Surplus Women and Trafficked Women: Tropes of White Womanhood

Amid a wave of academic writing about whiteness at the end of the twentieth century, Richard Dyer’s White (1997) helped to make visible the artificial construction of whiteness as a racial imaginary. Before Dyer, it was all too easy for whiteness to remain invisible in a dominant white culture that equates whiteness with normativity: “There is a specificity to white representation, but it does not reside in a set of stereotypes so much as in narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and habits of perception.”[1] Dyer’s work offered a way to read the dominance and normativity of whiteness back into its representations as techniques or framing mechanisms and thus “dislodge it from its centrality and authority” (Essays on Race, 10). Taking up the cultural power of narrative tropes in a different context, Susan Stanford Friedman has identified “tropic discourse” as “an opportunity to examine the interplay between global patterns and the distinctions that inflect each manifestation” of implied stories conveyed within tropes.[2] For Friedman, tropes are narrative machines that both contain and move cultural content and thus provide readers with comparative objects for transnational scholarship.

With these frameworks of whiteness and tropic discourse in mind, I identify two tropes of white womanhood—surplus women and trafficked women—across Anglophone Atlantic modernist narratives between the World Wars. Examining whiteness at the intersection of gender and narrative opens new lines of comparison for otherwise disparate texts by diverse women writers. Through variations on these tropes, narratives offer nuanced critiques of white womanhood while engaging with the relationship of womanhood to whiteness in the service of colonial-patriarchal stability.

The term “surplus women” describes only white, middle-class women in British, European, and North American societies who, as a result of globalization and war, outnumbered white middle-class men in metropolitan centers, especially after WWI.[3] Surplus women would therefore remain “unproductive” for a nation unless they were sent to colonies or rural areas for marriage to white men. “Trafficked women,” on the other hand, is an evolution of the “white slave trade” trope that became the focus of (primarily middle- and upper-class) women’s groups through the work of the League of Nations in the 1920s. At that time, an investigation was commissioned to track the conditions that sustained transnational prostitution, including an emphasis on disaffiliation from middle-class, white households.[4] “Surplus” and “trafficked” women helped shape the transatlantic imaginary of sexual and racial panic in the wake of war, disease, and refugee and migration surges. The terms also respond to increased professional and political visibility of middle-class women. As complementary tropes, surplus and trafficked women “paradoxically affirmed and denied the anxieties of losing control of demographic territory” through the mismanagement of white female reproductive capacity.[5]

And they show up in various texts during these interwar years: in Virginia Woolf’s post-WWI novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Lady Bruton asks Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread to help her compose a letter to the Times about “superfluous youth” who, she argues, should be sent to Canada.[6] This scene slyly refers to the many “surplus women” editorials in the Times following the 1921 census, one way the surplus women trope circulated.[7] Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 novel, Decline and Fall, incorporates the League of Nations’ investigation of sex trafficking as a plot device while offering a satire of British upper classes. Adela Quested’s status as a surplus woman, after all, drives her to India to marry a colonial officer, setting the events of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) on their path. Rather than incidental, these references to surplus women and trafficked women are cultural tropes that construct white womanhood as a function of colonial-patriarchal power and as objects of cultural paranoia. Examining these tropes might also contribute to our understandings of gender and race as intersecting when the tropes are seen as produced by, and producing, a particular transnational imaginary of white womanhood.

The social imaginary power of “trafficked women” flips the coin on the “surplus women” image: on one side is the pristine, colonial-patriarchal potential of white womanhood, on the other is the lost or despoiled ruins of that potential. Together, these figures emblematize the promise of (white) empire and the threat of a postcolonial future as embodied in women’s reproductivity, mobility, and agency. As a comparative framework, the tropes organize a thematic spectrum of white womanhood between heterosexual domestic spaces on one end, and extramarital and transient sexuality on the other. On this spectrum, domestic spaces integrate and fortify national identities through claims to white, middle-class womanhood while the mobility of extramarital sexuality in cosmopolitan or foreign settings poses the threats of racial ambiguity and national disaffiliation. In women’s texts, however, variations on these two tropes expose the precarious categorical safety of white womanhood.

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) is an example of a domestic surplus women novel. Set in 1921 amid the Irish War of Independence, the novel presents young Lois Farquar as a proto-surplus woman whose marriage and reproductive potential inflects the fate of Anglo-Ireland. In fact, Lois feels an overwhelming “doom of extinction” throughout the text, constantly reminded by others that her “race” is in jeopardy if she does not marry well.[8] The central image of her family’s Irish Big House, Danielstown, anchors the text with symbolic gravity: an image of Anglo-Irish aristocracy and domestic colonial order.

