“Why do they hate us so much?”: Women’s Vulnerability and Resistance in Julian Rathbone’s The Mutiny (2007)

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.1.6

Keywords:

women , vulnerability, resistance, neo-Victorian, The Mutiny

Abstract

Neo-Victorianism is concerned with the re-writing of the Victorian past and establishing parallelisms with the present; also, with giving voice to muted discourses. Britain was a huge Empire in the nineteenth century and the Indian Mutiny was one of the most violent episodes in its history. Postcolonial neo-Victorian narratives are a memorial practice that denounces the imperial atrocities long kept silent, Julian Rathbone’s The Mutiny (2007) being an example. The aim of this article is thus twofold: firstly, to analyse the trope of the Indian Mutiny as a massacre where violence and atrocities were committed on both the Indian and the British side through the critical lens of postcolonial neo-Victorianism and vulnerability studies; and, secondly, to discuss the role of women, both native and English, in the tragedy and its aftermath.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

María Isabel Romero Ruiz, Universidad de Málaga

Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz is currently a Senior Lecturer in Social History and Cultural Studies (ANECA full professor) at the University of Málaga (Spain). Her research interests are the history of gender and sexuality in Victorian England and Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture. Recent publications include the co-edition Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and the monograph Town and Gown Prostitution: Cambridge’s Architecture of Containment of Sexual Deviance (Peter Lang, 2022).

References

BLUNT, Alison. 2000. “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian ‘Mutiny’, 1857-8.” Journal of Historical Geography 26 (3): 403-428.

BOEHM-SCHNITKER, Nadine and Sussane Gruss, eds. 2014. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. London and New York: Routledge.

BRANTLINGER, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

BUTLER, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London & New York: Verso.

—. 2016. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” In Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016, 12-27.

BUTLER, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, eds. 2016. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, N.C., USA: Duke UP.

ERLL, Astrid. 2006. “Re-writing as Re-visioning: Modes of Representing the ‘Indian Mutiny’ in British Novels, 1857 to 2000.” European Journal of English Studies 10 (2): 163-185.

EVANS, Mary. 2013. “The Meaning of Agency.” In Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013, 47-63.

“General Wheeler's entrenchment at Cawnpore, March 1858.” National Army Museum. [Accessed 3 May 2025].

HO, Elizabeth. 2012. Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire. London and New York: Continuum.

KNIGHT, Lionel. 2012. Britain in India, 1858-1947. London: Anthem Press.

KOHLKE, Marie-Luise. 2008. “Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter.” Neo-Victorian Studies 1(1): 1-18.

—. 2010. “Tipoo’s Tiger on the Loose: Neo-Victorian Witness-Bearing and the Indian Mutiny.” In Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, 367-397.

—. 2014. “Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal.” In Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2014, 21-37.

KOHLKE, Marie-Luise and Christian Gutleben, eds. 2010. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth Century Suffering. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

LLEWELLYN, Mark and Ann Heilmann, 2013. “The Victorians Now: Global Reflections on Neo-Victorianism.” Critical Quarterly 55 (1): 24-42.

MADHOK, Sumi, Anna Phillips and Kalpana Wilson, eds. 2013. Gender, Agency and Coercion. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

MITCHELL, Kate. 2010. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Aftermarriages. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

PATI, Biswamoy, ed. 2010. The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: Exploring Transgressions, Contests and Diversities. London and New York: Routledge.

PATI, Biswamoy. 2010. “Introduction: The Great Rebellion of 1857.” In Pati 2010, 1-15.

PETER, Kurian Therakath. 2019. “A Therapeutic Mangle of History: Towards a Politics of Reconciliation in Arjun Raj Gaind’s Empire of Blood.” Neo-Victorian Studies 11 (2): 153-176.

PRIMORAC, Antonija and Monika Pietrzak-Franger. 2015. “What is Global in Neo-Victorianism?” Neo-Victorian Studies 8 (1): 1-16.

PUNTER, David. 2000. Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

RANDALL, Don. 2003. “The Making of the Indian Mutiny.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (1): 3-17.

RATHBONE, Julian. 2007. The Mutiny. London: Abacus.

SAID, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

—, 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.

SEN, Indrani. 2010. “Discourses of ‘Gendered Loyalty’: Indian Women in Nineteenth Century ‘Mutiny’ Fiction.” In Pati 2010, 111-128.

SINGH, Lata. 2010. “Courtesans and the 1857 Rebellion: The Role of Azeezun in Kanpur.” In Pati 2010, 95-110.

Downloads

Published

2025-06-25

How to Cite

Romero Ruiz, M. I. (2025). “Why do they hate us so much?”: Women’s Vulnerability and Resistance in Julian Rathbone’s The Mutiny (2007). Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, 47(1), 93–110. https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.1.6

Issue

Section

Articles