SOURCE: Taylor, Susan B. “Feminism and Orientalism in Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.” Women's Studies 29, no. 5 (2000): 555-81.

[In the following essay, Taylor explores Hamilton's paradoxical use of Oriental studies in Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah to address the subjugation of women in Britain while expressing support for British imperial control over India.]

Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) offers a place to view the interaction of two vexed issues that first draw considerable attention in the British Romantic era: the increasing debates over what constituted women's proper spheres and roles and the heated arguments over how best to govern the rapidly developing Empire in India. These two cultural currents intersect in Hamilton's orientalism—her study of Indian texts and language and her use of that knowledge in her epistolary oriental tale, the Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. In the Translation, what might be termed Hamilton's feminism and her imperialism lead to seemingly contradictory stances, the most central of which is her favoring the British rule of an entire foreign continent, India, while also advocating increased rights and self-governance for British women. Hamilton's complex positions on these significant issues of her era suggest several important points for readers of women writers to consider. First, Hamilton's work provides an opportunity to observe the ways a woman writer of her era might use orientalism, a rapidly developing cultural phenomenon in the late eighteenth century. Hamilton's orientalism provides her with a proper forum in which to argue political questions, since, as a woman in 1796, writing was one of the few ways she might address political questions publicly, and it allows her to pursue intellectual interests beyond the scope circumscribed by women's education in her era. Second, as with some of the other writers advocating women's rights in her era, Hamilton's work leads us to question the more recent assumption that advocacy of women's rights necessarily implies a generally “liberal” political outlook, in this case, that imperialism and feminism appear mutually exclusive.¹

Orientalism in popular literature of Hamilton's period used the settings, characters, and tropes from the “oriental” regions then known as Persia, India, Pakistan, and the lands of the Ottoman Empire. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters from the Turkish Embassy are a well known early eighteenth-century example of another variation of popular British orientalism, the epistolary travelogue. “Orientalism” also refers to academic or scholarly disciplines that focus on eastern cultures and languages—disciplines pursued by orientalists. Both of these concepts of orientalism are circulating in Hamilton's era (the OED cites the first meaning, of “Oriental” style or characteristics, as originating in 1769, and the second meaning, referring to those practicing orientalist disciplines, as originating in 1779-81). Hamilton's literary strategy in the Translation partakes of both definitions of orientalism as popular tale and as scholarly enterprise. The scholarly nature of her work is embodied in the novel's preface, a fifty-five page “Preliminary Dissertation” in which Hamilton explicates Hindu culture. The novel itself exemplifies popular orientalism: it is composed of a series of letters sent from Zaarmilla, the Hindoo Rajah of Almora, to his friend Kisheen Neeay Maandaara, Zimeendar of Cumlor in Rohilcund, and tells the story of what happens when the Rajah saves an Englishman, Percy, taken prisoner by the Afghans while researching “antiquities” in Hindoostan. Although Percy eventually dies, he piques the Rajah's interest in English culture, especially through the Bible, which the Rajah assumes every European follows to the letter. After meeting some of Percy's English friends in India, the Rajah resolves to go to England and see their culture for himself. Meanwhile, the Bramin Sheermaal, another friend of Maandaara's who has been to England, tries to convince the Rajah that it is not the perfect place he imagines it to be. The Rajah insists on seeing for himself, and his letters to Maandaara tell of his experiences. Among his comments on British culture generally, the Rajah addresses the treatment and position of women in British culture specifically.

In recent years, the complexities underlying these deceptively simple definitions of orientalism (as scholarly enterprise and popular entertainment) have been delineated, most notably beginning with Edward Said's analysis of orientalism in his 1977 book by the same name, in which he argues that orientalism is a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). As a literary practice, orientalism has been demonstrated to reinforce colonization and imperialism by reinforcing ideas of western advancement, religious authority, and moral superiority. However, while Said's model suggests the relationships between West and East are shaped almost exclusively by Western notions of superiority and absolute difference, more recent work has questioned this model. Other literary and cultural scholars have further examined the premises underlying Western concepts of the East, and called into question Said's formulation of an historically “monolithic” Western attitude toward the East.

Pertinent to my discussion of Hamilton's orientalism is work by Homi Bhabha, among others, which examines the “ambivalence” underlying the colonizers' identity that leads to their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to differentiate absolutely between the colonizing “self” and the colonized “other” (94). Similarly, Jenny Sharpe argues that at least in the era of William Jones, a contemporary of Hamilton's and a founder of the study of Indian languages, that European orientalists were seeking sources of Europe's past in the East. Sharpe suggests that “in the historical example of India that sympathy and identity are equally constitutive of Orientalist discourse as hostility and alterity” at least in the earlier years of the colonial enterprise (29).² Hamilton's novel emphasizes precisely this kind of ambivalence of identity, for she initially reinforces the Empire's basic premise of cultural difference in the novel's “Preliminary Dissertation” where she asserts the benefits of the British colonization of India, yet in the novel itself calls that premise of difference into question through the very act of taking on the Rajah's identity—and by allowing him to voice witty criticisms of British culture.

While Hamilton's feminism may be placed in the context of other feminist thought of her era, her orientalism is unusual for a woman writer of her generation. In fact, Hamilton's orientalism simultaneously expresses and disguises her feminism. By writing her oriental tale and by prefacing her work with her “Preliminary Dissertation” (in which she acknowledges women's ignorance about the topics in oriental studies that she discusses) Hamilton embodies the goals that her works posit for women of a more serious education and freedom from prescribed social roles which keep them frivolous and intellectually shallow. And yet, the popular orientalism through which she disguises her words as those of a Hindu man allows Hamilton a certain distance from her own identity as a woman in the 1790s, a potentially powerful strategy for articulating her didactic points.

