Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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Johnson clearly demonstrates the romantic move toward incorporating otherness within the self and the importance of exclusionary sensibilities to a “stable” national identity. His fictional and nonfictional works define the necessity for a privatized authorial space, dominated by his own sense of possessing an internal psychic self plagued by the vicissitudes of the unconscious.
This eighteenth-century hypostatization of the unconscious constitutes what we should recognize as the beginning of romantic ideology. The move Johnson makes toward interiorization may have been appropriated ex post facto forty-five years later to formulate the structures of a “new” romantic ideology.30 Thus while his corpus figures mightily in the established history of eighteenth-century men of letters, it is also clear that it gestures toward a romantic ideology; ironically, he may embody an Oedipal figure against which “canonical” romantics rebel even as they carry on his legacy.
In some ways, De Quincey’s relation to romanticism, while more obviously canonical than Johnson’s, is less trustworthy because of his infamous addiction to opium. That is, his autobiographical confessions to opium-eating demonstrate a pathological relation to romantic scholarship, as John Barrell and Nigel Leask have so provocatively uncovered. It is this addiction, however, that keenly problematizes his romantic xenophobia. My second chapter demonstrates the internalization of exoticism in De Quincey’s works, particularly his Confessions. I argue that his obsession with cultural monstrosity—“exotic” creatures like tigers and crocodiles that for him blur the boundaries of animal and human—functions as part of an impulse to derive histories of meaning that serve to situate, contextualize, and eventually mythologize the place of British imperial history. De Quincey’s traffic in opium, his problems with addiction, and his struggle to maintain his intellectual status in the circle of Lake District poets all manifest the ways in which the xenophobia is institutionalized through the process of xenodochy. In other words, the fear of the foreign that informs so much of British cultural identity is negotiated in De Quincey and other romantics only by entertaining that which is most feared: the foreign. Thus De Quincey is able to slide between registers of familiarity and difference—between the domesticity of Dove Cottage and the network of oriental fantasies it produces—with ostensibly writerly ease. The Zizekian symptom of phobic markers of desire and loathing for the foreign that Crusoe deploys to his advantage returns in De Quincey’s writing to mark off the limits of a “stable” identity.
What difference does gender make to the ways in which xenophobia is produced in romantic culture? Perhaps our attention should turn to the paradigms of xenophobia that depend on notions of reproduction. Maternal bodies represent the national body: more specifically, the mother’s body provides colonialism with a material identity and imbues imperial authority with the innocence typically attributed to motherhood. Romantic models of solitary, inward-looking authorship are more vexed in relation to female writing because the material conditions providing such roles for authors were simply not commonly available to women in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries (although both Mary Wollstonecraft and Shelley defy these conventions). Mary Wollstonecraft’s relation to romanticism is, therefore, more overtly political. Like Wordsworth’s interest in the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft’s political, fictional, and personal writings all addressed the interests of common citizenry that the Lake District poets endorsed. Such articulations are, however, particularly vexed by gender. On the one hand, writers like Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Wollstonecraft, and others demonstrate a keen sense of identification with the social oppressions wrought by imperialist traffic such as the slave trade. On the other, their own authorial positions are contingent upon same the kinds of power structures associated with imperialism.
In these interests, the second half of this study examines the mechanism through which a recently disclosed “female” canon complicates but does not overcome the xenophobic erection of such models of imperialism. Feminist recovery of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, while very crucially shifting the parameters of the canon, may have foreclosed our attention to some of the difficulties of her fictional and nonfictional work. For example, even while vociferously speaking for the need for women’s political and intellectual agency in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s own xenophobia determines the boundaries of which groups of “women” can claim subjectivity. Her fictional work, focusing on problems of mothering and female education, similarly reflects the insidiousness of the ideological structure of imperialism. Wollstonecraft’s interest in romantic politics is primarily centered around the overtly political causes Wordsworth and Coleridge ended up discussing in their Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. The French Revolution with its concerns of republicanism and enfranchisement dramatized for poets like Wordsworth a material means to engage his revolutionary poetics. For Wollstonecraft, her interest in radical views on education, particularly those of Rousseau, her unorthodox ideas about marriage and domesticity, her attachment to Richard Price, place her within the intellectual parameters that have come to be known as romantic. Her anti-Jacobin An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution seems to align her with De Quincey’s similar sentiments, though her opposition to the tyranny of the politically disfavored and the poor alike seems much less encoded by class (and gender) than De Quincey’s. However, they share an untroubled sense of British hegemony articulated by xenophobia. Here the paradigm Samuel Johnson uses to formulate conceptions of the definitive other through a self-assimilating francophobia is repeated by both De Quincey and Wollstonecraft (ironically for the latter, given her attachment to Talleyrand and Rousseau).
I begin my argument on female authorship with Wollstonecraft partially because of her stature in a canon of “feminist” writing. Like Johnson, Wollstonecraft carves out a new lexicography but her feminist language is subject to the same ideological conflicts complicating Johnson’s project. Specifically, I examine Wollstonecraft’s representation of mothering as a phenomenon informed by general maternal images of the body of colonial power. These images are complicated by her equally fervent representations of the Rousseauian model that advocate a specific relationship between mothering, patriotism, and national (imperial) identity on the one hand, and a resistance to the entire practice of mothering as the only important form of female occupation on the other.
The simultaneous beatification and vilification of the maternal colonizing body is, ironically, most dramatically achieved in Wollstonecraft’s own issue, so to speak: her daughter, Mary Shelley, makes almost painfully clear the cultural and psychic vicissitudes of xenophobic reproduction in Frankenstein. Though many critics have read this novel in the interests of cultural critique, and though my reading takes those ideological issues into account, I am specifically interested in the ways that maternity functions in the xenophobic figuration of romanticism. Do maternal bodies, because they serve the interests of nation by reproducing its citizenry, also perpetuate the xenophobic elements of national identity? Do they also critically resist the reproduction of imperialism? How complicit or implicit is maternity in the production of imperialist ideology?
The problems with the maternal, the xenophobic, the colonial, and the romantic body by no means end with the advent of late romanticism. Domesticity and its discontents, education and its oracular effects equally complicate popular readings of female-authored fictional works. What Mary Shelley articulates as “female” marginalization is further complicated by Charlotte Brontë. Villette in particular has been privileged as the text that most thoroughly investigates the female writer as marginalized subject. Set in the typically Gothic “foreign” space, Villette demonstrates with breathtaking concision the ways Lucy Snowe’s national affiliation to Britain, no matter how vexed by gender, is determined by xenophobia. Providing a transitional text into Victorian ideologies of gender, Brontë’s work articulates romantic ideals of identity, demonstrating similar xenophobic paradigms that inform early Victorian culture.
Reading women’s work without understanding how technologies of race and gender inform representation is a lot like imagining that one’s desires originate from oneself. There is no “outside” space in which to place the arena of women’s work; to imagine that such writing is not a product of the same kinds of ideologies informing men’s work is simplistic. To imagine that such work can remain “outside” the parameters of gender is also obfuscating. There is a significant body of work done by scholars of gender studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial