"To Reveal and Veil": A Postcolonial Reading of National Identity
Studies of neo-Victorianism highlight the importance of re-vision. In “What Is Neo-Victorian Studies?”, Mark Llewellyn posits that, by “writ[ing] back to something in the nineteenth century”, the Neo-Victorian text “aims to re-fresh and re-vitalise the importance of that earlier text to the here and now” (171). It is this very re-visioning, this “writing back”, that characterizes Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs in which Carey re-writes the Australian convict, Abel Magwitch, in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, to be his novel’s protagonist, Jack Maggs. Through a postcolonial lens, I will compare the character development and forging of a national identity of Dickens’s Pip and Carey’s Maggs.
Taking as my point of departure, John McBratney’s definition of “transnational irony” as “the location of an evolving process of creation and de-creation occurring in psychological time within a recurrent process of ‘voyage in’ and ‘voyage out’, of ‘tour’ and ‘retour’, occurring within international space” (532), I will compare how both Pip and Maggs, as protagonists, de-create and re-create their sense of belonging and identity in response to their unsettled ‘expectations’ and aspirations. What I seek to reveal is how Pip’s creation of identity as an Englishman overlooks and undermines a different (his)story represented by Magwitch. I will thus argue the paradox of Dickens’ peripheralizing of Magwitch. As Ankhi Mukherjee argues, it is Magwitch’s “reappearance” in Pip’s life that “triggers off a chain of events that revises the terms of Pip’s bildungsroman” (Mukherjee 118). Yet, as McBratney crucially points out, Dickens “has Magwitch die” because this is “the fate usually reserved for characters in nineteenth-century British fiction that are too ideologically troublesome to place in “home” society” (McBratney 538). With specific focus on Maggs’ writing of his own story, as well as his restorative homecoming, I will then highlight how Carey’s postcolonial writing and use of metafiction reclaim from Dickens Magwitch’s plot of identity and, as Bruce Woodcock points out, raise “questions about the responsibility of the novelist to his subject matter” (124).
In purposing to unravel this ‘hidden history’ in Great Expectations that is spotlighted in Jack Maggs—namely, the complex relationship between England as ‘homeland’ and Australia as colony, in the negotiation of national identity—I aim to consider critically “the transformative power of writing to reveal and veil” (Woodcock 132).
Contextual and Theoretical Framework
Llewellyn discusses the crucial link between “the Victorian past” and “our post-Victorian present” (165) and postulates that the Victorians offer neo-Victorianism “the potential space” (175) to revise, re-fresh and re-write “ideas and concerns that still dominate social discourses today” (175). With this in mind, the Victorian text, Great Expectations, offers its neo-Victorian counterpart, Jack Maggs, space for the revisionary writing of national identity.
It is worth noting here that McBratney’s model of “Janus-faced cosmopolitanism” (529), based on the concept of “transnational irony”, will be used to analyse the national identities of Pip, Magwitch and Maggs. McBratney conceives the cosmopolitan figure as “implicitly Janus-faced, looking both inward toward and insular England and outward toward a ‘Great Britain’” (529). Crucial to his conceptualizing of “Janus-faced cosmopolitanism” is Friederich Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony which encompasses “a two-part, oscillating function” (531) that entails a character’s creation “of some ‘fiction’ about the world” (531), on the one hand, and that fiction’s de-creation following a “moment of ironic skepticism” (531), on the other. McBratney then observes how Romantic irony “gives rise to a fresh enthusiastic burst of creation in a process of continual ‘becoming’ that moves the subject toward a fuller understanding of the self and the world” (531). In his reading of Great Expectations, he places this concept of Romantic irony “within the specific experience of an English nation convulsed by the transnational” (532), hence the concept of transnational irony.
In addition, I find Llewellyn’s term “critical f(r)iction” (171) compelling when examining Carey’s reconfiguration of what McBratney describes as Magwitch’s “indeterminate national identity” (529). It is the friction that describes Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives “simultaneously exist[ing]…on the same page, occupying the same space, and speaking in odd, obscure, and different ways to one another” (Llewellyn 171). Llewellyn’s use of the idea of ‘obscurity’, to describe the ways in which the neo-Victorian novel interacts with and writes back to the Victorian period, proves useful for my comparative study because, as he explains, “what is obscure is, in a literal sense, that which is present but not seen clearly; it is there (or rather here) but not evidently readable”, which creates “a kind of palimpsestuous vision” (171, emphasis in original).
