Antebellum White American ‘Mission Wives’ in the Orient: A Tale of Flawed Mimicry

Abstract

The American foreign missions of the early to the mid-nineteenth century epitomize a project that allowed white American women to share a Kiplingesque “white woman’s burden” with British “sisters,” to civilize the heathen world which gave the former a chance to share in an Anglo-American white identity.1 This imperial endeavor required of them to represent/re-present supposedly the most fitting incarnation of the idealized female of the antebellum or the “American true woman,” the “American mission wife,” a subjectivity that was reflective of the presumed superiority of white civilization, offering a model for the heathen women to emulate. Hence, this paper concerns itself with the manner in which a particular antebellum white women’s genre—the mission memoir—represents/re-presents American mission wives in the Orient (in the then Burma and Ceylon). Reversing the typical Saidian narrative of the West’s production of the Oriental subaltern/other, I show here how the white American mimic woman in the Orient disrupts her identity, thereby rendering herself ambivalent and interstitial.