British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785–1835: Re-Orienting Anglo-India by Kathryn S. Freeman (review)

Kathryn S. Freeman’s British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785–1835: Re-Orienting Anglo-India has an interesting thesis. It argues that women writers in late eighteenth-century British India occupied a unique position to challenge, or at the very least to refine, the epistemological foundations not only of European Orientalism—here referring to the body of scholarship rather than to the pejorative discourse aimed by the West at the East—but also what is here presented as the male-dominated paradigm of Romanticism itself. They were able to do so because such women were attracted to what the author calls Indian “nondualism,” the Vedic tradition of holistic integration of mind and body, self and object, which, Freeman argues, provided an alternative and potentially radical subject position from which to challenge “the masculinist tradition [with] its foundation in the dualistic philosophy of the west” (p. 125). Freeman suggests this attraction arose from the identification such authors made between their own status as subordinated subjects grappling with “the repressive patriarchal structures of the late Enlightenment” and the colonized Indian population (p. 131). They were thus able to establish an entirely new mode of thinking about the East in contrast to the “distorting lens of Orientalist dualism” exemplified in the scholarship of Sir William Jones and Charles Wilkins, the subjects of Freeman’s opening chapter (p. 26).

The study traces this strand of nondualism in the novels of Elizabeth Hamilton, Phebe Gibbes, and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and the plays of Mariana Starke, with shorter sections on Anna Maria Jones, Maria Jane Jewsbury, and Charlotte Smith. Freeman follows work on a similar body of material undertaken by Marie Dakessian, Anne Mellor, Daniel O’Quinn, Michael J. Franklin, and others, but her main contribution is to show how what she calls “women writing nondualism” are to be distinguished from the male Orientalist tradition and how these women frequently criticized both it and the colonial government with which it was closely (but, in truth, not straightforwardly) allied (p. 131). Freeman also employs a theory of “translation” to describe the physical, social, and cultural translocations to which British women in India were subjected and which formed the basis of their perceived commonality with the Indian population. This theory fades in and out of focus as the book progresses but advances the author’s formulation of a unique colonial feminine subjectivity that is capable of reworking our sense of both Orientalist scholarship and mainstream Romanticism.

The persuasiveness of the close readings, which make up three of the book’s four chapters, varies with the artistic sophistication of the texts involved. Freeman’s thesis obliges her to regard her material as delicately schematized yet deliberately wary of forming linear conclusions in order to show, on the one hand, how British women authors in India engaged with questions of binarism linked to gender and imperialism and, on the other, how they wanted to dissolve and regenerate anew rather than merely rearrange the parameters of Western thought. As a consequence, Freeman’s arguments are frequently couched in terms of multiple ambiguities, contradictions, and layerings that she strives to weave together into a consistent but capacious interpretative fabric, which suits her argument but occasionally leaves the reader uncertain about where the commitment in any particular discussion lies. There is also the persistent feeling any reader of Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) has that the novel’s contradictions and narrative drift stem from its hasty composition rather than its structure of “ironic nonsequitur[s]” and the author’s interest in associational psychology (p. 73). Here and there, we encounter the spectre of over-reading as a result of suggesting that a relatively small group of writers were bound together by the same epistemological standpoint.

Far more satisfying is Freeman’s ingenious reading of Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), a work of...