Search

The eponymous Asian narrator of Elizabeth Hamilton's epistolary Oriental satire embodies the role of a feminized cosmopolite outsider who seeks to understand British Enlightenment culture of the late eighteenth century. The Rajah's letters offer a narrative of colonial counterflow through which Hamilton details an agenda of benevolent colonialism and spiritually-based cosmopolitanism. While recent studies have integrated genre and interdisciplinary approaches into their political analyses of Hamilton as a Scots Irish woman writer, satirist, and Orientalist scholar, this essay applies theories of classical and modern satire and cosmopolitanism to read Hamilton's Hindoo Rajah as a free-roaming feminized eiron and cosmopolite. Through her genteel Eastern citizen of the world, Hamilton subtly asserts that politeness and virtue are foundational to Enlightenment cosmopolitan identity and, furthermore, that cosmopolitan spirituality is a necessary ingredient to civil society. The Rajah's insistence on religious foundations for universal benevolence indicates Hamilton's cultural biases. However, as a free-floating feminized eiron, the Rajah significantly broadens the potential of "embodied cosmopolitanism" beyond the tropes of cross-cultural matrimony and hybridized offspring, which critics have already noted in the work of post-French Revolution British female authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]