"Doleful Records": Empire and Melancholy in Romantic India

This dissertation considers how the feelings unleashed by death – namely mourning and melancholy – were harnessed to understand, organize, and legitimate imperial power in India during the British Romantic period. The project examines the writing of women authors such as Mariana Starke, Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Sydney Owenson, and Emma Roberts alongside contemporary political debates to demonstrate how the affective strategies surrounding death were performing the labour of empire in the literary topography and psychogeography of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Faced with personal, political, and national losses on a grand scale, Britons had to reimagine grief as a force to be mobilized and deployed, rather than one acting upon them. The difficulty of dealing with death from the distance and difference of a foreign outpost, where the traditional networks of consolation could not be accessed, demanded new forms of sympathy, sociability, and a reconstitution of communal identity in response to losses that could not be confronted. While the bodies of the dead grounded the imperial project in India, the mobility of their printed afterlives reconnected them to a sympathetic national body at home. The first chapter of this dissertation demonstrates how Elizabeth Hamilton exploits melancholy as a rhetorical strategy that provides women with access to political discourse and posits mourning as an affective branch of the imperial project. Nineteenth-century writers converged around a controversial death ritual – sati, the Hindu practice of widow-burning – to organize the policies and feelings that constituted the British “civilizing mission” in India, and the second chapter examines how the writings of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, and Sydney Owenson engage with the figure of the dying and mourning “other” woman. The third chapter investigates the vision of Anglo-Indian community drawn in Emma Roberts’s travel writing to suggest that the morbid sociability she finds in India is, in fact, an ideological projection of Anglicist colonial administration. This dissertation provides new channels of inquiry into the transperipheral dynamics of imperialism from the 1780s to the 1830s, and demonstrates how the afterlife of British Romanticism continues to haunt our understanding of political subjectivity.

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