ABSTRACT
In Jane Eyre, the prospect of the eponymous heroine directly partaking in the ‘civilizing’ mission and religious conversion of India is understood, within the overriding logic of the text’s marriage plot, as an irrevocable step towards certain death. Brontë construes Jane Eyre’s English identity in terms of optimal usefulness, envisaging a desired English womanhood rooted in complete physical disengagement from the colonial project. Such an isolationist model of national and imperial subjectivity for women in the metropole has as its ostensibly oppositional complement the historical experiences and textual labour of other women more actively engaged or more overtly interested in the business of empire. Emily Eden’s Up the Country (1866) and Harriet Martineau’s British Rule in India (1857) represent performances of Englishness by two nineteenth-century women writers wrestling more intimately with the British presence in India. This is not to say, however, that the imperially reluctant and strategically self-effacing Englishwoman that Jane Eyre epitomizes disappears completely from their textual performances. Rather, the challenge to these writers might be said to consist of finding the representational equilibrium between rhetorical detachment and colonial involvement. It is a balancing act that forms the discursive crux of what it means to be English in both texts. This chapter is concerned with exploring the ways in which English identity is made in India: how Emily Eden and Harriet Martineau, in their self-consciously styled positions as witnesses to colonial history-in-the-making, negotiate the imperatives of national belonging, imperial duty and narrative authority in their writing about India, that putative Jewel in the Crown. In performing Englishness, both writers constantly skirt the border between a self-possession borne of ‘knowledge’ and clear insight into England’s role in India, and an uncertainty about colonial involvement indissociable from guilt about its historical effects. Through their use of visual tropes and specific narrative strategies, they disclose, in the course of their respective performances, the masochistic or double nature of colonial power that blends both culpability and desire.
