Visions: “If You See Her Face You Die”: Orientalist Gothic and Colonialism in Bithia Croker’s Indian Ghost Stories.

Abstract

This paper analyzes Bithia Mary Croker’s ghost stories of the British Raj to argue that Croker in her texts reframes the eighteenth-century Orientalist Gothic writing tradition to critique British imperial presence in India. I specifically discuss two of Croker’s short stories, namely “To Let” (1893) and “If You See Her Face” (1893) published in her anthology of Indian ghost fiction To Let(1893) .The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century British India under the vigilance of the Empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. In my critique of the two stories, I take a transhistorical approach wherein my analysis starts with and builds upon the eighteenth century and moves into the late nineteenth century. The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century India under the vigilance of the British empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. The short stories build upon and expand the eighteenth-century gothic tradition that threads together the internal and the external, in this case the “others” of the British empire. They use Orientalist gothic elements to reflect the growing contentions in the Indian city of Lucknow against British imperial forces that also compromises the apparently safe and secure domestic space of the colonial dak bungalows. In doing so, Croker uses the figures of racial and gendered others to subvert the politico-cultural hierarchies of race, class, and gender.