Linda Hutcheon’s term ‘historiographic metafiction’ will be used in this paper to examine how Jack Maggs makes the ‘palimpsestuous vision’ readable—how Magwitch, along with Australia’s convict history, is recuperated from the periphery in Great Expectations to the centre of the neo-Victorian novel. Hutcheon defines historiographic metafiction as a “didactic” (28) form of postmodernism used to describe fiction “that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past” (3, emphasis in original). As she highlights, such fiction reveals how the past resurfaces in texts, in turn acknowledging the “inescapable textuality” of history and literature (11). An understanding of what this postmodern genre in relation to neo-Victorian fiction sets out to do is therefore relevant to how Jack Maggs exposes what Woodcock terms “colonial delusions” (129) and “call[s] attention to the process of fictional intervention” (129).
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is a coming-of-age novel or a Bildungsroman. Set in a Victorian England marked by change and transformation, modernization and industrialization, the novel revolves around Pip’s journey from childhood to adulthood, and his attempt to invent himself as a gentleman. His identity, however, is “grounded in unstable foundations, the loss of family, and an act of unwilled charity toward the convict [Magwitch]”, according to Mukherjee (118). This is already established in the novel’s opening scene, where Pip, visiting his family’s tombstones on Christmas Eve, ponders “the identity of things” (Dickens 9). What this scene reveals is that, as an orphan, Pip is in search of an identity; he is confused about family and home, and thus himself. Moreover, the first-person narration and use of past tense are typical of an autobiographical narrative. Adult Pip, the protagonist-narrator, retrospectively tells his life story. Pip’s pondering is interrupted by the “terrible voice” (10) of Magwitch, who is the first character introduced in the narrative, thus positioning the convict as playing a vital role in Pip’s unfolding story.
My discussion here is largely based on McBratney’s reading of Pip’s identity. McBratney observes that Pip’s attention, circuiting from “the churchyard”, to his family’s tombstones, to “the marshes”, to “the river”, to “the sea”, then finally to himself (Dickens 9), ends with Magwitch’s shout, crucially “prefigur[ing] future transnational events in the novel” (McBratney 533). For example, it is Magwitch’s reappearance in Pip’s life later on in the novel that sets off the revision of Pip’s bildungsroman and his ‘impression of the identity of things’. Magwitch, returning to England from Australia, reveals himself to be Pip’s benefactor. This can read as Pip’s moment of “de-creative irony” (532) because he initially believes that Miss Havisham is his benefactor, and that gentility can be learnt. When Mr Jaggers, a lawyer, informs both Pip and his stepfather, Joe, that Pip “has great expectations” (Dickens 109), and will be “brought up as a gentleman” (109), Pip immediately believes that it is Miss Havisham who “was going to make [his] fortune on a grand scale” (109). Pip creates a fiction about the world. Yet, when he realizes that it is Magwitch, not Miss Havisham, who is his benefactor, “[a]ll the truth of [his] position came flashing on [him]; and its disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds” (Dickens 240). Pip consequently realizes that “Miss Havisham’s intentions towards [him]” were “all a mere dream” (243). Pip is thus forced to “re-create” himself, in McBratney’s terms.
Beginning at home, then ‘voyaging out’ only to ‘voyage back in’ by returning home, the mapping of Pip’s identity—the journey of his re-evaluation of ‘the identity of things’—constitutes the novel’s narrative structure. Pip travels from home in the “marsh country” (Dickens 9) to London, then to Cairo, and finally back to his home. In moving from place to place, as McBratney argues, Pip “resemble[s] the vagabond Magwitch” because both begin “with no proper origin”, and both end up with “no familiar and comfortable resting place” (McBratney 538). Magwitch moves from England to Australia, then back to England, although never being able to call either place ‘home’. While McBratney seeks to highlight the similarities between Pip’s and Magwitch’s mapping of identity, I however seek to unveil a crucial contrast. While Pip remains an English citizen throughout the novel, Magwitch remains un-homed. His national identity, therefore, remains ambiguous and undefined. This is read in the extent to which the endings to the respective characters’ stories differ problematically. On the one hand, Pip creates a new fiction about his relationship with both Estella and Magwitch. In Dickens’s revised ending of Great Expectations, Pip holds Estella’s hand and “see[s] the shadow of no parting from her” (Dickens 358). As a result, the autobiographical novel entails a hopeful ending of what Mukherjee terms “a rebeginning” (115). Magwitch, on the other hand, is not afforded a rebeginning or a return. Rather, after being found guilty of escaping his sentence in New South Wales, Magwitch is sentenced to death, and dies ten days later. He is thus written out of the plot.
