Fashioning the Colonial Girl

Abstract

if woman, as Simone de Beauvoir has famously suggested, is not born but made, the machinery of that construction is arguably rarely more evident than in the making of the white Anglo-colonial girl of the British Empire. Impetuous, adventurous, naturally inclined to mothering, nursing, teaching, and problem solving, plucky, chaste and rosily Anglo-Saxon, this colonial girl sprang from the pages of novels, stories, magazines, catalogues and Anglo-imperial emigrationist propaganda at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In the context of a surge of migration from Britain from the 1880s on, the colonial girl simultaneously indexes thousands of young women circulating in colonial space and represents a cluster of ideas of femininity, race, class and nation that go into her formation on and in paper. On the one hand a crucial part of what Thomas Richards has described as the imperial archive, a ‘paper empire ... built on a series of flimsy pretexts that were always becoming texts’, her representation on paper is also an archive of process — not only of always ‘becoming texts’ but of becoming ‘girl’.¹ In fiction and across cultural representations, the Anglo-colonial girl was fashioned as a figure for young women to embody, her image and the ideology she staged in the things she did and the things she wore circulating in and through the paper that carried her around the empire. ‘Made in Britain’, the colonial girl is an agent of empire, an advertisement for and consumer of its products and technologies, and an imperial commodity in circulation in and through the mobilising of her representation in print.