When nature “punches back”: a new materialist reading of Alice Perrin’s East of Suez

ABSTRACT

Alice Perrin’s East of Suez is a collection of short stories set in India. She immediately plunges her readers into an unfamiliar and intense world where nature is not a passive object onto which the human subject can impose its will. Instead, nature is persistently visceral, vibrant, and vital in ways that echo changing perceptions of the natural world, especially in relation to matter and energy, in the fin de siècle. These shifts presented a challenge to patriarchal and colonial authority by dismantling dominant dualist ideologies. This article briefly sets out the development of non-dualistic scientific ideas about matter and energy, before outlining how this encouraged alternative approaches to material realities, such as theosophy and yoga philosophy. Finally, I look at Perrin’s East of Suez to show how non-dualistic ways of thinking contributed to anti-imperialist ideologies by challenging colonial attitudes to the indigenous environment.

KEYWORDS:

• New materialism
• Anglo-India
• British Empire
• nature
• women’s colonial writing
• animals
• Alice Perrin
• supernatural

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I am grateful to Melissa Edmundson Makala for providing this biographical information about Perrin (2011, 7–8).

2. Tyndall’s presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science was in Belfast in 1874. It was a notorious event due to controversies over his expression of materialism.

3. Theosophist Annie Besant later became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress. She also supported Swami Vivekananda’s spiritual teachings and practices. Sumangala Bhattacharya (2017) discusses Besant’s use of clairvoyant meditation practices, inspired by Indian yogic traditions, to determine the structure of the atom. She argues that Besant’s methodologies and research challenge post-Enlightenment scientific values of rationality and objectivity.

4. Edmundson Makala notes that Perrin was well known among the spiritualists of the early twentieth century (2001, 11).

5. Later studies by Alison Sainsbury and Julia Kuehn have shown that these domestic novels are often more complicated than this (Sainsbury 1996; Kuehn 2014).

6. Victoria Margree also focuses on Perrin’s use of supernatural; however, she argues that “where critique of Anglo-Indian behaviour is at work in Perrin’s tales, this seems to serve the purpose of recalling the British to an awareness of the conduct befitting them as India’s rulers, not as a critique of imperial rule per se” (2019, 116; original emphasis).

7. Throughout the collection, sublimated desires resurface in the form of dreams and fevers. For example, in an “An Eastern Echo,” Meg’s repressed sexual desires surface in a kind of dream.

8. For a discussion of how the curative agency of plants can be evoked in resistant black ecologies, see Jennifer Leetsch’s article in this special issue.

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Notes on contributors

Éadaoin Agnew

Éadaoin Agnew is a Senior Lecturer at Kingston University, London. She is the author of Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India, 1850–1910 and she is currently working on a new monograph about anti-imperial writing in the Indian fin de siècle. This research, like her teaching, takes a transnational and decolonial approach to Victorian literature.