Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (review)

In the case of postcolonial theory, at least, Samuel Johnson had it right: “How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page.” Too many are like fluid puddings; others are written in impenetrable prose. One suspects that vast numbers of them languish on shelves unread, begun but abandoned along the way. Hence the special pleasure of reading Patrick Brantlinger’s beautifully executed little masterpiece, a volume that manages in less than two hundred pages to survey and analyze one of the more complicated issues in our discipline: the relationship between Victorian imperialism and the response it produced in the era of decolonization. Citing myriad examples from across literatures in English, and blending critical, historical, and theoretical insights, Brantlinger shows the imperial imagination’s reach and grasp but also its manifold contradictions, uncertainties, and instabilities. Similarly, he explains the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism as well as their blind spots and aporias.

Brantlinger unfolds his study in three parts: an overview of Victorian imperialism, a discussion of critical controversies surrounding imperialism and postcolonialism, and a set of case studies that examine well-known Victorian literary texts in light of postcolonial critique. A useful timeline and an extensive bibliography complete the volume. Brantlinger provides a broad overview of Victorian imperialism and its influence on poetry, fiction, and other literary genres. He shows that while the Victorians expressed great pride in the idea of empire, they were also ambivalent on many fronts, ranging from self-criticism about the conditions that led so many Britons to emigrate to the colonies, to worries over the treatment of aborigines at the far reaches of empire. In both regards, Brantlinger argues, the Empire was significant, and thus he takes special pains to rebut the claim, advanced in recent imperial historiography, that most Victorians were largely uninformed about the Empire. His contention that before 1880 imperial affairs would have been inescapable for most educated Britons is compactly expressed yet convincing, supported by clear discussions of slavery, emigration, missionaries, travel literature, and racial theory.

His survey of critical controversies deals cogently with a variety of knotty issues: the importance of Marxism; the new imperial historiography; gender, sexuality, and race; Orientalism (with a nuanced treatment of Edward Said); colonial mimicry; and the vexed question of colonial agency. Taking this last as a synecdoche of Brantlinger’s critical procedures, we find first a detailed discussion of Gayatri Spivak’s arguments about subaltern agency, then several searching questions about the moral responsibility of critics to try to represent the previously unrepresented, then—and this is crucial—a less familiar archive in which to test Spivak’s arguments, this one drawn from Brantlinger’s study of aboriginal representations in Australian literature, history, and politics. He takes up the question of the genocide deniers in Australia, who dispute that the arrival of Europeans caused steep declines in the aboriginal population, and shows that contemporary critics and historians have produced reliable accounts of subaltern resistance dating back to the 1820s. What emerges is a rich historical and theoretical perspective on the subaltern that neatly frames the basic questions and offers new angles of reflection on them.

The final section of the book deals, as aforementioned, directly with literature, and puts the often abstract considerations of postcolonial theory, so to speak, to the text. Here again, Brantlinger’s deep command of nineteenth-century literary history serves him well, for the examples range across genres, geographical zones, and the entire span of Victorian literature. Brantlinger shows clearly how postcolonial critique has changed our view of Jane Eyre (1847), Great Expectations (1861), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Idylls of the King (1859–85).

Brantlinger’s focus is so fixed on theory and criticism, however, that he underplays the equally important influence of postcolonial literature on the subject he analyzes. He gives a brief mention of Jean Rhys, for example, but ignores how her Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) has informed many searching postcolonial readings...