Content area
Full Text
DALY, SUZANNE. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 167 pp. $75.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.
In The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels, Suzanne Daly successfully carves out a niche in the rather crowded field of studies of commodities in Victorian literature and culture. Daly adroitly situates her book alongside recent studies of material culture by Elaine Freedgood and Bill Brown, as well as earlier examinations of imperialism and material culture by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Gayatri Spivak, and Patrick Brantlinger. What makes Daly's approach fresh and engaging is her tight geographic and generic focus: she examines several specific commodities, all from India, as represented in mid-Victorian domestic novels. Daly's narrow focus is a strength rather than a limitation, bringing order to what could otherwise have been an unwieldy study. Daly succinctly weaves together historical context, literary analysis, and theoretical framework, drawing on canonical and more obscure novels, primary historical documents, and a wide range of essays from Victorian periodicals. Her study is likely to be of considerable use to scholars interested in Victorian material culture, India and imperialism, and the curious ways in which the foreign and the imperial were absorbed into quotidian English life and identity.
In the introduction, Daly outlines the parameters of her project: by "examining the British at home and...looking specifically at material objects," she aims to demonstrate that "in making something called 'India,' the English also remade themselves" (4). The central question of her book is how nineteenth-century notions of Englishness are "shored up by a particular brand of commodity fetishism that turns goods produced in British India into emblems of English identity" (6). Daly attends to the complex gender implications of English consumption of imperial imports, as well as the ways in which the labor embodied in such commodities was sometimes highlighted and sometimes...