The construction of woman in three popular texts of empire: Towards a critique of materialist feminism

Hennessy, Rosemary; Mohan, Rajeswari

doi:10.1080/09502368908582066

Textual Practice

1989

DOI: 10.1080/09502368908582066

|View full text |Cite

The construction of woman in three popular texts of empire: Towards a critique of materialist feminism

Rosemary Hennessy

Rajeswari Mohan

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

1990

2010

Publication Types

Select...

Article5

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent5

Authors

Journals

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…11 There are some stray references to her writings in recent post-colonial critical writings but none of these contain any substantial analysis of her short fictions. The only exception to this is Rosemary Hennesy and Rajeshwari Mohan's essay on Mussammat Kirpo's Doll (see Hennessey and Mohan, 1989).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Miserable Sham’: Flora Annie Steel's Short Fictions and the Question of Indian Women's Reform

Roy¹

2010

Feminist Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article examines a few short stories of Flora Annie Steel, a Scottish memsahib who spent a number of decades in the late nineteenth century in India with her husband, a British colonial official. Steel's short stories are interesting because they were produced at a time when most Anglo-Indian fictions (especially those authored by memsahibs) focused exclusively on station romances, and they explore with some seriousness and sense of complexity, issues related to the impact of Imperial reformatory intervention in the lives of Indian women. Her female contemporaries wrote fictions that more often than not completely ignored the existence of Indians, and even famous male writers like Kipling stereotypically reduced Indian women either to sexually licentious or completely passive, voiceless entities. Steel, in her stories, examines questions of gender, sexuality and reform in the context of Indian women's lives in ways that often seem to go beyond such racial stereotypes. The stories have been examined within the context of the different political and social formations of the specific regions -Punjab or Bengal -in which they are based, since women's reform had very different trajectories in these regions. The remarkableness of Steel's stories, however, lies in their attempting to look at the reform question from the Indian women's perspectives. What cannot be ignored are the ways in which these stories attempt to go beyond the prevalent Anglo-Indian modes of stereotyping or completely erasing Indian women and register their voices in examining questions related to their reform. This is not to say that racial and Imperial hierarchies are entirely abandoned in her writings. In fact the omniscient narrator in these fictions often narrates in ways that sustain and strengthen such hierarchies. However, there are moments when the diegetic narrative mode gives way to an ironically nuanced narrative voice and to ambivalences that seem to gesture at complex questioning of the bases of Imperial authority and its ostensibly benevolent intervention in the lives of Indian women. It is these moments that make the stories worth exploring.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Miserable Sham’: Flora Annie Steel's Short Fictions and the Question of Indian Women's Reform

Roy¹

2010

Feminist Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Travelers' Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley'sTravels in West Africa

Ciolkowski

1998

Victorian Literature and Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Victorian travel has always been about the politics of leaving home. And in a twentieth-century critical universe shaped by some of the fundamental questions about the making of “home” and “away” and the invention of “self” and “other,” the field of Victorian travel has necessarily taken its place at the center of a critical discourse about the sometimes fabulous and often sordid details of the colonial encounter. The Western travelers of such encounters are intriguing figures if simply because, despite the multiple voyagers' mythologies that adhere to them, they do not escape the demands of the Victorian world at home or the intricate structures of power out of which this world is made. Rather, the English adventurers who ostensibly left England behind for the mangrove swamps and cannibal villages of Africa regularly reproduced in their travels some of the very same structures of power from which they were purportedly freed. In leaving home, the English traveler also quite literally rediscovered it.

show abstract

Materialist Feminism and Foucault: The Politics of Appropriation

Hennessy¹

1990

Rethinking Marxism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Contact Info

customersupport@researchsolutions.com

10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614

Henderson, NV 89052, USA

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Blog Terms and Conditions API Terms Privacy Policy Contact Cookie Preferences Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Made with 💙 for researchers

Part of the Research Solutions Family.

The construction of woman in three popular texts of empire: Towards a critique of materialist feminism

Cited by 9 publications

References 18 publications

‘A Miserable Sham’: Flora Annie Steel's Short Fictions and the Question of Indian Women's Reform

‘A Miserable Sham’: Flora Annie Steel's Short Fictions and the Question of Indian Women's Reform

Travelers' Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley'sTravels in West Africa

Materialist Feminism and Foucault: The Politics of Appropriation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About