). Indeed, Steel’s novel celebrates the work of feminists by making the ‘New Woman’ the model of womanhood. Steel was a member of the 1908 Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL), an intellectual militant group claiming women’s right to vote and participate in political life. Diver and Steel’s narratives share the same structural strategies. Both create a dichotomous world based on parallelism. Diver uses the Oriental Lilamani, paralleled to the feminist missionary doctor Audrey Hammond, to hail femininity and motherhood. Conversely, Steel elects the activist missionary doctor Erda Shepherd, paralleled to the Oriental Laila, to celebrate feminism and the English woman’s pluck. Steel builds her novel on a nightmarish story recalling the horror of the 1857 Indian mutiny. Erda, a medical missionary, succeeds, with the help of Captain Lance Carlyon, in stopping the mutiny of the native prisoners and preventing a sanguine catastrophe. Erda Shepherd is “full of strong character, almost overfull of strong conviction” (56). She is given a full voice and presence: she speaks, argues, defends her convictions, acts, and reacts freely. She is contrasted to Laila whose half-Oriental blood, on her mother’s side, dominates her Italian blood. Laila is represented as a typical Oriental woman, symbolizing passive femininity. The freedom of Erda is contrasted to Laila’s immobility, quasi-imprisoned in her guardian’s palace. The “bread buttery” and “too young” (16) Laila with “childish garrulity” (17) is opposed to the militant Erda, “womanhood incarnate” (22). Contrary to Diver’s feminist character, Erda’s sentimental life is fertile. The narrative ends with her union with Lance Carlyon, symbolized by a tight clasping of hands. Following a tradition established by the New Woman novel, there is no marriage at the end. The novel rather ends with a union based on equal love. Contrary to Laila’s swift passion for Captain Dering, Erda’s love takes a long time to ripen. Faithful to the Oriental stereotypical way of loving, Laila offers herself to Captain Dering: “her wrists were fettered to each other by long trailing of scented jasmine flowers…‘I’m a prisoner—yours’” (102). Erda has to control her feelings and think in a rational way. Her work as a missionary will be enhanced if she marries her cousin, the Reverend David Campbell. The allusion to the Victorian prototype of feminism, Jane Eyre, is obvious here. Like Jane, who refuses St John’s offer of marriage, Erda achieves a balanced womanhood based on freedom and love. Laila’s passion, on the contrary, ends in tragedy. She is killed by her cousin, Roshan Khan, who has cherished an impotent hope of marrying her. Hence, Laila, representing the feminine and the passive, is erased to give room to the triumph of the New Woman. Charlotte Brontë’s scheme is emulated to the letter here, wherein the death of Bertha Mason (Laila) enables Jane Eyre (Erda), in Spivak’s words, to “become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” (154). Diver’s narrative aims at silencing the feminist voice and establishing a model of femininity inspired by the Oriental woman. Steel, on the contrary, gives voice to the New Woman by muting the Oriental voice. Nevertheless, both novels present only an echo of the New Woman’s voice. If Diver deliberately stifles this voice, Steel strategically undermines it. In spite of her feminist convictions, Steel cannot venture to displease her readers by making of Erda Shepherd a hard feminist. According to Miller, popular novelists, including Steel “would have risked alienating their large public if they had infused their romance novels with controversial politics” (129). Hence, Erda Shepherd is a moderate feminist who meets the expectations of the readers. Nevertheless, the divergence of opinions between Diver and Steel concerning the ideal white woman disappears in their depiction of the Oriental woman. Both writers seem to agree on a stereotypical image of the Oriental female based on a colonial masculine discourse. Using, like representing, entails a coercive abusing and misrepresenting of the other. The Oriental model of femininity, proposed by Diver to be followed and by Steel to be shunned, hides the monolithic Oriental woman, incapable of diversity or change. Both writers share the same colonial strategy of freezing the native female in her exterior appearance. The Rhetoric of Containment: The Oriental Dress Through their treatment of Oriental dress, Diver and Steel offer one of the best examples of the colonial strategies of fetishizing the female native. Laila’s ‘Mohamedan’s dress’ and Lilamani’s sari are given such importance that they seem to be full characters on their own. “There is no dress in the world,” declares the narrator of The Hosts of the Lord, “which is at once so dainty and so sensuous, as the court dress of a Mohamedan lady” (101). Lilamani, in Diver’s narrative, chooses saris matching her mood; for her “colours are nearly the same as people. Sometimes you are needing one, sometimes another” (63). In spite of her beauty, Laila, in Steel’s narrative, fails to attract the attention of Captain Vincent Dering. A few minutes before she appears dressed in an Oriental way, Dering had been thinking: “it would be a bore if she were returning to interrupt his cigarette” (101). The effect of her attire, however, is instantaneous: Dering falls in love with her. Actually Dering falls in love with her dress, and Laila seems aware of this fact: “He had said she was beautiful, that she ought always to wear that dress, and she had told him she could not…that he must learn to love her as much in her