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Abstract
Using early-twentieth-century Anglo-Indian female novelist Maud Diver's romances, this project analyzes the intersections of discourses of genre, feminism, and colonialism, which were circulating in England and Anglo-India at the end of the nineteenth century. My overall argument is two-fold. One, Diver's romances contained multiple contemporary discourses of gender, science, and justifications for colonial rule in British India, and the articulation of these discourses through the plot structures and character development in the narratives made them rich, complex literary products. Two, even though the romances did overtly espouse a position supporting colonial patriarchy, the various discourses inscribed in them both colluded and conflicted with each other. This undermined the overtly pro-colonial message in the texts and prevented the romances from acting as simple cultural vehicles of colonial indoctrination.
In looking at the interaction, collusion, and clash of various late-Victorian discourses as articulated in these romances, my dissertation shows how the narratives both supported and undermined conservative arguments on issues of gender, genre, and colonial rule. Through these narratives, I argue, Diver reworked the genre to develop female Anglo-Indian romances, rendering the form suitable for narratives that placed Anglo-Indian women squarely in empire and justified their roles and presence in the colony. These romances made a case for the presence of Anglo-Indian women in empire and for the relevance of their contribution to it in both domestic and public spheres. Ideal Anglo-Indian women were represented as active agents of empire who were competent in domestic and public roles, and committed to colonialism in its racist and traditionally gendered formulations.
Simultaneously, however, the presence of the various discourses lent to the romances a multiplicity of voices, which undermined the attempted coherence of colonial discourse and negated the possibility of their articulating a solitary, unproblematically anti-woman, anti-Indian, pro-colonial message. Thus Diver's romances, I show, while overtly disseminating an anti-feminist, imperialist rhetoric, often ended up resisting and undermining such rhetoric in subtle and covert, if unintended ways.
