The British Image of Empire in the Victorian Novel

Abstract

In my dissertation, I analyze six novels from five British authors, beginning with William Makepeace Thackeray's <Vanity Fair> (1847) and moving on to Charlotte Bronte's <Jane Eyre>, Emily Bronte's <Wuthering Heights>, Wilkie Collins's <The Moonstone>, and H. Rider Haggard's <King Solomon's Mines> and <She> (1887). My argument draws upon post-colonial critics, primarily Homi Bhabha, but also Franz Fanon, Benedict Anderson, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. The wide scope of my project allows me to consider British imperialism, too, in a broad framework, as a social, political, religious, and economic force. For example, in my discussion of <Wuthering Heights>, I explain how Emily Bronte portrays Heathcliff as a "hybrid" character, a gypsy gentleman, who undoes traditional notions of race and class through acts of violence that are symbolically regenerating. In analyzing <The Moonstone>, I show how Collins portrays the British legal system as disrupting upper-class families by dragging them into a quagmire of legal disputes about property, so that the flaw at the center of the Moonstone comes to represent an anxiety about the institution of the family and the very foundations of the British nation. The image of empire represented in <King Solomon's Mines>, I argue, reveals a comparable anxiety, by which the author's loyalty to the imperial project is threatened. By examining contradictions and ambiguities that appear throughout the text, as when European science appears to be less powerful than native intuition, I show how even in this quintessential "imperial romance" the representation of empire is no simple matter and still has much to teach us about Victorian conceptions of race, class, and gender.