The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (review)

The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects, by Rita S. Kranidis; pp. x + 228. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, $45.00.

In recent years a cottage industry has grown up in Victorian studies around the female traveler and her relation to the enterprises of Victorian colonization and imperialism. Studies on women travelers have done much to highlight crucial distinctions between male and female roles in imperial contexts. In her original and ambitious book The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration, Rita S. Kranidis shifts the lens of such inquiry away from the traveler and onto the unmarried female emigrant and the unique position she occupied in reference both to her home and to her colonial destination.

While interesting historical work on Victorian emigration has been published, studies addressing the importance of emigration to the literature of the period have been slow to emerge. This discrepancy may be accounted for in part by the fact that representations of emigration in the Victorian novel often appear as seemingly tangential elements of larger plots. Kranidis suggests, however, that Victorian texts are often "dominated and structured by the issues that surface within them only as marginal concerns" (18). In her latest book, as in the collection she recently edited, Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women's Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience (1998), Kranidis focuses on a subject that merits our attention as "something more than a series of isolated acts and events, since all available information indicates that [emigration] likely was a national trend suggestive of a predominant quest for an alternative mode of 'Englishness'" (23).

Kranidis explores these alternative forms of national identity by examining the status of the unmarried emigrant woman within the context of the social, cultural, and material discourses and practices that framed her. Kranidis's argument, "that women's emigration served several cultural functions and was instituted in response to compelling ideological and material needs on the home front" (60), centers around a paradox involving "the cultural redefinition of middle-class women from cherished and sheltered subjects to ones representing a particular kind of cultural excess" (17-18). According to Kranidis, middle-class emigrant spinsters, lacking a place in hegemonic conceptions of Victorian society, had to be redefined as valuable raw material and reconnected to the ideology of domesticity before they could be exchanged and transported to the colonies. Yet, in addition to delineating their status as commodities, Kranidis explores the possibility that emigrant spinsters could exert agency as cultural and national conduits capable of challenging the terms of their own commodification.

Admittedly more interested in the process of commodification and exchange than in specific colonial locations, Kranidis argues that "[t]he important focus for analyzing the emigration process [. . .] is not on destinations but on the symbolic preparations for transport" (161). To this end, she looks at literary constructions of what she calls "Elsewhere," a space which is neither England nor the colonies, but one that "appears both as an expansion of the Victorian domestic scene and is also constituted domestically, within England itself" (104). "Elsewhere" functions in her analysis as a capacious category that allows for the extension of England's boundaries and for the displacement of those domestic subjects who do not fit into the established class and gender categories available for national identity. Kranidis suggests that, like unmarried emigrant women, the colonies function in pro-emigration rhetoric as entities of "relative value" (59); as such, they are constantly redefined as appropriate receptacles for specific kinds of cultural excess that can then serve England's ideological and material needs.

The scope of this study is wide-ranging, and it draws on methodologies borrowed from cultural studies and from Marxist critical analysis. In the opening chapters of the book, Kranidis examines emigration statistics as well as the rhetoric concerning female emigration in Victorian newspapers and periodicals. Subsequent chapters examine how the problems posed by "the domestic dispossessed classes" (101), including unmarried women and the laboring...