"Sensation Fiction, Empire and the Indian Mutiny"

The Indian Mutiny (1857) was considered one of the most tragic events in Victorian colonial history, as well as a cultural trauma that affected the public and the literary world in unprecedented ways. Originated in Meerut and then spread through central India in the course of the year, the insurrection ended in 1858, when a peace treaty was signed on 8 June, three months after the recapture of Lucknow. Represented in highly melodramatic terms in contemporary newspapers and in more than seventy novels, it featured a series of recognizable Gothic tropes such as dark “exotic” settings, male violence, rape and brutality. As the nature of these “narrations” suggests, the mutiny was not simply a historical event of great relevance which generated a plethora of usually unreliable journalistic reports (rapes by Indian people on British women, for instance, were never proven). It was, above all, a sensational story centred on questions of colonial power and on the defence of Victorian institutions, such as the family and the nation, against any form of violent otherness, in which the image of rape turned into a recurring trope connecting gender issues to colonial concerns. The enormous media coverage given to the revolt was generally focused on a rigid juxtaposition between British innocent victims (and heroic soldiers) and violent Indian sepoys. Reports centred in particular on the massacres which took place during the siege of Delhi and Cawnpore (the English term for Kanpur), its Bibigarh well becoming the symbol of Indian brutality. Indeed, one of the most “sensational” tale of the mutiny is represented by the slaughter of Cawnpore, during whose siege 120 people (mostly women and children) were killed, and their bodies (some of them still alive) were thrown in the a well. Sensational writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon published her two most famous novels Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd at the dawn of the mutiny. Set during or soon after the Indian uprisings, her “pair of bigamy novels” deal in sometimes very different ways with the traditional rhetorics and iconograpy of the Indian insurrection. In Lady Audley’s Secret Braddon includes, among the other things, an explicit reference to the Cawnpore Well, in which the bigamous and “mutinous” Helen Talboys throws her first husband George in the (unsuccessful) attempt to kill him. In Aurora Floyd Braddon literally disseminates allusions to India and to the mutiny in the course of the whole text. In this latter novel, for instance, the character of dark-haired Aurora is repeatedly compared to a dangerous “tiger” (an animal India was traditionally associated to) and to an Indian queen. In both novels, India serves as a cultural paradigm to discuss questions related to peculiarly British issues such as gender roles, female independence and identity. However, although in Lady Audley’s Secret the female character’s rebellion seems to be finally censured and punished, on the contrary Aurora Floyd appears as Braddon’s (uneven) attempt to negotiate Victorian patriarchal cultural principles and women’s quest for freedom.