Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel
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Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel
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Overview
In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women’s suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad.
Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822382003 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/14/1996 |
| Series: | Post-Contemporary Interventions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Lexile: | 1670L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 525 KB |
About the Author
Inderpal Grewal is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at San Francisco State University.
Read an Excerpt
Home and Harem
Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel
By Inderpal Grewal
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8200-3
CHAPTER 1
Home and Harem: Domesticity, Gender, and Nationalism
She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was apart of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.
In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Casaubon experiences this transformative moment early one morning in the dawn light when, looking out of her bedroom window, she realizes the significance of the landscape she sees below her. It is the moment in which she reaches womanly maturity and understands her role in the community.
If, as Mary Pratt suggests, the "monarch of all I survey" is a trope within the nineteenth-century travel narratives in which a "rhetoric of presence" creates a "relation of domination between seer and seen," then Dorothea's location utilizes as well as departs from this masculinist mode. While her position at the window suggests her domination of the landscape below, the description of her epiphany places her "within" rather than "above." This location "above" is a dislocation of women's proper place within English nineteenth-century culture, a departure from Tennyson's portrayal of "compulsive domesticity" in "The Lady of Shallot" (first published in 1833) when the Lady is forbidden to look out of her window and dies when she does. Eliot's narrative of Dorothea's epiphany reveals a transformation of a trope in order to suggest other forms of connection between women and the world.
Middlemarch was published in 1871–1872 and Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa appeared in 1897. In those forty-some years between Tennyson's poem and Eliot's and Kingsley's narratives, Englishwomen had begun to travel in large numbers and Victoria had been queen for most of that time. Kingsley's narrative, Pratt suggests, does not include any "monarch of all I survey" scenes, and while imperial mastery is present in the narrative, there is also a denial of domination and a parody of power. Yet this female participation and mastery, also available in Dorothea's narrative, combines to create a subject position for middle-class Englishwomen that is gendered through discourses of class and imperialism. Pratt's "contact zones" are here in the heart of the English landscape, interpellating gendered subjects that are nationalist as well, revealing what it means to be an Englishwoman, as well as what it means to be other classes of Englishwomen and other races of women. The position of a gendered imperial subject is negotiated, as the figures of Dorothea and Mary Kingsley suggest, within the conflict between imperial, masculinist ideology and female experience as constructed within class, race, and nation. Such a conflict is visible in the comparisons between women and landscape and the ways in which the English notion of beauty as transparency is constructed through the discourses of women's work and leisure.
What Dorothea's epiphany illustrates is the way in which representations of the domestic landscape of England, by including certain features such as fields and cottages, working men and women, farm animals and children, taught its viewers what domesticity meant. The English landscape, as represented in Wordsworth's poetry and Constable's paintings, was didactic, teaching labor and endurance by portraying it, yet showing labor to be the lot of the working class, for the members of the bourgeoisie, such as Dorothea, merely consumed these scenes of landscape and labor without having to work themselves. Dorothea's epiphany does not mean that she would labor in the fields, but that she sees herself as being part of the community in which she will take her place as a middle-class, domesticated woman, not as the barren scholar she had mistakenly wanted to be with Mr. Casaubon. The position of the scholar, which was becoming professionalized during this period, was clearly unavailable to women, leaving them keepers of the domestic space, a situation that suggested both an existence that denied the value of housework or child care, but which was valorized as fulfilling and necessary moral labor for women. While labor and work were valorized discourses of the Industrial Revolution, the eighteenth-century pastoral Arcadia of idle shepherds and shepherdesses portrayed values that the poor must not be taught, and was perceived, by the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as either an "idealizing falsification" or an idea "dangerously radical."
This discourse of "home," of domesticity, of beauty, however, played differently within the colonial context of India, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, when colonial rule became more authoritarian and Indian nationalism was growing to become a powerful force. For instance, in India the English memsahib is seen as idle, useless, and too free in her associations with men; the Indian nationalists construct the Indian woman, a reconstruction of a middle-class Victorian woman, as the moral and spiritual opposite of the Englishwoman. Many Indians, especially those with an English education, used Victorian values to suggest Indian women as morally and spiritually superior and thus the proper symbol of "home." Consequently, "home" became a space that was deployed variously by multiple agents, though the usages were linked through colonial education. For the Indians, what colonial discourse termed the harem, a space of opacity, became then home, a reconstituted Victorian space that was transparent in its clear manifestation of moral virtues as symbolized by Indian middle-class women.
