'Myself in India': The memsahib figure in colonial India.

摘要

This project addresses Western women's subjectivities and the process by which women have come to define themselves as memsahibs in India. Past feminist criticism has chosen to impose a value-laden, positive interpretation of Western women in imperial settings. They are either heroes, who are somehow exempt from or transcend imperial ideology, or victims, who are not responsible for any complicity with the imperial agenda. Although current feminist criticism has exposed the limitations of these readings, it has not addressed as thoroughly the ways in which women's texts were influenced by the heroic and victim images of memsahibs, underplaying their function as guides that aided women in clarifying, understanding and performing their role as memsahibs. Through a reading of the autobiographies and fiction of Rosamond Lawrence, Morag Murray Abdullah and Santha Rama Rau and through an analysis of colonial, post-colonial and feminist criticism, this manuscript argues that there were four guiding constructions of the memsahib that helped to shape the way in which empire and many Western women understood their role in India: the sentimentalized heroine, the "destructive female," the victimized whore, and the disembodied emblem of empire. It also deconstructs the memsahib's bildungsroman, a universalized and essentialized understanding of the process Western women go through in order to "become" an Anglo-Indian memsahib. Western women-as-memsahibs were both constructed and self-constructing, shaped by these constructions and influential in shaping them. However, memsahibs often use their self-constructing agency to deconstruct various definitions, to unbuild the memsahib's bildungsroman, thereby unbuilding imperial iconography and, by extension, calling into question its agenda. Because Western women's experiences are complicated by the multiple constructions of the memsahib and by the degree of agency individual women asserted, Western women often unbuilt one construction only to be captured by or to adopt another. Thus, the goal of this project is to demystify the colonial constructions of the memsahib--in order to consider the complex and often contradictory ways in which that figure has been appropriated. Moreover, this project addresses the ways in which women embraced, enacted and were often manipulated by the figure of the memsahib and how these constructions shaped their own processes of identification and self-definition.