SOURCE: Grogan, Claire. “Crossing Genre, Gender and Race in Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.” Studies in the Novel 34, no. 1 (spring 2002): 21-42.

[In the following essay, Grogan addresses the difficulty of classifying the genre of Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, arguing that the work is part Oriental satire, part Oriental tale, but primarily an Oriental study. Ultimately, the critic proposes that Hamilton's approach can best be defined as female Orientalism.]

This study was prompted by an incident while researching the politics of British women's writing in the late eighteenth century several years ago. I dutifully arrived at the Birmingham Public library to examine a first edition of Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), referenced in the National Union Catalogue back in Canada only to have the librarians deny all knowledge of the work. Faced with failure I desperately searched my notes for the catalogue number as proof of its existence. Much to the librarians' surprise—given my summary of the work—they announced that they would never have found it since it was stored in the Geography collection! How were they to know and how was I to guess? As a fresh graduate student I couldn't imagine why the cataloguing librarian hadn't known Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah was a fictional work! This incident, while affording some humor—because it ended well—set me considering how this fictional work could precipitate such a cataloguing error. On reflection nearly all of Hamilton's titles lead the reader away from the fictional nature of the text as much as towards it since she uses the titles to challenge or perhaps elude genre classification and social dictates about appropriate subjects for female writers. This led me to ponder the battles among critics since 1796 about where to position Hamilton on the political spectrum and how to classify her works.

Hamilton, a popular late-eighteenth-century writer, is becoming more familiar to readers with the recent availability of two of her fictional works in modern editions and the increasing number of excellent critical studies on women's writing in the late eighteenth century.¹ Hamilton, however, continues to prove a difficult writer to categorize with more recent studies ranging in their description of Hamilton as an anti-Jacobin, English-Jacobin or pro-revolutionary, sentimental or satirical writer, or a novelist of manners, and her works classified as satirical tales, tales of the times, belle lettres or national tales, because of her eclectic and wide-ranging use of subject matter. This paper will consider why her works create such problems with classification through particular consideration of her first major publication, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.²

It is well documented that late-eighteenth-century British society was structured around rigid gender roles that prescribed the intellectual and social capabilities of the sexes. Educationalists used nature and religion to explain “the mental and moral difference of sex” (Fordyce 1:175) and to prescribe corresponding activities for each sex. The male was defined as public, political, intellectual and rational, while the female was defined as private, domestic, emotional, and irrational. That these characteristics were used to assign appropriate activities is evident in James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1766): “War, commerce, politics, exercises of strength and dexterity, abstract philosophy, and all the abstruser sciences, are most properly the province of men,” while females, because they have been formed “with less vigour” must “command by obeying, and by yielding … conquer” (Fordyce 1:272, 1:271, 2:261). Females were encouraged first and foremost to be “good daughters, good wives, good mistresses, good members of society, and good Christians” (More 133). Such demarcation of the sexes designated writing as a predominantly male activity. Since, Ralph Cohen reminds us, “genres possessed social purposes” (206), eighteenth-century female writers were only tolerated so long as they restricted themselves to “minor” (read: feminine) genres of children's literature, educational treatises, polemics on household economy, and certain types of fiction. Women, because of their presumed intellectual limitations, were deemed ill-equipped to write in the “major” (read: masculine) genres of political polemics, scholarship and philosophy. As a consequence, they often combined several genres within a single work to circumvent such restrictive edicts about female intellect or propriety. That the novel as a genre allowed and accommodated a wide range of other (often “masculine”) genres is evident in the way women writers presented poetry, autobiography, drama, natural history, botany, philosophy, and history within the novel.³ Gary Kelly explains in English Fiction of the Revolutionary Period how “novelists of the Romantic Period incorporated elements of other, accepted literary discourses, particularly history and belles lettres into their novels in various ways in order to dignify the subliterary form of the novel and give it more rhetorical effectiveness with a reading public very aware of differences of cultural status between different discourses” (253). Of interest here is Hamilton's incorporation of less acceptable literary discourses in Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, although this trait pervades her entire oeuvre. Her second work, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), incorporates within the fictional narrative a political satire, philosophical and literary criticism, and economic treatise; History of Agrippina (1804) includes biography and historiographical study within a fictional tale, while Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) combines elements of both sentimental and national tales with an economic treatise.

Although some critics argue that on one level all novels have a multi-generic quality, some clearly prove more troublesome to the reader than others.⁴ Since both male and female writers create multi-generic texts, it is not purely a function of gender, although there is a marked difference in response to women, as opposed to men, claiming entitlement to write with authority in a number of genres.

Genres require different modes of presentation and imply different modes of reading “individual narratives … articulated signs by which authors reached out to unseen readers and sought to position their writings in relation to the conventions of genre” (Phillips 10). As Alan Lui notes, “genre tells the story of the [writer's] relation to history even when the story … is no longer a story” (49), clearly indicating the importance gender played in the choice and use of genre. However, a work that eludes easy generic categorization because it combines several genres and/or crosses acceptable gender lines has traditionally been perceived as a “cultural monstrosity” and critics are often reluctant to acknowledge (or value) the monstrous nature of the work at hand. Such a “cultural monstrosity” is perceived to be a “threat to endogamous, hegemonic order” because it defies classification (La Capra 221).

Positive recognition of multigeneric works has been slow coming because critics continue to be engaged primarily in “familiar dialectical evaluations of genre” in which all works are positioned firmly in a literary hierarchy. Consequently works combining genres are regarded anxiously since the “superior” genre is felt to be in danger of contamination or belittlement by the “inferior's” presence.⁵ Dominick La Capra notes that “genres generally come in hierarchies, and the objection to a mixture of genres often occults … an attempt to retain or reinforce a dominant position or an authoritative perspective” (221). Robert Elbaz suggests that “perhaps genre should be considered as an ideological grid fixed upon our consciousness” since “generic classification is a hegemonic phenomenon which restricts literary practice to approved, institutionalised forms of expression” (199).

