Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (review)

Julia M. Wright’s Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature contributes in valuable ways to the study of the impact of British imperialism upon nineteenth-century literature. Post-colonial approaches to British literature have long expressed some uneasiness about how to write the history of empire without making it either a version or counter-version of the story of the diffusion of British culture and values – of ‘science’ and ‘civilization’ – from a metropolitan centre to the colonies on the periphery. Even critiques of the British Empire still tend to place Britain at the centre of the world, understanding colonial people and their histories almost exclusively in terms of how they were represented by their rulers and how they struggled against those representations. New grounds of comparison are being called for that do not use Europe as the standard against which all other cultures are compared. Wright’s study attempts to achieve just such a re-grounding of perspective by analyzing the manner in which Irish writers of the nineteenth century looked to India, rather than Britain, in their effort to understand themselves. This is a book about ‘intercolonial reference,’ about the imaginative connection that Ireland forged with India from the 1780s onward. Wright provides a compelling account of the important role that sensibility played in this process, both in justifying and resisting imperialism.

The first half of the book, focused on the relationship between Enlightenment sensibility and Irish national discourse, discusses the role of sensibility in forging the idea of Ireland as a community of feeling held together by bonds of sympathy. Sensibility here forms the basis of ideas of civility and social harmony in contrast to its absence. In the United Irishman Charles Hamilton Teeling’s Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (1828), for instance, patriotic feeling is understood as a national virtue, used to sanction resistance to colonial rule and to form ties with other oppressed nations. Teeling seeks to arouse his readers’ sympathy for Ireland’s condition. In other Irish writers, notably Lady Morgan, national feeling is gendered as Ireland is portrayed as a powerless, yet erotically attractive, maiden in distress, who remains defiant and virtuous in the face of oppression. In a chapter dealing with proselytization in Morgan’s The Missionary and Moore’s Lallah Rookh, Wright examines the sentimentalist critique of the role of religion in colonial policy.

In the second half of the book, Wright draws upon Patrick Brantlinger’s idea of ‘imperial gothic’ in order to discuss narratives in which Ireland and India are brought uncomfortably together, not by sympathy, eroticism, and romance, but instead in narratives of economic violence, fragmentation, alienation, and horror. In a superb reading of Matthew Lewis’s short story ‘The Anaconda,’ a story that turns upon the difference between and confusion of a dangerous ‘Anaconda’ with a sentimentalized ‘Anne O’Connor,’ Ireland and a gothically rendered Orient, seen as the dangerous site of colonial trauma and colonial wealth, are brought into close conjunction. Here the East is threatening because it disables and numbs sensibility. Gothicism fragments grand narratives. In Wright’s turn to history, she suggests the manner in which Ireland, continually associated with India and yet also differentiated from it –serving as the ‘that,’ in John Barrell’s psychological model of ‘this,’ ‘that,’ and ‘the other’ – disrupts British imperial historiography. Wright’s Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature is an excellent piece of literary scholarship, which combines a keen understanding of colonial history with a sophisticated grasp of the dynamics of literary genres in order to think about Irish literature in substantially new ways.