CONTEXT OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS ISSUES OF 1790S

In speaking of Hamilton's advocacy of women's rights (to a more rigorous education, to freedom from ridiculous fashions, e.g.) as feminism, I am concurring with recent scholarship which explores concepts of feminism in the 1790s and earlier.³ Hamilton's feminism is part of a tradition of writing which might in various ways be classified as feminist although composed years before the term's genesis.⁴ Several literary scholars have delineated useful frameworks for discussing these early feminist writers and their works, especially in terms of addressing the potential problems of anachronism in discussing feminism across the centuries. Gary Kelly argues, for example, “that feminism is always socially and historically particular, advancing the rights and claims of women within specific historical, social, and cultural conditions” (“Jane Austen” 19). Thus, definitions of what constitutes feminist work can vary widely.⁵

Within these variations shaped by the writers' respective goals and historical moments, however, there appear certain overarching issues, such as a desire to change the status quo for women and men, or to expand educational opportunities for women. One example is Barbara Lewalski finding in the Jacobean women writers she studies a “strong resistance […] to the patriarchal construct of women as chaste, silent, and obedient” and a “rewriting of women's status and roles” (2). An additional issue for current literary scholars to examine is the effect late twentieth-century concepts of feminism have on readings of earlier women writers—especially in the case of Hamilton, where feminist thought mingles with imperialism on the one hand, and with a more conservative desire to maintain the domestic sphere for women on the other hand. Hamilton's work raises several similar issues about feminism and conservative politics as does that of Mary Astell. Bridget Hill notes that Mary Astell, who wrote on women's education a hundred years before Mary Wollstonecraft or Elizabeth Hamilton, can be seen “as an early feminist expressing enlightened views on the education of women and wittily satirising the submissive role of women in marriage” (52) but that these views must also be considered in the context of Astell's “religious devotion and high Tory views” (53). Hill argues that “enlightened views on women” do not have to be necessarily tied to either conservative or radical thought and quotes Joan Kinnaird to point out “‘our tendency to assume that there is necessarily a contradiction between feminism and conservatism’” (qtd. in Hill 52).

While Hamilton remains conservative about the means by which women can be liberated from their restrictive social positions (advocating change from within the present system, rather than an overall change in the social structure) she nevertheless supports many of the ideas advocated by her contemporaries who are also concerned with women's rights, including Mary Wollstonecraft. Hamilton aims throughout her writings to better the education of women and to satirize the limitations of women's roles in contemporary British society. While Hamilton's emphasis on domesticity might thus suggest a conservatism—a desire to restrict women to carefully delineated private roles—her overall goals for the improvements she would like to see in women's lives suggest that the changes she desires might have great effects. Trying to capture Hamilton as either liberal or conservative is in some ways a faulty exercise, for her writings involve a spectrum of political positions, as Janice Farrar Thaddeus suggests: “In Hamilton radical and conservative elements consort together in an even more complex way than is customary for women of her period. Her writings are an unusual amalgam of politics, domesticity, class consciousness, and explicit awareness of women's subjection. Yet she has characteristically been seen simply as a conservative” (266). As Margaret Doody writes, Hamilton is “no mere dogmatic conservative […] she is humane, and socially critical. She holds no brief for the establishment at large, and is often caustic about men in power and about polite society” (190).

Part of what may be seen as Hamilton's “conservatism” can be traced to her efforts to broaden women's opportunities while maintaining an emphasis on the domestic sphere. When Elizabeth Hamilton published the Translation in 1796, an era of political, social, and industrial change in British culture solidified women's proper roles into the domestic ideal, in which marriage and family were the defining arenas of women's identity. This middle-class norm of “domestic woman” becomes normative for British culture as a whole.⁶ Thus, for example, Kelly finds Hamilton's feminism, while coming out of the Revolutionary decade of the 1790s, to be “more domestic and religious” (Women 143) than that of Revolutionary feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who “attacks the cultural revolution's figure of ‘domestic woman’ as merely a re-formation of dependent, eroticized, trivialized, and subjugated courtly ‘woman’” (Women 26). Other literary scholars have analyzed this sharpening of the domestic ideal during the later eighteenth century and have argued that a number of women writers of this era make strategic use of the domestic ideal to advocate greater women's rights from within social norms and to discuss issues and ideas that otherwise might be seen as inappropriate for women. Referring to Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, Eleanor Ty links its parody to other women writers' efforts: “To avoid being labeled and ridiculed as a follower of Wollstonecraft then, many of the women writers at the turn of the century developed narrative strategies and used fictional forms which enabled them to explore highly charged political topics without censure” (114). Hamilton's orientalism is one example of such a strategy, and it serves various purposes for her feminism. In addition to being a disguise through which to speak, it serves as a lens with which to examine British culture and a source of intellectual development for Hamilton herself.

RELATIONSHIPS AMONG EMPIRE, ORIENTALISM, AND FEMINISM

The feminist polemics of Hamilton's Translation cannot be discussed without also considering her orientalism and her position on the British Empire; her orientalism is the filter through which she views both the Empire and the position of women in British culture. What are the implications of the arguably feminist Hamilton using Hindu culture as a vehicle for her message? This conjunction between imperialism, feminism, and orientalism provides important clues about the roles women and women writers might play in the construction of empires. Even though she does not travel to India to build the Empire firsthand (as her brother Charles did), she builds it through supporting imperialism in her writings, and assisting her brother's orientalist work in England.