That Elizabeth Hamilton's first fictional work, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, defies easy generic classification is evident in the critical treatment it has received, which has deemed it variously a eulogy, a religious satire, a political satire, and an Oriental tale. Even those critics who focus on the work's satirical nature disagree about the object of the satire. For example, the Critical Review described the work in July, 1796, as “well pointed (though not ill-natured) satire, and general entertainment,” while Elwood, in 1843, summarized the work as an Oriental satire in which the “observations of the Hindoo … evince a keen sense of the ludicrous” (115). Twentieth-century critics Marilyn Butler (Jane Austen and the War of Ideas 108) and Gary Kelly (Women, Writing, and Revolution 111) focus on its political “anti-Jacobin dimension.” Claudia Johnson describes it briefly as “a satirical novel” (Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel 9) while Ann Jones's fuller study in 1986 describes it as a “general satire on society” with specific “commentary on the religion of the fashionable world” (Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen's Age 20). Jones does, however, note her unease about its generic status, suggesting “the collection can only tentatively be called a novel,” while as recently as 1992 Peter Garside evinces even less satisfaction with the adequacy of traditional literary genres to define this text when he terms it “a quasi-fictional work” (vii).

Russell and Perkins note in their recent Broadview edition that Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah “is the most difficult of [Hamilton's] works to classify. Part anti-Jacobin satire, part Oriental fable, it is an ambiguous piece of writing, one in which Hamilton engages directly with a range of the major issues of her day, from colonialism to the ‘new’ philosophy to the present state of literature to female education” (12). A problematic consequence, however, of each critic's desire to locate Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah within a specific genre has meant that other, often conflicting, generic aspects have been ignored.

The most common interpretation of Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah has been as an Oriental satire, but even this categorization is inadequate. Hamilton's decision to use an Oriental theme was not uncommon, given the eighteenth-century fascination with the East. The various anonymous translations of Antoine Galland's Arabian Night's Entertainments (1704-1717) had in large part whetted the public's appetite for things “Eastern” or “Persian,” an appetite that affected tastes not only in literature but also in architecture, garden design, furniture and fashion. Martha Conant subdivides eighteenth-century Oriental literature into four classes: the Imaginative, the Moralistic, the Philosophic or the Satiric style of tale (200).⁶ Although Conant argues that women characteristically wrote Imaginative Oriental tales, I wish to show how Hamilton opted instead to write part satire and part Orientalist study.⁷ As Cohen notes, “making a generic choice involves [an author] in an ideological choice” and Hamilton's choice immediately links her to a well-established tradition of male satirists, and less immediately obviously to the emerging genre of Orientalism (qtd. in La Capra 214).

In common with numerous eighteenth-century male Oriental satirists, Hamilton introduces a variety of foreign male correspondents within the epistolary form of Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah in order to pass comment on home life and its institutions.⁸ Contemporary reviews in the British Critic, Critical Review, and Analytical Review clearly describe her work as an oriental satire in the style of Montesquieu, Congreve, Lyttelton and Johnson.⁹

Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah describes the friendship of Rajah of Almora, Zããrmilla, with the English Captain Percy, whom he rescues fleeing from the Afghans, and who educates him about Britain and its customs. Zããrmilla's interest in other political and social systems than those in Hindoostan is piqued by Percy's accounts and his own experience of the British Empire's “civilising influence” throughout the East, his description of Christianity and the equality of women before God. After Percy's death, Zããrmilla travels to Benares and Calcutta where his interaction with British officers fuels his curiosity about Britain. The death of Zããrmilla's wife four years later allows him to visit “the Queen of the oceans” (Britain) where he is entertained by London socialites, New Philosophers, members of the landed gentry and members of the peasantry. These experiences afford Zããrmilla a wealth of information, which he diligently conveys by letter to his friend Kisheen Neeay Mããndããra, Zimeendar (a landholder) of Cumlore, in Rohilcund. Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah includes criticisms of novels and novel readers, women who prefer pets to children, card playing, gambling, newspapers, critics, gossip, libel, philosophical groups, religious sects, and the dangers of generally irresponsible or unsociable behavior. The reader is persuaded, as by many satirical pieces, that Britain and the Westerner rather than the East and Easterner require improvement and reform.

Although Zããrmilla's experiences and naiveté are used to expose numerous minor flaws in the British social fabric, they are shown to be preferable to any foreign regime because of its tolerant Christian principles. Hamilton uses Zããrmilla's story to warn her readers of the dangers associated with xenophobic conservatives, English Jacobins, revolutionary agitators, and New Philosophers, all of whom (in her view) advocate or incite violent measures and encourage intolerance.

But considering the text as an Oriental satire only accounts for part of the work. In this paper I argue that we learn more about Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah if we consider the text as an oriental study rather than as an oriental satire or fable. I am making a clear distinction between oriental fable and oriental study (terms that I hold in opposition to each other throughout the paper), since the former is an imaginative representation of another group or culture characterized by stereotypical references to veils, harems, exotic Eastern fare and characters, while the latter provides a heightened, factual, scholarly cultural analysis of an Eastern culture or community's behavior, history, manners and customs.

Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah can only be partially described, then, through comparison to other Oriental satires, for it is only by considering this work as an Orientalist study that the reader fully appreciates Hamilton's fine balance between deference and defiance of social prescripts. The most significant departure from other popular writers of Oriental satire—a departure that signals her desire to be an Orientalist—is Hamilton's investment of the protean Oriental form with a more factual representation of the East. For example, while Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721) depicts Persian characters, there is little accurate Eastern matter in the tale, which generally reiterates existing Western prejudices. The East is not so much “a geographic area but a nightmare territory of the mind in which all the worst human impulses govern” (Shklar 46). Montesquieu's Préface describes how he “translated” and abridged the Lettres persanes to bring them into line with English tastes, which meant erasing much of the “langage asiatique” and removing “d'une infinité d'expressions sublimes, qui l'auroient ennuyé jusques dans les nues” (Montesquieu 1:131). Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) employs a distant, Eastern landscape as a favorable setting for his moral and philosophical musings, but there is little more than gesturing towards an authentic East. Although the characters' Eastern names help produce an effect of remoteness, there is little accompanying phraseology. The continuation of Johnson's story by Ellis Cornelia Knight in Dinarbas (1790) also contains limited Eastern material or texture, as the philosophical musings of various characters about happiness continue. George Lyttelton includes even fewer foreign elements in his Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan (1753) since his aim is to provide a superficial glossing of English customs from the Persian's viewpoint.

Unlike these satirists, Hamilton attempts to present the East in a more realistic manner by letting the Easterner Zããrmilla speak for himself and by referring to numerous secondary sources to corroborate statements about the East. For example, she refers to her brother Charles's History of the Rohilla Afghans to make her letters both geographically and historically precise when she locates Kisheen in Rohilla shortly after the Battle of Cutterah.¹⁰ In so doing, Hamilton combines a satirical political commentary on England with a display of her extensive knowledge of Oriental studies, scholarship, and contemporary scholars.¹¹

While I have no intention of dismissing the multi-generic dimension of Hamilton's work. I will privilege one genre amongst several, that of Orientalist study, in order to illustrate how reading it from this perspective draws attention to the complex nature of the work as a whole. Orientalism as a lens through which all other generic elements are highlighted is not a random choice, since the genre was and remains highly charged both to eighteenth-century and to twentieth-century readers, but for different reasons. The emergent eighteenth-century genre of Orientalist study was considered an intellectual, humanistic endeavor to understand and order the other, while twentieth-century Orientalism has been characterized by Edward Said as the appropriation and misrepresentation of the Easterner by the Westerner.

Hamilton's use of genre challenges traditional prescriptions about Orientalism and contemporary perceptions of who was writing and where to locate them. Exploring political and social reasons why it has been until recently argued that Orientalism, in both the eighteenth- and twentieth-century terms, was beyond the female purview highlights the instability of pronouncements then and now specifically about the genre of Orientalism, and more generally about works of a multi-generic character. Hamilton's foray into Orientalism demonstrates the politics of genre in the 1790s and the inadequacy of modern interpretations of Orientalism some two hundred years later, raising issues not only of politics of genre but also of gender and race, since genres are characteristically gendered and in turn carry racial connotations.

HISTORY OF ORIENTALISM

In Orientalism, Said explodes the myth of Western objectivity in its dealings with the Orient by illustrating how the discipline of Orientalism—the study of Eastern languages, customs and characteristics—reflects Western views, standards and desires to control the East. He indicates that because Orientalism was predicated upon writings by aristocrats and members of the professional middle-class (soldiers, explorer-entrepreneurs and philologists), it “encouraged a peculiarly (not to say invidiously) male conception of the world” (207). While one would be foolish to deny how Said's contribution opened up our understanding of the field of Orientalism, what has been less considered is how his seminal work closed off our ability to read either the Orient or the genre of Orientalism differently. Although Said stresses that it is “hypocritical to suppress the cultural, political, ideological, and institutional contexts in which people write, think and talk about the Orient” (345), his study neglects issues of economics, class and gender, an omission he himself notes in the afterword to the 1994 edition when he concedes that while male middle-class writers defined and dominated the field of Orientalism, it was not “exclusive to one people, gender, race, or class” but in fact “involved others” (351). One group of “others” whose contribution is suggested by Said, but whose impact has not been adequately explored, is that of women.

Women writers, when they have been considered at all, have been considered for their contributions to travel writing, insights into the harem,¹² travelogues, journals and letters—areas, some critics argue, that have been equally poorly served by Said's pronouncements on the Orient. For example, Susan Morgan warns us that because “Said's critical description of Western orientalism refers … to a phenomenon which is fundamentally masculine and the creators of which are primarily male,” it inadequately accounts for the female travel writer (13). While Morgan is concerned with women who physically traveled the East and Middle East, her observations alert us to the dangers when a partial truth is taken as a general truth.

In order to recognize Hamilton's contribution to the field of Orientalism we have to broaden the terms of the debate. Although Hamilton did not visit the Middle East herself, she clearly stakes her claim in the intellectual domain of Orientalism. Hamilton's use of Eastern material supports the emerging field of Orientalism—what becomes the genre of Orientalism—but also challenges it by virtue of her gender. Examining how she does this allows the modern reader to appreciate the obstacles facing female writers in Hamilton's own day because of prevailing social prescriptions about female intellect, and current prescriptions about the field of Orientalism as largely designated by Said in the twentieth century.

This is not, however, to disavow the growing voices of dissent with Said's analysis. John MacKenzie in his interdisciplinary Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts explains how

[S]ince 1990 a number of writers … have issued a series of largely unconnected challenges to Said. … They have revised his binary oppositions and produced a major critique of his oversimplifications of the imperial relationship. These works have highlighted mutual complicity and the interpenetrations of imperial and indigenous culture which can produce reversals in apparent power relationships. They have emphasized a multiplicity of voices, differentiated by gender, ideology, and religious standpoint, distinctions between surface simplicities and disguised ironies, and the disfunctions between representation and agency.

