Imperialist Feminism: Colonial Issues in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book

Imperialist Feminism: Colonial Issues in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book IvetaJusova Miami University IN LIGHT of recently developing post-colonial inquiries into the British New Woman movement,1 the major objective of this essay is an examination of the relationship between feminist and colonial issues in the writing by Sarah Grand (Frances McFaIl, 1854-1943). The epitome of the New Woman movement for many of her contemporaries, Grand gained much of her notoriety for her unusually frank discussions of venereal diseases and of the effects of British colonial officers' promiscuity on their wives' health. She was praised by radicals for bringing this important but tabooed topic to women's and the public's perception and for exposing the double standard in Victorian society. Conservative proimperialist critics, on the other hand, censured her for discussing sexual and other presumably immoral topics which would, allegedly, undermine the high standards of British culture and bring it closer to the "degenerate " cultures of "corrupt" societies like the French.2 An examination of racial and colonial issues in Grand's career and writing, specifically in The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book, however, suggests that rather than undermining the imperial status quo, the author was herself personally invested in the maintenance of the empire . As a wife of Lieutenant Colonel David Chambers McFaIl, Grand spent several years (in the 1870s) overseas and it was during her life in the colonies that she became fully aware of British officers' promiscuity and of the health risks posed by their sexual choices to their wives. To share her knowledge with other women became the goal and content of Grand's feminism. Her feminist consciousness was, at the same time, informed by her growing sense of privilege as a highly positioned British colonial housewife, living a life of luxury and enjoying the social position 298 JUSOVA : GRAND derived from her husband's senior rank.3 A long list of McFall's distinctions in his service as a British military doctor testifies to his own place in imperial history. Before marrying Frances, he had already distinguished himself during the Indian Mutiny by dealing with outbreaks of cholera among colonial soldiers.4 Since the high mortality rate of British troops in the colonies was mostly due to preventable tropical diseases like cholera or yellow fever rather than battle casualties,5 McFall's role as an army surgeon—supervising and enforcing sanitation—was central to the success of British colonialism. Although Grand later grew detached from her husband—eventually leaving him (and their, by then, grown son) to become an independent writer—there are no indications that she rejected the roles required of her as an "incorporated colonial wife."6 While Teresa Mangum suggests that Grand openly persued her intellectual interests during her life overseas,7 Grand seems to have fulfilled her colonial duties—supervising servants, representing appropriately British culture and its values, and assisting her husband in upholding the ideological structures which reinforced beliefs in European superiority and made the success of the imperialist project possible . Of particular note are the ways in which Grand's personal interest in the maintenance of the British Empire intertwined her feminist objectives with Britain's imperialist agenda and, in the end, impaired the model of feminism constructed in her work. Developing Lyn Pykett's observations concerning Grand's mobilization of the contemporary dominant evolutionary discourse in order to legitimize the New Woman project,8 I argue that the subversiveness of Grand's feminism was diminished by the emphasis her writing placed on racial, social, and cultural purity (dictated to the author both by the contemporary dominant discourses and by the requirements of her position as an upper-class colonial wife). Instead of developing a discourse which would be inclusive of all women and which would challenge dominant social structures in her most popular novel The Heavenly Twins and, to some extent, also in The Beth Book, Grand shaped a feminist narrative which was centered around the ideal of a white English upper-class woman whose identity was described as preferably fixed and as based on sexual self-denial and on her careful differentiation from "lower" classes and races.9...