A climactic scene demonstrates the narrative’s tentative negotiations with, and rejection of, alternative plot lines. In a ruined colonial mill, Lois and her older friend Marda encounter an armed Irish rebel. Beyond the gaze of the Big House, the mill represents a postcolonial future constructed from disputed and reappropriated territory, and Lois’s exploration of the ruin with her friend, recently engaged to marry an English businessman, threatens a deviation from reproductive fortification and towards a surplus woman future.

Facing down the rebel’s gun, Lois proposes a conspiracy of silence about the encounter, which would preserve an intimacy between the three of them and thus queer national, colonial, and sexual boundaries (Bowen, The Last September, 184). But Marda evades this possibility by ignoring Lois (“But nobody listened”) and minimizing the effect of the rebel’s errant gunshot, saying afterwards: “being me, it was bound to happen” (184). Marda’s recourse to typical Anglo-Irish euphemism not only redirects attention to herself but also deflects the shame of illegitimate, unpatriotic penetration represented by the rebel’s gunshot that grazes Marda’s hand. In abandoning Lois and the Irishman in the ruin, Marda collaborates in a colonial-patriarchal narrative grounded in the expectation that white womanhood should preserve the power of white men and colonial territory.

By the end of the novel, Lois is still unmarried. She is disappeared from the narrative with an indirect account of her travels on the continent. She is therefore symbolically linked to the Anglo-Irish Big House that is removed from the landscape in an “abortive birth” of flames at the hands of Irish rebels (303). While it may seem that Lois has escaped the marriage plot, her shared narrative fate with the house re-establishes her identification with white, middle-class womanhood as a function of the colonial, patriarchal narrative. Lois’s unresolved narrative thus provides a double warning that sustains the aesthetic atmosphere of the novel into the future: the reincorporation of Lois into the protective myth of white womanhood promises continued territorial violence and threats of disaffiliation.

Complicating the surplus-trafficked spectrum, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) presents Sasha Jansen as a hybrid surplus-trafficked woman.[9] A white creole moving through European settings, Sasha is in her 40s, childless, and without masculine legal affiliation (no husband, no father) to provide legitimate citizenship or income: these characteristics not only announce her surplus status, but also emphasize her proximity to sexual and economic ruin. She drifts between hotel rooms and cafés in 1937 Paris, making brief connections with other disaffiliated travelers who offer tentative hope for companionship but inevitably let her down—often because they assume she is a prostitute, thus reminding her of her own proximity to being trafficked or ruined. As in the example of Bowen’s novel, Sasha’s interactions with other women or other “others” negotiate between whiteness and colonial-patriarchal safety on one hand, and symbolic or real death on the other.

Her encounter with a girl washing dishes in a café sends Sasha into a spiral of, first, solidarity with the girl’s abject working life (“Salut!”), then a paranoid recoil that reconstructs racial difference to maintain a narrative shield of self-pity based, ironically, on her own claim to whiteness: “Sorry for her? Why should I be sorry for her?” the narrator asks herself:

“Hasn’t she got sturdy legs and curly hair? And don’t her strong hands sing the Marseillaise? And when the revolution comes, won’t those be the hands to be kissed?” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 409)

The washing-up girl is racially marked by the narrator with the reference to “curly hair,” which aligns racial-social identity with class position, removing the girl from the protection of white womanhood and paradoxically establishing the narrator’s own white woman status as vulnerable to a post-revolution future.

In Sasha’s narrative, repeating encounters like this demonstrate self-sabotage: Sasha succumbs to the narrative weight of whiteness and abandons herself to social paranoia. This infectious paranoia is directed at other trafficked men and women and, most devastatingly, towards herself. This negation also results in a kind of exclusion from her own narrative, which winds up abandoning her briefly in a discursive void where there is “no past, no future, there is only this blackness” (450).

Through an apparent focus on protecting white womanhood, surplus and trafficked women tropes reflect and distribute a white patriarchal anxiety about the loss of economic or political power during the interwar period. These figures simultaneously assume and fail an obligation to protect “white womanhood,” and in doing so they demonstrate the intersecting values of whiteness and womanhood for national or economic narratives. Examining variations of these figures reveals a volatile tension in these women’s modernist narratives: colonial-patriarchal plots are redistributed even as they unravel.