Strangulating Fictions of the Empire and the Thuggee in M.J. Carter’s The Strangler Vine (2014)
The paper examines the resurgence of the thuggee trope in neo-Victorian fiction, with a special focus on Miranda J. Carter’s The Strangler Vine (2014). In previous readings of the thuggee in Victorian texts, Parama Roy and Alexander L. Macfie have argued that the British Empire constructed the thuggee as an exceptionally deviant figure that eluded the Empire’s gaze. A construct of the hyper-vigilant British Empire, the thuggee, as historians have previously argued, served as an excuse for the Empire to legitimise its regime of control in colonial India. The paper explores how the thuggee mythology, primarily consolidated through fictional narratives in early nineteenth century, is now used by neo-Victorian writers to retrospectively expose the workings of the British Empire. The paper argues that M.J. Carter’s orientalist novel offers a critical commentary on the imperialist project through its exploration of a triangulated relationship between the figure of the thuggee, the British Empire, and the realm of popular fiction/poetry. The novel revolves around the British Empire’s hunt for a libellous Scottish writer, Xavier Mountstuart who embarks on a search for the thuggees. The paper will investigate how, in placing the writer at the heart of the thuggee’s den, the novel suggests that a thread of fictionality links them with the Empire itself emerging as the manipulator of fNiyati Sharma completed her doctorate in English from the University of Oxford in 2019. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonepat, India. Her research interests include studies of the unconscious, theories of race, crime fiction and policing, and forms of reader reception in nineteenth-century British and South Asian popular fiction.ictions. Drawing on clichéd tropes (a transformative journey inwards into the colonized country) from Victorian imperial adventure novels, Carter in the novel creates an atmosphere that subverts these very tropes to expose the Empire’s depravity, and most significantly, its role as a master generator of fictional narratives.
Niyati Sharma completed her doctorate in English from the University of Oxford in 2019. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonepat, India. Her research interests include studies of the unconscious, theories of race, crime fiction and policing, and forms of reader reception in nineteenth-century British and South Asian popular fiction.
