Empire and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

Suzanne Keen discusses The Chymical Wedding and Possession as examples of what she calls ‘romances of the archive’, a contemporary genre which responds to ‘the postmodern critique of history with invented records full of hard facts’ (3). Keen relates this desire to confirm the accessibility of the past through documentary evidence to the widespread turn-of-the-century concern ‘less [with] academic history than [with] British heritage’ (5). Heritage, in this context, is the version of the past popularly available and popularly conceived. Judie Newman, in turn, equates the notion of national heritage in the popular perception with the commodification of Empire ‘as a marketable entity, based on nostalgia for a past never-never land’ (29). The mid-Victorian period that so preoccupies Clarke’s, Byatt’s and Swift’s contemporary characters coincided with organised (governmental, exploratory or missionary) imperial expansion, but this element is barely discernible in the three novels and, even when performing a relevant role in the events, the Empire leaves no trace into the present and does not, therefore, appear in the reconstructed representation of the past by the contemporary characters.