ordinary clothes” (132). If Steel’s Dering “was a connoisseur in chiffons, and had a pretty turn in painting” (16), Nevil Sinclaire, in Diver’s narrative, is a real artist. The first time he sees Lilamani clad in her “mother-o’-pearl” sari (56), all his artistic creativity awakens. He decides that “in that dress he must paint her” (35). The sari turns out to be the real muse. Laila and Lilamani join the figure of Defoe’s Roxana: the prototype of “self-merchandization,” as argues Brown: “in the process of her self-merchandizing, Roxana repeatedly identifies with the material stuff in which she is dressed, resolving her problems through changes of clothes” (123). Roxana’s ‘Mahometan’ Turkish dress is put at the center of the narrative and acquires more importance than her own being. Her first apparition, clad in this extravagant attire, raises a hypnotizing admiration quite remindful of Nevil and Dering’s infatuation with their Oriental girls’ dresses. The first time Dering sees Laila in her Mohamedan dress he “gave an exclamation; and rose to his feet” (101), “his very admiration kept him silent” (102). The speechless admiration of Dering is articulated by Nevil’s astonished remark upon first seeing Lilamani: “Where on earth did she spring from? And who, in the name of all that’s exquisite, can she be?” (3). Silence and speech combine in Defoe’s Roxana (1724); the effect of her dress first mutes then gives burst to a cheering admiration: “The Company were under the greatest Surprize imaginable; the very Musick stopped a-while to gaze; for the Dress was indeed, exceedingly surprizing, perfectly new, very agreeable, and wonderful rich” (195). It is worth stressing Defoe’s deliberate use of a capital letter for the word ‘Dress.’ The Dress is personified and all the attention is directed to it/her. Roxana is erased and substituted with a Dress providing all the tools of seduction: “surprizing,” “new,” “agreeable,” and especially “rich.” The admiration related to the Dress gives Roxana her name/identity. Without her Dress, she would have never existed. Laila and Roxana share an awareness of the importance of their dresses to the detriment of their beings. Like Laila, Roxana knows that without her Dress she cannot raise such a sweeping admiration: “It must be confessed, that the Habit was infinitely advantageous to me, and every-body look’d at me with a kind of Pleasure” (Roxana 180). The two women seem to dwell in a world dominated by objects. Accordingly, they are reduced to an exchange value. Their reification operates within an economy of dress, whereupon the apparel is used as a trading tool: Roxana to raise money and Laila to seduce Dering. Diver also uses the Oriental attire as a trademark to sell in Lilamani. Though Lilamani does not make such a deliberate use of her dress, ranking her as a prostitute (Roxana) or a beggar of love (Laila), she is nevertheless aware of the impact of her sari on Nevil and uses it to please him: “in touching it [the sari], I wished suddenly to wear it; and also–I know it would give pleasure–to you!” (65). This sentence echoes a strikingly similar one in Steel’s narrative; Laila “would put on that dress at once and so give him pleasure” (189). This pleasure raised by the Dress steeps Oriental women further in a fetishistic representation. In the case of Diver’s Nevil, it is the artistic inspiration derived from this scopic pleasure that he needs to produce paintings liable to please and consequently to be sold. Indeed, Lilamani’s saris are exhibited on the painting market to provide Nevil with necessary funds to free his estate from a heavy mortgage. Both Laila and Lilamani are contained in their Oriental dresses. Deprived of their enchanting clothes, both become invisible. The Cinderella myth is restated in both narratives, for Cinderella uses the magic of her dress to attract the attention of the Prince. Without her dress, Laila is nothing but a native ‘Begum.’ Likewise, without her sari, Laila can never stir the artist in Nevil. Nevertheless, if the visibility of the two girls is linked to the fact of being ‘Orientally’ dressed, the pleasure derived from this visibility is based on their being undressed. Dressing and undressing shape the colonial aesthetics of the striptease. While Lilamani’s sari “veiled without hiding” (54), Laila’s dress is resumed in this sentence: “To hide and to reveal, that was the note of all!” (102). The veil has always been considered as the basic element of the Oriental feminine attire. Steel uses it to stress the sensuality of Laila in being naked while completely covered: So hiding, yet revealing, was the soft film of fine muslin over the scented, ivory-tinted corselet, which fitted close to the full curves of her figure. So was it with the silver-streaked veil, through which the jewels in her dusky hair, the bracelets on her fair arms, shone undimmed (102). Similarly, Diver exploits the veil to stress the Oriental side of Lilamani. She even seems obsessed by the word ‘veil,’ which she uses metaphorically: “Nevil…had succeeded in lifting a corner of the veil that Lilamani would always wear” (65), or Lilamani “veiled her eyes” (67). The veil becomes a part of Lilamani’s character and body: it stands for her timidity and reserved personality as well as for her eyelids. It is used as a synecdoche, a part representing the whole—the whole of Lilamani as well as the ensemble of Oriental Women. Diver also makes a stylistic use of the veil. Her style, in some parts of the narrative, imitates the erotic oscillation of the veil between hiding and revealing. The description of Lilamani’s wedding night, for instance, answers