New Literary History

In a recent article entitled “The Iconographies of Sati,” ¹ Paul B. Courtright proposed three schemata of interpretation of that most disturbing Indian practice of a wife’s self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre: ² (a) the religious iconography of the sati whose blessings ensure fertility for her devotees; (b) the colonial scenario of the bigoted yet heroic widow forced on the pyre by the superstitious doctrines and demonic machinations of the Brahmin priests; and (c) the present-day feminist iconography of the practice of suttee in which the deification of satis serves as a screen for the material greed of both priests and the women’s families. ³ Another essay in the same volume, Dorothy M. Figueira’s “Die flambierte Frau,” complements Courtright’s three schemata by an additional European scenario which flourished in German and French poetry, prose, and opera during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ⁴ Unlike the use of suttee as a motif in British literature, where it is extremely rare before the late nineteenth century, these noncolonial European deployments of suttee are clearly exoticist and document Western clichés, fantasies, and obsessions rather than providing factual information about the Indian custom itself. ⁵ Indeed, the suttee love tragedy has been tailored to fit traditional Western conceptions of heroic death and saintly womanhood, symbolizing the sublimation of erotic impulse. The German and French scenario deploys, for instance, the cliché of the prostitute whose repentance and martyr-like love-sacrifice convert her into a saint (a motif that, in the figure of the fallen woman, will haunt much Victorian prose) and glorifies satis’ death as Liebestod. Thus, the German and French treatments of suttee, particularly in the melodramatic operatic versions that Figueira discusses, can be traced back to the quasi-religious portrayal of (sublimated) love, a tradition that extends from the chivalric medieval formula to Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. ⁶

In this article, which is written from a nonspecialist position, I want to consider early nineteenth-century British depictions of suttee as determined by English literary traditions which have, as I will argue, decisively [End Page 411] influenced the “colonial iconography” (Courtright’s term) of self-immolation. I will compare the discourse about suttee with two prominent literary traditions: the representation of martyrdom, and the aesthetics of the sublime. Accounts of suttee, first, relate to the Elizabethan tradition of hagiography, much of which is filled with detailed accounts of Catholics and Protestants bravely meeting their death at the stake. There are obvious parallels between the Liebestod motif and the heroics of martyrdom; however, the aspect that will concern me most is that of the representational choices and of the selectivity brought to bear upon the hagiographic material by the standard British literature on the subject. My second line of approach, which likewise concentrates on representational issues, involves the aesthetics of the sublime. I will argue that the bulk of British representations of suttee can be classified as an exoticist watered-down version of the generic features prominent in the eighteenth-century literary traditions of the Burkean sublime with some affinities to the sentimental novel. As has been noted by Rajan and Sabin, ⁷ the figure of the British officer in accounts of suttee recalls that of a would-be knight of honor come to rescue the virtuous maiden in distress. In the reality of the historical documents, on the contrary, one encounters no British heroes; British witnesses mostly engage in merely halfhearted and futile verbal interventions. More frequently the British spectator does not even attempt interference. The British witness therefore resembles less the chivalrous knight of honor than the sentimental hero whose ineffectual emotional involvement in the misery with which he is confronted renders him a laughingstock and, from a latter-day perspective, makes him subject to moral reproach and condemnation. ⁸ Even more centrally, witness accounts deploy the Burkean analysis of the sublime, which makes a stunning reappearance in representations of suttee, particularly in the prevalent evocation of the “horrors” of the scene. Moreover, the emotional reaction of the British bystander can be argued to reflect...