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7. Natal Women’s Letters in the 1850s: Ellen McLeod, Eliza Feilden, Gender and "Second-World" Ambi/valence
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7 Natal Women’s Letters in the 1850s: Ellen McLeod, Eliza Feilden, Gender and ‘‘SecondWorld ’’ Ambi/valence Margaret J. Daymond Adistinction between the positionality felt in settler writing and in imperialist writing has recently become crucial in postcolonial studies; in support of this distinction , Stephen Slemon and Alan Lawson have both argued that settler writing is properly positioned as a ‘‘middle ground’’ (Slemon 1990:34). While the settler writer may depict the same geographical locale and even the same set of events as the imperial writer, the former inhabits a distinct realm inasmuch as his or her sense of margin and centre, while including the perspective of the imperialist, becomes an ‘‘inherent awareness of both ‘there’ and ‘here’ ’’ (Lawson 1994:76). In this way, settler writing ‘‘not only has to encounter ‘the other’; it is constrained by the discourse to be ‘the other’ as well’’ (Lawson 1991:68). In this condition of ‘‘ambi/valence’’ the settler feels herself ‘‘caught between two First Worlds, two origins of authority and authenticity ’’ (my emphasis; Lawson 1994:72). Slemon argues for this fundamental ambivalence from his sense that resistance in all postcolonial Notes to chapter 7 are on pp. 111-12. 99 writing is inevitably compromised; this view leads him to disagree with a critic such as Timothy Brennan who has argued that writers like Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee are to be placed within the line of the European novel of Empire rather than within a postcolonial line. Slemon counters this first-world positioning of settler writers (white South Africans in this case) by pointing out that reserving postcoloniality for the resistant black writer may only reverse and so perpetuate the binaries of imperialism, and that this may, ironically, recentre Empire and leave the resistant black writer forever marginalized . Lawson posits a middle ground in order to explore the conflicted subject position of recent Australian and Canadian postcolonial writing . While both critics seek to establish settler writing as a proper part of the field of postcolonial studies, and while Lawson wishes to examine ‘‘the very place where the processes of colonial power as negotiation , as transactions of power, are most visible’’ (1995:22), neither critic has so far related the concept of ambi/valence to writing which comes from a moment of settlement itself. Furthermore, while Lawson’s suggestion of the doubleness of the middle ground, which positions the settler as both agent and subject in colonial relations of power, gives valuable flexibility to the field of study, neither he nor Slemon have extended this account of doubleness by incorporating feminist analyses of the double consciousness to be found in women’s writing. This line of analysis can be traced to Virginia Woolf’s observation that ‘‘if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical’’ (1974:96). It was not by chance that Woolf placed this ‘‘sudden splitting off’’ as happening at the heart of England’s whited sepulchre; for women at the remove of the colonies, the experience may well have been rather less surprising and rather more frequent. By incorporating this gendered sense of being in but not of a place and its ‘‘civilization’’ into my account of writing from the middle ground, I wish to release two possibilities. First, attention to the unsettled place of women will help to expose ambi/valence as present in colonial discourse from its earliest days. Second, it will show that, in the colony as in the metropolis, gender stereotypes are both seductive and dangerous for a woman writer in that they are so readily usable to ratify male-favouring relations of power. As the historian Joan Scott puts it, because gender differences have been ‘‘[e]stablished as an objective set of references, concepts of gender structure . . . the 100 Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture [3.235.229.251] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:35 GMT) concrete and [the] symbolic organisation of all social life’’ (1986: 1069). In establishing gender and settler ambi/valence in the writing of Ellen McLeod and Eliza Feilden, I will show how their writing both represents and rejects the authority of Empire and both desires and repudiates the authenticity of the indigene. In her study of travel writing by metropolitan women in the nineteenth century, Sara Mills has argued that although their work emanated...