Hamilton's feminism in the Translation occurs in a tangled and almost contradictory relationship to her orientalism. In fact, her feminist and orientalist goals provide the novel with a central dichotomy—the seemingly unconscious ambivalence about which the text is centered. Her feminist stance on women's education mingles with her orientalist descriptions of Hindu culture and her support for the British colonization of India. This doubly framed project contributes to the construction of the British empire, while it also suggests ways to liberate women from their subjection, a seemingly paradoxical combination of results.⁷ Much of the Translation repeats this overall pattern of doubled interests, as the British Empire's observing “eye” turns inward and outward through the Hindoo Rajah's observations and critiques of both British and Hindu customs. Yet it is through Hamilton's paradoxical focus on feminist issues in an orientalist context that the Translation inverts some of empire's founding binarisms, such as its split between civilized and uncivilized, for example. In addition to the complex and often conflicting layers of representation that structure any encounter between cultures, Hamilton further complicates her finally pro-empire position by analyzing women's roles in both English and Indian culture.

The Translation's two-pronged focus reflects Hamilton's position as doubly outside the evolving middle-class woman's sphere of the 1790s: she writes both as a woman working in a field almost exclusively the domain of men, and in the first person as a Hindu man visiting England. This peculiar combination of knowledge and interests results in such descriptions as the following, given by the Rajah upon first seeing English women at a ball in India: “they shone forth with invincible lustre, in spite of the deformity of a dress, which appears to have been invented by envy, with an intention of disfiguring the fairest works of nature” (I. 223). This attack on British women's fashion continues as he describes the frame of the skirts, which “instead of falling in easy and graceful folds around their limbs, are extended on huge frames, made of bamboo, or some similar material, and gives to their figure very much the shape of a Moor Punky.” A Moor Punky, Hamilton's footnote explains, is a “country vessel of a peculiar construction used for the conveyance of cotton and other bulky articles” (I. 253). In this characteristic example from the Translation, the orientalist's strategy of using metaphors from other cultures, explained by footnotes, conveys the feminist message of the ridiculousness of European women's fashion. Hamilton's orientalism provides her with a vocabulary of images and words with which to make her feminist points.

Hamilton's feminism and her orientalism both are introduced in the “Preliminary Dissertation,” which provides background information on the Hindu and Indian cultures (including a glossary of Hindu terms). With this “Preliminary Dissertation,” Hamilton demonstrates that the British Empire is constructed by knowledge as well as commerce. She directs this Dissertation to people who are ignorant of the orientalists' knowledge, gathered, she writes vaguely, as one of the “consequences […] from our intercourse with the East-Indies,” and suggests that even reading oriental literature in translation requires certain knowledge that not everyone may have (I. i-ii). Women are especially unlikely to have encountered orientalist scholarship, and Hamilton justifies her Dissertation by arguing that for

particularly those of my own sex, who may have been deterred […] from seeking information from a more copious source, I think it necessary toward explaining many passages in the letters of the Rajah, which might otherwise be unintelligible, to give a short and simple sketch of the history of the nation to which they belonged.

(I. v)

Hamilton asserts herself as an orientalist, as someone with knowledge of the Hindu culture and language, and depicts the development of an orientalist as characteristically male. In a related point in the Dissertation, she observes that women in particular have little chance of learning about “oriental” cultures, when they are not even taught the “classics” with boys in school. In fact, Hamilton gained her own knowledge of Indian culture through studies with her brother Charles, who was a self-taught orientalist. Through her correspondence with her brother Charles who was in India for fourteen years, and her work with him on his return translating the Hedaya, Hamilton claims a sort of first-hand knowledge of Indian culture, and also cites extensive reading of orientalists.⁸ Hamilton's acknowledgment of her brother's role in her oriental studies underscores the notion that a female orientalist can only develop her interest under the tutelage of a more established, male orientalist. Yet at the same time, she deliberately encroaches on this masculine territory. As the “Preliminary Dissertation” acknowledges, Hamilton is trying to present in her fictional letters a version of Hindu culture that will be “unintelligible” to those who are not versed in that culture—to those who are not orientalists, and by implication, especially those who are women.⁹

The unusual knowledge of Indian culture that Hamilton gains through studies with her brother is also a potential liability in an era that questions the propriety and fitness of women's education in general. She is placed in the awkward position of asserting her intellectual authority to write the series of letters by the fictional Rajah, while at the same time needing to avoid being reproached as a woman who has overstepped the bounds of her gender. Thus, central to Hamilton's feminist focus in the Translation are arguments related to the importance of educating girls and women, which she carefully qualifies to avoid presenting inappropriate advice or too radical suggestions for female education. One of her more radical arguments supports co-education for boys and girls. Hamilton's own formal academic schooling lasted about five years, from age eight to age thirteen, at which point she stayed home to study music; her contemporary biographer Elizabeth Benger notes that Hamilton later wished she had studied classics or science instead of music (I. 46). She continued educating herself through extensive reading and through correspondence and suggestions from her brother.¹⁰ Benger is also careful to point out that Hamilton's involvement in oriental studies was not simply a function of “copying” her brother. She explains,

It was not, however, that Miss Hamilton borrowed from her brother's mind, but that he taught her to explore her own latent and hitherto unappropriated treasures […]. His conversation inspired her with a taste for oriental literature; and without affecting to become a Persian scholar, she spontaneously caught the idioms, and she insensibly became familiar with the customs and manners of the East.

