ABSTRACT
In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens coins the word ‘Podsnappery’ to refer to the unabashed jingoism-blustery, unself-reflexive, and small-minded in equal measure-of Victorian bourgeois society. Mr Podsnap’s overweening national arrogance, his neat, peremptory division of the world into two halves, and his imperious denunciation of everything non-English are held up as cause for obvious ridicule and laughter. Yet the humour inherent in this exaggerated, satirical portrait of a character like Mr Podsnap is in large measure dependent, first and foremost, on an implicit assumption about what constitutes or should constitute ‘true’ English behaviour. Thus Mr Podsnap is laughable to the extent that ‘true’ Englishness is here tacitly being understood as that which is inimical to bombast, or even, as something profoundly ineffable and inarticulable. Put another way, one could say that here is an enactment of Englishness by Dickens that is mediated by his attempt to unmask Mr Podsnap as it were, to show him up as a hollow version of the real thing. The idea of national selfhood or identity as resistant to language and representation, more
easily felt than described, and more susceptible to recognition in the breach and the negative, contributes significantly to the hegemonic power of Englishness. Yet, as Christophine, Antoinette Cosway’s black servant who represents an alternative native or folk tradition of knowledge in Wide Sargasso Sea hints in her doubts about the existence of such a place, England and Englishness are often nothing more than fantastical, albeit powerful, projections. This book is 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. The approach to be adopted towards the problematic identified is hinted at in the other quotation by Rudyard Kipling in the epigraph. ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ asks Kipling’s persona rhetorically and provocatively in the poem, ‘The English Flag’. Empire, as Kipling succinctly suggests, provides the extra-territorial and transnational co-ordinates of Englishness, rendering the knowledge and indeed construction of English culture in irrevocably relational rather than autochthonous terms. In pursuing this idea across a varied landscape of textual and cultural terrain opened up by the intensified circulation of ideas, people, and commodities that colonialism prompted in the Victorian period, I seek specifically to locate Englishness in terms of textual performance and performativity, arguing that the English subject’s knowability-or the very ground upon which Kipling makes his assertion-is a function of the normalizing effect of discursive performances multiply reiterated.
