Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947 (review)

Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947, by Nancy L. Paxton; pp. xi + 338. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1999, $52.00, $23.00 paper, £18.50 paper.

Nancy Paxton's new book is a sure-footed and closely argued examination of rape, both as material phenomenon and as an ideology working to shore up critical aspects of colonial rule. For Paxton, the emergence in the colonial context of what she calls a "rape script" is no accident, but rather an indication of the ways in which colonialism relied upon particular readings of sexuality separated out by race and by sex role.

Its centrality to British colonialism in the later-nineteenth and well into the twentieth century has made India the subject of much recent historical and literary work concerned with empire. For Paxton, India was a less restricted space than domestic Britain for evoking and speaking of physicality within the novelistic and indeed the poetic tradition. The blurred line between exoticism and degradation made an Indian setting a popular one for many of the authors, major and minor, with whom Paxton deals here. Yet, as she shows in many of her case studies, the examination of India invariably raised questions and anxieties around the allegedly superior status of British women, and, of course, around the eternally feared expectation of miscegenation.

Paxton is deeply influenced by three concepts in particular: the idea of abjection drawn from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1982) but overlain here by Judith Butler's attentions to its associations with xenophobia (Bodies That Matter [1993]); the spatial metaphor of the "colonial contact zone" drawn from Mary Louise Pratt's influential work on colonial travel (Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [1992]); and the notion of psychological "splitting" consonant upon the contradictions and strains of colonial life. Yet she brings to her analysis a distinctiveness and originality beyond, though always cognizant of, these influences. Necessarily, Paxton's work will be compared with that of Jenny Sharpe, whose important book, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (1993), is also centrally concerned with the question of rape in India. But while Sharpe sees the 1857 Mutiny or Uprising as producing the re-emergence of rape in texts set in India, Paxton traces a longer literary tradition beginning with the Romantic poets. She thus persuasively challenges Sharpe's chronology as well as her understanding of the place and symbolism of rape within colonial hierarchies.

Paxton offers an impressive range of close readings extending from Romantic poetry to the modernist novels of E. M. Forster and George Orwell, and excavating a host of neglected Anglo-Indian novels which reveal the workings of colonialism's ambivalences in useful ways. Her sensitivity to historical context offers a periodization quite distinct from Sharpe's, and in which the late-nineteenth century acquires immense significance. Paxton, I think rightly, connects the shifts she sees in novels of the 1880s and 1890s to the considerable changes in readings of both masculinity and femininity in domestic Britain and their connectedness around both political and sexual desire.

At the same time, Paxton's rigorous demonstration of what she calls the "prevailing homosocial structure of desire in British India" (174) also exposes what for me is the only troubling gap in her reading. I wanted to know more about exactly how homosociality, both as an expression of desire and as a lived experience, worked upon the trope (and the reality) of rape. What is the meaning of their simultaneous existence? What effect does homosocial desire have on the effects of and indeed the committing of rape, with its iteration of a powerful heterosexuality? Such questions suggest not that homosociality leaves no space for rape as a trope of colonial power, but rather a wish that these particular questions might...