This is somewhat paradoxical considering the fact that Pip’s story and the creation of his identity hinge on Magwitch’s character. After all, it is Pip’s revised perception of Magwitch, and compassion for him, that can be read as a moment of ‘becoming’ that moves him toward a fuller understanding of himself. When Pip is first confronted by Magwitch’s presence and involvement in his life, he tries to dress him differently to conceal his true identity. Pip observes how “[t]he more I dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes…[F]rom head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the main” (Dickens 252). Yet, later on, when Magwitch holds Pip’s hand in court, Pip observes how “[his] repugnance to [Magwitch] had all melted away (332).
It can be argued, therefore, that the Australian convict merely serves as an instrumental character to Pip’s bildungsroman—possessing neither agency nor, in the case of the novel’s narrative point-of-view, voice. The implication of this is that the complex relationship between the metropole, England, and the colony, Australia, as represented by Pip’s and Magwitch’s relationship, remains unwritten. Australia’s convict history, as embodied by Magwitch, remains obscured and unseen.
Jack Maggs
Typical of neo-Victorian literature, Jack Maggs “rewrites elements of a canonical text from the heart of the English literary tradition to reveal the hidden alternative history that cultural hegemony has effaced or suppressed”, as noted by Woodcock (122). Jack Maggs tells the story of the life of the convict, who, after serving time in the penal colony, returns to his native England to reconcile his traumatic past and reunite with his adopted son, Henry Phipps. When he cannot locate Phipps, Maggs becomes the footman of Percy Buckle’s house. During this time, and mirroring Magwitch’s experiences when he returns to London, Maggs’s fiction about ‘Mother England’ and aspirations for an English national identity are subverted. Yet, unlike Dickens’s Magwitch, Maggs tells his own story by writing letters to Phipps about his past. More so, while Magwitch’s final destination in Great Expectations is death, Carey writes a restorative homecoming for Maggs in Australia. Jack Maggs thus rewrites what has been ‘effaced’ and ‘suppressed’ in Great Expectations: the national identity of Magwitch. Carey, as a result, gives voice to the suppressed, and centralizes the once peripheralized.
The ‘hidden alternative history’ is unveiled with the unfolding of what Maggs calls his “secret history” (Carey 150). One flashback of Maggs’s past in particular reveals his idealization of England as ‘home’. Undergoing brutal floggings in Australia, Maggs “would begin to build London in his mind” (321). It is Maggs’s childhood memory of a mansion in Kensington that informs his ideal of the nation and his place in it. Maggs describes being forced down the mansion’s chimney as a child, as the moment in which “his eyes had first opened” to what “was meant by authors when they wrote of England, and of Englishmen” (322). What this necessarily suggests is that the trauma Maggs is subjected to throughout his life shares an origin with his fantasy of the nation, beginning when he was introduced to the world of crime by his foster mother, Ma Britten, and his benefactor, Silas Smith.
