Domestic realities and imperial fictions: Jane Austen's novels in eighteenth-century contexts

Abstract

The author contends that the sphere of domesticity associated with women during the late-18th century was constructed alongside - and in complex relation to - the changing socio-economic conditions of England as a whole. At the centre of the change was the British drive towards an empire. The book's double focus on home and empire illuminates the various ways in which imperialisn penetrated the daily lives of women. These were deceptively represented as remaining largely untouched by England's overseas trading, its conquest of India, and the cultivation of West Indian slave plantations. At the same time, the imperial enterprise challenged the social and ethical systems of the gentry. Stewart's point of entry to this material is a central theme found in the novels of Jane Austen: the struggle for mastery between the older son who inherits the traditional estate, and the younger sons who enter various colonial services, gain wealth, and return to contest the supremacy of the older brother. It is argued that this contest transforms the traditional, paternal country house into a maternal domestic space. Consequently, domesticity is revealed as a compensatory realm, a world of denials and false appearances, where imperial domination may be symbolically transformed. By placing the ideologically-charged domestic scene in the larger context of British imperialism, Stewart attempts to show how the construction of female subjectivity and female virtue functioned as both an antidote to, and a mask for, colonial aggression. Stewart's approach - post-structuralist, post-colonial and intertextual - calls for a revisionary reading of Austen's novels. The models she offers may also be used to re-read other texts, inviting fresh examination of the dominant cultural discourses at the beginning of modernity.