Amalgamated Anatomies and Crossbred Cultures: Biological Hybridity in British Colonial Fiction

This dissertation challenges the predominantly cultural understanding of hybridity in postcolonial studies by returning to its biological genealogy in nineteenth-century Britain and the colonial East Indies. While postcolonial scholars have theorized the metaphorical forces of cultural hybridity, such as the exchange of ideological frameworks, spiritual beliefs, and social values, I pay particular attention to the biological sciences of hybridism within the empire. Whether in studies of colonial plants grafted onto domestic species or of foreign blood entering British lineages, Victorian natural sciences defined the boundaries of national identity and what it meant to transgress those boundaries, or to be “hybrid.” This project thus historicizes and problematizes this concept long associated with postcolonial studies, showing how biological theories of hybridity served as an imperial tool that reconstructed categories of human difference within the British Empire. In Chapter 1, drawing on the debate within Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone of whether budded hybrid roses or independently cultivated roses were more vigorous, I situate the novel within the broader scientific shift toward mass-scale botanical hybridization, which became increasingly adopted as a model for imperial thought. I argue that the novel represents contradictions between the desire to promote biological vigor through propagation and the colonial anxiety about foreign species contaminating the local ecosystem. In my second chapter on Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, I contend that Kim undergoes acclimatization in the colonies, becoming a racial variant (or “lusus naturæ,” a term used in the novel and in medical discourse) to sustain life in a colonial environment as a European boy. I show how Kipling adopts Lamarckian theories of race to reframe hybridity as a generative method for colonial survival. For the latter two chapters, I turn to the racial sciences of miscegenation, considering representations of mixed-race Eurasian heroines in nineteenth-century fiction. My third chapter situates Dinah Craik’s The Half-Caste within debates of palmistry, showing how Craik’s fixation on Zillah’s hands, an overlooked dimension of the story, provides a crucial lens for understanding the novel’s engagement with race and agency. By delineating the story of Zillah’s hands, from being visible markers of racial difference to invisible signs of feminine assimilation, Craik transforms Zillah from an odd “hybrid” to a naturalized Englishwoman, imagining the potential for hybridity to become a productive tool for British colonial rule. Finally, I end with a chapter on the obscure Anglo-Indian novel Poor Elisabeth by M. Hamilton. In this chapter, I argue that by deploying the reversion theory of miscegenation to challenge dominant polygenist views, Hamilton imagines mixed-race unions not as sterile dead ends but as dangerous conduits for the persistence of racial difference, representing a form of ethnological pessimism that sees violence as the inevitable end-product of hybridity. Through this interdisciplinary framework of science and literature, this project uncovers new understandings of how the Victorians weaponized scientific theories to advance and justify imperial rule.

Author dc:creator

• Jiang, Yixuan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Taylor, Jesse Oak

• Empire
• Hybridity
• Postcolonial Studies
• Race
• Science and Literature
• Victorian Studies
• Literature
• Science history
• British and Irish literature

Statement dc:rights

• none

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1773/57309

OAI record oai:identifier

https://digital.lib.washington.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Adigital.lib.washington.edu%3A1773%2F57309