The imperial picturesque in Felicia Hemans "the Indian City"

Abstract

This essay studies Felicia Hemans The Indian City as embodying an aesthetic view of India. The essay argues that the poem deploys the aesthetic of the picturesque in order to produce a cultural fable about the collapse of an Indian city. The first section maps Hemans "Indian picturesque" and its pastoral Concordia discors in which diverse elements exist in harmony, and with a definite feminisation of the landscape. In the second section, it shows how this picturesque is subverted through an emphasis on the moral geography of the city; the feminisation of the land continuing in a different fashion. In the final section the essay argues that the civic picturesque of the poem retreats behind the natural picturesque, a process again initiated by the woman's presence, even as the landscape itself serves as a space of gendered memorialisation. It argues that, ultimately, Hemans presents the Oriental woman as politically ineffectual because although Maimuna is initially a point of political coalition she slides into the role of a sentimental mother blunting her political role and ambitions.