Perera's Reaches of Empire

Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. NY: Columbia UP, 1992.

It really is extraordinary, when one thinks about it, just how little the great mid-Victorian writers cared about the British empire. Throughout the nineteenth century this great administrative and trading structure was being assembled piecemeal. It may have happened "in a fit of absence of mind," as the epigram has it, but its growth was remorseless: in its heyday it brought nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth and a full quarter of the human race under British rule. Yet when we look for a reflection of this vast enterprise in the literature of the day, what do we find? Mostly a vacuum.

"The imperial story," wrote James Morris, the great social historian of the empire, in Heaven's Command, "the imperial story was only ancillary to greater themes at home, and even the wistful imperial tragedies of time, distance or disillusion, did not seem the stuff of art." But why was the story ancillary; why was it not central? Why, for instance, did not a single one of the great novelists tackle the grand, rich and colourful theme of the British experience in India? Morris doesn't attempt an explanation. Martin Green has argued that because the "organising centre" of the "serious" Victorian novel was domesticity and the resulting moral problems, it was implacably hostile to the central myth of empire -- which he defines as the promise of irresponsible adventure. This is ingenious, but it merely pushes the argument back a stage: if the British "yearned" (to quote Morris again) "to break out of their sad or prosaic realities, and live more brilliant lives in Xanadu" why didn't their yearnings find expression in the novels, those great dream factories of the day?

Of course, we are generalising. British writers did not wholly ignore the empire. Tennyson wrote on imperial themes, though he was the only substantial poet to do so, and the results were not often happy. The sages of the day -- Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin -- touched on imperial matters now and again, though in no case was their interest long sustained. It remains true than an historically naive student could go right through a solid reading course in the mid-Victorian novel without suspecting for a minute the sheer range and richness of human experience which the empire offered the British people.

In literature the empire seems, indeed, to have had only two minor functions. One was to supply elements of burlesque or jest or fear: we think of Thackeray's nabobs in The Newcombes and Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair ; or Mrs Jellaby's telescopic philanthropy on the left bank of the Niger; or the West Indian creole, Bertha Rochester, Jane Eyre's bete noire. The other was as a plot device. The imperial countries and colonies serve simply as a black hole, into which characters could be dumped or fished forth as the exigencies of the story required. Look where you will among the master novelists, search the pages of Eliot or Dickens, Thackeray or Trollope or Hardy, and the empire serves, by and large, only as a refuge for middle-class criminals or broken-hearted husbands (Tom Gradgrind or Angel Clare), or as a dumping-ground for ex-virgins (Hetty Sorrel, Little Emily). What they actually do out there, whether it is to die miserably or make a fortune like Magwitch, is almost always a matter of report, not direct observation.

Only at the very end of the century, in the gaudy days around Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897, did the idea of empire at last find spokesmen of genius or popular appeal: Kipling and Conrad, obviously; but also Schreiner and Rider Haggard, and later on Forster and Maugham. The only two indisputably great fictions which are centrally "about" imperialism in this period are Heart of Darkness (1899) and Kim (1901), and the work of both these delineators of empire, Conrad and Kipling, was finished within a decade of the Jubilee.

It may therefore seem paradoxical, even perverse, of Suvendrini Perera to write a study of the novel and imperialism whose temporal range is the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, instead of, say, the last seventy. However, her purpose in Reaches of Empire is not to challenge these historical facts. She accepts them, or most of them. Her study is not the literature of empire (that is, "colonial literature", mostly bad). Rather, the novels under her eye are some of the canonical texts of early-middle Victorian fiction and her subject is the empire in literature, or, to be more exact, how imperialism did not merely provide novels with themes but how it was actually constituted and constructed, "processed and naturalised", or "legitimised" (as she puts it) by its portrayal in fiction.

Furthermore, she intends, so she tells us in her introductory chapter, to "relocate or recontextualise the novel form," by pursuing her insight that the ideology of empire actually helped to shape the development of the novel, the form being itself one of the great Imperial productions. That the big, bursting, triple-decker, Henry James's "loose baggy monster", as broad as the foreign acres under British rule, was as much a product of empire as the verandah or the cork helmet is certainly an intriguing idea, but it is a thesis which inevitably needs a lot of proving.

It has to be said at once that, in its 120-odd pages, Reaches of Empire doesn't begin to approach these objectives. Although she is careful to distinguish the concepts of imperialism and colonialism, Perera's British empire is limited to India, Africa and the Caribbean. The imaginative influence on the writer of the "white" colonies, of bush, veldt, prairie or Irish peat bog, is virtually invisible in her study, but their absence is not acknowledged. Again, given her geographical range, she needs to distinguish carefully between the literary themes derived from imperialism and those from orientalism, but she fails to do this systematically. Further, any study of this kind needs to have a solid historical underpinning. The perceptions of empire shifted radically throughout the century, as one might expect; yet scant notice is taken of this. Perera rather muddles together the ambience of the early to mid-Victorian sense of empire -- the cynical empire inherited from the eighteenth century with its sweating soldiers dying like flies, the comical curry colonels with their dusky mistresses and the heyday of the East India Company -- and the arrogant, assertive, crisp imperialism of the 1890s, with its memshahibs and its convictions of duty and manifold destiny.

