“’Why do they hate us so much?’: Women’s Vulnerability and Resistance in Julian Rathbone’s The Mutiny (2007)”

  • Author: María Isabel Romero Ruiz
  • Journal: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies
  • Year: 2025
  • Vol. 47. 1
  • Pages: 93-110

Abstract:

Neo-Victorianism is concerned with the re-writing of the Victorian past and establishing parallelisms with the present; also, with giving voice to muted discourses. Britain was a huge Empire in the nineteenth century and the Indian Mutiny was one of the most violent episodes in its history. Postcolonial neo-Victorian narratives are a memorial practice that denounces the imperial atrocities long kept silent, Julian Rathbone’s The Mutiny (2007) being an example. The aim of this article is thus twofold: firstly, to analyse the trope of
the Indian Mutiny as a massacre where violence and atrocities were committed on both the Indian and the British side through the critical lens of postcolonial neo-Victorianism and vulnerability studies; and, secondly, to discuss the role of women, both native and English, in the tragedy and its aftermath.