Mrs. Frank Penny's A Mixed Marriage: "A Tale Worth Reading"

Mrs. Frank Penny's A Mixed Marriage: "A Tale Worth Reading" Srilekha Bell University of New Haven THE REVIEWS that followed the publication of the now forgotten novel A Mixed Marriage (1903) were sympathetic though guarded given the subject matter. The Times called it "a tale worth reading" with "a point of view" that was "very original." The Guardian ventured it was a "remarkably interesting and good book, which should appeal to many beyond the circle of novel readers." That comment proved perhaps unexpectedly prophetic. The novel was reprinted twice within three years and was included among the ten best novels of the year by the Academy. Certainly A Mixed Marriage remains an unusual novel in the history of the Transition era. Penny chose to delve into a topic considered taboo in nineteenth-century British society—interracial love and marriage— and anticipated E. M. Forster in doing so. Her attitude towards IndoBritish sexual relationships contradicted in many ways the dominant imperial perspective. A Mixed Marriage also expresses Penny's attitude towards the victimized Indian woman. It epitomizes what in White Mythologies Robert Young suggests is the function of all colonial discourses: to examine the "representations" Enghshness "has produced for itself of its Other, against and through which it defines itself."1 Sara Suleri has said that "books about India [are] . . . more accurately books about the representation of India."2 But then social perception , like treason, is a matter of date. In order to appreciate Penny's novel, we should set it against contemporary history. This essay does that, analyzing nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian imperial attitudes extracted from Mrs. Penny's novel to throw light upon the very nature of this relationship. The novel is grounded in the attitudes and behavior that arose out of the specific political and social conditions in both India and in Britain. Indeed, one is tempted to assume that it can only be un28 BELL : PENNY derstood by a grasp ofthose political and social facts. This essay also repudiates the stereotypical view of the nineteenth-century memsahib and the kind of "Orientalism" defined by such scholars as Edward Said. In Said's "Orientalism," the Indian Other is reduced to silence and then fetishized and controlled, thereby becoming a fascinating subject of discourse . Said's "Orientalism" is a masculine view of the imperial relationship .3 As Billy Melman observes, "New evidence may be used to develop a new perspective on the relation between Europe and its Others' and redefine these relations in terms which are not mostly political." Melman asserts that the male perspective of the Other has always been in the context of the battle for economic or political supremacy: "It is precisely because ofthat women are omitted from the histories of orientalism and imperialism."4 The Western gaze upon the Other is located in the centers of power, in the public sphere and may, therefore, only be defined as "masculine" or "patriarchal," to use Said's terms.5 By legitimizing the female experience in the Orient, an aspect of East-West relationship may be understood which has been neglected. As Melman reports, "in the eighteenth century there emerged an alternative view of the Orient which developed during the nineteenth century alongside the dominant one." The new view, as she explains, was in many ways more complex than that of the orientalist topos and much of it the result of women travelers or residents.6 Although Melman confines herself to the Middle East, this new view extended as far as India and perhaps beyond. ♦ ♦ ♦ Who was Mrs. Penny? What is the substance of this novel that delighted her contemporary readers so much? And most importantly, why is it now totally forgotten? The answers to these questions are interrelated ; they lie at the heart of Victorian imperial attitudes towards race and gender relations as they existed in late nineteenth-century India. Perhaps as Malek Alloula explains the object of the imperial male gaze was different from that of the imperial woman because the latter eliminated the erotic and mysterious and concentrated upon the day-to-day existence of life behind the purdah.7 Recently feminist scholars8 have worked to show that the Englishwomen who went to serve...