The meat of Reaches of Empire is five chapters which take up a series of "cruces" in the formulation of empire: abolition, feminism and orientalism, miscegenation, mercantile adventuring and so on. Her main texts are a clutch of novels ranging from the forgotten Belinda (1801) by the almost forgotten Maria Edgeworth, to discussions of Dombey and Son (1846-8), Jane Eyre (1847), Vanity Fair (1848) and Edwin Drood (1869-70), with brief detours into Persuasion (1818), North and South (1853) and a number of others. A brief concluding chapter is particularly disappointing. After five chapters which are virtually self-contained essays, the reader is eager to see to see how Perera is going to bring all the threads together. Unfortunately, in the barely two pages of generalities which she allows herself, that is impossible.

The argumentative strategy of each chapter is to pursue a question which might be framed thus: If the literary art of the period was, consciously, apparently so uninterested in empire, does not this very silence speak volumes? Might writers have been subconsciously fascinated by the ideology of empire, so that it may be deconstructed as "a suggestive hidden presence"? Perera quotes Mineke Schipper on silences in the novel: "Who is not speaking?. . . Whose view is not expressed?" These questions are good ones. The problem, though, is to distinguish the silence of occlusion and evasion from the silence of indifference and non-existence.

Perera asserts, for instance, that Persuasion "preserves a careful silence on the possible corrupting effects of the new imperial wealth." But how do we know Austen's silence is "careful", especially when the narrating voice tells us that naval triumphs have brought prize money and promotion to Captain Wentworth and joy to the heart of Anne Elliot? At any rate, Austen's unfortunate "silence" cannot be forcibly vocalised by allying her with an hysterical outburst from (of all people!) Cobbett, inveighing against Cheltenham as the home of "East India plunderers." Perera says that Austen "weighs the freedom and mobility of the new imperial domain against its moral accountability." That is rather a lot to claim for Anne's sighing over the lot of the sailor's wife. When Persuasion shows us naval officers ashore on half pay, it is to contrast the informal warm domesticity of the Harville home with the pretensions, snobbery and coldheartedness of the Elliot menage. Austen's biography adequately explains her attractive sailors; thematically speaking, Persuasion is no more interested in them as guardians of empire than it is interested in the brutal reality, the rum, bum and concertina of the Georgian navy.

Similarly, Jane Eyre's love-sparring with Rochester, when she likens him to a bashaw in a Turkish harem and teasingly plots rebellion, looks promising (although this is hardly an image of empire in any case). But then we remember that Jane, having escaped to be a schoolmistress "in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England," compares her good fortune with being, yes, Rochester's "slave"; but not a slave in an Eastern seraglio; rather in a "pleasure villa" located in some "fool's paradise in Marseilles." Clearly for Bronte's simple, hand-clasping brand of Jingoism, abroad means vice whether it is the Mediterranean or the Golden Horn.

In short, Reaches of Empire never really comes to grips with the most intractable problem, which is that, even on the most generous reading, the whole extra-European world remains so irretrievably, so immutably marginal to the concerns of the mid-Victorian novel, capacious though its domestic range may have been. In each case the question insistently obtrudes itself whether these elements -- interesting though they may be -- actually organically inform their texts. In this critic's hands, at least, the argument that they do can only be made to stand up with a good deal of dubious starch: Cobbett used to stiffen up Austen, or De Quincey and the Eyre controversy sprayed on to an analysis of patterns of opium and thugee imagery in Edwin Drood. It makes for flimsy foundations to a grand theory.

Originally an American doctoral thesis, Reaches of Empire employs a tiresome jargon full of strained metaphors and neologisms. "The intensive interrogation of these texts could be seen as a reinscription of their institutionalization," Perera lectures sternly at one point, before letting us off the hook: "they are also, because of that institutionalization, especially productive sites for the posing of new questions." Peering through the mist of nominalisation, we see we are being told only that famous novels are products of their time but that it is still valuable to discover what they say and omit to say. Is that all? And who ever doubted it? The sentence quoted is a fair sample of the book's style; the goal seems to be to make it sound as much as possible like an inept translation from French.

Perera is at her best when she forgets about theory and her determination to force a case, and digs down into a text: her reading of Jane Eyre, for instance, is brief but enlightening, penetrating and patient in its attention to the small metaphorical stitching of the novel. Inside the plump grandiloquence of Reaches of Empire there is a good, plain critic struggling to get out.