Complicity and resistance in Lady Morgan's The missionary

Kellie Marie Herson

This project engages with Lady Morgan's 1811 novel The Missionary as a complex response to British imperialism. While the novel is infrequently read and has only generated a small volume of criticism, what scholarship does exist has largely engaged in determining the ideological position Morgan takes within these historical and political circumstances, an ideology which is difficult to assess due to her layering of plot, culture, politics, and representation. While some critics have focused on the novel's orientalist sensibility and unconsummated romance as evidence of imperial sympathies on Morgan's part, others read the novel as a call for individual resistance to imperialism through cross-cultural sympathies. Most of these attempts to determine definitively whether the novel is resistant to or complicit with the rapidly expanding project of Western imperialism, however, have overlooked the frequency and significance with which Morgan represents exchange-based materialism in the novel. I argue that understanding Morgan's engagement with material culture is vital to a cohesive, contextualized reading of the text. This material concern is manifested most compellingly in Morgan's materialist representation of Catholicism and Hinduism " a move which makes religion available for intercultural exchange and calls into question efforts toward explicit imperial domination, a strategy that will be established, theorized, and historically contextualized in chapter one of this project. This materialism also complicates the novel, as Morgan employs a distinctive Romantic orientalist sensibility in her luxurious, feminized depiction of India, which will be analyzed in chapter two. While this orientalist representation seems to be in direct conflict with the Irish nationalist allegory Morgan simultaneously creates, I will argue in chapter three that these two strategies, while perhaps not consistent with one another, are consistent with Morgan's material concerns and political engagement, as well as with the cultural and ideological tensions embodied by Irish nationalist movements. These three chapters work together to provide an extended, contextualized explanation of Morgan's novel, which resists imperialist power structures, supports cross-cultural exchange, and remains ambiguous about the problems of cultural imperialism raised by increasingly globalized consumer economics.

Complicity and resistance in Lady Morgan's The missionary

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