“She had eyes and chose me”:
Kathryn Freeman
That Sophia Goldborne, the young protagonist of Phebe
Gibbes’ Hartly
House, Calcutta, loves a Bramin priest visiting
this novel’s eponymous British estate in India, has recently become important
testimony of the contrast between the enthusiasm towards India during this
early phase of British colonialism and the later reversal by the Anglicists for whom the presence of an Indian in a grand
British home would have been taboo. By focusing on the ambivalence
towards miscegenation underlying Sophia’s letters, this paper argues that the
novel’s depiction of the early colonists’ life of insular privilege is
ambivalent as the yet murky boundaries between the British and Indian spheres
threaten to dissolve. The often incongruous literary references that
pepper Sophia’s letters, dismissed by criticism as her clumsy attempt to
display erudition, are here viewed as a central means by which the novel
undermines Sophia’s superficial playfulness, particularly when they betray
moments of racial anxiety, such as a reference to Southern, whose Oroonoko transmutes Aphra Behn’s African princess, Imoinda,
into a white European. The pattern reaches its culmination when,
following the wedding of an East India Company man to a British woman and just
before she meets the Bramin, Sophia misquotes Othello preceding his murder of
Desdemona. Though there is no literal murder in the novel, Gibbes must kill off the Bramin
so that Sophia may recoup her distance from the threat of miscegenation by
marrying Doyly, whose name conjures the safely
domestic if unromantic British sphere she will inhabit as his
wife. By the novel’s conclusion, Sophia’s tidy resolution, “Doyly shall figure away as my Bramin,”
is a hollow compromise against the disturbance of the novel’s sentimental
surface.