"Passion's Empire": Sydney Owenson's "Indian Venture," Phoenicianism, Orientalism, and Binarism

Abstract

I have at last, waded through your Oriental Library, and it is impossible you can ever feel weight of obligation I owe you, except you turn author, and some kind friend supplies you with rare books that give sanction of authority to your own wild and visions. Your histories place me upon fairy you know I love to tread, nothing is but what is not, and you have contributed so largely and efficiently to my venture, that you have right to share in profits, and claim to be considered silent in firm. (1) ********** THUS SYDNEY OWENSON, IN AN UNDATED LETTER TO HER CLOSE FRIEND and former lover, Dublin barrister Sir Charles Ormsby, acknowledged her debt to a silent partner in her textual of The Missionary, novel which was to receive four London editions and New York edition in its year of publication. (2) The narratives of history and fiction operate in productive symbiosis: each can rewrite other. The implicit contrasts between bulky quarto tomes and aerial lightness of her imagination, between the fairy ground of sentimental novel and commercial realities of book production exemplify polarized ambiguities apparent not only in this work but throughout Sydney Owenson's life and career. Such ambiguities were complicated by confusing contemporary cross-currents of ideology and class. The financial transactions of her Indian venture were completed not in Leadenhall Street headquarters of East India Company but in even more august surroundings of Foreign Office, where her publisher, John Joseph Stockdale, somewhat overawed by presence of Secretary of State for War and Colonies, purchased manuscript of The Missionary; A, Tale for sum of four hundred pounds. Viscount Castlereagh, architect of 1800 Act of Union by which Ireland's Parliament had voted itself out of existence, was, according to Percy Bysshe Shelley, more often accompanied by seven bloodhounds than Jacobin novelists, and story of how this wild Irish patriot, republican sympathizer and radical slut came to be sitting at ease, negotiating sale of her latest improbable vision in his Cabinet Office, is in many respects worthy of one of Owenson's own fictions. (3) In politicizing her sentimental discourse, she adapted an old tradition which had figured colonized Ireland as woman, such as Kathleen Ni Houlihan or Roisin Dubh, oppressed or sexually exploited. Her adaptation incorporated time-honoured romance trope of transformative encounter by which handsome and prejudiced young protagonist/colonizer is subjected to romantic initiation with beautifully representative muse of an alien land. Sexuality transcends and transgresses cultural boundaries and ethnic seduction could be vicariously relished by novel-reading public who were simultaneously instructed in Gaelic traditions by means of elaborate footnotes. Her readers were encouraged to engage if not in sexual tourism then in heavily eroticized cultural tourism, and appeal of this formula might be extended far beyond colonial Ireland to colonized Greece in Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), or further east to colonized India. Sydney Owenson launched herself into troubled waters of Orientalism as easily as she might take dip in Bantry Bay. It was all question of origins; and for Owenson Gaelic culture had its origins in Orient. In this light, Ireland was not only Britain's first colony, but also her first Oriental colony, and Owenson frequently represented Ireland in Oriental tropes. When Glorvina's preceptor, redoubtable Father John, in his defense of priority of third-century Irish bardic legends of Oisin, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, announced: For Ireland, owing to its being colonized from Phoenicia, and consequent early introduction of letters there, was at that period esteemed most enlightened country in Europe, he was airing contemporary theory of Irish Phoenicianism with its piquant fusion of Orientalist and Celtic exoticism. …