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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
I have at last, waded through your Oriental Library, and it is impossible you can ever feel the weight of the obligation I owe you, except you turn author, and some kind friend supplies you with rare books that give the sanction of authority to your own wild and improbable visions.
Your Indian histories place me upon the fairy ground you know I love to tread, "where nothing is but what is not," and you have contributed so largely and efficiently to my Indian venture, that you have a right to share in the profits, and a claim to be considered a silent partner in the firm. (1)
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THUS SYDNEY OWENSON, IN AN UNDATED LETTER TO HER CLOSE FRIEND and former lover, the Dublin barrister Sir Charles Ormsby, acknowledged her debt to "a silent partner" in her textual venture of The Missionary, a novel which was to receive four London editions and a New York edition in its year of publication. (2) The narratives of history and fiction operate in a productive symbiosis: each can rewrite the other. The implicit contrasts between the bulky quarto tomes and the aerial lightness of her imagination, between "the fairy ground" of the sentimental novel and the commercial realities of book production exemplify the polarized ambiguities apparent not only in this work but throughout Sydney Owenson's life and career.
Such ambiguities were complicated by confusing contemporary cross-currents of ideology and class. The financial transactions of her "Indian venture" were completed not in the Leadenhall Street headquarters of the East India Company but in the even more august surroundings of the Foreign Office, where her publisher, John Joseph Stockdale, somewhat overawed by the presence of the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, purchased the manuscript of The Missionary; A, Indian Tale for the sum of four hundred pounds.
Viscount Castlereagh, the architect of the 1800 Act of Union by which Ireland's Parliament had voted itself out of existence, was, according to Percy Bysshe Shelley, more often accompanied by seven bloodhounds than Jacobin novelists, and the story of how this wild Irish patriot, republican sympathizer and "radical slut" came to be sitting at ease, negotiating the sale of her latest "improbable vision" in his Cabinet Office, is in many respects worthy of one of Owenson's own fictions. (3)
In politicizing her sentimental discourse, she adapted an old tradition which had figured colonized Ireland as a woman, such as Kathleen Ni Houlihan or Roisin Dubh, oppressed or sexually exploited. Her adaptation incorporated the time-honoured romance trope of the transformative encounter by which a handsome and prejudiced young protagonist/colonizer is subjected to a romantic initiation with the beautifully representative muse of an alien land. Sexuality transcends and transgresses cultural boundaries and ethnic seduction could be vicariously relished by a novel-reading public who were simultaneously instructed in Gaelic traditions by means of elaborate footnotes. Her readers were encouraged to engage if not in sexual tourism then in a heavily eroticized cultural tourism, and the appeal of this formula might be extended far beyond colonial Ireland to colonized Greece in Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), or further east to colonized India.
Sydney Owenson launched herself into the troubled waters of Orientalism as easily as she might take a dip in Bantry Bay. It was all a question of origins; and for Owenson Gaelic culture had its origins in the Orient. In this light, Ireland was not only Britain's first colony, but also her first Oriental colony, and Owenson frequently represented Ireland in Oriental tropes.
When Glorvina's preceptor, the redoubtable Father John, in his defense of the priority of the third-century Irish bardic legends of Oisin, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, announced: "For Ireland, owing to its being colonized from Phoenicia, and consequent early introduction of letters there, was at that period esteemed the most enlightened country in Europe," he was airing the contemporary theory of Irish Phoenicianism with its piquant fusion of Orientalist and Celtic exoticism. (4) Phoenicianism constituted an Orientalist tradition of culture which not only reversed received stereotypes of Irish barbarity, but spelled out the civilizing effects of Eastern culture all too frequently destroyed by Western barbarism. The victimized and vanquished Celts were presented with a venerable ethnology and a tradition rich in alternative culture, both of which had transformed nostalgic consolation into patriotic opposition in the heady Patriot decades of the 1780s and 1790s. (5)
It was with a consciousness of her exotic and Oriental roots and in a spirit of Indo-European, or even Indo-Hibernian, solidarity, that Owenson contemplated an "Indian Tale" to extend her generic repertoire of national tales. While Vallancey was enthusiastically linking ancient Irish with Persian and Sanskrit, radicals on both sides of the Irish Sea were drawing parallels between imperial despotism within the "internal colony" of Ireland and the external colony of British India. (6) In the intervals between branding its subject races as barbaric, the potent masculinity of colonial discourse gendered Hindu and Irishman alike as lethargic, soft, and feminine. Although Owenson stoutly resisted accusations of barbarism levelled at either Hibernia or Hindostan, she seems complicit in colonialist gendering; as Glorvina had proved a representational icon of Ireland, her new heroine, Luxima would embody the perfumed and yielding allure of the subcontinent.
Hinduism presented a substantial challenge for Owenson's cultural relativism and religious syncretism. Furthermore, a novel entitled The Missionary: An Indian Tale which appeared amidst the heated debate preceding the renewal of the East India Company's Charter, and especially the so-called "Pious Clause" concerning the question of whether missionaries should be allowed to proselytize among the Indian peoples, might well be seen to be making a timely commercial as well as political intervention. (7)
That The Missionary was not "a dangerous novel" had less to do with its implausibility than with its exposure of Iberian rather than British imperialism and its seventeenth-century setting in Kashmir, beyond the territorial acquisitions of the East India Company. (8) Its topical resonance, however, was indisputable; politicians were beginning to recognize the power of narrative fiction in the shaping of public opinion, and thus we can begin to appreciate some of the reasons why Castlereagh was anxious that the novel should be published.
Governor-General Wellesley, favoring the tradition of the Orientalist regime established by Hastings, had discouraged Missionary activity in Bengal, and this was largely Castlereagh's position. In short what the much-maligned Foreign Secretary and the much-mythologizing author had in common was a belief in the East India Company's established policy of non-interference with the religious "prejudices" of the Indian races.
Two years after Lord Castlereagh had driven Sydney Owenson in his chariot to a meeting with her publisher, another arresting political juxtaposition of reactionary and radical occurred when in June 1813 the Morning Chronicle announced, "Several Petitions for facilitating the introduction of Christian Knowledge into India, were presented by Viscount Lord Sidmouth and Lord Byron." (9) What these piquant associations have in common is the question of India and the Missionary Clause, where the politics of right and left were far from straightforward. The editors of Owenson's memoirs described Castlereagh as "perhaps, the greatest admirer the Missionary ever found," but it was his Lordship's arch-enemy, Percy Shelley, who out--bid him in the admiration stakes, describing Owenson's novel as "a divine thing ... Since I have read this book I have read no other--but I have thought strangely," yet strangely the atheistical Shelley appears to have believed that "the zeal of the missionaries...
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