‘Worthy female victims’? The rape of a white woman as metaphor for colonialism in two miniseries by Hugo Blick

Abstract

This article focuses on two miniseries written, directed and produced by Hugo Blick, The Honourable Woman (2014) and The English (2022). Both series are partially set in colonised regions – present-day Palestine and the nineteenth-century United States, respectively – and have upper-class white heroines who are citizens of colonising countries: they are British-Israeli and British, respectively. In both cases, a key plot point is that the heroine has been raped and, as this article seeks to show, that rape is made to serve as a metaphor for colonialism. This manoeuvre, which can also be found in some colonial and postcolonial literature, represents a problematic displacement of the sexual violence often endured by colonised women at the hands of the colonisers. Although both series allude to this violence, neither addresses it directly, and colonised women play minor roles. Those that do appear are treacherous and/or sacrifice their lives saving the white heroines from danger, thereby paving the way for their children to be raised by white people. The focus of both programmes thus remains fixed on the white heroines and the trauma and other negative repercussions they have suffered as a result of their rapes. Consequently, neither series constitutes an effective critique of colonialism.