Currents (Dec 2023)
Conflict of cultures: a marginalised orphan of the colonial discourse ‘disinterred’ in Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
Abstract
Jack Maggs by Peter Carey, being the Australian version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, challenges the Victorian propaganda about the primacy of a white race, openly opposing the Empire’s misdeeds and hypocritical behaviour of its citizens. Carey undermines the colonial discourse in the shape of Dickensian imperialistic England as a motherland concerned with its colonial children, implicitly presented in Great Expectations when the British gentleman attends to the Australian convict, Abel Magwitch. The moral corruption of the Victorian society seems particularly reflected in the character of Mary Britten—a ruthless abortionist being an allusion to Victorian Mother Britain in its unstoppable colonial expansionism. In this paper I will show that Jack seems to epitomise the colonised and marginalised Australia that avenges itself. Maggs ceases to be spoken for as a study of the Eurocentric world, becoming a voice of those silenced and devoid of their land, whose culture was meant to be uprooted by the colonial power dynamics. Carey’s downgrading of the dominant status of the Western culture can be read with respect to Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity when the non-European culture seems to pose a threat to the Western hegemony, diminishing its authority and enabling the emergence and articulation of other histories consciously suppressed by the colonial discourse. Jack Maggs metaphorically emerges as the drowned out voice of the culture vanquished by the Western hegemony, detracting and destabilising the centre which loses its paramount stance due to being characterised by the subaltern ‘other’ from the peripheries. Orphaned by the country representing the ‘superior’ culture, Jack Maggs returns to imperial London to subvert the order of the colonial discourse and narrate his story from the subaltern standpoint.
