Abstract
Readers of Sydney Owenson's 1811 novel The Missionary: An Indian Tale have usually understood it generically: as a romance of imperial reconciliation or a tragedy of failed imperial sympathy. This essay argues that Owenson's treatment of Anglo-Indian relations is best read in conjunction with works of tropical medicine, which, like The Missionary, seek to intervene directly rather than to theorize, recommend, or describe. In emphasizing the pragmatics of The Missionary, this essay seeks to reorient readers’ attention toward Owenson's sentence-level poetics, more specifically her enchainment of metonymies, which produces for its readers a syntactical as well as lexical experience of equivalence without prioritization and speed without rest. In contrast to the strictures on disease and contagion in medical writing about India, Owenson's metonymies celebrate as well as enact the circulatory motions of the Anglo-Indian sphere her novel depicts.
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