| Summary: |
In Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions, Maaja A. Stewart juxtaposes the discourses of late eighteenth-century domesticity and imperialism to provide an original and compelling reading of Jane Austen's novels. Stewart contends that the sphere of domesticity largely associated with women during this era was constructed alongside - and in complex relation to - the changing socioeconomic conditions of England as a whole. At the center of these changing conditions was the British drive toward empire. Stewart's double focus on home and empire illuminates the varied ways in which imperialism penetrated the daily lives of women, who were deceptively represented as being largely untouched by England's overseas trade, its conquest of India, and its cultivation of West Indian slave plantations. This focus also illuminates the challenge the imperial enterprise posed to social and ethical systems of the gentry. Stewart's concrete point of entry to this material is a central narrative in Austen's novels - the struggle for mastery between the older son who inherits the traditional estate and the younger sons who enter various colonial services, gain wealth, and return to contest the supremacy of the older brother. This contest, Stewart argues, transforms the traditional paternal country house into a maternal domestic space. In this context, domesticity reveals itself to be a compensatory realm, a world of denials and false appearances, where the brute realities of imperial domination could be symbolically transformed. By situating the ideologically charged domestic space in the larger context of British imperialism, Stewart shows how the construction of female subjectivity and female virtue were both an antidote to and a mask for colonial aggression. Stewart's approach - poststructuralist, postcolonial, and intertextual - yields a revisionary rereading of Austen's novels. The model she offers can also be used to reread texts other than Austen's and thus invites a fresh examination of the dominant cultural discourses at the beginning of modernity. |
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