In fact, Ma Britten, often referred to as “the Queen of England” (92), can be read as an allegory for ‘Mother England’ as Janet C. Myers points out (460). She argues that, “[j]ust as England ‘adopted’ the colonies for exploitative purposes[,] Ma Britten adopts the infant Maggs in order to exploit the child for material gain” (460). Despite this, Maggs still returns to London in pursuit of this fantasy. When he returns years later, his first stop in London is Ma Britten’s house. Initially not recognizing him, she queries his motive for returning. Maggs significantly replies, “[i]t’s my home…That’s what I want. My home” (Carey 5). It is evident, therefore, that in reading Ma Britten as allegorizing imperial England, and Maggs representing Australia as England’s colonial subject, there is a disjunction between the idea Maggs has of his ‘homeland’ England, and the cruel reality of his lived experience there. More so, when Percy Buckle discovers that Maggs is a convict, he encourages Maggs to “remove [himself] again to New South Wales” (128) since Maggs would be hanged “if [he] were to ever set foot in England again” (128). Maggs aggressively responds: “I am a fucking Englishman, and I have English things to settle…I am here in London where I belong” (128, emphasis in original). The vehemence with which Maggs asserts his identity as an Englishman is indicative of a deep-seated fear that he does not actually belong in London. In other words, there is a sense that Maggs is desperately trying to convince others, as well as himself, that England is indeed his home. This is what the neo-Victorian novel intends to spotlight: the fraudulence of the fantasy of ‘Mother England’, and the cruel consequences of unbelonging and displacement.
What becomes apparent is that the tighter Maggs holds onto his ‘fiction’ of England, the more it eludes him. As desperately as Maggs asserts his belonging in England, so England forsakes him. I read Maggs and Phipps’s fraught relationship as a microcosm of the complex ties between Australia and England. On the one hand, Maggs associates Phipps with the English idyll, and he imagines the portrait that he keeps of King George IV “dressed as a commoner” (262) to be a portrait of Phipps. He claims that Phipps is his son, and that “[he] will not abandon him” (264), since it is the idea of Phipps that “kept [him] alive these last twenty-four years” (264), or so Maggs believes. On the other hand, Phipps rejects and betrays Maggs. He goes into hiding upon hearing the news of Maggs’s return (267). In the meantime, Mercy Larkin, “the kitchen maid, by title” (7) who is a vital character to the de-creation of Maggs’s fiction about both Phipps and England, points out to Maggs that it is the King in the portrait, symbolic of the imperial nation, who “lashed [him]” (318). In other words, it was England that sentenced Maggs to time on the penal colony and is thus responsible for the brutality he endured. Maggs’s fantasy of Phipps, and thus fantasy of England as home, is further destabilized when Phipps attempts to murder Maggs at the end of the novel (325). The irony, therefore, is that even though Maggs believes England to be his home rather than the Australian colony, his fiction about the nation and his identity attached to it is unsettled.
Carey, however, affords Maggs the opportunity to revise and redeem — or in this case, re-write — his ideals about home and belonging. It is revealed in the novel that Maggs’s initial fantasy of England was informed by English authors (322). Yet, Maggs is able to come to terms with reality and re-create his identity by becoming an author himself. This is evident in the postmodern narrative structure of Jack Maggs, which takes the form of autobiographical fiction in Maggs’s letter-writing. Such a narrative records the contents of Maggs’s letters written to Phipps about his childhood in London. Writing from right to left, and with “violet-coloured ink” (74), Maggs addresses his adopted son directly: “Henry Phipps, you will read a different type of story in the glass, by which I mean – mine own” (74). His letters thus contain the details of his “history” (92). As Maggs writes about his past, he takes ownership of his story and inadvertently exposes the fraudulence of his fiction about England. “Page after page”, Maggs “[pours] all his feelings into that secret history” (150).
Such a ‘secret history’ no longer remains undisclosed, however, with every letter Maggs writes. The significance of this is crucial to Carey’s postcolonial response to Great Expectations. As Woodcock contends, Maggs “writes, rather than merely being written” (130). In the Victorian text, the Australian convict is only read and understood through an Englishman’s point-of-view. In the neo-Victorian text, the Australian convict spotlights what once remained ‘secret’ and ‘hidden’ – the relationship between England and Australia. This is further illustrated by Oates’ and Maggs’s struggle for his story. While Maggs tells his own story through the letters, Oates mesmerizes Maggs to uncover content for his own novel The Death of Maggs. A “naturalist” and “author” (Carey 47), Oates “wish[es] to sketch the beast within [Maggs]” (47). When Maggs realizes that Oates manipulates his life story to create his own fiction, he says that his “secrets had been burgled” (272), and calls Oates a “damned little thief” (279). Moreover, Oates views Maggs as merely a subject for his fiction and both reduces him to “the Criminal Mind…awaiting its first cartographer” (90), as well as explicitly identifies him as “my subject” (184). Writing then is perceived as a sort of thievery.
