Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (review)
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Covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Julia M. Wright comprehensively and instructively analyzes inscriptions of India and other British oriental colonies in literary texts with Irish authors or characters. Wright regularly identifies sensibility: moral sympathy or "fellow-feeling" towards others' poor, painful conditions. For example, she quotes James Clarence Mangan's 1840s poetic demand that, concerning the likes of "The swart slave of Kaffirland," Irish youths manifest "Soul-felt sympathy with grief."
Wright's Introduction holds that, especially after the Act of Union (1800), Ireland is difficult to assimilate into the "this / the Other" binary whereby "this" is metropolitan England and "the Other" the exotic periphery of its empire. The Introduction sees Ireland—European, Christian, "literate . . . enfranchised . . . white"—as in-between: an instance of "that" per John Barrell's formulation "this / that / the Other." Being physically like the English—and culturally more like them after the 1831 Stanley Education Act—the Irish could mimic, better than Indians, their colonial superiors, either to subvert or emulate them.
In each of the last five of her six full chapters, Wright compares and contrasts two or three major colonial texts, making elegant, historically grounded arguments about Irish-Oriental nexuses. The first chapter, however, offers a contextualizing claim that, through "political and literary writings" in its newspapers—and in documents like Charles Hamilton Teeling's 1828 and 1832 memoirs of the 1798 Rebellion—the United Irishmen advanced the notion of "sentimental nationalism." Irishness became less a matter of proving cultural purity (the mission of antiquarians) than of asserting one's ideological commitment to sympathy. A Scots-Irish Presbyterian was Irish if he felt, and responded benevolently to, woes inflicted upon his fellow countrymen by the "unfeeling" colonial regime.
Chapter 2 focuses on Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and works by the Edgeworths, father and daughter. These authors, Wright argues, use education and the trope of fostering to suggest effective means of recalibrating Anglo-Irish relations after the Union. Morgan characterizes Ireland as an achieved Milesian woman who educates her English suitor into national sympathy, facilitating his emergence as a kind of colonial foster-father. In such tales as that of the orphan Dominick O'Reilly, who becomes an Indian colonial secretary (Essay on Irish Bulls [1803]), the Edgeworths allegorize the country as a young male who needs British fostering and pedagogy to achieve full, prosperous manhood. [End Page 295]
Taking as a starting point British press coverage of the 1806 Vellore Mutiny over religious symbols, Chapter 3 examines two hugely popular Irish orientalist texts: Lady Morgan's The Missionary (1811) and Thomas Moore's multi-narrative Lalla Rookh (1817). Both authors use universal human sympathy to expose proselytism as a calculating imperial strategy. Oscar Wilde's mother, writing in the Young Ireland Nation newspaper, identified the Irish subtext in Lalla Rookh: persecuted Sunnis in Iran resemble persecuted Catholics in pre-Emancipation Erin. Moore's work remains famous for offering the oily Fadladeen as a parody of Edinburgh Review critic Francis Jeffrey.
The remaining chapters dissect gothic texts that critique imperial wealth—the dark side of whose acquisition Edmund Burke's prosecution of Warren Hastings exposed. Chapter 4 problematizes the Edgeworths' ideal of a muscular colonial frontier through an innovative interpretation of Matthew G. Lewis's Ceylonese short story "The Anaconda" (1808). A detailed reading of C.R. Maturin's complex Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in Chapter 5 identifies violent imperial appropriations of native property as precipitating patterns of failure in colonized spaces like Ireland and India. Respecting Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Chapter 6 probes how the significantly Irish East End of London contrasts with the commercial and aesthetic economy apparent in the West End's surfeit of oriental luxury goods. The chapter also presents Bram Stoker's late fiction as advocating the revitalization of England through interventions there by hardy, savvy colonials, such as an Anglo-Australian and his Anglo-Burmese wife, heroes of The Lair of the White Worm (1911).
A glory...
