6 - Gender, Genre and the Truth Condition: Failure in Anna Leonowens’s The English Governess at the Siamese Court

Summary

In literary and cultural studies, the politics of failure often seem opaque. Who or what counts as a failure, for which reasons this judgement is made and by whom it is made are rarely discussed openly. Instead, failure judgements mostly operate covertly at the interface of several regulatory patterns. The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, for instance, appears to draw on a mixture of paradigms such as public recognition, peer appraisal and market profitability to draw up its list of alleged failures. What is missing is a reflection on the methods it uses or, indeed, the norms it applies. Focusing especially on gender norms and societal patterns, Jack Halberstam investigates how the underlying norms of failure judgements inculcate ideologies in readers and audiences, which also apply to other contexts. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam maps how models of gender, sexual reproductivity and heteronormativity determine the underlying politics of failure and how they intersect with other trajectories, including capitalism, Western modernity and the cultural industry. For Halberstam, it is necessary to critically interrogate the ‘standards of passing and failing’ in literary and cultural studies as well as society at large in order to dismantle the ‘logics of success and failure with which we currently live’. Failure is linked to normative standards in culture as well as to economics and market profitability, as Halberstam explains:

Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes; capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005), requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for some means certain losses for others.

The present chapter takes up Halberstam's argument about the necessity to think about the underlying logics of failure, in both its cultural and its material dimensions. It examines a set of paradigms that structure literary and cultural production and reception models, namely the relationship between failure, gender, genre, market conditions and the truth condition. As a case study that also highlights how interculturality plays into these intersectional paradigms, the essay turns to Anna Leonowens's The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and its transmedia adaptations, including its literary, film, stage and musical adaptations.