Behind the veil of the zenana: Cornelia Sorabji and the colonial heritage of the trapped housewife

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that second wave feminist accounts of the trapped housewife type, who must remain inside the house, consumed with domestic drudgery, derive from a colonial precedent. Many second wave writers relied on Orientalist metaphors and anecdotes in order to dramatize their theses of global patriarchal oppression. My essay reframes this bibliography by centering the neglected work of modernist-era Indian writer and activist Cornelia Sorabji. As an Anglophile and defender of empire, Sorabji fails many of the terms of a valorized feminist recovery. However, her writing suggests a clear precedent for the Orientalized housewife type later adopted by second wave feminists. In addition, she appropriates a white feminist literary persona to new, modern results: she is an intermediary to women living in purdah in pre-Independence India. Because she shares the heritage and language of these confined housewives, she can chronicle their lives with nuance and ambivalence. Ultimately, Sorabji inaugurates a tradition of women who have evoked modernity for themselves by differentiating themselves from a cloistered, racialized throng.