Colonialism in Victorian English literature, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Colonialism in Victorian English literature e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! LETTERATURA INGLESE II COLONIALISM IN VICTORIAN ENGLISH LITERATURE The Victorian period, in British history, is the highest point of British imperialism. During the nineteenth century Britain, not only consolidated its existing empire, but also experienced an expansion in its colonial possession. This process started in 1857 in India and continued through Africa in the late 1800s, so that at the end of the century it could be proclaimed that “the sun never sets on the British Empire”. The growth of the imperial activity, during the nineteenth century had a pervasive impact on British culture. Also the literature of the period was involved in the imperialist project. It was, in fact, shaped by the influence of the colonial ideology. This influence is evident in the colonial novels of writers like H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. These novels were usually set in distant lands that Britain colonized and attempt to expose the insular domestic public to the exotic strangerness of their country’s colonial possessions. The reality of colonialism enters these texts as the necessary background that makes possible the adventure or romance. In some other novels, colonial ideology appears as a framework that provides the raison d’ être of the action. The impact of the colonialism is not restricted to the colonial novels. The nineteenth century’s dominant genre of DOMESTIC FICTION is also implicitly informed by colonial ideology. Though the novels of writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brönte, Charles Dickens and George Eliot focus on DOMESTIC BRITISH SOCIETY, Britain’s overseas possessions play an important role in the action. Colonialism thus provides an expanded canvas which reveals the involvement of domestic british society in the colonial enterprise. It is only in the latter half of the twentieth century (post-colonial period) that critics have explored the influence of colonial ideology throughout nineteenth century British society. Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1978) is a seminal work which provides an exhaustive analysis of the West’s constructio of the Orient as its “other”. This construction is not motivated by any desire to represent the reality of the colonized cultures and their people. It works as a sort of ideological control, allowing the West to create a series of Manichean oppositions between the colonizer and the colonized that makes the latter manageable, and provide a moral justification for colonial enterprise. Feminist post-colonial critics, like Gayatri Spivak and Jenny Sharpe, analyzed the relationship between colonial ideology and the growth of British feminism in Victorian England. Similarly, colonial ideology is also seen to have an impact on the representation of domestic class relations, whereby the lower classes are frequently portrayed as internal “others” who share the characteristics of the colonized. The postcolonial critics reveal also the complexities of colonialism and its multi-faced influence on Victorian society and literature. SUSANNE HOWE [Here Howe explores the conditions of men and women in India in Victorian novels, focusing on the representation of WOMEN, YOUNGER SONS, MISSIONARIES, AND ANGLO-INDIANS] ANGLO-INDIANS We should not believe that novels about India have always been peopled with psychoneurotics. There were many happy years before the middle of the 19th century. We may return to those days for a while and see how the Anglo- Indian stories fitted in the well-established pattern of the English novel. The novelists had 30 or 40 “quiet” years of the earlier 19th century in which they needed to be conscious of India. No one needed to be uncomfortably of her as a problem. If we may believe the novelists, the apathy and ignorance about India prevailing at home are the despair of soldiers and civilians alike. Many distinguished Governors-General (Wellesley, Hastings, Bentinck etc.) took over India from the East India Company in 1858. We hear about them in novels of later date. But at the time during which they were establishing “subordinate cooperation” among the native states, or fighting the first Afghan and Sikh Wars, or suppressing the Thugs (=members of an organization of robbers and assassins in India), no one at home or in India itself impelled to write a whole novel about India in terms of Anglo-Indian life and events. During these years, the trading monopolies and commercial privileges of the old East India Company were being swept away with each renewal of the Charter (a written constitution). Nabobs, Muslim officials and other arrivals from India, who flourished at the expense of the Company, continued to be props of the Minerva Press novelists into the 19th century. But these “old Indians” belong to a vanished 18th century and most readers have the impression that no one before Thackeray in interested in writing about their successors. Arnold, Lang, Cunningham and Kaye wrote about them too. These novelists knew a good deal more about India than Thackeray. The other novelists have their significance too, with the addition of being contemporary with the events and people they describe. It’s a mistake to think about Thackeray as the only creator of the Anglo-Indian figures of the early and mid-century. EDUCATION: among 5 or 6 kinds of novels in vogue during these years, the didactic and pedagogic books, written partly for and partly about children, were easily distinguishable. Mrs. Barbauld, Hanna More, Mrs. Trimmer, Maria Edgeworth, Mrs. Sherwood, and other women wrote them. These tract-like stories seem to have been the almost exclusive territory of the evangelical woman writer. The evangelicals were beginning to form the moral attitude of a new Victorian world in which the middle class was to legislate on matters of conduct. It was to decree standards of behaviour more decorous than the rowdy manners of the 18th century world. Since children and their training are important to establish a new order, juvenile reading formed a special concern for the Evangelical mind, and ushered what might be called “The Century of the Child”. In this evangelical fortifying of national morals, Mrs. Sherwood and India played an important part. She worked as a missionary for educational kind in the Province of Delhi. She wrote fables with a strong Sunday School flavour. Thanks to such missionary pieces as these the foundations of Empire were being laid. They fitted in with the current taste for the pedagogic and didactic and moralistic tone in fiction, and used the Indian scene to lend novelty to the lessons of missionary. Mrs. Sherwood wished little English children to think of converting the heathen in India as an admirable lifework. Her English readers might as well learn some of the Hindostani words most commonly in use. She translated each ones in a footnote at the bottom of the page. She was much celebrated in Calcutta because new arrivals from England had heard much of “Little Henry”. The English version was brought to Calcutta by the wife of a baptist missionary, and the little volume passed from hand to hand in the small religious society there. She wrote in 1825 another story of the Indian scene, “The Lady of the Manor”, which is a novel of purpose, a species of conduct-and-etiquette book. It delivers lessons regarding the behaviour of young English ladies who come out to the east. LADIES The problem of the Englishwoman in India fascinated every novelist who wrote about that country. These improving writers posed certain questions about the disintegration of the female character and personality in hot climates. At first, the ladies in exile are passive, unresisting victims of bad example and bad climate. They stop dressing for dinner, they give up their music, needlework, and water colours. If they were frivolous at home, they became doubly so in India. By the fifties, women were often pictured as ruthless little husband-hunters, flirts, and jilts (=civette). Life in India for them is both boring and dangerous. Their husbands are away for long periods of time. Trevelyan thinks that India, for ladies, is unbearable. Because of the climate, they must spend the hours, from 8 to 5, indoors. He also assume that only a very brave or a very stupid woman can endure India for long without suffering in mind, health and torture. If a lady become dowdy (=sciatta), it is all up with her. YOUNGER SONS Here we have the classic problem. What to do with too many younger sons? India, in many cases, became the solution. Younger sons are often the heroes of novels about India. They couldn’t inherit (=ereditare) the land, and it was getting more and more difficult to place them well at home and more and more expensive to train them for professions. So, in early 19th century novels, they are often traders and adventurers. Toward the middle of the century they begin to be “competition-wallahs”= young hopefuls of a rejuvenated and democratized Indian Civil Service. Another new system was placing many younger sons as District Officers in the 50s. Some D.O.’s appears in Hunter’s “The Old Missionary”. This was published in 1897, but it is set in the fifties after the Mutiny. In fact those D.O.s did not become heroes or martyrs. The problem of the younger sons takes less importance comparing with the problem of racial mistrust and misunderstanding. For sure, younger sons have their difficulties in English life and fiction through the 19th century. Their dilemmas are intensified by India. MISSIONARIES