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111 6 Jane Eyre’s Doubles? Colonial Progress and the Tradition of New Woman Writing in India Narin Hassan Bertha Mason—the paradigmatic figure who frames and inspires Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic—represents female anger and confinement in their analysis of Brontë’s Jane Eyre and other texts by nineteenth-century women writers. For Gilbert and Gubar, Bertha is “Jane’s truest and darkest double,” an embodiment of the suppressed rage experienced by silenced or marginalized Victorian women writers.1 By emphasizing the patterns and metaphors that link Bertha with Jane’s hidden rebelliousness, Gilbert and Gubar suggest a psychological and symbolic connection between the novelist, the heroine, and her “mad” exotic Other. Although some critics, such as Laurence Lerner, have argued that Bertha is a minor character,a sensational plot device undeserving of the symbolic weight of Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis, their reading nevertheless opened the door to radical questions regarding the figure of the female writer and the production and reception of her work.2 Their critique of Jane Eyre has provoked responses from a range of postcolonial critics, most notably Gayatri Spivak, who has argued that the native other is silenced through the emphasis on Bertha as a double or mirror for Jane. Spivak claims that Gilbert and Gubar’s “emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism ”and that“isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and America establishes the high feminist norm.”3 Jane Eyre has since then become a central text for critics engaging with questions of 112 Narin Hassan race and empire in the context of Victorian culture. Suvendrini Perera, Susan Meyer, and Jenny Sharpe have noted the orientalist motifs in Brontë’s novel and addressed Bertha as a “colonial other” representing not only feminist rebellion but also the anger of natives in Britain’s vast empire.4 While current feminist and postcolonial analysis of Jane Eyre is wide ranging in its scope, much of it is indebted to Gilbert and Gubar’s initial efforts to recover a female history and analyze a neglected female literary tradition. This essay traces the ways Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist reading of Jane Eyre intersects with questions of identity and native subjectivity that concern postcolonial studies. I take as my focus a late-nineteenth-century autobiographical novel, Saguna (1887). Although this novel is set in India, it resonates with themes from Jane Eyre and provides a lens through which we can read native women’s writing and its relationship to the English novel and empire. Written in English by an Indian woman writer, Krupabai Satthianadhan , Saguna is concerned with many of the issues that Gilbert and Gubar placed in the forefront of feminist reading in Madwoman: female confinement , the struggle for autonomy, creative resistance to dominant feminine roles and social expectations. The central character, Saguna, emerges as a“new”Indian woman,who struggles with the desire to study medicine while negotiating the burdens and expectations of colonial womanhood. Making use of Gilbert and Gubar’s critical paradigm and building the process of historical recovery that their monumental work revealed, this essay complicates our reading of the Victorian female subject and her relationship to the native other by examining how the female tradition that Gilbert and Gubar address was translated—and perhaps extended—in the work of late Victorian Indian woman writers. Through a reading of Saguna, this essay will examine the ways that feminist identities in India were shaped by competing discourses in much the same way that they were in Britain, but also how progressive Indian womanhood was forged in the late nineteenth century and how women writers had to negotiate multiple influences and expectations—colonial, feminist, and nationalist—at once. My reading of Saguna attempts not simply to trace unities or a set of interconnected themes that relate the work to Victorian novels such as Jane Eyre. Instead, I suggest that this particular novel provides one way to expand the boundaries of feminist reading and complicate our analysis of the native other. I read Saguna not as a derivative text inspired by Victorian fiction but as an example of an expanding tradition of women’s writing that reveals the widening influence of nineteenth-century feminism and its engagement with colonialism. As such, my essay addresses some of the limitations of Gilbert and Gubar’s approach by examining how a global exchange of feminist ideas took place in the nineteenth...

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