Domestic imperialism in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Henry Rider Haggard’s She, a history of adventure -

Abstract

This thesis aims to discuss the Victorian understanding of gender politics through Imperial thought and discourse in both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and in Rider Haggard’s She: a History of Adventure. In both novels, the “woman question” was a source of anxiety for patriarchal Victorian society as it was detrimental to the progress of Imperial Britain. Dimensions of gender interplay constituted fundamental aspects to the definition of domesticity and in turn to the security and maintenance of imperial power. For Haggard, the “woman question” is addressed in his imperialist novel not only as problematic but also as a means to question the success of male sovereignty over Imperial Britain. As for Brontë the “woman question” is answered through Jane Eyre’s manipulation of society in Victorian England. Jane Eyre is the embodiment of the “New woman” who rises in the novel as the subject and the object of the patriarchal society which cleverly empowers her to move independently through the Victorian milieu. Using a feminist-imperial theory to reinterpret the social advancement of women in the Victorian age, this thesis studies the anxieties presented by the “woman question” and its implications that reshaped the positioning of women in society and the understanding of imperialism in Victorian Britain. After having read the works of various feminist-imperialist critics on the representation of female roles in Victorian novels, I have decided to exclude biographical interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s orphaned life and of Rider Haggard’s disappointment with British politics in South Africa. Moreover, I have steered away from the traditional psychoanalytical and feminist interpretation of Jane Eyre through the studies of Freud, Gilbert and Gubar respectively. Instead, to understand the “woman question” in a new light I focus on interpreting the progress of women through domestic agency as a performa