In England, it was because of a tension between a mythic harmony and working-class unrest, between the threat and the domination of the unknown, that transparency, as the visibility of what lay underneath, or the matching of surface with depth, became an important cause of beauty in the nineteenth century. Though obscurity and mystery were sought after, for instance, by travelers in search of the exotic, these did not constitute the aesthetic of beauty, for beauty was the result of clarity and the opposite of the opacity of the exotic. Jean Starobinski's account of the Rousseauist dream of the transparent society explains what Foucault reads as the fear of darkened spaces, of the pall of gloom that prevents the full visibility of things, which appeared in the aesthetic of the Gothic. Foucault sees the landscapes of Ann Radcliffe's novels, which were composed of mountains, forests, caves, ruined castles, and dark convents, as the "imaginary spaces [which] are like the negative of the transparency and visibility which it is aimed to establish." The nationalist dream is the dream of transparency, one that English writers like Dickens and Wordsworth and landscape artists like John Constable represented in their works.
Gothic opacity, as the darkness of the prerevolutionary era, was both perceived in and sustained by travel and exploration, for it was recuperated in the representations by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travelers of regions and cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. What became known as the "East," in particular, which mostly comprised Asia, was depicted as this area of darkness not only because it was unknown and perceived as mysterious, but also because it was believed that these lands were ruled by a despotism equivalent to that which had been removed in Europe, a darkness Foucault describes as that of the "unlit chambers where arbitrary political acts, monarchical caprice, religious superstitions, tyrannical and priestly plots, epidemics and illusions of ignorance were fomented." The complement to this fear of opacity is Bentham's panopticon, this instrument that would enable society to become transparent. The panopticon was thus the reversal of the dungeon; it was the metaphoric opposite of the harem where the principle of visibility governed technologies of power.
The Eighteenth Century in England: Gender, Physiognomy, and the Feminine Aesthetic
For writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, what was beautiful was the Rousseauist dream of a transparent civil society with the perfect social contract, where homogeneity was the predominant trait ensuring knowledge, a single will, and a disciplined populace. Here democracy and equality were present only because everybody was like everybody else and people saw into each other's hearts. In England the fear of a revolution underwrote such a desire, taking shape as an upper-class attempt to see harmony in the land while maintaining class distinctions and upholding a patriarchal culture.
The desire for transparency was clearly visible in conceptualizations of women, in which the supposed opacity of female nature was to be understood. Writers such as Burke and Ruskin saw beauty only in the face of a woman. With the interest in physiognomy, the face became an indication of inner qualities. Within such an aesthetic, blackness as a racial category became associated with opacity, fear, and horror, and features could be read as analogous to moral characteristics. As Jeanne Fahnestock suggests, the face was believed to be an accurate mirror of the character, for the woman with irregular features was believed capable of irregular conduct. Perfection of a feature became a sign of perfection of a quality. Thus in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, published in 1875, we are to of Hatty Carbury that "her face was a true index of her character."
With such knowledge, the fallen woman's degradation is visible on the face. Louis Enault, a French visitor to London, shows the influence of physiognomy when he says of the prostitutes in London: "their hideous features, objects of horror and disgust, bear the trace of their depravity and degradation." The attempt to hide was therefore a sign of immorality. Artifice and makeup become the trademarks of the prostitute, who must hide the depravity written on her face. Makeup symbolized an opacity that was to be found only in the prostitutes and, in some nineteenth-century travel narratives, on oriental women. The "curled and painted" prostitute, so frequently written about in the literature of the London poor by writers such as Henry Mayhew and William Acton, was presented as a contrast to the visibly virtuous bourgeois woman.
In all these aesthetic discourses, perfection of features was described often as "classical" and "regular," and perfection implied, as in Burke, that the moral virtues were visible on the face. Physiognomy, or the practice of seeing qualities of character on the face, indicated the knowledge and power of the viewer who could scan the inside from the outside and the alignment of inside with outside. It was thus a discourse of knowledge as power. Yet while emphasis remained on the moral virtues as a component of beauty and the insistence on transparency as the visibility of the virtues on the face, physiognomy also illustrated that all faces could be read: the virtuous and the imperfect. Nothing could remain hidden, for the science of physiognomy had provided the power to remove the darkness of mystery. Transparency no longer meant only the harmony of inside with outside, for it also implied what had been discovered and was open to knowledge. Implicitly, without this physiognomic discourse, the harmony of virtue and features could not be known. Consequently, in the nineteenth century, where the divisions of class remained along with the desire for harmony, the pursuit of knowledge of the female sex as well as classes and populations became predominant in the attempt to conceive of England as a unified community that comprised a nation.
In discourses of the aesthetic of the nation, the debate whether England could be described as beautiful or picturesque presented two different views of the condition of England. Whereas those claiming that the beautiful, which implied order and hierarchy, best represented England, those arguing for the picturesque believed that variety was necessary for a pleasing aesthetic. Such debates in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth were part of the upheaval caused in Europe by the events leading up to the French Revolution and its aftermath.
