"The Sabbath of the Heart": Transgressive Love in Lady Morgan's India

Abstract

The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) by Sidney Owenson (Lady Morgan after her marriage 1812), presents tragic love story between Western cleric and an Indian princess, fraught with all the tensions and pressures that contraries of culture bring to bear on forbidden love. The Missionary was Romeo and Juliet religious garb, crossing sacred boundaries climate hostile to both of them. Such transgressive love is powerful metaphor for cultural conflict, which Owenson uses to represent the crisis faced by non-European woman love with celibate Christian and Western missionary. Much of it is set the valley of Kashmir, India, during time of political conflict and religious tempest when idealism, nationalism, patriotism, and radicalism collided with an oppressive European hegemony over an ancient people from civilization alien to Western understanding. Percy Bysshe Shelley called The Missionary a beautiful thing (qtd. Wright 43), and the Indian setting and themes probably influenced Alastor. From the example of Shelley, one can see that India held powerful allure for British writers of this time as its exotic world clashed with the West. India, as Julia Wright observes, in The Missionary is contrivance for addressing colonialism and the attendant issue of religious intolerance while apparently dislocating them from Owenson's main sphere of influence, nineteenth-century Ireland ... (19). Joseph Lennon, however, sees Ireland and Indian culturally connected, identifies an Irish Orientalism and Celtic roots the East. By the time Owenson wrote The Missionary, India presented special problems for Westerners and epitomized similar problems closer to home. Lady Morgan uses the religiously inscribed transgressive love experience as the crucible to examine the effects of colonialism. The Missionary provides distorting mirror of conflicting religious practice and custom, those of the imperialists against native beliefs and patterns of behavior. Lady Morgan writes her Dramatic Scenes. ''Those who would live by the world, must live it, and with it: and adapt themselves to its form and pressure' (v) (qtd. Canuel 123), an appeal of religious tolerance by those who live secular world. Referring to Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish. Girl, Mark Canuel argues that religious intolerance this period served writers as way of exploring and understanding a feeling of separation with community--a separation from communal feeling that is itself communal ... (268). In The Missionary, community is vexed issue, and the religiously oriented characters of the novel, Princess Luxima and Hilarion the Missionary, seek to define themselves and their worlds and find their mediating communities and means to validate their relationship maelstrom of challenge and threat. Thus, Lady Morgan scrutinizes her novels topical, politically charged religion as means of creating fictions that resonated for her readers then and now when scholars and critics are challenged by the representation of non-European people, places, and cultures British Romantic literature. Transgression has special meaning novel published 1811, novel that deliberately poses several different worlds and circumscribed communities, which have unique and often conflicting patterns of mores and codes of behavior and sanction. Sydney Owenson had never been to India, though she was reputed to have been diligent the research to substantiate her novels, and the authorial foot-notes The Missionary exemplify her scholarship, particularly her sympathetic portrayal of Hinduism, as Michael J. Franklin has argued (General Introduction, 25). The Missionary opens Portugal, under the despotic rule of Spain, then relocates to India, the province now called Kashmir, as ideologically tense between Muslims and Hindus two hundred years ago as it is the modern world. …