(21)

For example, Billie Melman, in Women's Orients, challenges Said's pronouncements that Orientalism is “peculiarly … male” or characteristically uniform when she identifies an alternative female discourse on the Orient which is heavily fractured. Lisa Lowe's Critical Terrains examining Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Montesquieu, Flaubert, and Forster, uses the ideas of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes to discredit Said's “totalising framework” in favor of “multivalence,” “indeterminability,” and “heterogeneity.” She argues for a profoundly heterogeneous Orientalism, “engendered differently” not only by distinct national circumstances but also by the “social and literary circumstances” of particular historical moments (24). Similarly, Sara Suleri uses a wide range of texts and periods to illustrate the complexities of the “Rhetoric of English India.” She reveals a “mutual narrative of complicities,” illustrative of the “necessary intimacies that obtain between ruler and ruled,” which deem the concept of a “monolithic other” as an obsolescent conceptual blockage (25). Louisa Heffernan in “Feminism against the East/West Divide: Lady Mary's Turkish Embassy Letters” concurs with Lowe that Said's “theory of Orientalism does not take into account the heterogeneity of works on the East” (201).

All of these studies posit an “alternative female discourse” of the East—highly fractured, multivocal and polyglot—but use predominantly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century male writers and twentieth-century theorists to do so. If we heed MacKenzie's warning that Said “has said little or nothing about the intended audience of different areas of ‘Orientalism’ or the possibility of contrasting receptions based on historical phase, class and economic context” (14), what happens if we acknowledge the novel as a genre contributing to or perhaps even contesting the field of Orientalism? How does a novel by a woman force us to question Orientalism at the moment of inception rather than as a late-nineteenth- or twentieth-century practice?

It is only by unraveling all the different generic threads in the final literary product that the modern reader is able to appreciate the “cultural, political, ideological, and institutional contexts” in which Hamilton wrote (Said 345), and acknowledge her work as both part of and also a critique of what Said terms the emerging canon of eighteenth-century Orientalism.

What anxieties, biases or obstacles prevented, and continue to prevent, Hamilton's work from being categorized as an Orientalist study by numerous critics since its publication? That such a categorization evinces anxiety is evident when Hamilton's earliest biographer, Elizabeth Benger, describes Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah in 1818 as a “tribute to her brother” Charles. Charles while serving a cadetship in India, worked with members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal including William Jones, on various projects which promoted an intellectual awareness of the east.

Benger's deferral of Elizabeth to her brother Charles downplays Elizabeth's own competence or right to discuss Oriental matters, as evidenced when Benger assures the reader Elizabeth Hamilton wrote “without affecting to become a Persian scholar” (1:109). This assessment is reiterated in the Critical Review when the reader is informed that “Miss Hamilton, is we understand, the sister of the late Mr. Charles Hamilton, the learned translator of the Arabic code of Mussulman laws” (July 1796: 249). In an 1859 biographical afterword the work is described as “the treasured up memorials of Mr. Hamilton, his letters, and his conversations” (v), rather than considering it as a study in its own right.

These anxieties are also voiced by Hamilton herself. Born to middle-class Scottish parents of a mercantile background, Hamilton reiterates the established gender demarcation when she voices conventional feminine reservations in both her private letters and her literary works about the propriety of women publishing. Hamilton apologizes in the Preface to Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah for her audacity in addressing the public since “it may be censured by others, as a presumptuous effort to wander out of that narrow and contracted path, which they have allotted to the female mind” (1:1). However, despite such reservations, Hamilton uses her several works (fictional and non-fictional) to challenge society's assumptions about a female's limited intellectual capabilities. In particular, Hamilton dissented from current dictates about gender and genre in her use of the Orient and Oriental elements in Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.

I suggest that Hamilton negotiates the numerous obstacles presented by the current social, religious, and political dictates by combining elements of the typically masculine genres of Oriental satire and Orientalism within the feminine genre of the novel to create her own brand of Orientalist study. This mixing of acceptable (feminine) and unacceptable (masculine) genres within a single work hides the radical import of her actions and raises the intellectual tenor of her work by exhibiting her own intellectual competence.

It is intriguing to note that while the literary ploy of the foreigner abroad aligns Hamilton with largely male eighteenth-century satirists such as Montesquieu, Lyttelton and Congreve, her packaging of her Letters clearly distinguishes her work from theirs. Hamilton presents the Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah in two volumes with an extensive preamble in the first. She dedicates the work to the late General-Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, and provides a 52-page Preliminary Dissertation of background material and a 5-page Glossary of “Oriental words that occur in the letters of the Rajah” (1:liii). Her use of various scholarly trappings veils the fictional nature of the work so effectively that the Monthly Review (Oct. 1796) felt the need to stress the work's fictional nature to the reader.

ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED

Hamilton ascribes her interest in and knowledge of Orientalism to the several years she spent in the company of her brother Charles, who in 1785 was back home on a five-year leave of absence from the East India Company to pursue a research project sponsored by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and sanctioned by then Governor-General Warren Hastings.¹³ Charles spent much time discussing his latest project, a translation of the Hedaya, both with his youngest sister Elizabeth and with members of the Asiatic Society in London. This exposure whetted Elizabeth's appetite for factual as opposed to apocryphal or fantastical information about the East, and this exposure to “distinguished, enlightened men” (1:li) in a domestic setting, she argues, justified her interest and competence in Orientalism. Writing of herself in the third person in order to distance both herself and her work from the first-person confessional and romantic texts of the time—specifically feminine novels—and align herself with scholars, she explains: “She had the peculiar advantage of hearing it discussed by those, who, from local knowledge, accurate information, and unbiased judgment, were eminently qualified to render the discussion both interesting and instructive” (1:li).