(I. 109-110)

Benger's description of Hamilton's developing interest in oriental scholarship depicts the equivocation women needed to articulate their intellectual goals. On the one hand, Benger fears labeling Hamilton an intellectual derivative who simply steals from her brother; thus she acknowledges that her brother was awakening “latent” elements of Hamilton's own mind, which the reader might assume had been undiscovered because of her more limited education. In effect, her brother encourages a sort of intellectual colonization of her “hitherto unappropriated” mental treasures. On the other hand, Benger is wary of attributing too much academic intensity to Hamilton; thus she does not “affect” too serious a scholarly interest, and is almost subconsciously or “insensibly” lulled into a familiarity with the material. A spontaneous education guarantees that one will not become a bluestocking, or a Bridgetina Botherim, the obsessed female philosopher of Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. In the same vein, Benger writes that Hamilton's Aunt Marshall, with whom she lived from age six, warned her to “avoid any display of superior knowledge, by which she might be subjected to the imputation of pedantry” (I. 50).

Hamilton herself expresses considerable ambivalence about the Translation when she sends a friend a few pages of an early version to critique; she also demonstrates dramatically her conflicting assumptions about cultural differences when she writes of the Translation. “I am afraid to enquire what you will say to my black baby,” she informs this friend, and asks her not to worry about criticizing “any child of my brain, towards whom I am so unnatural a parent, that I have hitherto seen them smothered without remorse” (Benger I. 126).¹¹ In this quotation, Hamilton positions herself as the mother of her writings and, in an inverse image of Mary Shelley's later references to her “hideous progeny” the novel Frankenstein, considers herself a hideous progenitor, in a sense. Her claim that she is an unnatural parent questions both her connection with her offspring, and the passivity and indifference with which she sees her “children” “smothered.” She distances herself from her creations with these images, and makes that distance even greater when she terms the Translation her “black baby.” With this metaphor, she makes racial differences between the Hindus she depicts and the Britons she satirizes the salient feature of her novel; yet, in a way she places herself closer to the Hindus than the Britons as the producer and parent of this “black” text. As an orientalist, she bears a textual child that embodies the differences she uses.

Benger's concerns about Hamilton's interests and knowledge, and Hamilton's own initial insecurities, do not correspond to the authoritative and enthusiastic tone of the Translation's “Preliminary Dissertation.” The Translation not only celebrates orientalist scholarship, it also glorifies British rule in India. Hamilton's support of the British presence in India emerges in both the “Preliminary Dissertation” and in the body of the letters themselves praising the British for saving Hindoostan from the Mogul invaders. Hamilton's Dissertation calls British rule there a “happy change” and evades potentially disagreeable aspects of British power by stating that it is “totally foreign to our purposes to relate” how Great Britain came to power in India (I. xlii). She generally distinguishes the “purposes” of orientalism from those of imperialism. Instead, Hamilton glosses over the ways the “thirst of conquest, and the desire of gain” have been the “means of opening sources of knowledge and information to the learned and the curious” (I. ii). This recognition of the imperialist drive behind the expansion of knowledge is one of the few places where Hamilton implies a critique of British Indian policy by indicating that less than noble “thirst” and “desire” has motivated Britain's involvement; however, the rest of the text dilutes this potential critique of imperialism with open support of the Empire regardless of motivation. This support of the Empire persists throughout the novel, and becomes particularly pronounced when voiced by the Hindoo Rajah himself. Even in his first letter, he praises the British as “sons of mercy” who have “checked the fury of the Afgan Khans, who have so long oppressed our unhappy country” (I. 3). This view of the British as saviors, while presented in the sort of inflamed, excessive discourse that the Rajah uses for his other descriptions, never really is refuted, even when the Rajah's other idealizations about the English are tempered. Instead, messages such as the following, spoken by the Rajah, reinforce the idea that Indians favor the British occupation of their land:

Benevolent people of England! it is their desire, that all should be partakers of the same blessings of liberty, which they themselves enjoy. It was doubtless with this glorious view, that they sent forth colonies to enlighten, and instruct, the vast regions of America. To disseminate the love of virtue and freedom, they 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 Hindoostan.

(I. 20-21)

Although the language of the passage emphasizes the satirical, in its exaggerated praise and idealized notion of the British motivations behind colonization (qualified by the word “doubtless,” which of course points to a possibility of doubt), in the context of the novel, it presents itself as a genuine commentary by an Indian on the British role in India. Especially in its invocation of the British rescuing Hindoostan from its oppressors, this passage claims to be an exaggerated but truthful version of what an Indian might say about British rule.

Paradoxically, the British orientalists' invasive presence both liberates the Hindus from their conquerors and preserves Hindu culture, since the Hindus have been unable to preserve it for themselves. The Rajah describes the way English officers in the Army spend their spare time learning Persian and Sanskrit (much as Charles Hamilton did), and how

It is by these strangers that the annals of Hindoostan, which her barbarian conquerors have sought to obliterate in the blood of her children, shall be restored! Already have temples, palaces, and cities, which Calli had covered with the mantle of oblivion, been, by the indefatigable researches of these favourites of Serraswattee, dragged to light.

