Habits of Empire and Domination in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy
Malinda Snow, Georgia State University
Volume 14, no. 2, January 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Eliza Fenwick’s novel Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795) displays an unusual collocation of Gothic devices and a Jacobin purposefulness, set forth in an epistolary format. Readers have noted that the novel describes female oppression, also noting Fenwick’s interest in children’s education and her association with Mary Wollstonecraft. Those who examine specific characters in the novel remark primarily upon Sibella Valmont as someone removed from social convention, a child of nature, a product of her sensibility. Readers have not, however, examined Fenwick’s references to India and the English exploitation of Indian wealth. … A reader examining the parental or familial domination of Sibella … will find the details relating to India pertinent to the theme of female oppression. Caroline Ashburn, the principal epistolary narrator in Secresy, looks with alarm upon the treatment of her friend Sibella. Likewise, Caroline regards with discomfort and distrust her own family’s sojourn in India, where her parents grew wealthy. Thus it is Caroline’s analytic gaze that ties the two circumstances together and prompts the reader to find similarities between familial and imperial behaviour. In considering the oppression of Sibella and of India, Caroline is discomforted by her suspicions that innocent victims have suffered while selfish predators have stolen their freedom and their resources. What I shall argue is that the novel is not principally about Sibella as female rebel or as “natural” heroine, or about Caroline, or overbearing parents, but that it concerns itself more generally with exploitation and oppression, and with the moral discernment required to detect such inhumanity.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Colonialism” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
Penelope Aubin and Narratives of Empire
by EDWARD J. KOZACZKA (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme
by INGVILD HAGEN KJØRHOLT (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
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