Suicide, Romance, and Imperial Rebellion: Sati and the Lucretia Story in Sydney Owenson'sThe Missionary: An Indian Tale

Abstract

AbstractAs Britain expanded its global interests at the turn of the 19th century, reports of ritual suicide such as sati, the Hindu custom of widow burning, registered clashes between colonizing and indigenous value systems. In the metropole, sati scandalized both secular individualist sensibilities and religious communal values, and the British public debated the extent to which East India Company administration should extend to such matters as local religious practices. Focusing on Sydney Owenson's 1811 novel,The Missionary: An Indian Tale,this essay sets the controversy over sati within the broader context of Romantic Britain's deep preoccupation with suicide. In so doing, this essay understands sati not as an isolated phenomenon, or as one unique to the problems of imperial management. Rather, it relates sati to Romantic‐era debates over the rights (and wrongs) of British women, and also to form of political and spiritual defiance associated with the French Revolution. Specifically, by examining the attempted sati of Owenson's protagonist Luxima, a Hindu “prophetess,” as an iteration of the classical Lucretia story, this essay explores the novel's posited links between female chastity, inter‐racial romance, and political community.