Disruptive Widowhood: Rights, Resistance, and Agency in the Indian and British Novel
Open AccessThis dissertation, titled “Disruptive Widowhood: Rights, Resistance, and Agency in the Indian and British Novel,” investigates how debates about widows’ rights in Britain and India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries are represented in literature. It illuminates how questions of empire, race, caste, and class shape debates about power and women’s property rights in colonial India and England. I focus on widows to raise larger questions about empire and nationalism, gender relations, and the rhetoric of colonial modernity. I argue that both in India and England, novels represent the figure of the widow as a disruptive subject in terms of her position within heteronormative patriarchal family structures. This project is interested in how, in the novels I analyze, powerful and property-owning widows as well as powerless indigent widows are coded as disruptive and dangerous figures. These works uncover socio-political efforts to minimize that perceived disruption by depriving widows of economic, sexual, and social rights. Simultaneously, they offer stories of resistance from women who defy social control, challenge prevailing socioeconomic conditions, and fashion selfhood. This dissertation shows how whether it be the abolition of sati (ritual suicide on the funeral pyre of the dead husband) in 1829 and the passage of the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856 in colonial India, or the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 in England, the rhetoric of legal and social reform in the empire, especially in the contexts of widows’ rights, was couched in patriarchal paternalism. Analyzing the rhetoric of legal and literary discourse reveals, I contend, the limits of liberal patriarchy in India and England during this period. I study the novel as a genre because it constitutes, due to its popularity among the middle classes in both geographies, a key site for understanding the changing discourses surrounding widows. In chapter 1, “Gender, Nation, and the Novel – Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s The Poison Tree and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora” I argue that the figure of the widow disrupts the ideas of gender, family, and nationhood articulated by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore during the Bengal Renaissance. The second chapter, “The Question of Property in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Swarnakumari Debi’s The Uprooted Vine,” examines how Eliot and Swarnakumari Debi’s writing underscores the importance of financial freedom and access to property for widows. This chapter illuminates shows how property-owning widows are seen as doubly disruptive in both social and political contexts. The third chapter, “The Desiring Widow in Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali,” explores how in two key novels from England and India, the desiring widow-figure is eventually disempowered and disciplined. Here, I uncover how different modes of punishment for the desiring female subject expose the anxiety surrounding women who embraced sexual autonomy. The final chapter, “The Would-be Sati in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters and John Master’s The Deceivers,” analyzes how the figure of the would-be sati is deployed to justify colonial intervention in the novels On the Face of the Waters by Flora Annie Steel and The Deceivers by John Masters. Through an analysis of these eight novels, “Disruptive Widowhood” illustrates how the figure of the widow, although marked by mourning and lack, can cause powerful disruptions at the levels of both narrative structure and ideology. These novels portray different facets of disruptive widowhood and show how such disruption is mitigated by the violent deprivation of various rights – economic, social, and sexual. By studying these novels together to examine formations of agency, power, and dissent, this dissertation reveals the shifting rhetorics about and contestations over women’s rights in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century England and India.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Visibility | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Chakrabarti_gwu_0075A_15913.pdf | 2022-10-04 | Open Access |
|