Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of Performance (review)

Angelia Poon's new volume advances an intelligent, complex argument about the crafting of "Englishness" in multiple Victorian texts and colonial sites. While some of her texts have been the focus of similar comment in recent years—Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), for instance, Charles Dickens's Edwin Drood (1870), and H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain (1887)—Poon also analyzes lesser-known texts like Harriet Martineau's British Rule in India (1857), Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), and Emily Eden's Up the Country, Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (1866). Poon is an astute reader, with a good ear for textual nuance—even in novels like Jane Eyre, whose weight of critical comment makes it a daunting text to take on.

Poon's guiding concepts—"Englishness" and "performance"—are worth considering carefully because they function in complex ways in her argument and have filled similarly complex roles in British, postcolonial, and cultural studies in recent years. In Poon's view, the concepts are closely interrelated. Suggesting that Victorian Englishness was a mystified, shifting, even fantastic notion, she sees her study as "an attempt to draw out the forms and guises that Englishness as a hegemonic construct assumed in an age of empire as well as to ask in what ways it was troubled and contested" (2). While the idea of a contested notion of Englishness is certainly not new, Poon resists the use of "hybridity," a term widely used in postcolonial studies, to address it: hybridity, she argues, has often been used in problematic ways to suggest that "heterogeneity on its own naturally implies dissent and opposition" (9). Instead, she opts for "the performative paradigm," a paradigm that she believes allows us to see "how the power of Englishness is maintained while at the same time allowing us to see the fissures in its construction" (9).

In Poon's hands, this paradigm does indeed expose Englishness as a crafted, challenged entity. She sees the Creole writer Seacole, for example, as enacting a "functional" Englishness in her work on the Crimean battlefields and in her use of the conventions of travel writing, a notion of national identity that "interrogates the notion of authenticity" by passing for the real thing (53). Similarly, Eden and Martineau illuminate the "double nature" of English colonial rule in India (75), demonstrating its simultaneous senses of heroism and masochism, idealism and guilt. Poon's analyses of Eden and Martineau are particularly insightful, most notably in her keen awareness of the role that class played in their perceptions of India. Using Eden's Up the Country, for example, she shows how the aristocratic British colonist created a persona that accommodated a simultaneous conviction of imperial power and vulnerability.

In addition to being a good reader of primary texts, Poon applies theoretical concepts with skill and sophistication. Her concept of performativity, for example, is clearly derived from the work of Judith Butler, and she knows how to make persuasively Butlerian moves. Had Poon interrogated some of her theoretical sources in the same subtle ways she interrogates her primary texts, however, her study would have been even more impressive. As it stands, the familiar invocation of Butler leads to some fairly predictable conclusions about her primary texts. Scholarship on performance and theatricality—both theoretical and historical—has exploded in recent years, as this theoretically informed author undoubtedly knows. But Poon's use of this body of work is strikingly slight compared to her extensive and careful use of postcolonial scholarship, especially given her stated goal: "I seek specifically to locate Englishness in terms of textual performance and performativity, arguing that the English subject's knowability . . . is a function of the normalizing effect of discursive performances multiply reiterated" (2). Performance theorists in addition to Butler and a very few others could have contributed, I believe, to a more flexible and...