- Phebe Gibbes, Edmund Burke, and the Trials of Empire
The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings before the House of Lords, beginning in 1788 and ending in 1795 with an acquittal, was hardly the first crisis in the East India Company's management of British India, but it nevertheless presented the most comprehensive and sustained public discussion of colonial culpability to that date.1 Reports of the dramatic proceedings, published in the daily press for a national audience, variously distilled and dilated, annotated and embellished what was said before the House of Lords.2 Edmund Burke's celebrated oratory [End Page 151] set the tone for the prosecution, and the trial turned Westminster Hall, for all intents and purposes, into a theatre; contemporary accounts record that mobs of aristocratic spectators clamoured for admission.
As Daniel O'Quinn points out, the scale of this incursion of fashionable, and thus female, society into Parliament had few precedents.3 O'Quinn further argues that the highly publicized presence of these women in the visitors' gallery helped make all women's "spectatorial relation" to imperial governance more immediate, and that this immediacy in turn elicited a variety of responses from women to the problems of British India.4 Phebe Gibbes's anonymous 1789 novel Hartly House, Calcutta provides a rich and complex example of such political engagement.5 This novel of India under Hastings's rule—the very society Burke was then denouncing before Parliament—presents a female protagonist whose observations and experiences in the colony outline the shortcomings of Burke's mode of imperial justice.
While some critics have noted the novel's timely publication—in the year following the trial's opening—and have linked its depiction of colonial Calcutta to the publicity surrounding the trial, this article offers the first account of the full extent to which Gibbes interrogates what Sara Suleri calls Burke's "sexual metaphorics."6 As Suleri and others have amply demonstrated, [End Page 152] Burke consistently tropes imperial conflict as sexual conflict, pitting himself, a champion of chivalric honour, against Hastings, a colonial libertine, in a contest for dominion over a feminized India.7 By inserting British women into Burke's narrative of India under Hastings, Hartly House disrupts this triangulation of imperial desire; in the course of pursuing her own desires in the colony, the novel's heroine contests Burke's representation of British imperial masculinity and complicates his deployment of Indian femininity. Moreover, the novel indexes cultural anxieties about class boundaries that are embedded within—though frequently obfuscated by—Burke's sexually charged rhetoric. In so doing, the novel critically intervenes in Burke's scenario of East India Company policies and practices under the Hastings administration.
Read within the context of the Hastings impeachment, Hartly House's argument about imperial politics emerges as a [End Page 153] complicated one, more so than previous critics have recognized; it is neither entirely complicit with the imperialist agenda, as Felicity Nussbaum has cogently argued, nor uniformly resistant, as Betty Joseph has more recently suggested.8 Like Burke, Gibbes calls for reform, but not abolition, of colonial government, though Hartly House ultimately evinces doubt in Burke's belief that better governance by the British can improve the situation. Hartly House's defence of Hastings is less an endorsement of his policies (as Michael J. Franklin claims)9 than it is a pointed critique of Burke's rhetorical strategies, suggesting that it is too simple to place the blame for the company's abusive practices at the feet of its governor-general.
Phebe Gibbes, "Hartly House, Calcutta," and the Traces of a Literary Career
Gibbes's varied output over her long career points to her professional savviness and acuity.10 The timely publication of several novels registers her responsiveness to topical issues and thus to the prevailing interests of the reading public. For example, in The Life and Adventures of Mr Francis Clive (1764), the two eponymous protagonists share the surname of one of the East India Company's most celebrated and notorious officials, Robert Clive, who in May of that year had been reappointed governor of Bengal. One of the novel's Francis Clives is a merchant whose...