'The Native Question': Genre, Gender, and Governance in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Abstract

As one of the writers in my project, Olive Schreiner, stated so plainly, “the native question is the real question.” What she meant — and what I examine in my dissertation — is that the pressing question for nineteenth-century writers was both the past treatment of Indigenous peoples and the future of settler and imperial states, from Canada to India to Australia and New Zealand. Drawing from insights in post-colonial theory and feminist literary criticism, I argue for reading nineteenth-century Anglophone women’s genre writing as inherently political. Though these women were often barred from political debates, I examine the genres in which women cloaked their political philosophy: romance novels, frontier memoirs, travel narratives, and Christian conversion stories. Simultaneously, I consider Indigenous writers to dislocate white writers as the sole narrators of colonialism in the nineteenth century. For example, in one chapter, I consider the Bengali writer and activist Swarnakumari Devi, who is now considered one of the leading women intellectuals of nineteenth-century British India. Her writing, however, was not then and is not now seen as intervening in broader political debates about the future of the Indian subcontinent. I argue, however, that her novel The Fatal Garland advocates a pan-ethnic Indian solidarity as the only political counterweight to British governance. Even contemporary critics often value her more for what she represents than what she actually said. One of my goals in this project is not only to recuperate women writers from historical footnotes into serious subjects of sustained, literary critical study but also to emphasize new modes of understanding history that come into view only by taking into account these little-known and often disregarded works.