Barthes’s question: “Is not the most erotic of a body where the garment gapes?” (98). Her description is more telling than revealing and leaves room to the imagination of the reader: Then as he turned, with a light in his eyes that made her heart stand still, it had come upon her afresh–the fear and the ecstasy. In one appealing look she had besought him to understand. And he had understood: most tenderly and amazingly he had understood…and it had needed just this touch in Lilamani’s husband to ensure that the ecstasy should outweigh the fear–nay, drive it out for good (175-6). The repetition of the words ‘understood,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘ecstasy’ sum up the whole sexual scene which Diver describes in a veiled way. Since the publication of Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits, “the Oriental costume,” argues Melman, “presented the exotic and picturesque at its most elaborate” (119). The sensuality of their dresses matches the names attributed to Laila and Lilamani. They refer to the Arabian Nights, one of the most influential texts in the construction of the Oriental myth. Laila explains to Dering that her name is extracted from “the Alif Laila,” “It is my name, you see–Laila–it means ‘night’” (17). Lilamani is an anagram of Laila, and she is often referred to as the “Princess from the Arabian Nights” (5). Laila and Lilamani offer a vivid case of the fictional fabrication of the Oriental woman. A name, a dress, and a passivity marinated in sexual passion are enough to produce and reproduce the Oriental female. Indeed, the “Eastern woman,” argues Kabbani, “was a narrative creation that fulfilled the longings of the Western imagination” (22). Kabbani avoids judiciously gendering the Western imagination, implying that both men and women novelists conspired in concocting the Oriental woman. The female Oriental attire has a great influence on the colonial imagination. The veil, as one main component of the dress, has a rebuking as well as an alluring role. The male writers’ fantasies of unveiling Oriental women can be explained by a scopic drive of “trespassing upon…the private space” of the veil (Alloula 13). Women writers prove subordinate to masculine rhetoric in their use of the Oriental dress, but they add something of their own in the very release of feminine fantasies. Female Fantasies The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by a massive publication of novels dealing openly with sex. The label ‘sex-novel’ was current by 1905. Keating argues that “the sex-novel marked a distinctive phase in the growing interest of novelists in psychology. It could be silly, serious, or sensational, but always it focused on the need to rid the self of sexual repression and honestly faces the consequences” (209). Though men and women novelists participated in shaping this fictional sub-genre, it was mainly women who suffered from sarcastic comments and “catchy tags and labels.” “They were ‘revolting women,’ members of the ‘Ibsenite nemopathic school,’ or the ‘psychological-porno-graphic school;’ they were ‘diseased,’ ‘morbid,’ ‘pathological;’ they suffered from ‘tommycrotics,’ ‘sexmania,’ ‘extomania’” (Keating 178). Among the many sex-novels published by the turn of the nineteenth century, Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks (1907) stands out as one of the most electrifying erotic texts. Though the setting is European, the whole erotic scenes are marinated in a sensual and languid Oriental passion. Paul Verdayne, a young Englishman, enjoys a devastating passion with an East European ‘Lady.’ Paul persists in calling her, until the end of the narrative, ‘Queen’ or ‘Goddess.’ The European Zelenska is Orientalized to adorn the setting: “She looked barbaric, her raven brows knit. She might have been Cleopatra commending the instant death of an offending slave” (Glyn 187). Paul has the impression that he “embarked upon an adventure which savoured of the Arabian Nights” (44). The first part of the novel depicts three weeks of licentious sexual fantasies which end up by the Lady’s disappearance and the beginning of Paul’s suffering. Glyn’s open and straightforward use of the Oriental-woman figure as a model of sensuality is not imitated by all women writers. Either out of conservatism (Diver) or because they do not want their works to be branded with the label ‘sex-novel’ (Steel), many women novelists avoided a direct involvement in sexual matters. Diver joined her dissenting voice to the hostile criticism directed to women writers’ meddling with the subject of sex. Together with Mrs. Olliphant and Eliza Lyn Linton, she deplored the shameful role given to women in this type of fiction. In her two essays “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents” and “The Wild Women as Politicians,” Linton criticized the degraded status of the modern woman. Steel’s recoil from a frank talk of sexuality, however, is different from Diver’s. She rather joined Violet Hunt, May Sinclair, and Cicely Hamilton, all of them adherents of the suffragette movement. Keating explains these women’s avoidance of sexual topics by the possibility that “they feared that concentration on so specific an issue would lead them into a trap similar to that which had already dated New Woman fiction” (210). Nevertheless, sexual fantasies do exist in Diver’s and Steel’s narratives, even though they are deftly camouflaged. If male writers bury their fantasies in deep caves, craters, or devouring animals, female novelists hide them behind the veil of their Oriental characters. Laila and Lilamani are eroticized in spite of their young age. Their early