Mirrored images: England and India. Women's educational opportunities in literature, 1844–1898
Abstract
In this study, I explore how nineteenth-century women writers in India and England affected the public discourse on both domestic and imperial ideology by interweaving the ideas determining roles within the home with those maintaining the colonies. I examine the social and political ramifications of the changes in women's education following the Indian Uprising of 1857. It is my supposition that when the English had to reconsider their role in the colonies following the uprising, decisions made about women's education were part and parcel of decisions about colonial management. I investigate fiction and non-fiction written between 1844 and 1898 by English and Indian women writers. Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, Pandita Ramabai, and Tarabai Shinde used their non-fiction writing to explore history-making and to provide a viewpoint on the history of both women's education and the Indian Uprising of 1857 that was not a part of the public record. This study takes history-making further by exploring how history and social pedagogy work together in sensation fiction by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Krupa Satthianadhan, and Ellen Wood. Twentieth-century critics have been slow to realize the potential power of sensation fiction because of its reputation as “low art.” By juxtaposing this “low art” fiction with the “high art” of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Swarnakumari Devi, this project reveals the variety of strategies these authors employ. Reading Eliot, Gaskell, and Swarnakumari through the lens of social Darwinism provides a view into the process by which crumbling ideologies marshal this science to their aid. This study ends with the image of the woman's part of the home both in England and in India and argues that the multiple meanings of domestic—both of the home and of the home country—link domestic and imperial ideology. Women's access to education is limited by the many ways in which these two ideologies overlap.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Sagar, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Asian literature|Womens studies
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