Centering Gender and Race in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters
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This essay contextualizes the 1857 Indian Uprising in its cultural and literary history. It examines nineteenth-century imperialism in Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of the Waters (1896) while raising questions about race and gender. Jim Douglas, aka James Greyman, is a former soldier and current English army spy who is distinguished as “a gentleman to be obeyed” by the Indian order, while the British merely reduce him to a “reliable source of information.” This double identity of Douglas is shaken to its core when Kate Erlton, a woman he saves from Indian attacks during the mutiny, is more in control of and more active in his household. While Kate maneuvers through the city during the siege, Jim is sick and has to be nursed by his native mistress Tara. Douglass finds it suffocating to play the feminine, passive, vulnerable bedridden patient rather than the masculine, powerful and active gentleman role that was forced upon Anglo-Indian men. Nevertheless, Douglas upholds the condescending attitude of the mainstream ideology that deemed British women helpless victims on a pedestal whom strong British officials must save from violent Indians. As many critics have noted, this novel has a feminist overtone and attempts to revise and interrogate conventional understandings of gender and race.
Abstract
This essay contextualizes the 1857 Indian Uprising in its cultural and literary history. It examines nineteenth-century imperialism in Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of the Waters (1896) while raising questions about race and gender. Jim Douglas, aka James Greyman, is a former soldier and current English army spy who is distinguished as “a gentleman to be obeyed” by the Indian order, while the British merely reduce him to a “reliable source of information.” This double identity of Douglas is shaken to its core when Kate Erlton, a woman he saves from Indian attacks during the mutiny, is more in control of and more active in his household. While Kate maneuvers through the city during the siege, Jim is sick and has to be nursed by his native mistress Tara. Douglass finds it suffocating to play the feminine, passive, vulnerable bedridden patient rather than the masculine, powerful and active gentleman role that was forced upon Anglo-Indian men. Nevertheless, Douglas upholds the condescending attitude of the mainstream ideology that deemed British women helpless victims on a pedestal whom strong British officials must save from violent Indians. As many critics have noted, this novel has a feminist overtone and attempts to revise and interrogate conventional understandings of gender and race.
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