Before Its Time, of Its Time: The Transnational Female Bildungsroman and Kartini's Letters of a Javanese Princess

Abstract

The Indonesian woman, Kartini, now revered in Indonesia as its pioneer for women's education, wrote a series of letters between 1899 and 1904 to her Dutch colonial friends and feminist correspondents in Holland. Their publication, first in Dutch--the language in which they were written--then in English, provides us with a text that is chiefly literary, despite its historical and ethnographic dimensions. Using the elements of genre theory regarding the female bildungsroman to reread Letters of a Javanese Princess, the paper argues that colonialism, racism, and transnational gender biases inflect the Letters. The narrative of conflict between women's desires for growth and the combined repressive regulatory ideologies of Javanese patriarchy and Dutch racism, while it falls within a broader transnational tradition of women's life stories, offers an original testimony to early twentieth century Asian feminist struggles.