Abstract
Colonial women’s morality came under serious scrutiny in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the aftermath of the 1857 uprisings. At this time, the sexual purity of English women was seen as a key part of Britain’s national identity and in this context, private matters such as concerning sex and sexuality became a matter of public concern. As Nancy Paxton argues, imperial ideals refracted ideas about sexual propriety and reconstituted gender and sexuality in the service of the Raj (Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, p. 110). Sexual relations that did not contribute to the building of a future generation of empire builders were fervently criticized. Yet, women’s memoirs delight in revealing salacious stories about other women. Lady Dufferin, Lady Curzon, Mrs Paget, Florence Marryat all enjoy telling tales of indecent behaviour which they then moralize about. While such narratives serve as evidence of the writers’ own upstanding virtue, imperial women’s recognition of the sexual activities and desires of their peers created a space where women began to contest the ideal of the pure and passive virginal woman.
[I]f my Gossip can lay no claim to being considered either instructive or amusing, it may at least be passed, by those who have honoured me with their attention, as harmless. (Florence Marryat, Gup: Sketches of Anglo-Indian Life and Character, p. 284)
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Notes
- 1.
Angelia Poon, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), p. 31.
- 2.
These women are the subject of a recent book by Anne De Courcy: The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012).
- 3.
Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. xvii.
- 4.
The intense scrutiny of female sexuality is discussed in detail by Philippa Levine in Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Nancy L. Paxton in Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
- 5.
Lady Caroline Mary Minto, My Indian Journal, 6 vols. (Calcutta: n.p., 1905–10), 2: 35.
- 6.
Minto, My Indian Journal, 2: 42.
- 7.
Minto, My Indian Journal, 2: 43.
- 8.
Minto, My Indian Journal, 2: 43.
- 9.
For a more detailed discussion of the gradual regulation of mixed-race relations, see Anne De Courcy, The Fishing Fleet and Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 10.
Levine states that a system of concubinage continued for some time. See, Gender and Empire, p. 138.
- 11.
Georgiana Theodosia Fitzmoor-Halsey Paget, Camp and Cantonment: A Journal of Life in India in 1857–59, With Some Account of the Way Thither (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), p. 105.
- 12.
Paget, Camp and Cantonment, p. 105.
- 13.
Levine, Gender and Empire, p. 140.
- 14.
Levine, Gender and Empire, p. 154.
- 15.
These figures are taken from Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (London: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 178.
- 16.
W. R. Greg outlines this view in Why are Women Redundant? (London: N. Trübner and Co., 1869).
- 17.
De Courcy, The Fishing Fleet, p. 2.
- 18.
For a detailed discussion of the floating brothels, see Siân Rees, The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts (London: Headline, 2001).
- 19.
Mary Curzon, Lady Curzon’s India: Letters of a Vicereine, ed. John Bradley (New York: Beaufort Publishers, 1986), p. 69.
- 20.
Marryat, Gup, p. 18.
- 21.
Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India, (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1909), p. 26.
- 22.
Marryat, Gup, p. 10.
- 23.
Marryat, Gup, p. 11.
- 24.
Lutyens, Mary. The Lyttons in India: An Account of Lord Lytton’s Viceroyalty, 1876–1880 (London: John Murray, 1979), p. 105.
- 25.
Poon, Enacting Englishness, p. 33.
- 26.
For a detailed discussion, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 8.
- 27.
For a detailed discussion of this orientalist art and literature, see Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, p. 24.
- 28.
Marryat, Gup, p. 39.
- 29.
Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, p. 6.
- 30.
Levine, Gender and Empire, p. 134.
- 31.
This story appears in Hariot Dufferin’s Ten Printed Journals, 1884–88, Dufferin and Ava Papers (Public Records Office of Northern Ireland), 1: 58.
- 32.
Dufferin, Ten Printed Journals, 1: 58.
- 33.
Dufferin, Ten Printed Journals, 3: 168.
- 34.
Dufferin, Ten Printed Journals, 3: 168.
- 35.
Curzon, Lady Curzon’s India, p. 31.
- 36.
It must be acknowledged that romantic liaisons between Viceregal family members and members of the household were not entirely uncommon: Lord Elgin’s daughter also married an ADC.
- 37.
This story appears in Lady Dufferin’s journals, but does not appear in her published volumes. See Dufferin, Ten Printed Journals, 3: 175.
- 38.
Marryat, Gup, p. 38.
- 39.
Diver, The Englishwoman in India, p. 86.
- 40.
Diver, The Englishwoman in India, p. 26.
- 41.
Marianne North, Letter to Burnell, 17 July 1878. Papers of Marianne North. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Library and Archives. RM2.
- 42.
For a detailed discussion of North’s displacement of sexual desire, see Éadaoin Agnew, ‘“An Old Vagabond”: Science and Sexuality in Marianne North’s Representations of India.’ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 7.2 (2011): 1–19. http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue72/New%20PDFs/NCGS%20Journal%20Issue%207.2%20-%20An%20Old%20Vagabond%20-%20Eadaoin%20Agnew.pdf.
- 43.
Antoinette Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and The Indian Woman. 1865–1915’ in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, eds. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 141.
- 44.
Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden’, pp. 142–3.
- 45.
Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden’, p. 139.
- 46.
Burton, The White Woman’s Burden’, p. 143.
- 47.
Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katharine C. Bushnell, The Queen’s Daughters in India (London: Morgan and Scott, 1899), p. 13.
- 48.
Andrew and Bushnell, The Queen’s Daughters, pp. 15–16.
- 49.
Andrew and Bushnell, The Queen’s Daughters, p. 20.
- 50.
Andrew and Bushnell, The Queen’s Daughters, p. 101.
- 51.
Pandita Ramabai, Pandita Ramabai: Through her Own Words, ed. Meera Kosambi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 271.
- 52.
For a detailed discussion, see Levine, Gender and Empire, p. 134.
Bibliography
Morgan, Lady Sydney. The Missionary: An Indian Tale (3 vols.). London: J. J. Stockdale, 1811.
Taylor, Philip Meadows. Tara: A Mahratta Tale. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1863.
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Agnew, É. (2017). Hot Gossip: Sex and Sexuality in Victorian India. In: Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India . Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33195-9_6
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