The aesthetic of the beautiful was implicated in very many discourses, all of which were governed by the politics of transparency and opacity, of knowledge and darkness, that indicated a wish to establish a homogeneous populace in England and a known, un-threatening one in the colonies. Romantic and Victorian ideas of beauty owe much to Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Burke's taxonomy, published in 1764, was the result of a felt need to bring an exactness to aesthetics, and to inscribe an aesthetic status quo that could teach taste and judgment to the upper classes. He saw the necessity for maintaining the superiority of the ruling classes before the "swinish multitude," which might wish for a revolution. Burke's Enquiry suggests the fashioning of an English social order that by a taxonomy of aesthetic responses resists any revolutionary upheavals. He saw the increasing poverty of the laboring poor by the end of the eighteenth century as a natural corollary to the industrial expansion of Britain. As he remarked, "the laws of commerce are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God." Poverty was thus naturalized and considered the proper order of things. Believing in the principle of free trade, Burke saw the hardships in the life of the poor as temporary and an exception and thought that it was not governmental interference but charity that could be of help. He had what Eric Hobsbawm calls "a frankly irrationalist belief in the virtues of tradition, continuity and slow organic growth." This anxiety about any upheaval was a result of working-class unrest and emerged from a desire for a continuation of the traditional hierarchies of class and gender.
His definition of the beautiful, consequently, stressed order and submission. Whereas the sublime feeling of terror could be caused by seeing a black woman, beauty, the qualities of which were smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, and fairness, caused the "social quality" of love and affection. Burke argued that the origin of what he saw as the universal love for beauty was the love of society which was intrinsic to all mankind. He suggested that all mankind was agreed on what constitutes beauty; those who did not had either "vitiated palates" or had acquired an "unnatural" relish opposed to what was "natural." Here he naturalized both the taste for beauty as well as the term society as he had naturalized poverty, assuming that upper-class culture and taste were "natural" and universal and thereby normalizing them.
In this universal aesthetic, Burke saw beauty as a feminine quality, yet one that was racialized because it could not belong to a woman who was not white. He suggested that the beautiful was that which was small, "because we love what submits to us" (113). It came, he claimed, from the "softer virtues" (110). It was the weakness of women that Burke defined as beauty, saying that "Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty" (204), and "an air of robustness and strength is prejudicial to beauty" (218); thus those bodies that were "pleasant to the touch, are so by the slightness of the resistance they make" (229). Formulating a gendered opposition of the sublime and the beautiful, Burke pointed out that people admire "great" objects and submit to them, whereas they love "what submits to them" (212). Beauty was a restful and "amiable" quality, marked by the "softer virtues such as easiness of temper, compassion, kindness and liberality" (205).
Smooth bodies, weak bodies, a smooth bed, fragile flowers, a dove: these were Burke's examples of beautiful objects. In Burke's taxonomy all these qualities of beauty were available in one object: a white woman. A black woman could not be beautiful because she could only arouse a feeling of terror and would therefore be in the category of the sublime. Burke cites the case of a boy who was cured of his blindness and was made uneasy by black objects and was "struck with great horror" at seeing a black woman. Furthermore, a beautiful woman belonged to home and offered relaxation and not the exercise of lustful passion. Burke effectively showed beauty as a quality that could only belong to the upper classes, since no woman who worked in the fields, the factories, or in the domestic space could possibly have the softness and smoothness ascribed to beautiful women; it was only the aristocratic woman whose idle life enabled the cultivation of such qualities.
This feminized beauty was also moral. The eye that was termed beautiful in a woman should be, according to Burke, clear and transparent: like diamonds, clear water, glass. His analogies suggest that the inner moral qualities must match the externals. Using physiognomic discourse, Burke implied that a beautiful woman was one whose moral qualities, which promoted the love and preservation of society and which included submission, weakness, and dependence, appeared on her face. By using glass as an example of transparency and beauty, he insisted that the outer form would necessarily mirror the inner. A woman who lacked virtue would be ugly or deformed. Thus he said, "the face must be expressive of such gentle and amiable qualities, as correspond with the softness, smoothness and delicacy of the outer form" (118), and the eye "is expressive of some qualities of the mind" (225). And since the moral and the physical must be in harmony, beauty implied "union with neighboring parts" (118). The aesthetic of beauty, therefore, attempted to put the realm of Englishwomen in order, for it implied that no woman who was beautiful could be mysterious or deceitful or possess faults that she wanted to hide.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Home and Harem by Inderpal Grewal. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
I ENGLISH IMPERIAL CULTURE
1. Home and Harem: Domesticity, Gender, and Nationalism
2. Empire and the Movement for Women's Suffrage in Britain
3. The Guidebook and the Museum
II EUROIMPERIAL TRAVEL AND INDIAN WOMEN
4. The Culture of Travel and the Gendering of Colonial Modernity in Nineteenth- Century India
5. Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale: Homes for Women, Feminism, and Nationalism
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index