sexuality is explained by Diver in a single generalizing sentence: “And at seventeen a child of the East is already a woman” (20). Diver’s position is clear—the ideal woman should neither repress her femininity nor exhibit it openly. In short, the woman should find the equilibrium of the veil: cover to uncover. Through the passive femininity of Lilamani, Diver liberates her fantasies around the Oriental Harem. The Orientalist discourse derives all its images of Oriental sexuality and licentiousness from the Harem. Lilamani, the “harem child” (363), is described by a male character in the novel as: “Alluring. That’s the word. A woman all through as they still make ‘em in the East. We’re losing the art this side, worse luck” (278). By making the Oriental girl the model of femininity, Diver is fantasizing about the exotic side of Lilamani. Indeed, she is admired by all the males of the narrative, especially Nevil Sinclair. Nevil chooses Lilamani as the model for all his paintings, and decides “that he should make his name as a painter of Eastern subjects” (176). One of his paintings, called “Dreaming,” shows a group of sleeping girls in a Royal “pleasure home.” Nevil has the “joy of painting six sleeping Lilamanis, each in some new pose of girlish grace and beauty” (177). In fact, he creates his own harem. “The erotic charge of the harem,” explains Lewis, “has two main trajectories: the fulfillment of seeing the forbidden faces and bodies of Muslim women; and the fantasy of a man’s sexual ownership of many women” (112). If Nevil Sinclair “had completed his dream of one fair woman multiplied by six” (177), Diver completes her fantasy of being owned, like a harem woman, by a white man. Indeed, Nevil’s sexual supremacy is highlighted by Lilamani’s passive sensuality, which gives him the power of silencing or giving voice to Lilamani. Steel’s use of the Harem is different from Diver’s. Rather than liberating, she depicts it as a prison-like place: In old times the guardians of the frail beauties for whose delectation the garden had been made, had lived in the crypt-like vaulted rooms which opened out from this ailed passage; so keeping the gate against illegal wanderings…The butterfly prisoners had had no chance of fluttering to strange honey (12-13). The description of the seraglio seems to satisfy her feminist, albeit colonial, convictions. Steel hides behind the Oriental passivity of Laila to attack English non-feminist women who behave like Oriental women, devoid of personality and completely dominated by men. This tradition of criticizing Eastern women and institutions can be traced back to early English feminist discourses, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft establishes a clear parallel between women’s subjugation and the Harem females’ “docile blind obedience” (23). Steel, as explained above, cannot spoil her romance by attacking ordinary women, who may constitute the majority of her audience. Killing Laila at the end of the narrative completes her feminist dream of eradicating the passive woman. It also meets her feminine audience’s expectation of a poetic justice punishing the enticing native female who may snatch their men. The image of the prison prevails throughout Steel’s narrative. Laila is somewhat imprisoned in a harem-like castle under the custody of Father Ninian whom she calls “my guardian” (14). This castle is near a real prison guarded by Captain Dering. Steel creates an ambiguous atmosphere in which the real prison and the harem-like castle fuse. While Laila is offering herself to Dering as a prisoner, a conspiracy to liberate the prisoners is taking place. By accepting the shackled Laila, Dering metaphorically becomes the Sultan of the Harem. Laila succeeds in dragging him down to her sensual world. Nevertheless, Steel perceives this world, where women are submissive yet predatory, as a chaotic one. She parallels Dering’s reckless self-indulgence in sensuality with the prisoners’ apocalyptic mutiny. Order is only restored after Laila’s killing, which coincides with the crush of the prisoners’ rebellion. Steel, however, uses Laila’s Oriental sensuality to fantasize on sexual liberty–strongly advocated by the New Woman. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the nineteenth-century woman writer veers towards identifying “not only with her model heroines, but also with less obvious, nastier, more resilient and energetic female characters who enact the rebellious dissent from her culture” (169). The infatuation of Laila and Dering, triggered by the erotic Oriental dress, is the only open and direct sexual relationship in the novel. This love affair is contrasted to the inhibited love and sexual attraction between Dering himself and Mrs. Smith, whose status as a married woman prohibits any extramarital relationship. Their physical attraction is reduced to friendship; a euphemism never used to qualify the relationship between Laila and Dering. The English reader, who readily accepts the licentiousness of an Oriental girl, would never accept that of a white married one. The very word ‘adultery’ becomes taboo, and is never used by Steel though it remains a fantasy. This fantasy floats in an erotic episode in which Dering mistakes in the dark the hand of Laila for that of Mrs. Smith: As he bent his head a scent of violet—the scent she [Mrs. Smith] always used—assailed him. Even in the darkness he knew she must be close to him. He felt the soft ruffle of the lace about her hand upon his wrist. It trembled, surely. Did it? Or was it only his own bounding pulse…Then, with a sort of suffocating rush to heart and brain, came the knowledge that his clasp was answered by that small hand—so small, so clinging, so trustful—so dear—so absolutely dear—so dear!