Imagining Queer Power: Colonialism and the Queer Mentor in Fiction, 1790–1850

During the Romantic era, writers, politicians, and educators alike wrestled with the ideals of liberty in the face of the realities of slavery and the expanding borders of the British Empire. This project traces the imbrications of those realities with queer mentoring, an educational relationship built on dominance and desire between women in fiction of the Romantic Era. The three core chapters successively address the emergence of the queer mentor in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1795) and the anonymous Woman of Colour (1808); the height of her power in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Jane Austen’s Emma (1815); and the decline of her influence in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and Hannah Bond’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1850s). In the opening chapter, the queer mentor advocates for abolition and freedom from tyranny while relying on enslavement and colonial wealth in order to pursue other women. The queer mentor in the next chapter enables relationships between white couples that will keep colonial wealth within the borders of England. In the final chapter, as the heroines move away from Britain and from close ties to economic and racial power, the queer relationships they pursue also diverge from the strength of the queer mentor toward segmented communal and educational relationships.

The argument of this dissertation is that the Romantic era gave rise to a new model of the queer mentor in the novel who paradoxically asserts power through her reliance on colonial mechanisms and metaphors of dominance, while expanding the possibilities of queer intimacy and futurity through her control over narration. This project takes up the challenge of both utopian and non-utopian theories of queer history, recognizing the harms of queer mentoring in its ties to colonialism as well as the queer mentor’s liberatory narrative potential. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in scholarship at the intersection of queerness, colonialism, and education in the Romantic era. The primary texts freshly investigated here hint at a way forward through the injustices of dominance by naming the dangers of power and by narrating new horizons of community between women across time.