Sydney owenson's wild indian girl

Abstract

In 1811, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) published a novel set in India, The Missionary: An Indian Tale, arguably the first Irish Orientalist text. If, as Madeline Dobie has recently argued, the discourse of Orientalism in France was used to avoid moral questions about colonialism and slavery, Owenson used the genre in order to confront the brutalities of British colonialism. Owenson's intertextuality drew on not only other works about the east, but also her own literary productions and experience of authorship as an Irish woman of undistinguished background performing for an imperial audience. As she did in The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, her first publishing success, in The Missionary Owenson exploits just those equivalences imperialism posits among its peripheries. This essay examines The Missionary's intervallic position between the Irish novels The Wild Irish Girl and O’Donnel, and its possible role in the oft-noted shift in Owenson's practice of textualist history.

Notes

 Joseph Lew, “Sydney Owenson and the Fate of Empire,” Keats–Shelley Journal (1990): 48.

 A first volume appeared in 1810, but Owenson, always ready to wrangle with her publishers, was unhappy with Phillips's terms. Phillips, who had published The Wild Irish Girl as well as other earlier novels of Owenson's, halted proceedings and Owenson found another publisher for The Missionary. See Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (Surrey: Pandora Press, 1988), 105–7. See also, Lionel Stevenson, The Wild Irish Girl: The Life of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (1776–1859) (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 130.

 James Newcomer, Lady Morgan the Novelist (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 31.

 Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

 Quoted in Stevenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 104–5.

 Ibid., 106–7.

 Ibid., 107.

 Natasha Tessone, “Displaying Ireland: Sydney Owenson and the Politics of Spectacular Antiquarianism,” Éire-Ireland 37(4) (2002): 172.

 Ibid., 176.

 See Ibid. Also see Claire Connolly, “The Politics of Love in The Wild Irish Girl,” in The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000); Ina Ferris, “Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15 (1996): 287–303; Joep Leerssen, “How The Wild Irish Girl Made Ireland Romantic,” Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-Irish Letters 18 (1988): 209–27; Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Julia Wright, “Introduction,” in The Missionary: An Indian Tale, ed. Julia Wright (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002).

 Wright, “Introduction,” 15.

 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 166.

 Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29.

 Balachandra Rajan, “Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1996), 154.

 Ferris, The Romantic National Tale.

 Lady Sydney (Owenson) Morgan, The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (London: Pandora Books, 1998), 97.

 Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 46–7.

 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

 Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives, Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 82.

 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111.

 While Owenson's Western, Jacobin perspective may not ultimately share much with Ashis Nandy's controversial claims for sati's transgressive content, both writers rely on a similarly politically valenced recognition of women as the grounds and signs of colonial struggle. See Ashis Nandy, “Sati as Profit vs. Sati as a Spectacle: The Public Debate on Roop Karwan's Death,” in Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India, ed. John Stratton Hawley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13–159.

 Daniel J. O’Quinn, introduction to The Containment and Redeployment of English India, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, November 2000, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/.

 Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, 19.

 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 27.

 Lew, “Sydney Owenson and the Fate of Empire,” 44.

 Morgan, The Missionary, 241.

 Rajan, “Feminizing the Feminine,” 154.

 Ibid., 166.

 Siraj Ahmed, “‘An Unlimited Intercourse’: Historical Contradictions and Imperial Romance in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Containment and Redeployment of English India, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, November 2000, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/.

 John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 249.

 Rajan, “Feminizing the Feminine,” 152.