—So very dear!! (61). When the light is switched on, Dering realizes his mistake. This confusion between the two women betrays a fantasy of sexual freedom trespassing the social boundaries. Nevertheless these boundaries can only be braved by the Oriental Laila, who satisfies her sexual impulses in a bold way: “‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Laila Bonaventura with a stolid indifference. ‘You thought it was her hand, of course—I quite understand’” (61). As a foreigner, Laila is free from the English norms of modesty and decency. Laila’s behavior is contained within a stereotypical representation of the Oriental woman–she is there to satisfy the white man. Laila, Lilamani, and the Orientalized Mrs. Zelenska behave according to their writers’ gender and race perceptions. The element of class mediates between the two perceptions, forming, thus, a harmonious trinity. Gender, Class, and Race The most outstanding consensus between colonial male and female fiction writers is in their treatment of gender, class, and race. In spite of being themselves classified as the ‘Other’ in their own culture, women writers follow the same masculine classification regarding the female native. The English woman shows no sisterly solidarity with the colonized one. Even for Steel, the activist feminist, women’s bonding does not take race into consideration. In fact, Laila is never included in the English women’s circle. Though she attends their parties and shares their entertainment, she has no close relationship with any of them. She has not, for instance, a single conversation with any English woman in the whole narrative. Her presence is linked only to the male desire. Either out of racial revulsion or because of cultural restrictions, women writers adopt the same masculine strategies in delineating gender relationships. In Steel and Diver’s narratives, for instance, gender perceptions follow a colonial fictional tradition. Both narratives include a love story between a white man and an Oriental woman. None of the writers ventures to contemplate the obverse and write a romance between a white woman and an Oriental man. The revulsion for the native male is translated in colonial narratives by depriving him of any relationship with white women. Father Ninian, in Steel’s romance, severely rebukes Laila for having a mere chat with Roshan Khan: “I would rather you did not speak to such natives at all. They cannot understand—quite—for they look on women differently from what we do” (87). The half-native Laila is completely marginalized from her own race and treated as a white woman who needs protection against the degenerate native male. The precondition of class legitimizes any fantasy of inter-racial relationship. Steel and Diver do not part from this class-conscious classification. They load their fantasies with racial prejudice and social snobbery. Lilamani and Laila have very fair complexions and descend from high social classes. Laila has “some of the best blood of Italy in her veins” (96). And Lilamani belongs to the highest Hindu caste. Her marriage with a white man is legitimized by making her his equal in social rank. “She is of old Rajput family, of good birth and lineage, like yourself,” says Lilamani’s father to Nevil. “In fact, if you had not been her equal in that, I could never give consent” (130-1). Diver’s use of racial Darwinism is clear. Nevil is irritated at his family’s opposition to his marriage with the Indian girl–an opposition he seems helpless to understand: “If I’d married a Hottentot or an American Negro, I would excuse” (241). Because of her color, Lilamani is ranked in a higher level on the racial scale than the black female. Lilamani is even made convincing as a perfect match to Nevil by appreciating Christianity, which she finds “more simple–more solemn” (251) than her own religion. Lilamani is progressively domesticated and naturalized so that the reader can accept her. She ends up by being Anglicized when Nevil calls her “English wife” (258). Laila, in Steel’s novel, is also naturalized by being called Juliet. Both Oriental girls are first unnamed, and then renamed to fit the fantasies of both writers and readers. Ventriloquized Discourse: Feminine Tongues with Masculine Voices Steel and Diver articulate the same masculine and colonial values perpetuated in male popular fiction. Faithful to her appellation—the “Female Rudyard Kipling” (Patwardhan 25)—Steel reproduced the Kiplingesque style with an E. M. Forsterian tone. Forster is present in her attempt to reconcile the West to the East or what she calls “the mutual assimilation of East and West without injury to either” (Hosts of the Lord 84). Kipling’s presence is obvious in her generalizing sentences such as: “like all the natives of India, he lived largely on the approbation of his immediate superiors” (40). The same rhetorical economy is used by Diver and is even more remindful of Kipling: “as far as the East is from the West, so far had destiny set them asunder” (107). The feminist convictions of Steel are steeped in a colonial racial discourse stressing the supremacy of the white woman. Erda’s medical mission in India highlights the superiority of the English woman as savior. Burton argues that “feminism, like imperialism, was structured around the idea of moral responsibility. In Victorian terms, responsibility was custodial, classist, ageist and hierarchical” (296). Indeed, the “noble work English women are doing for their Indian sisters” (Steel 153) hides the same racist