Exoticism and Consumption in Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Abstract

Neo-historical fiction in postcolonial countries typically adopts an interrogative stance towards inherited historical discourses and their tendencies to propagate degrading colonial fantasies and stereotypes. Concerned with telling the other side of the story or recuperating the Other from the distorting fictions of the archive, they generate agenda-fuelled narratives. Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) tells the story of an Irish born courtesan in Paris who became the unofficial first lady of Paraguay during the reign of Francisco Solano Lopez. Countering the derogating representations of Lynch’s biographers, Enright’s neo-historical novel forms in part a response to the tendency of historical narratives to demonise powerful women. Furthermore, the novel’s exploration of tropes of cannibalism and national stereotype illustrates in the most graphic terms how cultures literally consume one another. Negotiating the distortions of colonial, nationalist and revisionist historiography in a feminist and postcolonial re-imagining of the past, Enright’s Eliza is both victim of and complicit in her status as sex object, being both controlled and controlling, manipulated and manipulating, a corporeal palimpsest capable of changing from ‘Angel of Mercy to Angel of Death, without a blink of her lovely eye’ (Enright, 2002, p. 122).