Crossing Genre, Gender and Race in Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

This study was prompted by an incident while researching politics of British women's writing in late eighteenth century several years ago. I dutifully arrived at Birmingham Public library to examine a first edition of Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), referenced in National Union Catalogue back in Canada only to have librarians deny all knowledge of work. Faced failure I desperately searched my notes for catalogue number as proof of its existence. Much to librarians' surprise-given my summary of work-they announced that they would never have found it since it was stored in Geography collection! How were they to know and how was I to guess? As a fresh graduate student I couldn't imagine why cataloguing librarian hadn't known Translation of 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 reader away from fictional nature of text as much as towards it since she uses titles to challenge or perhaps elude genre classification and social dictates about appropriate subjects for female writers. This led me to ponder battles among critics since 1796 about where to position Hamilton on political spectrum and how to classify her works. Hamilton, a popular late-eighteenth-century writer, is becoming more familiar to readers recent availability of two of her fictional works in modern editions and increasing number of excellent critical studies on women's writing in late eighteenth century. (1) Hamilton, however, continues to prove a difficult writer to categorize 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 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 classification through particular consideration of her first publication, Translation of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. (2) It is well documented that late-eighteenth-century British society was structured around rigid gender roles that prescribed intellectual and social capabilities of 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 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 abstruser sciences, are most properly 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 daughters, good wives, good mistresses, good members of society, and good Christians (More 133). Such demarcation of sexes designated writing as a predominantly male activity. Since, Ralph Cohen reminds us, 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 major (read: masculine) genres of political polemics, scholarship and philosophy. …

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