(I. 190)

The orientalist is depicted as the savior of the cultural heritage of India, a heritage that has been neglected due to one goddess, Calli, and that will be restored by the British as delegates of another deity, Serraswattee. This reassurance that the British orientalist's project is divinely appointed encourages British readers to believe that the Hindus approve of and want the British “indefatigably” to restore their ruins.

This image of Hindu culture rescued from oblivion clashes, however, with the concept of respecting another culture's literal or figurative veils that the Rajah supports elsewhere. This notion of respecting and accepting a certain amount of mystery or obscurity serves as a comment on the typical orientalist's thorough and exhaustive study. Using the trope of the veil, the Rajah speaks of the importance of respecting a culture's secrets:

Not presuming to lift the veil of mystery, with which some passages are enveloped (a presumption, which in a stranger would be equally unpardonable and unbecoming) I pass over what appears to be mysterious, with the most profound respect.

(I. 28)

Here, the Rajah respects the Bible as a sacred text, accepts its mysteries as such and comments on the importance of not finding an answer for every question he has. For the Rajah, the stranger should never try to lift the veil donned by other cultures; to do so offends the other culture and reflects badly on the stranger. This passage parallels the custom of purdah, the screening of women from the sight of other men, including men from other cultures. The Rajah's emphasis on the unpardonable and unbecoming act of unveiling the mysteries of another culture suggests a critique of at least certain orientalists' approaches. Yet, the Rajah also praises the British “strangers” who save Hindoostan's heritage from obscurity, and invokes a Hindu divinity to justify their efforts. Through the Rajah, Hamilton approaches and backs away from criticizing orientalists.

Hamilton's Translation rarely acknowledges directly that the developing Empire might face criticism from British citizens. In one unusual instance, Hamilton voices anti-imperial sentiment through a man who encounters the Rajah in a British coffee house. This man had just read a notice in an English newspaper stating that the Rajah had “come thither on behalf of the Hindoo inhabitants of Bengal, to complain of the horrid cruelties, and unexampled oppression, under which, through the mal-administration of the British Governor of India, we were made to groan” (II. 175). The coffee house patron excitedly spouts his concern to the Rajah about the Hindus' treatment and tries to convince him that not all English are evil tyrants; he supposes that the Rajah will tell him that “it is we who have desolated your empire […] and have extirpated the noble race of warriors, who were your kind protectors” (II. 173). The Rajah dismisses this man as insane, especially since he has not yet seen the notice. When he does read the newspaper's account, he is shocked to find such blatant lies in print, for he considers the British a benevolent and helpful presence in India. While Hamilton's satire criticizes the commercialism of newspapers (being willing to print anything under the category of paid notice), it manages to depict the Rajah's support of the British without irony. The orientalism of the novel permits this, by treating British India seriously.

The impassioned language of the newspaper notice argues for the existence of a faction of Britons opposing the Empire, and the novel attempts to counter this possibility by voicing support for the Empire in one of its subjects, the Rajah. Yet at least one contemporary publication, The Analytical Review, questions Hamilton's support of the Empire. Given The Analytical Review's generally liberal audience (and reviewers who included Mary Wollstonecraft), it is not too surprising that it praises Hamilton's “considerable knowledge of india affairs” in the Translation but finds it “doubtful, whether the generality of readers will perfectly accord with her in opinion, respecting the happy change which the long-suffering hindoos have experienced under the dominion of Great Britain” (429). Or as the reviewer suggests more explicitly, “many” people will think that “these injured people have merely changed masters, and one species of oppression for another” (429). The implication that the British presence in India is akin to a kind of slavery counters Hamilton's careful glossing over of exactly how the British came to power in India, and what is keeping them there still.¹²

At the same time, The Analytical Review finds in Hamilton's text a “vein of ingenious pleasantry […] mingled with a number of judicious, and sensible observations, on various subjects, especially on the female mind and manners” (430). It praises the Translation as “one of those publications, which are calculated to undermine and destroy the barbarous, sensual prejudices, which have hitherto been indulged respecting the female mind and manners, and to confute the pertinacious sophisms of witlings” (432). This review praises Hamilton's feminist questioning of prejudices against women which sound remarkably similar to prejudices against Britain's “Others” that focus on their supposedly “barbarous, sensual” qualities. Without directly articulating it, this review emphasizes the paradoxical blind spot of Hamilton's Translation, that Hamilton overlooks the circumstances of the increasing British dominion over India while arguing for new consideration of women's lives in Britain.

ORIENTALIST SATIRE AND CRITIQUES OF THE POSITION OF WOMEN IN BRITISH CULTURE

The Translation is thus not just an example of orientalism; it is orientalist satire with the express point of criticizing British customs, especially the treatment and position of women. Indeed, The Analytical Review compared the Translation to Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), Lord Lyttleton's Persian Letters, an imitation of Montesquieu's (1735), and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762) (429). Another reviewer described the letters similarly: “These letters are filled with sound sense and observation; they illustrate in a very lively manner the remark, that many of our practices, habits, and sentiments, depend entirely on custom, prejudice, and education” (Scots 47). One effect of defamiliarizing one's own customs is the recognition that they are constructions, just as those of other cultures appear to be.¹³

Hamilton's orientalist satire takes great advantage of the new vocabulary of terms and tropes supplied by this orientalism to critique women's lives in her own society. One recurrent and successful theme of the Translation's satire is hypocritical religious devotion. The Bramin Sheermaal interprets the English passion for pastimes like playing cards as a form of religious fervor, and assumes that the Britons' apparently apathetic behavior in church demonstrates their ability to mask their intense religious feelings. He remarks upon the Priest, who looked so spiritless during the church service yet brings such zeal to the card table (I. 98). The Rajah offers his own observations on religious behavior in England when he goes to church with a female acquaintance and critiques the way women's obsession with their clothes pervades their religious practices. At this stage in the novel, he is still convinced that the English follow the Bible's precepts, and assumes that they are doing so secretly when he cannot find outward proof of their Christianity. He notes that in church,

Instead of behaving in this temple, as if they had assembled together to send up their united tribute of praise, thanksgiving, and humble supplication to the Most High, so successfully did they affect the concealment of their devotional sentiments, that no one would have suspected they had met together for any other purpose, but that of staring at each other's dress!

