Abstract
This chapter examines the colonial workings of the body as thing, and the body among things, in the writing of women travellers in the mid-Victorian imperial conflict zones of Afghanistan and India. Colonial bodies (of colonizers and colonized) figure in imperial disaster narratives as uneasy sites of racial and ethnic ‘thingness’, in particular female bodies with their problematic capacities for sexuality, pregnancy, and maternity. Poised between vessels for animate subjectivities, and things whose literal weights are often most present in their textual absence, colonial bodies intersect with colonial things in these writings through complex patterns of absence, substitution, and/or transformation. Such intersections suggest the need for a more fluid and more phenomenological approach to the textual experience of Victorian material culture, one that incorporates experiencing subjects’ self-conscious narrative relationships with materiality. Given postcolonial studies’ recent emphasis on thing theory in relation to the objects of empire, this chapter develops the theoretical implications of considering colonial bodies as and among things, and, ultimately, of considering the traveller’s text itself as thing.
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Notes
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Things, Special Issue of Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 4.
Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, ‘Introduction’, in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 3.
Erika Rappaport, ‘Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn: Response’, Victorian Studies, 50 (2008), 289.
See Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
See Karen R. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 20–1.
Corinne Fowler, Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas About Afghanistan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 11.
Jordanna Bailkin, ‘Review of The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel’, Victorian Studies, 49 (2007), 507.
Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 129.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perfection and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 163.
Florentia Sale, A Journal of the First Afghan War, ed. Patrick Macrory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 14. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.
Harriet Tytler, An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of Harriet Tytler 1828–1858, ed. Anthony Sattin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 162. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.
See Christina Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Literature and Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
See Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) for a discussion of changing Victorian representational cultures of pregnancy and maternity.
Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 22.
Frederick Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1897), I, 160, quoted in Tytler, Englishwoman in India, p. 146.
Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, I, 160; W. S. R. Hodson, Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India (London: Parker, 1859), p. 207, quoted (in editor’s notes) in Tytler, Englishwoman in India, p. 215, n.39.
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 98–9.
Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 38–58.
E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 112.
See Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 61–9;
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 209;
Nancy Paxton, ‘Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857’, Victorian Studies, 36 (1992), 5–30.
A cujava, or cadjowa, was a ‘kind of frame or pannier’. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Ware: Wordsworth, 1996), p. 140.
Helen Mackenzie, Storms and Sunshine of a Soldier’s Life: Lt.-General Colin Mackenzie, C.B., 1825–81 (Edinburgh: Douglas, 1884), p. 281.
The political and material actualities of the Uprising have been much discussed; see, for example, Kim Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010).
Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Writing and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 114.
Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth Century Britain and France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 67–9.
See Freedgood, Ideas in Things, p. 54. On the history of the linen industry see Peter Solar, ‘The Linen Industry in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. David Jenkins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), II, 809–23.
Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 7.
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London: Pimlico, 2002), p. 352.
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© 2012 Muireann O’Cinneide
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O’Cinneide, M. (2012). Travellers’ Bodies and Pregnant Things: Victorian Women in Imperial Conflict Zones. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_5
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