Masked Fictions: English Women Writers and the Narrative of Empire

Nalini Iyer, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between feminism and imperialism and suggests that men and women produced different narratives of Empire because their imperial experiences were different. Women's narratives of Empire are subversive because they claim territory for women through writing, which territory was culturally denied to them since imperial practice relegated women to domestic roles. Paradoxically, in claiming territory for themselves, women writers retained the illusion of English cultural superiority, thereby using their act of resistance to propagate patriarchal imperial ideology. In order to retain the integrity of their feminist ideology (i.e., to present feminism as a non-hegemonic discourse), some women writers are forced to mask or submerge their imperialist ideology in narratives that ostensibly deal with domestic issues. This paradox of resistance and complicity with patriarchal imperial ideology is examined in the writings of three women writers—Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and Doris Lessing—all of whom have been celebrated in academic circles a "feminist" writers. The chapter on Bronte examines her collaborative writing with her brother, Branwell, and argues that in her adult work, she displaces her imperialist ideology and presents her imperial narrative in the guise of a domestic one and consequently masks her imperialist ideology. This study presents Virginia Woolf's disguised commentary on imperialism as a means of retaining her readership and suggests that Woolf subverted the travel narrative to claim a place for the woman in English imperial history. Doris Lessing constantly battles with her conflicting ideology and attempts to reconcile ideological conflicts through experimentation in the form of the narrative. Her space fiction is a masked narrative of imperialism. This study does not attempt to undermine feminism nor try to be an apologia for English women writers; it simply explores the complexity of writing about self-empowerment in an imperialist culture.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Rowe, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

COinS