Experimental Female Fictions; Or, The Brief Wondrous Life of the Nahḍa Sensation Story

Abstract

In this essay I argue that paying attention to the ephemeral genre of female sensation stories sheds insight on, and expands current understandings of, the many ways in which cultural production operated in the Arabic-speaking world during the nahḍa. Paying particular attention to two short stories in the genre, Adelaide Bustānī's ‘Henry wa Amelia’ (1870), and Labība Hāshim's ‘Ḥasanāt al-ḥubb’ (1899), I show how these texts produced and encoded a series of cultural values about male and female bodies, and how they participated in the ongoing cultural debates of that era. In particular, they seem to be preoccupied with two modern subject formations: the modern, middle-class female subject and the modern, middle-class reader. While the sensation genre is known for producing and reproducing textual and cultural anxieties before resolving them in a socially and culturally conservative manner, I argue that, despite their inherent conservativeness, these texts were nevertheless able to imagine flawed, yet strong, nuanced and complex female subjectivities. This aspect separates them from contemporaneous forms of textual production, such as prescriptive biographies written by women or the novellas written by men of the same era, and renders them valuable cultural artifacts, despite their ephemerality.

Acknowledgements

A much shorter version of this paper was first presented at a thematic conversation of women's contributions to the naha at the 2011 MESA conference in Washington, DC, USA. The author wants to thank everyone who participated in the conversation for their helpful insights into the topic. The author is particularly grateful to Elizabeth Saylor for organizing the panel, and to fellow discussants Marilyn Booth, Mervat Hatem and Elizabeth Holt.

Notes

1. For much of 1899, al-Ḍiyāʾ 's readers were concerned with the publications of the Jesuit Lūīs Shaykhū, especially with their linguistic errors; so much so that the journal's editors finally had to publish a plea to their readers to stop sending them such letters. But readers also wrote in with questions about medical matters, such as whether one could contract plague (al-ṭāʿūn) twice.

2. Al-Ḍiyāʾ, Issue 8, 31 December 1899 (my translation).

3. For more on this, see Elizabeth Holt's ‘Narrative and the Reading Public,’ Holt makes an argument that suspense is produced and enacted by these early serialized prose novels and novellas, as a way of forming a new reading public.

4. Daly, ‘Railway Novels,’ 466 (paraphrasing Miller).

5. Also interesting, although perhaps tangential, is that the originator of the question was a policeman; Miller's hypothesis about Victorian literature and discipline is contained in The Novel and the Police.

6. Al-Ḍiyāʾ published several translated stories, riwāyāt muʿarraba, usually by Nasīb Affandī al-Mishʿalānī.

7. Debenham, ‘The Victorian Sensation Novel,’

8. Gesturing to its rapid takeover of the British literary landscape, Nicholas Daly describes the genre as ‘appearing as if from nowhere’ to dominate the literary scene during the 1860s. Daly, ‘Railway Novels,’ 466.

9. For a summary of this scholarship, see the introduction to Harrison and Fantina's Victorian Sensations.

10. Debenham, ‘The Victorian Sensation Novel,’ 211.

11. Hāshim, ‘Ḥasanāt al-ḥubb,’ In what follows, I will use my own translation of Hāshim's Ḥasanāt and Elizabeth Holt's translation of Henry wa Amelia, with her kind permission. Both translations will appear in the forthcoming (2013) anthology The Arab Renaissance: Literature, Culture and Media. I have deliberately chosen not to paginate quotes from the translations, since these have obviously not been set yet.

12. Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar, 16.

13. Wynne, The Sensation Novel, 7.

14. Ibid., 2.

15. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 20.

16. Ibid., 198–199.

17. Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation Building, 119, suggests that the social features of colonial modernization produced a ‘new lifestyle [that] undermined the Islamic definition of the roles that men and women were to play within the marriage institution and familial rights,’

18. Booth, May Her Likes, 38.

19. Baron, Women's Awakening, 166–168; and Booth, May Her Likes, 38.

20. For an overview of the topic, see Ayalon, The Press in the Modern Arab Middle East.

21. For more on the relationship between the press and the emergent readership, see Holt, ‘Narrative and the Reading Public’; and Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity.

22. Holt, ‘Narrative and the Reading Public,’ 39.

23. Beth Baron acknowledges this point in The Women's Awakening in Egypt; in the context of Lebanon, things have been even more dire. For more on the latter, see Holt, ‘Narrative and the Reading Public,’

24. For an example, see Stephen Sheehi's reading of the female character Warda in Salīm Bustānī's longer serial narrative al-Hiyām fī jinān al-Shām, published in al-Jinān in the same year as Henry wa Amelia. Warda, Sheehi remarks, is an incredibly passive figure, which is necessary in order for her ‘to be the hero's desired love object,’ Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 87.

25. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 19.

26. Harrison and Fantina, Victorian Sensations, xii.

27. Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar, 45.

28. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 51.

29. Ibid., 19.

30. Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction, 210.

31. For more on the two ideals of marriage and mothering in the female press in Egypt, see the chapter entitled ‘Catherine the Great's embroidery’ in Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied.

32. Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction, 210.

33. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Eve, 20.

34. Ibid.

35. On the discussion about companionate marriage, Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt, 165, writes: ‘Writers argued that marriage should be based on love, not economic considerations, and a couple should be able to meet before marriage to determine affinity.’

36. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 156.

37. Ibid., 165.

38. Daly, ‘Railway Novels,’ 466.

39. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 164.

40. Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 10.

41. And also, perhaps, makes a little joke: Hāshim was educated at a convent run by the same order of nuns to which Soeur Augustine Marie claims to belong.

42. Mervat Hatem and Marilyn Booth both note a class anxiety about lower-class men and women that pervades the writing of 19th-century women. See Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation Building; and Booth, May Her Likes be Multiplied.

43. Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar, 45.

44. In May her Likes Be Multiplied, Booth points out how mention of servants or domestic staff was often occluded from women's biographies, in order to highlight their own domestic capacities.

45. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 165.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Wynne, The Sensation Novel, 10.

49. Abou-Hodeib, ‘Taste and Class,’ 476.

50. Ibid., 479.

51. For an overview of this, see Abou-Hodeib, ‘Taste and Class,’

52. Booth, May Her Likes be Multiplied, 225.

53. Abou-Hodeib, ‘Taste and Class,’ 479.

54. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 52.

55. Ibid.

56. For a good summary of this scandal, see the introduction to Harrison and Fantina, Victorian Sensations.

57. Williams, Marxism and Culture, 121.

58. Ibid., 123.

59. Ibid., 124.

60. Ibid., 126.