Devastated by her brother's untimely death in March of 1792 from typhus, Hamilton turned to literature as a means of consolation. Her first biographer Elizabeth Benger describes how Hamilton “conceive[d] the design of writing the Hindoo Rajah, in which she was not only permitted to recall the ideas she had acquired from her brother's conversation, but to poutray [sic] his character, and commemorate his talents and virtues” (1:125). In deference to her dead brother and in a bid to gain recognition as an Orientalist, she imitates the structural features of his translation of the Hedaya: namely, a glossary, similar subject matter, a dedication to the late Governor-General of Bengal, and a Preliminary Dissertation. As such, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is a rethinking, a rewriting and reimagining of her brother Charles's experience and learning. The Dedication to Warren Hastings¹⁴ serves a dual purpose since it both endows the work with the authority of a male in a respected position of power—thereby reinforcing the masculine genre of Orientalism she wished to emulate and enter—and it implies that the work contains an accurate account of life in Hindoostan for Hastings to have endorsed it with his name and reputation. The Preliminary Dissertation also serves a twofold purpose: it simultaneously helps prevent the reader from feeling alienated from the subject matter and helps establish the work as a scholarly, factual piece quite distinct from contemporary imaginative Oriental fables. Since, however, she is in fact writing a novel, her reworking of contemporary Orientalist discourse within this genre blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, between the genres of scholarship and novel.

Of interest is what happens when, as in Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, the elements of another genre, in this case Orientalism, “dominate the text as a whole, lending it new authority, or requiring the reader to attend more carefully to the text or to question received generic limits. Such texts could be called quasi-novels” (Kelly, English Fiction 253).

An important device Hamilton employs is the footnote, which she deems the best solution to overcome reader ignorance: “perhaps, the only way in which this difficulty [ignorance] can be surmounted is by explanatory notes” (Benger 2:126). Hamilton provides an astonishing one hundred and twelve footnotes in Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah to educate her reader. She provides definitions, refers the reader to other texts, invariably Orientalist scholarship, explains customs or presents historical, religious, or geographic background material. A few footnotes present her personal endorsement both of Orientalist policies and the practitioners of them—specifically Warren Hastings. Kelly notes this feature when he describes Hamilton's work as “an early footnote novel of the kind developed in the Revolutionary aftermath by women writers … to practice learned discourses and engage in political issues conventionally closed to [them]” (Women, Writing 113).

The tradition of scholarship, now defined as Orientalism, that Hamilton wished to join was headed by the likes of Sir Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, whose overriding goal was the professionalization of Imperial administration in the East. In order to achieve this goal, they promoted the intellectual study of the Orient as part of a humanistic movement that sought to link all mankind. Hamilton's protagonist Zããrmilla actually espouses a central tenet of the Asiatic society when he justifies his intellectual interest in the cultural other as neither threatening nor treasonable. In response to Mããndããra's horror that he should wish to “sojourn among infidels … impious eaters of blood” (1:61) Zããrmilla replies: “There is a period beyond which, if the human mind remains bound in the chains of ignorance, it loses the power of expansion, and considers the existence of it in others as the dream of illusive imagination” (1:160). Through such comments Hamilton endorses the major policies of Hastings and William Jones. While she acknowledges that the “thirst of conquest, and the desire of gain … first drew the attention of the most powerful and enlightened nations of Europe toward the fruitful regions of Hindoostan” (Preliminary Dissertation), she argues that the real benefits of such an Imperialist foreign policy are not the commercial ones but the “sources of knowledge and information … [which] have added to the stock of the literary world” (1:ii). It is this appetite for intellectual rather than financial gain which underpins the Orientalist movement and which places utmost importance upon civilized non-violent and non-confrontational change and exchange.

Like William Jones, and the numerous other members of the Asiatic Society whom she cites or mentions, Hamilton attempts to present the Orient and Orientals in a dignified light by emphasizing similarities and downplaying differences between East and West, as is apparent in the comparisons Hamilton draws between respective religions, mythologies and languages. Her description of the Hindoo's religious faith assumes that Hinduism and Christianity have an interchangeable system of reference, that she can translate the Hindoo faith into Christian terms in order to Westernize it and make it less threatening.¹⁵ To accomplish this, Hamilton stresses the common spirituality: “in her eyes, the mode of worship was nothing; the spirit from which it proceeded was every thing” (1:49). She also uses the Preliminary Dissertation to explain how “the names of heroes of Greek and Rome are rendered familiar” through a classical English education, whereas Persian and Hindoo writers remain unfamiliar, alien and neglected (1:iii). The English reader's familiarity with classical mythology allows him to overcome his resistance and sense of alienation just as Orientalist studies will in the future allow the reader to acquire a similar understanding and overcome a similar resistance to Hindoo mythology. After all, she notes “the long list of inferior deities … exhibits such a striking similitude in their character and offices to the ancient gods of Greece and Rome, that it has led to a conjecture of their being actually the same” (1:xxiv-xxv). Hamilton's desire and apparent ability to locate a common source or structure in both Occident and Orient mirrors the practices of the male Orientalists. William Jones, in the annual lecture for the Asiatic Society of Bengal, February 1786, for example, announced that

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source.

(Qtd. in Arberry 65)

Hamilton's numerous citations of members of the Asiatic society and references to their studies throughout Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah mirrors the Orientalists' practice of referring to each other's work to perpetuate the Western construct of the East: “Such texts … create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe,” since “Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors [and the role of the Orientalist is] not so much the East itself as the East made known, and therefore less fearsome, to the Western reading public” (Said 94). Western scholars' discoveries about the East both allow the West to maintain its control of the East and also imply that the Western scholar's superior mind is required to teach the Easterner about his own culture. Hamilton perpetuates this process when she endorses Governor-General Warren Hastings's decree that Asians should be subject to their own laws under British rule (1:xliii).¹⁶ Such reforms, espoused by Orientalists and supported by Hamilton, facilitate a “better” rule of the Empire because an application of Muslim laws by British ministers avoids both the existing Eastern corruption and potential British corruption of the situation. (Ironically, Hastings was himself impeached despite his endeavours to improve the existing system of rule which he felt was open to exploitation, bribery and corruption.) Although the British had to learn Sanskrit and Persian in order to translate the Muslim laws, it is finally the English interpretation of these laws which is enforced. Such actions reveal the British assumption of racial superiority and cultural understanding of other systems and its tendency to westernize them in the subsequent process of application.¹⁷

Hamilton also refers to the Hindoo nation's inability to govern itself other than by despotic autocrats until the British colonized and democratized India, and in so doing suggests that the East did not exist or have proper status until it was “occupied, systemised and rationalised” (Said 206) by the West. Hamilton justifies Imperialist policies by having Zããrmilla describe to the sceptical Mããndããra the liberating and enlightened impact of the British upon his country: “in order to disseminate the love of virtue and freedom, they [the British] cultivated the trans-Atlantic isles; and to rescue our nation from the hands of the oppressor, did this brave and generous people visit the shores of Hindustan!” (1:20-21). This view of “texts as transmitting authentic human experience is … a traditional emphasis of western patriarchal humanism” (Eagleton 193).