This, in turn, enables Carey to highlight and challenge the act of writing. The same way Maggs is able to reclaim his identity and story by writing it in his words, so Oates is able to steal Maggs’s story and make it his own. It is worth noting here that, as Myers points out, Oates can be read as a “figuration for Dickens” (463). Reading this with Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’ in mind, that speaks to the intertwinement of history and literature and how the past resurfaces in fiction, it is clear that Carey positions Oates – and, thus, Dickens – as a ‘thief’ stealing and silencing the (his)stories of the Australian penal colony and its convicts. Hence Carey’s ‘writing back’ to Dickens.
In rewriting a restorative homecoming for the Australian convict, Carey reclaims what once was stolen, or in this case, unwritten. As mentioned in this paper’s Introduction, McBratney explains that Magwitch dies in Great Expectations because he is too “ideologically troublesome” as a character “to place in ‘home’ society” (538). In other words, because the Victorian novel focuses on Pip’s coming-of-age, to try resolve and settle Magwitch’s ‘indeterminate’ national identity, caught between England and Australia, would be too complex and ‘troublesome’ for a novel that focuses on Englishman Pip’s national identity. Carey revises this, however, by rewriting Magwitch’s future with Maggs’s return to Australia, claiming it as his true home. Mercy reminds Maggs that, while his “little boys”—his sons in Australia— “wait for [him] to come home, [he] prance[s] round England trying to find someone who does not love [him] at all” (Carey 319). The final chapter of the novel details Maggs’s ‘happy ending’: he “escape[s] London with Mercy Larkin” (327), and “the Maggs family” (327) grows, “[leaving] many stories scattered in their wake” (327). In reference to McBratney’s transnational irony, what ultimately follows the ‘oscillation’ of the creation and de-creation of Maggs’s idea of England and self, is a ‘fuller understanding’ of his national identity and home—that of Australia. Magwitch, and the Australian national identity as a result, are restored, re-storied.
Conclusion
Having identified national identity as a central issue that the neo-Victorian text, Jack Maggs, re-stories as a postcolonial response to the Victorian text, Great Expectations, this paper set out to compare Dickens’s Magwitch and Carey’s Maggs. I firstly established the discussion of national identity in Great Expectations by studying Pip and Magwitch in relation to McBratney’s “transnational irony” and “Janus-faced cosmopolitanism”. Such terms helped develop the argument that, while Pip was able to ‘de-create’ and ‘re-create’ his perception of the world and his place in it as an Englishman, Magwitch as an Australian convict served merely as an instrument to Pip’s bildungsroman and was ultimately written out of the plot. His identity remained undefined and ambiguous. Through a close reading of Woodcock’s postcolonial reading of Jack Maggs and Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction, I then argued that Jack Maggs re-stories the character of Magwitch. Through writing his own (his)story and returning to Australia, Maggs is afforded what Magwitch never was: the space to ‘de-create’ and ‘re-create his perception of the world, and thus, place in it. Australia’s convict history and the Australian national identity, as a result, move from the margins in Great Expectations to the centre in Jack Maggs. Carey’s “writing back” to Dickens concerning national identity can therefore be regarded as a “transformative” form of writing that ‘reveals’ and ‘unveils’ that which is obscured and unseen in Great Expectations – namely, the ‘secret history’ of the complex relationship between imperial England and penal colony Australia, and the impact it has on identity and belonging.
Carey, P. (1997) Jack Maggs. London: Faber and Faber.
Dickens, C. and Rosenberg, E. (1999) Great Expectations (A Norton Critical Edition). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Llewellyn, Mark. “What is Neo-Victorian Studies?” Neo-Victorian Studies, 1.1 (2008): 164-185.
McBratney, John. “Reluctant Cosmopolitanism in Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’”. Victorian Literature and Culture, 38.2 (2010): 529-546.
Mukherjee Ankhi. “Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations”, Contemporary Literature, 46.1 (Spring, 2005): 108-133.
Myers, Janet C. “’As These Fresh Lines Fade’: Narratives of Containment and Escape in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46 (2011): 455-73.
Woodcock, Bruce. “Jack Maggs”, in Peter Carey. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003. 119-137.