From Jane Eyre to Governor Eyre, or Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood

Abstract

The scope of this chapter is the normalising power of empire and its violent side-effects. Post-colonial approaches to nineteenth-century British texts, for example Edward Said’s in reading Mansfield Park, find imperialism the other scene of their domestic setting and politics. Texts become complicit, in their silence or half-revelations, with imperialist violence, or, in a deconstructivist move based on this, they show the metropolitan centre of imperialism to be riddled with the signs of the heterogeneous power and resistance of the empire itself.² There is, however, a predictability in some of the moves of this critical writing, whose effect confirms for the critic both the history he or she is looking for, and the reading of the historical present that is supposed to be the aim of a criticism centred on history. The deconstructive move itself, which finds the colonialist the haunted and demonic figure, ends up by re-centring the text it was supposed to take out of the metropolitan context. As an example, take Suvendrini Perera, discussing Edwin Drood in her book Reaches of Empire and linking it with De Quincey’s opium-eating.

In British culture… one may discover a consistency of concern in Spenser, Shakespeare, Defoe and Austen that fixes socially desirable, empowered space in metropolitan England or Europe and connects it by design, motive and development to distant or peripheral worlds (Ireland, Venice, Africa, Jamaica), conceived of as desirable but subordinate. And with these meticulously maintained references come attitudes — about rule, control, profit, and enhancement and suitability — that grow with astonishing power from the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century. These structures do not arise from some pre-existing (semi-conspiratorial) design that the writers then manipulate, but are bound up with the development of Britain’s cultural identity, as that identity imagines itself in a geographically conceived world.¹