‘Impossible to do otherwise'
Social Injustice and Colonial Guilt in George Moore's 'A Drama in Muslin'
Keywords:
Colonial guilt, spatial poetics, nineteenth-century IrelandAbstract
This paper examines concerns about the social injustice caused by colonialism as articulated in George Moore’s 1886 novel A Drama in Muslin. In doing so it draws on recent analyses of the way in which guilt about colonial injustices can be found buried in literature and film produced under and ‘after’ colonialism. It also draws on Saunders calls for more careful analysis of the ‘spatial poetics’ of literary texts, that is the narrative devices authors use to tell stories about places in carefully crafted ways. Drawing on ideas from these fields, the paper examines how Moore’s repeated juxtaposition of local poverty alongside colonial privilege, as seen from multiple perspectives in a range of social and geographical contexts, is a narrative device which serves to highlight the social injustice upon which the wealth and status of his class was predicated. However, also explored is a counter narrative that argues that while local instances of redress might be possible, at the broader national scale redress is neither possible nor desirable. As such Moore’s novel works to acknowledge injustice but also frees his community and his readers from the responsibility of having to take action.References
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