Mary Eliza Rogers' Domestic Life in Palestine contributes significantly to a distinctive tradition of British women's travel writing about the Middle East, a tradition begun by Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Craven, and Hester Stanhope. Residence in Palestine during the Crimean War provided access for Rogers to a world of empowerment closed to her in England, where she was constrained by the conventions of what I refer to as "The British Harem." I am particularly interested in the ways in which Rogers constructs herself as imperial through representations of her honorary male status, and her "conquest"' of Arabs and "Oriental" territories in her interactions with Arab and Turkish men and women in the Middle East.
For Rogers, the Middle East provided a discursive site fraught with ironic possibilities, since the Orient was a space historically regarded by Eurocentric "Imperial eyes," via the trope of the Oriental harem, as a locus of women's enslavement. As a Victorian woman, Rogers experienced a tremendous sense of liberation through her travels. In contemplating women in Palestine, particularly Muslim women secluded in traditional harems, however, she consistently rejected identification with local women. Women's dress and manners, Eastern and Western, become the focus of significant portions of the description in her text, figuring Rogers, the British woman observer, as educated and civilized, active and superior. In other words, Rogers' status as a foreign British women empowered her to act in ways usually gendered male. At the same time, Rogers tended to assign the local Palestinian woman a relatively uneducated and childlike role similar to that of the Victorian angel on the hearth. Rogers herself preferred to be outside playing empire with the men. In order to reconcile her roles of domestic observer and honorary imperial male, Rogers constructed herself as a gentle and nurturing ruler, a figuration similar to the British imperial construction of Queen Victoria herself.
In constructing herself as a British woman with the agency and power to act decisively within the public sphere, Rogers helped to construct a model of British imperialism in the Middle East which was highly attractive to her audience in England, and which disguised Britain's imperial motives in Palestine. This was a feminized imperialism which attained influence and power for Britain in the Middle East without appearing overtly aggressive or invasive. Rogers' self-representation served as an example of what Mary Louise Pratt has described as the rhetorical move of the "Anti-Conquest," a mystified manifestation of Western imperialism which appears on the surface to be friendly and affiliating, but which ultimately serves to underwrite appropriation and control. In subtle ways, while ostensibly claiming to represent the domestic life of Palestinians, Mary Eliza Rogers' text served to represent the British as appropriate rulers for the area and their burgeoning imperial economic power in the Orient as beneficial. In significant ways, Rogers assumed the mantle of a Gentle Britannia.
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