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THE HAMILTON CASE (2003) BY MICHEL LE DE KRETSER and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006) by Yasmine Gooneratne are similar in their focus on the spectacle of colonial domesticity: the Victorian cult of femininity affecting women's identities in British Ceylon. They satirize the Victorian literature that is esteemed by this culture, examining the literature's construction and power as a force of imperialism. They parody the patriarchal tropes of femininity that dominated this genre, such as images of 'angelic women' and 'female monsters', which affected the identity of colonial women. De Kretser is particularly interested in the extremities of the angel/monster feminine dyad as developed in Romantic fiction, while Gooneratne is more concerned with the expression of Victorian domesticity and femininity in Ceylon. Gooneratne explores the attraction of this domestic ideal for elite Ceylonese girls and their families, while highlighting the problematic and limitations of this patriarchal and bourgeois ideology. She also critiques the culturally competing ideology of Buddhist domesticity, which is shown to be equally troublesome for girls and women. This chapter examines representations of problematic women's identities in these novels.
Romanticism and Domesticity
In Britons: Forging the Nation: 1707-1837, Linda Colley suggests that the Victorian cult of domesticity was directly influenced by the European Romantic movement, and that it was specifically connected to a Rousseauvian ideal of domesticity. Rousseau's Émile ou de l'éducation (1762), as Colley notes, "appeared in at least five different English-language editions before 1770."1 Its popularity was maintained in the Victorian era, where it had a profound influence on the gendering of education and domestic practice.
Rousseau's argument for 'domesticity' is that women have a duty of care, a duty to nurture and mother their children, which is vital for the well-being of a state. Rousseau contends that women of "society" have "despised their first responsibility," that they have "refused to nurse their own children" and entrusted them to "hired nurses."2 He accuses these women of acting as if they were the "mothers of a stranger's children, without the ties of nature," and insists that they are mostly interested in saving themselves "trouble."3 He rebukes their conduct further by suggesting that they are neglectful, that "there is no substitute for a mother's love," and that "hired nurses" are deficient. "How,"...