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GLOBAL VICTORIANS, Gikandi, Exploring Identity Through Horror, Satirizing…

- - - - Christopher Herbert, "Introduction" to *War of No Pity:"From 1857-1859" The Sepoy Rebellion indicates India’s dissatisfaction with British colonial rule. Historians have rewritten the narrative of the Sepoy Rebellion, suggesting that Victorians demonized the Indian soldiers. Herbert challenges the conventional wisdom and draws attention to the fact that Victorian leaders viewed the rebellion as a moral failing, questioning the benevolence of imperial rule and pursuing a new imperialist strategy of inclusion and paternalism.
        
        New Imperialism
        
        Nathan Hensley, “Empire:” “Britain’s imperial project was marked at every turn by resistance, negotiation, and what seemed, from the point of view of imperialists, like failure.”
        
        William Howard Russell “From my Diary in India, in the year 1858-9:"
        Russell visits India and bemoans the “wickedness of the world.” He “debunks many of the most shocking rumors about the rape, torture, and killing of British people and criticized the cruelty of indiscriminate British reprisal.”
        
        Strengthening Colony-Empire Relationship
        
        Strengthening through Art
        
        The Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1866
        
        “The Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886” was “was intended to provide ocular proof of the “commercial wealth and power of England beyond the seas” (Peripatetic 511), the “solidarity of a world-wide Empire, its unity of interest, and its manifold resources” (“Colonial and Indian,” Saturday Review).” (Aviva Briedel).
        
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        The Pall Mall Gazette: The exhibit features a “jungle display with wild beasts and birds of India,” “colours dear to the oriental mind,” and a hodgepodge of various colonial cultures. In effect, the exhibit aggregates colonized peoples into one easily-identifiable “other” under the guise of unification.
        
        Strengthening through Writing
        
        Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen (Tennyson): At the opening of the exhibition, a poem by Tennyson attempts to convey a message of unity between the empire and its colonies. The poem promotes the idea of “one imperial whole,” and suggests that Britain and its colonies are united under “one flag/one fleet/one throne.”
        
        Kipling’s “Recessional” is similarly lofty in its goals of uniting the empire and carnivalesque in its grand display of British imperialism. The poem was written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (1897) and promotes the narrative of holism, suggesting that Britons can all claim a similar shared history of greatness. “Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!"
        
        shared history
        
        holism
        
        unity
  - - - Literature as propaganda
        
        The Dramatic Monologue: a narrative in which the author adopts the voice of a character other than themselves.**
        
        Melissa Valiska Gregory: "Race and the Dramatic Monologue
        
        White women have the tendency to “adopt the voices of people of color…By speaking not merely for but as the victims of slavery, white women poets could both heighten their social authority and showcase their mastery of the dramatic monologue’s dominant convention for other white authors.” At the cost of muting marginalized voices, the dramatic monologue allows the author to establish themselves as an agent of social change.
        
        The History of Mary Prince is a mediated text disseminated for purposes of propaganda. Without the ability to read or write, Mary Prince has no agency over her own narrative. Thus, it almost functions as a dramatic monologue, in which someone else is adopting her voice and telling traumatic stories for emotional impact. While the text includes footnotes with clear insertions of an outside voice, the selection of anecdotes featured in the narrative serve the purpose of mobilizing white Christian victorian readers to join the abolitionist cause.
        
        The Christian Triumph
        
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        "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"
        
        The poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning was originally published in a pro- abolitionist book called “The Liberty Bell.” The poem, written from the perspective of an enslaved woman, features a Black, enslaved mother killing her mixed race child. The unspeakable wrongs committed by the protagonist horrify Christian audiences, encouraging them to see the ways in which slavery corrupts their fellow Christians.
        
        Navigating the conventions of the dramatic monologue
        
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      - Art as Propaganda
        
        John Ruskin, "The Slave Ship"
        
        Ruskin’s description of the work praises the aesthetics of the piece, and the way in which Turner captures the wrongs of slav
        ery in the pen stroke. He describes the “guilty” ship’s “thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror.” Notably, Ruskin devotes little time to the victims of the massacre, focusing primarily on the aesthetics of the sky and ship.
        
