상세 보기
The Irony of Englishness in The Moonstone
초록
Countering a popular Victorian notion of racial Others as nemeses of English domestic stability, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone advocates its “un-English” characters as preservers of English domesticity while identifying mainstream, hitherto “English” characters as the real adversaries. The novel presents a double irony by first showing how the “Englishness” of the Verinder household can only be reinstated through collaborative efforts of the novel’s “un-English” characters, and then by showing how the task of restoring domesticity which the Victorians generally considered as an essentially “English” value might lead one to question the very notion of Englishness. The Moonstone’s representations of its “un-English” characters as truly “English” encourage readers to relinquish racialized notions of Englishness as an identity embedded in whiteness. The novel invites readers to reconfigure Englishness as a liquid quality consisting of traits such as self-possession. The essay suggests that The Moonstone comprises a part of Collins’s ongoing effort to redefine the concept of Englishness.