discourse underlying the civilizing mission. Creating a colonial world based on dichotomy is a rhetoric shared by both male and female romance writers. The white man is beautiful, manly, and courageous, while the native is ugly, effeminate, and cowardly. Among women novelists who corroborated the cult of the masculine beauty, Ouida (Marie Louise de La Ramee) stands as a notable example. John Buchan mentions her in The Three Hostages when Richard Hannay tries to imagine Medina: “I had made a picture of something between Ouida’s guardsman and the Apollo Belvedere” (77). “Ouida’s guardsman” is the hero of Under Two Flags (1867), the Eton-educated Cecil Bertie, known as ‘Beauty’ in England and nicknamed ‘Bel-a-faire-peur’ in Algiers. Bertie’s beauty is equaled only by the Apollo Leo-type in Haggard’s romances. He has a face of as much delicacy and brilliancy as a woman’s, handsome, thoroughbred, languid, nonchalant, with certain latent recklessness under the impassive calm of habit, and a singular softness given to the large dark hazel eyes by the unusual length of the lashes over them. His features were exceedingly fair—fair as the fairest girl’s; his hair was of the softest, silkiest, brightest chestnut; his mouth very beautifully shaped; on the whole, with a certain gentle, mournful love-me look that his eyes had with them. (4) Bertie is not only beautiful, he also incarnates all the late Victorian ideals of manliness. Under Two Flags was originally serialized in The British Army and Navy Review and had a faithful military readership. The sensational novels Ouida wrote were destined for a male audience, although the label ‘sensational novel’ was associated with a feminine readership. In his introduction to Under Two Flags, Sutherland quotes Ouida’s declaration: “Je n’écris pas pour les femmes. J’écris pour les militaries.” (“I don’t write for women. I write for military men.”) “The point is stressed,” comments Sutherland, “in the dedication of Under Two Flags to Colonel George Poulett Cameron (1806-82), an old war-horse and author of The Romance of Military Life (1853)” (xix). Bertie’s heroic self-sacrifice to protect his young brother and the name of a Lady is offered as a model for military men to emulate. Ouida’s legendary hero can be traced in Steel’s Lance Carlyon, a model of the heroic soldier. Nevertheless, contrary to Ouida, who opts for an exclusive concentration on Bertie’s character, Steel (as well as Diver) opts for a binary opposition between the Englishman and the native. The latter is interpolated in their narratives to stress the masculinity of their heroes. Lilamani and The Hosts of the Lord are a recreation of a masculine vision of a feminized Orient. The two Oriental girls stand for the Orient—a recurrent male strategy of gendering the land. Diver is quite categorical about this fact: “The soul of the West is masculine and the soul of the East is feminine” (133). Hence, Neville Sinclair is “enamoured of half a hemisphere in the person of one small woman” (176). The dominating figure of the Indian mother stresses the feminized Orient. Mataaji, Lilamani’s mother, is a replica of Mumtaza Mahal, Roshan’s grandmother in The Hosts of the Lord. Mataaji wants to marry her daughter to a rich old man, while Mumtaza pushes Roshan to marry his cousin, Laila. The dominating Indian mother aims to emphasize the weakness of the male native. Hence, the Orient is not only feminized, it is also effeminated. Mr. Lakshman, Lilamani’s father, seems powerless in the face of his wife’s tyranny. His only solution is to escape with his daughter to France. Diver sustains the same representation in The Singer Passes (1931), a sequel to Lilamani. She calls Indian men “mother-shackled men,” who “through their excessive mother-adoration and dependence lose half of their manhood” (451). Roshan, in Steel’s novel, is depicted as devoid of personality—influenced by his grandmother and served by a eunuch. His killing of Laila translates a moral as well as a physical impotence. The adjective ‘impotent’ is used twice in the narrative to describe his helplessness. The two native males, Diver’s Mr. Lackshman and Steel’s Roshan Khan, seem to be taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a text embedded in colonial and patriarchal discourse. The domesticated Mr. Lackshman matches Ariel, the tamed native on Prospero’s island: “If modern India produced more of his type we should hear little or nothing of political unrest” (Lilamani 41). Roshan Khan has the role of Caliban, the untamed native whose voice of resistance is stifled by Prospero, the usurper: “Your pupil,” shouts Roshan at Father Ninian, Laila’s guardian, “whom you taught–curse you” (The Hosts of the Lord 324). This echoes Caliban: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse” (The Tempest 1.2). Like Caliban, the real owner of the island, Roshan descends from the dethroned Indian aristocracy. His marriage with Laila/Miranda enables him to regain his title/island. His killing of Laila is a metaphorical rape echoing Caliban’s attempt to violate Miranda. Father Ninian’s punishment is killing Roshan in a duel–a symbolic castration of the degenerate native. The impotent death of Roshan is opposed to the heroic one of Dering. The prisoners’ mutiny happens at the time when Dering is with Laila. His duty as a soldier is overpowered by his infatuation with Laila. The castrating power of the Oriental female who entices the male colonizer away from his duty is paralleled to Erda’s helping Lance crash the mutiny. It is only after Laila’s death that Dering regains his manhood and heroically defends the tower. The masculine anxiety