        Fallacies of hope: Contesting narratives of abolition in Turner’s Slave Ship (Brace)
        
        White Victorians were generally appalled by this sequence of events, and “the abolitionists had scented a cause that they could make work for them.” The painting gives the reader “a way out [of the ineffable loss and trauma” through the narrative of humanitarian triumph and the moral certainties of abolition.” (444).
        
        Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (J.W.M. Turner):
        The painting depicts a combination of two events: the Zong massacre and a typhoon attacking a slave ship. The Zong Massacre, which occurred in 1781, consisted of the captain of a slave ship throwing enslaved people overboard and collecting $20 of insurance money for “damaged property.” The case went to court, and a judge ruled in favor of the captain. The painting was created almost half a century after the event, and serves the interests of Victorian audiences basking in the moral triumphs of abolition.
- - - - Kipling creates a set of instructions for Victorian men in the poem “If,” outlining precisely how to act as a noble steward of the empire. Kipling instructs men to be pragmatic/humble (“dream but don’t make dreams your master”), unaffected by failure (“never breathe a word about your loss”), and bold in their actions (“think and not make thoughts your aim”). He encourages men not to succumb to primal instinct, but to act with principle and prepare to defend their empire and its values.
      - The Man Who Would be King: The men featured in the story short by Kipling, Dravot and Carnehan, do not embody the ideal imperialist man as described in Kipling’s “If.” Instead, Carnehan and Dravot are “soft” and emotional in their desires for a wife. Additionally, Dravot begins to thirst for power, a virtue condemned by Kipling and one that ultimately leads to his downfall. At the conclusion of the story, both men die disgraced and unsuccessful in creating and maintaining an empire. The story serves as a warning against behaving unlike a noble, ideal imperial man.
    - - Weaponizing Femininity and Motherhood
        
        New Woman feminism advocates for women’s suffrage and inclusion in the public sphere. The New Woman valued education, behaved with courage and humility, and embraced motherhood as a means of strengthening the empire. Appendix B states that women should not wish to be men, nor should they “hold marriage and motherhood in contempt.” Instead, the New Woman recognized her role in the reproducing empirical structures of power.
        
        Eugenics
        
        Eugenics is an idea rooted in Social Darwinism that suggests a society must intervene in the reproduction of its population and “rationally select” its fittest members to reproduce. Galton, a famous proponent of eugenics, believed “ skilled professionals must manage reproduction in order to ensure that the ‘best’ people have the most offspring while the poor (or those referred to as the ‘feebleminded’) should be discouraged or even prevented from having children.” (Burdett). The idea that New Women were encouraged to embrace motherhood is rooted in eugenicist practices and the fear that the empire was weakened or vulnerable to moral corruption by foreigners.
        
        During the Victorian era, progressive women were prepared “to deny love rather than risk having a child with an unsuitable husband.” (Burdett)
        
        The Story of an African Farm features feminist protagonist Lyndall, who, when she falls pregnant, refuses to marry the father of her child because he is “unfit.” In the novel, Lyndall’s feminism is rooted in eugenics and ultimately serves the interests of the British empire. While Lyndall already gave birth to a child, the principle of abandoning love (and personal pleasure) for the sake of creating a “perfect” family fit for imperial leadership still represents the eugenicist principles of the movement. Lyndall says herself: “There was never a great man who had not a great mother” (160).
      - Appealing to Victorian Feminine Ideals
        
        A Special Nature in the Home
        
        The Victorian Age: During the Victorian era, women were believed to have a “special nature” for the home. Considered too fragile for the public sphere, the home provided not only a place of sacred refuge, but also an opportunity to develop and teach ethical morals to the children. While men were perceived as capable intellectual leaders and noble stewards of public influence, women were perceived as ethically “pure” and morally-virtuous.)
        
        The White Woman's Burden
        
        New Women Feminists adopt the “white feminist burden.” They “worked to identify themselves with national interest,” borrowing from the paternalistic rhetoric of the empire to advance their agenda and justify the crusade for women’s suffrage. New Women believed that as women, they could enlighten their “depraved Indian sisters” and aid the prosperity of the empire. Burdens of History, “Politics of Recovery”
        
        “The White Man’s Burden:” While the title of the White Man’s Burden appears to target a male audience, the poem effectively embraces and includes women in the imperialist cause. For example, the poem hails virtues of “patience” and calls upon Britons to save the colonial “half-child,” both of which appeal to women's role as the virtuous and ethical guiding force in the home.
        
