Matt Poland, “George Henry Lewes and the Interior Frontiers of Whiteness in The Spanish Gypsy” (pp. 178–207) This essay concerns George Eliot’s poem The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and its significance for assessing the theme of race in her work. The Spanish Gypsy reveals Eliot to have been a more supple, ambivalent thinker about race than she later became in works including Daniel Deronda (1876). The essay reads The Spanish Gypsy against George Henry Lewes’s unpublished journal chronicling the Leweses’ trip to Spain in 1867. Drawing on the work of Étienne Balibar and Ann Laura Stoler, the essay reads the construction of Lewes and Eliot’s cosmopolitan British whiteness as an “interior frontier” manifested in ordinary encounters with racialized others like the Roma and Spanish in Granada. Lewes’s version of whiteness was discursively ordered according to universalizing historical and anthropological narratives and by imposing his perception of time and its frames of reference onto others. Lewes imagines these racial borders to be closed off, even as he tries to connect across them. But in grappling with her sense of the inadequacy of Victorian racial categories, in The Spanish Gypsy Eliot imagines the interior frontiers of race as porous and paradoxical, revealing an indeterminate openness that she would subsequently back away from.
Uttara Chintamani Chaudhuri, “The Narrative Possibilities of ‘Sari Government’: Female Friendship in Rajmohan’s Wife” (pp. 125–146) In this article, I consider the narrative and political significance of female friendship in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), the first Indian novel written in the English language. While the novel’s critics have focused on the violent unmaking of the novel’s titular couple—the demure Matangini and her villainous husband Rajmohan—I depart from an insular focus on conjugality to instead consider the diffuse network of women who enable this uncoupling. My reading of the novel—written outside of a European context—also challenges Sharon Marcus’s assessment of female friendship as a narrative lever for the advancement of the Victorian marriage plot. However, the novel’s networks of female friendship are not only significant for the ways in which they trouble heterosexual marriage but also for their situated critique of colonial and patriarchal categories. The alterity of female friendship generates fresh configurations of plot, character, and modes of reading. Ultimately, reading Rajmohan’s Wife as a novel of female friendship—in an incarnation in which it is neither deployed to stage heterosexual union nor mask homoerotic desire—invites a new investigation of female friendship as a literary category in the global Anglophone novel.