over the emasculating power of the female native is felt in Diver and Steel’s texts through their hints to the lurking savagery behind the civilized façade of the two girls. Though advocating the Oriental female as a model of womanhood, Diver cannot repress her racial anxiety. Lilamani cannot be completely domesticated “for beneath her surface gentleness throbbed the passionate, unforgiving heart of a soldier race, strong to smite, swift to revenge” (267). The Oriental passion of Lilamani awakens when she is faced with the hostility of Jane, her husband’s sister. The scene showing her burning Jane’s letter, in which she abuses her, is rather frightening. Lilamani is transformed into a demonic figure “with a gleam of primitive hate in her eyes that her husband must never see” (252). Like Dering, in Steel’s novel, Nevil cannot repress an instinctive revulsion of native females. For Dering, “the idea of treating this love of his on conventional lines was still repugnant to him” (Lilamani 185). Nevil realizes his innate disgust during his honeymoon spent in Egypt. The sight of Oriental women demystifies the image he has created of his Oriental wife: there were moments of unreasoning, yet invincible revulsion, when he could scarcely endure the sight of those Eastern women, who, in a dozen trifling ways, so subtly recalled his wife, robbing her of unique quality that was for him an essential part of her charm. (256) Lilamani is a dream which, once realized, loses its essence. She joins Laila at the margin of the text where their shadowy presence is no more than an aesthetic vision. Specters of heroines Both Lilamani and Laila are pseudo-heroines: the former is only a reflection of her picture and the latter is a mere shadow of her dress. Steel opts for a stereotypical colonial end to her novel: the native woman is erased. Laila is doubly punished: first by the feminist because she is an ordinary passive woman, and second by the colonialist because she is an enticing native female. Her death highlights the superiority of the white feminist Erda, the real heroine of the novel. Laila is used, like her dress, as an ornament to the narrative. There is even more life in the dress than in her. She is no more than a peg on which to hang the Oriental garb. If Laila is marginalized by being killed, Lilamani is marginalized by being given life. Her two attempts at suicide are intercepted by her husband, who saves her life only to resuscitate the artist in him. Diver’s use of an artist as a hero reflects the literary mood of the fin de siècle, when the artist became a fashionable fictional character. Keating explains this growing interest as a “part of the more comprehensive assertion that writing of novels, once it could rid itself of the degrading connection with popular entertainment, was an activity worthy of comparison with that of the poet, musician, sculptor or painter” (80). If the painter in Lilamani could not raise the literary status of the novel, he served at least to provide it with a poetic mood. Actually, the Orient is transformed in Diver’s texts into the locus of inspiration and creativity: Mrs. Vane in Lonely Furrow (1923) is a musician, and Roy Sinclair in The Singer Passes is a novelist. Though the Orient is given a central position in the works of these authors, it is rather contained in an imaginary artistic vision. Sinclair declares: “I’m possessed by India. She is my true heroine” (The Singer Passes 351). He echoes his father’s passion for Lilamani as a picture—a heroine of his paintings, for Nevil “saw this child of an alien race rather as a picture” (Lilamani 4). Once the work of art is completed, the Orient/Lilamani is displaced to give room to the artist himself. Indeed, “through this–her picture–Mr. Sinclair had ‘found himself’ at last” (99). Commenting on Lilamani’s marginalization from the field of production, Deidre states: “Rather than becoming a physician in service of her own people, Lilamani becomes an artist’s model in service to Nevil’s Orientalist fantasies” (163). Lilamani joins Haggard’s Ayesha in She, for in neither case is the title character the work’s heroine. To be placed at the center does not mean to be the center of the narrative. Indeed, “she of seventeen summers,” (48) as Lilamani is called, is imprisoned in a frame fixing her at the center of the canvas space. Her picture, however, is nothing but the shadow of her real self. Hence, Lilamani is marginalized while being at the very center. She is no more than a picture reflecting the artistic triumph of Nevil, the sole hero in Diver’s narrative. Her presence only acquires a meaning through her absence, as the narrator’s description of a character contemplating one of Nevil’s paintings suggests: “he was absorbed in no picture, but in the face and figure of a woman rendered almost living by the magic of Nevil’s brush” (347). Both Laila and Lilamani are denied the status of heroines. Their bodies are transformed, as Greer states in another context, into “aesthetic objects without function” (36), and therefore are deformed. Steel and Diver close their texts to Oriental heroines. In reality, however, it is difficult to decide whether these writers thereby shut out the native females or shut in themselves. Excluding the Oriental woman on the basis of a masculine fictional tradition intimates shutting oneself, as a woman writer, in a patriarchal circle. Writing is consequently transformed into a mere subordination to the male tradition. Woolf complains about women writers who change their “values in deference to the opinion of the others” and promote sexist codes “by way of conciliation” (50). Similarly, Cixous denounces feminine writings using masculine voices: “Most women are like this: they do someone else’s–men’s–writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing what is in effect masculine” (“Castration” 68). Nervertheless, colonial women writers are not that innocent. Actually there is no such thing as ‘innocence.’ “Anything one names,” Sartre judiciously states, “is already no longer the same; it has lost its innocence” (82). Women writers produced their texts from their own vantagepoint as white English women. Their fictional attitudes towards native women reflect their real conviction of their feminine supremacy. If male writers use Oriental females to stress their masculinity, women writers use them to show their superior womanhood. The Oriental woman is the Other against whom the identity of the English woman is forged. In short, Oriental women may serve as scapegoats to alleviate sexual and colonial anxieties, as a bridge to attack the rising feminist movement by the late nineteenth century, or as a bad example against which Western identity is asserted, but, in Lewis words, “they have always served” (5). At no time throughout this essay have I intended to indulge in the facile rhetoric of victimization. My assessment of female-authored colonial fiction is fueled by a desire to investigate how the ‘truth’ of the Oriental woman is constructed, believed, and perpetuated. Nevertheless, any enterprise to represent Oriental women, however well intentioned, should be interrogated. Works Cited Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Azim, Ferdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London: Penguin Books, 1993. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. London: Macmillan Students’ Novels, 1982. Brown, Laura. “Amazons and Africans: Gender, Race, and Empire in Daniel Defoe.” Women, “Race”, and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. London: Routledge, 1994. 119-37. Buchan, John. The Three Hostages. 1924. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1952. Burton, Antoinette M. “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865-1915.” Women’s Studies International Forum 13.4 (1992): 137-57. [Special issue: Western Women and Imperialism.] Ed. Nupur Chandhuri and Margaret Strobel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation?.” Trans. Annette Kuhn. Signs 7.1 (1981): 36-40. Defoe, Daniel. Roxana. 1724. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Deidre, David. Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. New York: Cornell University Press, 1995. Diver, Maud. Lilamani. 1910. London: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd., 1935. _____. The Lonely Furrow. 1940. London: William Blackwook & Sons Ltd., 1940. _____. The Singer Passes. 1931. London: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd., 1934. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Glyn, Elenor. Three Weeks. 1907. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1974. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. 1970. London: Granada, 1981. Haggard, Rider. The Holy Flower. London: Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd., 1920. Harper, Mary. “Recovering the Other: Women and the Orient in the Writings of Early Nineteenth Century France.” Critical Matrix 1.3 (1985): 1-31. Hull, E. M. The Sheik. 1919. London: Virago Press Ltd., 1996. Kabbani, Rana. Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of the Orient. London: Pandora, 1986. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875-1914. London; Fontana Press, 1991. Lewis, Darby. Nudes From Nowhere: Utopian Sexual Landscapes. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. Lewis, Reina, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Feminity and Representation. London: Routledge, 1995. Linton, Eliza Lynn. “The Wild Women as Politicians.” The Nineteenth Century 30 Oct. (1891): 596-605. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge, 1995. Melman, Billie. “Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918”. Sexuality, Religion and Work. London: Macmillan, 1992. Miller, Jane Elridge. Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. London: Virago, 1994. Ouida (Marie Louise de La Ramee). Under Two Flags. 1867. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Parry, Benita. Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1800-1940. London: Penguin Press, 1972. Patwardhan, Daya. A Star of India: Flora Annie Steel, Her Works and Times. India: A. V. Grika Prahashan, Poona 2, 1963. Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1993. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Writing, Reading and the Public.” Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Walder Dennis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. 1883. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1924. Scott, Rebecca. The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1992. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1623. London: Methuen, 1986. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture in the Fin de Siècle. London: Bloomsbury, 1990. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Postcolonial Criticism. Eds. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley. London: Longman, 1997, pp. 145-65. Steel, Flora Annie. The Hosts of the Lord. London: William Heinman, 1900. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1988. Woolf, Virginia. “To Cambridge Women.” Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Dennis Walder. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. |
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