        Implicit appeals
        
        reinforcement of gender roles
        
        purity
        
        moral virtue
        
        Angel of the home
  - - - Leaky Bodies
        
        Leslie Allin argues in “Leaky Bodies: Masculinity, Narrative, and Imperial Decay in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle” that the Beetle, who assaults male characters throughout the text, “underscores the leakiness of male bodies in order to pull apart traditional narratives of British manliness and male narratives about empire.” In other words, the permeabaility of the male body in the text represents the permeability of the empire, and the ways in which both internal threats(New Woman feminism) create fractures in the empire, making it vulnerable to and external threats, such as Egypt and colonial resistance.
      - Mesmerism
        
        Mesmerism and the trance-like state that the Beetle’s victims fall into represent the extent to which the horror genre allowed Marsh to explore the fear of an impressionable and broken empire. Roger Luckhurst, “Trance-Gothic”; Fred Botting, Gothic.
- - - - “I taught students that the Victorians didn’t think the same way about race, or other races, as we do today, and thus I was implying that nineteenth-century writers couldn’t know how wrong they were.” (731). (Betensky)
        
        Even when texts don’t centrally assault, condemn, or mock a marginalized identity, they often still include instances of racism. When contemporary readers struggle to navigate the offensive content of Victorian Literature, Betensky suggests interpreting the texts through a lens of “strategic presentism.” Strategic presentism is a productive way to interpret a text that neither accepts the racist incidents (and absolves Victorian writers of their wrongdoings) nor entirely discredits the intellectual and creative value of their work. While “presentism,” or assuming historical figures “didn’t know how wrong they were,” is typically seen as a negative concept that serves and privileges the contemporary speaker (“the speaker’s benefit”), strategic presentism allows readers to contextualize current issues of racism and bigotry to better understand its origins
- - - - Autoexoticism describes the a phenomenon in which a marginalized figure internalizes the xenophobia and racism of empire, and subsequently represents itself as the “exotic” other. “Autoexotic Literary Encounters…,” Fukuzawa. Conforming to the imperialist gaze, and appealing to the favored (racist) values of the empire, is one way of “performing Englishnesses.” This concept isn’t necessarily empowering, it isn’t necessarily disempowering either. In fact, some may autoexoticize themselves for monetary gain.
        
        Natsume’s “Tower of London” features a Japanese protagonist haunted by ghosts of traditional English culture. Natsume positions the protagonist on the periphery of English culture and essentially “does the work” of an Orientalist empire for free. While this reading is not the only interpretation of the text, it is certainly one worth considering.
        
        Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan plays a unique role in the canon, as though they are often read by Japanese students, they are written by a Greek-Irish author about a culture of which he is not a part. While Hearn is not himself Japanese, he dons the veil of Japanese culture and contributes to the auto-exoticism of Japanese texts.
        
        The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands: Being of both Scottish and Jamaican descent, nurse and shopkeeper Mary Seacole embraces her Scottish identity while disengaging with her Jamaican roots. In order to appeal to a wide audience and receive more financial compensation for her work, Seacole establishes her “good Scottish blood” on the first pages of the text. While this claim demonstrates a desire to assert whiteness and more closely align with white British culture, it also demonstrates the liminal space in which she occupies, as Scotland is technically also a colony of Britain. Englishness, and perhaps inadvertently distances Seacole from the identity she attempts to performa and embrace. Both intentionally and unintentionally Mary Seacole exoticizes herself in the text.
- - - - Baugmaree: features a distinctly non-English landscape, but references Christian concept, such as the Garden of Eden in the line “gaze and gaze on a primeval Eden.”
      - Our Casuarina Tree: This poem once again features a distinctly non-English landscape (the Casuarina tree) and conforms to Western tradition by including references to a serpent akin to the one featured in the biblical parable of Adam and Eve. Additionally, the emotive poem about love and longing imitates traditional emotional conventions of Western Romantics.
      - The Lotus: Features a protagonist who wishes to purchase a flower for their lover, but can’t decide between a red rose and a white lily. The character opts for a Lotus. The poem romantically blends the Western and Eastern traditions through floral symbols, representing a union between the traditional English rose and the Indian/Bengali lotus (which, while just as beautiful as the rose, is initially overlooked by the protagonist).