(II. 62)

Women are particularly guilty of the offenses the Rajah naively observes, and fashion is a favorite target of Hamilton's. Similarly, the Rajah begins to understand that not all Christians behave according to the religion's doctrines, when, during this same service, his female escort turns a fainting, impoverished woman out of her pew after the Rajah, “supposing that the Christian lady who sat by me, though her eyes were roving to all parts of the temple, was, in reality, too much engaged in her devotions to observe what passed” asked the poor woman to sit with them (II. 62). Later in his stay in England, the Rajah writes to his friends in India of his error in thinking that all or even many English would adhere to their holy text, the Bible. Instead he finds that “Christianity (as it is set forth in the Shaster [holy book]) has the smallest number of votaries; and, according to the accounts of my new friend, is fast journeying to oblivion” (II. 202).

Hamilton's satire also transcends gender in its critiques of her society that reflect the influx of orientalist knowledge into Britain. Social hierarchies are one such object of satire in the Translation. The Bramin Sheermal, who visits England first and tries to discourage the Rajah from going, informs him that he is mistaken when he says that the English have no caste system:

Instead of being all of one Cast, as he imagines, the people throughout Great Britain are divided into three Casts, all separate and distinct from each other; and which are commonly known by the several appellations, of PEOPLE OF FAMILY, PEOPLE OF NO FAMILY, AND PEOPLE OF STYLE, or fashion. The first two are of much more ancient origin than the other Cast; which indeed appears to have sprung from an unnatural mixture of the others; like the tribes of Buhran Sunker, in Hindostan.

(I. 117)

Part of the humor in this orientalist satire comes from the way the Bramin reads English culture in terms of his own, interpreting social divisions as castes. This satire, especially, pokes fun indirectly at the orientalist's way of interpreting other cultures strictly in relation to his own. Yet, another part of the humor comes from the accuracy of his interpretations: English social hierarchy often operates like caste in India, as an inescapable social position complete with duties and expectations, and with clear delimiters. If the English reader finds the comparison between English social structures and the Hindu caste system amusing (because a little absurd), it criticizes the orientalist's search for analogs to western culture in eastern cultures. This example is layered still further with orientalism's trappings: Hamilton footnotes “the tribes of Buhran Sunker” with the suggestion to “See Gentoo Laws, page 43” and explains the Bramin's comparison of British culture to Hindu culture with a reference to a British translation of Hindu law.

The Rajah's ingenuous confusion over a range of issues relating to women's roles is the device that Hamilton uses to satirize what is oppressive to women in both cultures. His enlightened view that women should be educated further, and more seriously, than they are now in both cultures contrasts with his friend the Bramin's views. Female seminaries in Britain, the Bramin argues, teach useless skills such as painting and harpsichord playing, and are otherwise places “where science, reason, and common sense, dare not to intrude” (I. 129-130). This is not to say that the Bramin wants women educated equally with men; he asserts that the primary function of a wife is to have enough practical sense and education to fulfill her domestic duties. Instead, he criticizes the way in “that country, as well as in this, all men allow that there is nothing so amiable in a woman as the helplessness of mental imbecility” (I. 136). Perhaps echoing Wollstonecraft, Hamilton's Bramin points to the hypocrisy of teaching women to adorn themselves “inspired with no other view, but that of rendering themselves objects of pleasure to the eyes of men,” leaving them unskilled for surviving when widowed or otherwise left without the support of men (I. 134).

In discussing the role of marriage in the Translation and the novel's feminist satire, it is important to note the novel's position on sati. Hamilton's text wavers between condemning the practice (by making the Bramin's rationale for it objectionable), and demonstrating that British culture has its own methods of sacrificing women. The Bramin Sheermaal praises sati as a way to dispose of widows otherwise incapable of caring for themselves (and voices some of the novel's harshest satire):

How much wiser is that institution of Brahma, by which creatures, incapable of acting with propriety for themselves, are effectually put out of the way of mischief, by being burned with the bodies of their husbands.—Wise regulation! Laudable practice! by which the number of old women is so effectually diminished.

(I. 135)

This depiction of sati plays into British anxieties about the true motivations of sati, and its function in Hindu culture. Hamilton attempts to excite British readers' sympathy for the widows, and to alarm them at the practice. Yet in a later reference to sati, the Bramin compares the number of English women “sacrificed to the licentious passions of unprincipled men” through their destitution, and asks how British soldiers in India can “declaim, with apparent horror, against the holy ceremony of the virtuous widow throwing herself upon the funeral pile of her deceased Lord” while remaining indifferent to women in their own culture (I. 143). While the Bramin's argument that it is better to be dead than a prostitute states the plight of women in both nations rather starkly, his criticism does point to the hypocrisy of British concern for Hindu women, and the lack of concern for the potential suffering and slow death of life on the streets for a woman in Britain.