In these ways Hamilton incorporates the genre of Orientalism into her own fictional work. However, entering this masculine sphere of writing, albeit within a novel, creates numerous problems for her. Her assumption of the mantle of masculine authority while also advocating elements of Wollstonecraft's feminism and promoting views of racial tolerance is problematic since the crossing of gender and genre boundaries creates contradictions and tensions in her work. Considering some of the problems Hamilton's presentation of herself as an Orientalist creates exposes not only the ideological underpinnings of Orientalism (which Said and Homi Bhabha describe in their studies) but also, and more intriguingly, exposes the fallibility or precariousness of the term Orientalism. In the remainder of the paper I will consider what Hamilton's presentation of herself as Orientalist does to our perception and interpretation of the term Orientalism.

FEMALE ORIENTALIST

As early as 1991 Dennis Porter noted in Haunted Journeys that Said “fails to show how literary texts in their play establish distance from the ideologies they seem to be reproducing” (21), a point with which Susan Morgan concurs:

The point is not that the writers blindly, and powerlessly, parroted a dominant ideology. On the contrary often they consciously understood the ideological function of their writings about the East. They also often fashioned their descriptions to invoke or support a particular ideological position different from that of the Colonial Office or the commercial companies, different from the supporters of white or male western supremacy. They were vocal participants in what they saw as an active and as yet undecided debate about the political, economic and moral meaning of the East … Moreover, imperial texts can display considerable heterogeneity, revealing doubts and contradictions, both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic thought.

(194)

Hamilton's gender makes her own reaffirmation of the Orientalist's paternalistic control over the East problematic and creates tensions and paradoxes within the Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. For example, unlike her male peers, Hamilton (in life or in fiction) cannot profess to have translated Zããrmilla's original letters, given that her class and gender denied her a classical education.¹⁸ In contrast, Lyttelton can boast about having acquired a competence at Persian and translated the letters that “were put into [his] hands … by … accident” (Preface) while Montesquieu's Lettres persanes are the supposed correspondence of his Persian guests.¹⁹ To circumvent this problem, Hamilton presents her letters through her role as editor of a translation of the private correspondence between Zããrmilla and Mããndããra supposedly undertaken by the protagonist himself at the request of the elderly Mr. Denbeigh in the final letter (2:329). While the letters are purportedly filtered through the male character, Zããrmilla, and collated and organized by the elderly Mr. Denbeigh—they are ironically actually created and organized by a female writer/editor within a feminine genre but with many signs of a masculine genre. Although Hamilton's representation of the Orient purports to be the Hindoo's account of his own culture, it is heavily annotated by the editor to encourage a Western understanding and empathy for the East. Likewise, the Preliminary Dissertation is yet another example of the Occident's control of the Orient, the former's desire to explain and thus tame the latter.²⁰ Unlike the male satirists, Hamilton presents Zããrmilla's letters as his own English translation, yet it is still as I have suggested the Western culture which gives voice to the Eastern one. Thus the Western voice is dominant because it has the power to articulate or silence the marginalized voice and the relationship between Occident and Orient is established or remains one of power. This is most evident in Hamilton's mimicry of the male voice. She professes to speak for the Easterner but actually speaks for the Westerner. To speak or write on Orientalist matters, Hamilton has to speak through the voice of the Orientalist; that is, she has to forego her female voice and style for that of the male writer. This mimicry indicates how Hamilton accepts the teachings of male conduct writers, such as Dr. James Fordyce and the Rev. Thomas Gisborne, that discourse is gendered. Gisborne explains in his Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797) that conversation is an “index to the mind” and the language of females is either “shallow and frothy … or muddy, bitter and corrosive,” and marked by “vanity, affectation, and frivolousness” (99, 113).²¹ As Mary Eagleton concludes, the “implicit rider to this definition is that ‘male’ language is authoritative, rational, appropriate for serious public platforms and that if women wish to improve their position, they must become adept in the use of this language” (204). To assume the power of the Orientalist, Hamilton must employ his language and style. The “authentic” letters are meant both to reveal the Hindoo's satisfaction with the British and also to sidestep the self-serving nature of the latter's Imperialist policies. While she undoubtedly furthers Hastings's colonizing strategies, she also, whether consciously or unconsciously, simultaneously undermines his Imperialist thrust when she usurps the Western male's position of power. Problems arise because she is not male and thus the ideological underpinnings of her mimicry create a dialogic language—she undermines what she seems to uphold at the very moment of utterance. She speaks as a male of male things but is a female intruding into male territory. As anthropologist Fatima Mernissi notes: “A woman has no right to use male spaces. If she enters them, she is upsetting the male's order and his peace of mind. She is actually committing an act of aggression against him merely by being present where she should not be” (144). In so doing, Hamilton blurs the clear distinction between male and female. Speaking as or like a male Orientalist makes her complicit with them and their ideology, but because she is in fact a female speaker she is, to a greater degree, subverting their original intent.

