Trehy, Bernadette
(2011)
In Ruin Unreconciled: Women Writers and the End of the British Empire.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
Drawing on recent feminist cultural and historical scholarship on the roles o f
women in colonial societies in the twentieth century, this dissertation examines the
works o f four women writers who wrote important novels that reflect on the wider
historical condition o f British imperial contraction and late colonial settler crisis. The
women writers in question are from Ireland, India and southern Africa, and thus their
works deal with some o f the key sites o f British imperial crisis and collapse in the last
century. Beginning with Elizabeth Bow en ’s The L a st September, a novel which reflects
on the condition o f the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy against the backdrop o f World War One
and the Irish War o f Independence, the dissertation then moves on to examine two m id century
novels by Anglo-Indian writer Rumer Godden, namely, B la c k Narcissus and
B reakfast with the Nikolides. Both novels deal with th e anxieties o f the English
community in India in the context o f World War Two and an increasingly assertive
Indian nationalist movement. The later chapters in the study deal respectively with Doris
Le ssing’s The Grass is Singing and with Nadine Gordimer’s The L y in g Days, novels
that engage in diverse ways with the mentalities and predicaments o f English-affiliated
settler communities in Africa in the post-World War Two era as the British Empire
entered its final and closing phase. Deploying a b ro ad ly psychoanalytic mode o f
analysis informed b y the scholarship o f Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as well as b y
that o f Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, the dissertation argues that the novels in
question are deeply conflicted narratives that seem overtly to offer fairly conservative
colonial settler views o f th e world, b u t which nonetheless also suggest a restive sense o f
impatience and frustration with the restrictions imposed on women b y the colonial and
imperial order o f things. The source o f these narrative tensions, elaborated in diverse
ways in each writer, may b e traced to the historically-conflicted condition o f colonial
women generally in the twentieth century. This was a period in which colonial women
were compelled as white subjects to witness the collapse o f the colonial worlds in which
they had come o f age, b u t in which as female subjects they were also drawn to the
advances for women made possible by the women ’s movement in this period. The thesis
concentrates in particular on the ways in which the novels mentioned above deal with
houses and landscapes as crucial tropes that register a sense o f domestic colonial crisis
and with inter-racial interactions o f various sorts as a means to explore the limits o f the
possible as one historical dispensation came to an end and a new one opened up.
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