The Translation's feminist satire emerges especially in its stereotypical female characters. The women that the Rajah meets in England generally correspond to a range of types: the bluestocking, the vacuous woman, and the virtuous woman. The novel's bluestocking, Miss Ardent, is learned in Greek and Latin, but is ignorant and contemptuous of domestic duties. The Rajah describes her beliefs in the “superiority of her own masculine understanding” and thinks her indelicacy and vanity about her own learning as bad as that of a male pedant (II. 100; 101-102). The vacuous woman, almost certainly a member of the caste of People of Fashion, is represented by the Rajah's novel-reading shipmate on his journey to England. The Rajah borrows books from this woman, assuming she must be extremely well educated from the number of books she reads per day:

Notwithstanding the knowledge she must doubtless have acquired from the number of books she has read, she is so modest as never to utter a sentiment beyond vulgar observation, nor to attempt making use of her reason upon any occasion whatever.

(II. 18)

This novel-reader (at least of women's romance and gothic novels) represents the other end of the spectrum of women satirized through the Rajah's misinterpretations, the woman whose rational faculties are completely undeveloped.

The virtuous and perfectly educated woman is embodied by the Rajah's first English friend, Percy's sister Charlotte (in a thinly veiled parallel between Charles and Elizabeth Hamilton). Although encouraged by family friends to write poetry, she protests saying “you know how female writers are looked down upon. The women fear, and hate; the men ridicule, and dislike them” (II. 328). Charlotte (a female Charles?) voices the restrictions of her gender. These female types, especially that of the overly learned and thus unfeminine Miss Ardent, serve to reinforce the stereotyping of women according to their education and pastimes, and usually reduce women to this surface analysis. Yet there are also moments in the text which question the labeling system. When he has been in England for a while, the Rajah writes,

Nothing but experience could have convinced me, that the cultivation of the rational faculties should, among the Christian women of England, be so rare, that no sooner does one of them emerge from the depths of ignorance, than she is suspected of assuming the airs of self-importance and conceit. If she has the knowledge of a school-boy, she is thought vain of her learning. Nor are there many men of sense among the Christians who would not prefer to the conversation of such a woman, the impertinent tattle of the frivolous, the capricious, and the ignorant.

(II. 253)

Through the Rajah, Hamilton points to several of the paradoxes of educated women, paradoxes that she writes of with first-hand familiarity to her brother Charles. One is the social bias against women demonstrating their intelligence: what is acceptable for school-boys is presumptuous of women. Additionally, the “frivolous, the capricious, and the ignorant” women are the ones who get the men. There is no ambivalence about the value of getting a man in Hamilton's writings, especially a man who can be a respectful companion. In fact, the Translation reinforces the importance of marriage with its stress on conventional models of virtuous womanhood, and confirms it with its ending, in which the modest and virtuous daughter of one of the Rajah's hosts marries her genteel, rich, and practical suitor. This sentimentally depicted ending participates in the genre it earlier mocked, of sentimental novels in which all is resolved with a marriage.

Hamilton's memoirs, and especially her letters to her brother Charles, demonstrate her conscious efforts to reconcile herself to her unmarried life. In part, she seems reluctant to give up pursuing her literary and intellectual interests for a conventional marriage. Her brother Charles suggests that she might join him in India at one point, for the purpose of meeting eligible men. Aside from her obligations to her aging uncle (she lived in isolation with him for six years following the death of his wife), Hamilton says that she is not suited to such an expedition,

nor would even the certainty of getting a husband weigh so very deeply with me, as you gentlemen may perhaps imagine; nor am I sure I should be quite so saleable as you might partially suppose: I believe a pert adventuress would have the advantage of me.

(Benger I. 93)

Hamilton holds herself indifferent to the abstract notion of getting a husband, and reproaches men who assume that this is the sole goal of a woman's life. However, she also seems to realize that her intellectual interests and principles may have made her a less desirable commodity in the marriage market than the pert adventuress, who sounds like an energetic follower, rather than a woman with her own direction. Yet Hamilton also seems to have in mind an ideal marriage partner, one with whom she would share a “similarity of disposition, an union of heart and sentiment”—a combination of qualities she thinks unlikely to be found in an East India Company employee (Benger I. 93).

In her “Preliminary Dissertation,” Hamilton acknowledges that her introduction “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” (I. xliv). To wander outside of her narrow path means for Hamilton to wander (at least figuratively) outside of the country, not only into masculine territory, but into the territory of the other. From this other territory, Hamilton launches what are in many cases the strongest criticisms of British culture that she expresses anywhere in her writings. Hamilton's orientalism serves her feminism as a disguise and vehicle for its goals—and as a reminder of its blind spots. The Translation assumes it is appropriate for a woman subjugated to British patriarchy to take the voice of a member of a colonized nation as a way to make her points about the imperial society that imprisons them both. By taking on that Hindoo voice, Hamilton unwittingly argues for the impossibility of one feminist claim, that imperial conquests are parallel to sexual conquests and that imperial domination of colonies is parallel to patriarchal domination of women.