Despite protestations otherwise, Hamilton cannot represent the East in the language of male Orientalists without implicating herself in the underlying prejudices of their ideological project. This is clearly illustrated when her attempts to advocate a similar tolerance towards other races (as that exhibited by her protagonist Zããrmilla) are undercut by her reliance on the Orientalist's “etymological” history of “the word Hind,” which both inscribes and reinforces Western prejudices about the East. Hamilton provides a footnote which explains that the word “Hind” is

Computed by Colonel Dow to have been derived from Hind, a supposed son of Ham, the son of Noah, and by other Orientalists, to owe its origin to the river Indus … The word Hind is often used by the Persian Poets to signify Black or dark-coloured, and it is probable that Hindoo may mean no more than a black man, as our negro from Niger.

(1:vii)

Hamilton's combination of various Orientalists' definitions links the servitude of Ham's descendants (Noah cursed his son Ham with expulsion and a life of servitude) with all black races. As the biblically conscious readership would automatically pick up the allusion of blacks/foreigners as slaves and inferior men, Hamilton perpetuates the belief in white superiority. It proves impossible for Hamilton to use the language, terminology and research of Orientalists without the accompanying sexual and racial prejudices.

This mimicry is most troublesome for Hamilton because Orientalists characteristically describe the East and women in similar language. The “invidiously masculine” Orientalist discourse Said outlines identifies the East as a feminine continent sharing the same traits as British women: submission, irrationality, depravity, childishness, and abnormality. In fact, Said claims “Every [Orientalist] kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine impenetrability” (206). Similarly, Nigel Leask writes: “One of the common Romantic Orientalist stereotypes … sets up a figure of Western male rationality against the ‘dreamy imagination’ of a feminized Orient” (142). This view of “the Orient as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption” (Said 206), establishes a relationship based on power and it is this same discrepancy of power that advocates of women's rights such as Mary Wollstonecraft criticize in the West's male/female relationship.²² Thus the Orientalists' relationship to the East parallels the establishment's treatment of women in eighteenth-century Britain where individual women were seen to be intelligent but were nevertheless expected to conform to socially-constructed norms.²³ This contradiction presents a major dilemma for Hamilton because she refutes such stereotypes through her own actions, yet perpetuates them for other women through her role as Orientalist.²⁴

Hamilton's appropriation of the male voice thereby creates tensions in her text because, while on the one hand she reinscribes the male/female, powerful/powerless dichotomy, on the other hand she simultaneously and perhaps unintentionally merges these opposites. Indeed, despite any protestations otherwise her desire to write and speak as an Orientalist subverts the established order. Her apologetic defense that she cannot be accused of breaking social etiquette because she is repeating the words of male Orientalists is refuted by her popularization of learned culture for a wider readership than most of the male scholars whom she cites and to whom she defers.

Although critics argue that genres require different modes of presentation and imply different modes of reading, in fact, as Favret notes, “genres share authors, share production and share consumption” (296). Hamilton's writing challenges readers and critics both to recognize and to accept the audacious range of genres at play in her work.

Strikingly, Hamilton's transgressions lead not only to the erasure of gender and genre but also to a form of textual miscegenation. If the primary responsibility of the Orientalist is to maintain racial distinctions between East and West, and if the primary responsibility of the Western female is to produce a white heir, Hamilton challenges both roles in Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Hamilton not only assumes the male role of Orientalist but also does so to produce what she refers to in her correspondence as her “black baby” (Benger 1:68). It is a “black baby” because it is a “child of her brain” and not of her womb, because black denotes the ink marks on the page and as such links her with a long tradition of literature as progeny. However, more significantly the denomination as “black baby” is significant because of her protagonist's color. That Hamilton is aware of her “black baby's” transgressive nature is evident when one recalls her lengthy definition of the word “Hind.” Hamilton undermines the existentialist opposition of color (white/black), sex (male/female) and genre (fiction/non fiction, novel/Orientalist study) by producing, as a white woman, a black child. Her inability or refusal to produce a white baby and her production of a black baby further explodes the existentialist basis of Western society, for the offspring of such interracial breeding must likewise create a new racial category. Perhaps unwittingly, Hamilton's refusal to remain circumscribed by society's dictates of appropriate feminine behavior prefigures the collapse of the center itself. Hamilton's participation in Orientalist discourse challenges the premises of Orientalism itself and critiques Said's characterization of early Orientalism as a wholly male domain, and as such suggests why the participation of women in Orientalism has been overlooked. Such participation, like the participatory text itself, is fraught with tensions and contradictions, failing to fit comfortably into established generic, gender or racial categories.

CONCLUSION

Since Hamilton's gender precludes her joining the ranks of male Orientalists, her writing creates a new category to contain her: that of the female Orientalist. This new field has the popular appeal of the Oriental tale, the political thrust of the philosophical or satirical piece, and the scholarship of the Orientalist's study. Hamilton creates a new dynamic space—a space that shapes the works of later women writers. Perhaps the most notable example is Maria Edgeworth, who in Murad the Unlucky (1804) copies Hamilton's footnoting technique. Edgeworth's fictional tale is similarly glossed with references of historical authenticity and accuracy to provide a more realistic and more culturally responsible account of the Orient.²⁵

Hamilton's work demands serious consideration as an exposé of the impact socially constructed differences of gender, genre and race exerted upon the female writer. It is, after all, “the significant or challenging text [which] has a more problematic relation both to genres it is placing in question and to those it is helping to engender” (La Capra 221). Since “the older generic specifications are transformed into a brand-name system against which any authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle” (Jameson 107), we should not dismiss a work because it defies easy classification. Hamilton has Zããrmilla note how “critics … call everything stupid that is beyond the limits of their slender comprehensions,” and how new works “have to sustain the heavy blows of those who cut down everything as nonsense, that swerves from the beaten track over which they have been accustomed to trot” (2:331). Acknowledging the full range of genres at play in Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah allows us to appreciate how she negotiates both her own society's and current society's definitions of gender, genre and race to reveal how such terms are necessarily always contested and fluid.

