Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature (review)

Tara Ghoshal Wallace sets out to demonstrate "how consistently English and Scottish writers of [the long eighteenth century] articulate the potential dangers of imperial ambition [and] warn that imperial power poses grave social and moral dangers for the metropole" (18). On the one hand, she concedes that her primary texts do participate in the Othering of the colonial subject. On the other hand, Wallace counters the idea promoted by some postcolonial critics that all writing in this period embraces imperialism and claims that some texts recognize an authentic difference between the European and the Other and even imagine the Other gazing on and assessing the European.

In order to make her argument, Wallace navigates between two sets of poles: Britain's western and eastern empires, and the English and Scottish authors who write about them. In most chapters, she compares and contrasts a work by an English writer with one from a Scottish author, all works popular in their time. In addition, the introduction situates the book between the chronological poles of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Robert Louis Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae, which provide epigraphs for all chapters. Throughout Imperial Characters, Wallace works through explicit representations of the empire to uncover the complexities hidden under the surface. Ultimately, this slim volume does not promote any master narrative, but offers a convincing demonstration of the complexity of eighteenth-century views on empire.

In the first chapter, Wallace juxtaposes Alexander Pope's Windsor-Forest and James Thomson's The Seasons, both poems noted for their internal inconsistency. In contrast to critics who see Windsor-Forest as a celebration of imperialism, Wallace argues that most aspects of the poem expose hidden problems that empire creates in Britain: forests are denuded because the trees have been turned into ships; citizens must be coerced to join the navy; hunting is horrifying and destructive; and Britain has become dependent on foreign products. While (English) Pope is thus consistently critical of empire, (Scottish) Thomson sees redeeming features. Certainly, the imperial project is problematic because it encourages enslavement and oppression through brute force and leads to the vulgar accumulation of wealth and power. However, Thomson reassures himself by configuring alien races as having savage natures and characters that must be ameliorated by European intervention in the name of progress.

The ideological positions are somewhat switched in the next chapter: the English is more positive about empire, the Scot more critical. In Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders, exile in the colonies helps the protagonists recuperate their fortunes (and to some extent their morals), though only because they are different from other transported convicts. In the end, however, both Moll and Jack want to return to Britain, the only place where they can really achieve the status of leisured gentry. Partly, Wallace argues, this may be because "Defoe anticipates the problems for British imperial ambitions if American colonists become too comfortable, too settled, too independent" (87). In contrast to Defoe, Tobias Smollett proposes in Humphry Clinker that the British should never have colonized America in the first place. For him, America is dangerous because it depopulates Scotland at a time when that country should be rebuilding after the Act of Union and the Jacobite rebellions. Rather than embracing wholesome country life, Smollett's returnees bring vices such as consumerism and mixing of social classes back to Britain.

With Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, Imperial Characters takes the turn from western to eastern empire, insisting correctly that previous critics have overstated the difference between the two. In Hermsprong and Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Robert Bage and Elizabeth Hamilton introduce indigenous characters who critique Britain from the western and eastern peripheries, respectively. Coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum (Jacobin/anti-Jacobin), both authors still have the same target: "what they perceive as corrupt institutions run by a corrupt class system: the church, the...