Notes

1. It is important to clarify briefly what I mean when I describe Hamilton's opinions as either liberal or conservative. By conservative, I mean that which favors preserving the traditional and resists change, especially abrupt change, and generally recognizes established social hierarchies and values. By liberal, I mean that which espouses change, especially in expanding the rights of the individual and altering established hierarchies and social structures. “Imperialism” is a tricky concept to codify as either liberal or conservative, since from various perspectives it can be seen as reducing the autonomy of the colonized country, or as expanding the commercial rights of the imperial nation. These multiple perspectives can be seen in the debates in Parliament in the decade before Hamilton wrote the Translation, during the crisis over what to do with the East India Company's debts and with the controversial actions certain administrators had taken in India while aiding the Company's ventures (including the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the administrator to whom Hamilton dedicates her piece). Various arguments were made for and against British imperialism in India, ranging from the idea that the British government had an obligation to support the commercial charters it granted the East India Company in 1600 by sending military and governmental employees to India, and that the British government had no right to intervene in the affairs of the various Indian states which affected the East India Company's trade. I will discuss Hamilton's support of the imperial venture in greater detail later in this essay.

2. Laura Brown also examines the “intrinsic otherness within the colonial subject that operates as a pressure, a repetition, or a mutation, like the difference between a self and its doubles” (30).

3. See for example Anne Mellor's comprehensive treatment of the issue of Romantic women writers and feminism in Romanticism and Gender and her collection of essays, Romanticism and Feminism.

4. The issue of terminology is central, since “feminism” as used today is a relatively recent term, cited by the OED as first occurring in 1895 in English, and meaning “Advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of the equality of the sexes).” Interestingly, this English term derives from the French “féminisme” first used in 1837 to mean, in translation, “Doctrine advocating the extension of the rights and roles of woman in society” (Le Petit Robert). However, ideas that might be considered as advocating the rights of women were certainly expressed long before the emergence of either the French or the English term “feminism.” Thus I use the term to signal this broad meaning even when referring to writings before it became part of English usage.

5. Similarly, Moira Ferguson proposes a model for delineating four categories of “feminist polemics” that women wrote in a variety of genres and to a variety of purposes in order to “defend a pro-woman point of view which includes resistance to patriarchal values, convention, and domination, or a challenge to misogynist ideas” (27).

6. Moira Ferguson vividly describes the shift in women's roles as the domestic model becomes predominant (3).

7. Hamilton's blindness to her orientalism's implications for her feminist agendas is really not so paradoxical, for it is a subset of the problems that recur throughout twentieth-century feminism as well. One recent example is the blindness of some early 1970s feminism to issues of race and class.

8. Charles Hamilton published the Hedaya in addition to one other work, a history of the Rohilla campaign in India, in which he took part. These two volumes are in contrast to his sister's eight major works, yet she is labeled consistently as the sister of Charles Hamilton first, and an author in her own right second.

9. Another example of Hamilton's assertiveness about her knowledge of oriental literature occurs in her Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman […]; describing the account of creation in Genesis, she writes:

   [I]t is so very brief, that it must of necessity be obscure. But this briefness and obscurity are additional proofs of its authenticity. If you ever become acquainted with Oriental literature, you will perceive, that events which are stated by Moses within the compass of a few sentences, would have been amplified into volumes, had imagination been permitted to have any share in making up the record. (II. 25-26)

   The implicit critique is that “oriental” texts contain the same amount of message as Biblical texts; they are simply augmented by imaginative stuff. An additional criticism is that all of this imaginative stuff is unnecessary to the function of the text.

10. Elizabeth Benger also writes, regarding education in the Hamilton family, that “like the Mother of Sir William Jones, [Hamilton's mother] considered a good education as the noblest patrimony” (I. 26). This comparison to the learned and famous Jones underscores the esteem Benger shares with many for orientalist knowledge. It also suggests that through the East India Company, a man of good birth but low income, like Charles Hamilton, could advance to a position of social security, if not social prestige. Charles Hamilton advanced from a cadetship in the East India Company to being paid to translate the Hedaya, by industriously studying oriental languages in his spare time in India. And, through his defense of William Hastings, Charles bonded with his powerful circle of friends in London.

11. Hamilton also tells this friend that on her opinion “it will depend, whether my poor Rajah shall sleep in peace on his native mountains, or expose himself to the dangers of criticism, by a trip to England” (Benger I. 126-27).

12. The Analytical Review still more explicitly states its opinion of imperialism: “The interference of foreign states in the internal government of nations is generally equivocal in its motives, and always mischievous in its tendency. A simple, commercial intercourse would perhaps have been attended with more beneficial consequences to both countries” (429).

13. It also comments on the genre of the oriental tale itself. As Martha Pike Conant suggests of satirical oriental tales in France, “satire used the oriental tale seriously for the purpose of criticizing contemporary society, morals, and politics; but it also turned its criticism against the oriental tale itself, which it travestied and parodied” (155). Byron's oriental tales sometimes verge on this sort of genre parody (evidenced by their writerly self-consciousness and sophistication), but Hamilton's also parodies the genre, in the Hindoo Rajah's exaggerated speech and in some of the British characters he encounters. One result of Hamilton's satire is that her introductory “Preliminary Dissertation” appears all the more authoritative and objective when contrasted with the humorous depictions of Hindus and Britons. Her satirical tale articulates a division between scholarly orientalism and popular or entertainment orientalism, which is not necessarily as clearly etched as it claims. Scholarly orientalism is authenticated by comparison to parodies of oriental tales which take advantage of the genre's tendency to use excessively elaborate tropes and images.

Works Cited

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Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984. Colchester, UK: University of Essex, 1985.

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———. Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

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