Notes

1. See Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. S. Russel and P. Perkins and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. Claire Grogan. Much recent scholarship considers the difficulties facing the eighteenth-century Englishwoman writer as a result of inherent social sexism, a pervasive—albeit weakening—belief in a female's innate intellectual inferiority, and the improprieties of women publishing. See, for example, Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827; Todd, Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800; Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel; and Ty, Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812.

2. Hamilton, Elizabeth. Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah: Written Previous to, and During the Period of His Residence in England, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1796). All parenthetical references are to this edition.

3. For example, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, and Helen Maria Williams incorporated poetry within their fiction, while Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft incorporated autobiographical material in their fiction. Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie merged drama and fiction, Charlotte Smith incorporated natural history, botany and geology in her fictional works, while Hays combined biography, history and fiction. Wollstonecraft, Hays and Opie combined political and philosophical polemic in their fiction.

4. See McKeon and Kilgour.

5. See Mary Favret (281-300).

6. Conant subdivides eighteenth-century Oriental literature into four classes: the Imaginative (Clara Reeve, Frances Sheridan, Beckworth, Galland), the Moralistic (Johnson, Marmontel, Addison and Steele), the Philosophic (Johnson, Addison) or the Satirie (Montesquieu, Lyttelton).

7. Two notable exceptions are Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Letters (1763) and Ellis Cornelia Knight's Dinarbas (1790). The latter, subtitled A Tale; Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, “combines the genres of apologue and novel to demonstrate the truth of a statement … about the nature of happiness” (Knight 3).

8. Examples are Goldsmith's Letters from a Chinese Philosopher: Citizen of the World (1775); Walpole's A Letter from Xo-Ho: A Chinese Philosopher at London (1757); Graffigny's Letters Written by a Peruvian Princess (1771); Marana's L'Espion dans les cours des princes chrétiens (1684); Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721, English translation Persian Letters John Ozell 1722); and Lyttelton's Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan (1753).

9. The British Critic (Sept. 1796) describes the work “as not inferior to the Persian Letters, or any thing that we have had of the same kind for many years” (241). The Critical Review (July 1796) notes “the letters before us are in a different style [to Lord Littleton [sic] and Montesquieu], and are more upon the model of Addison's humorous Epistle from the Ambassador of Bantam, than of the Persian Letters” (241), while the Analytical Review (Oct 1796) notes “the style of these letters is agreeable and appropriate, though less glowing and metaphorical than the admired oriental compositions of Drs. Johnson and Hawkesworth” and that “the author of these letters seems to have taken the hint of conveying her sentiments to the public in the present form, from Montesquieu's and Lord Lyttelton's Persian Letters, Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, the Turkish Spy &c.” calling it “a lively and amusing little work” (429).

10. Elizabeth refers to Charles's first major study, An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afghans in the Northern Provinces of Hindostan; Compiled from a Persian Manuscript and Other Original Papers, published in December 1786, to describe the battle of Cutterah between the “armies of the Visier, assisted by the English, and troops of Hafiz Rhamut, the Rohilla chief on the 22nd day of April 1774” (1:3).

11. Hamilton references numerous Orientalists, many of whom are members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal: Colonel Dow, Mr. Wilkins, Halhed, Crawford, Maurice, Sir William Jones, Sir Warren Hastings, Scrofton, Charles Hamilton and Richardson (1:xxxii, 82).

12. See, for example, Jill Matus.

13. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, later the Royal Asiatic Society, whose mandate was “enquiry into the history and antiquities, arts, sciences, and literatures of Asia” first met in January 1784 (Arberry 64).

14. The Dedication reads “As the honoured Patron, and Friend, of a beloved, and much lamented brother, is this trifle, as a Sincere, though humble tribute of esteem and gratitude, respectfully inscribed.”

15. It should be noted that Zããrmilla's friends do exactly the same thing when describing England and the English to the Asian reader. Sheermal views card-playing as “a form of idolatry”, compares prostitutes to “the ancient Hindu blood sacrifice to the Goddess Calle, and describes the British class system in terms of three castes “people of family, people of no family, [and] people of style or fashion” (1:118). Further, Sheermal believes that these similarities prove the “Braminical origin of the English nation” which illustrates, as Kelly notes, “a commonplace of enlightenment cultural relativism, that all cultures see others in their own terms” (Women, Writing 137).

16. For details about the translation of these laws see Edwardes, Warren Hastings: King of the Nabobs (152).

17. Despite the partial success of Orientalist endeavors to link the East and West through marking their common ground, problems arise because of the British and Occidental prejudices which underpin and permeate all such representations of the Orient. In the process of establishing a common link between East and West, “Something patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another, the status more rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judging things either as completely novel or as completely well known; a new median category emerges, a category that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time as versions of a previously known thing” (Said 58).

18. An exception such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had better access to learning because of her upper-class status.

19. “Les persanes qui écrivent ici étoient logés avec moi; nous passions notre vie ensemble. … Ils me communiquoient la plupart de leurs lettres; je les copiai … Je fais done que l'office de traducteur; toute ma peine a été de mettre l'ourage à nos mœurs” (Montesquieu 1: 131).

20. William Jones exemplified this colonial attitude in his “irresistible impulse always to codify, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient to a ‘complete digest’ of laws, figures, customs, and works” (Said 56).

21. Dr. James Fordyce describes the gendering of discourse in his Sermons to Young Women (1:161-203).

22. See Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (5).

23. For example, Dr. Johnson praises his acquaintance Elizabeth Carter for her scholarly achievements, but still asserts that “My old friend Mrs. Carter could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem” (Boswell 1:122 n.4.). The inference is that a scholarly woman could exempt herself from criticisms of “masculinity” only by asserting her femininity through performing traditionally female activities such as cooking and sewing.

24. See, for example, 1:38-39.

25. See also Eliza Fay, Original Letters from India.

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