Abstract
Drawing on recent work on settler colonialism, which emphasizes the ambivalence with which settler societies negotiated the complex ties between metropole and colony, this essay examines how such ambivalence is played out on multiple levels in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, his postcolonial response to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. This occurs both through the process of simultaneous resistance and accommodation that happens as Jack Maggs and Tobias Oates struggle for ownership of Maggs’ story, which breaches the gap between England and Australia, and through the analogous process whereby Carey comes to terms with Dickens’ depiction of Australia’s ancestral history and offers his own re-interpretation of this classic story. Domesticity plays a crucial role in these complex negotiations because it is through an understanding of what “home” means that Jack Maggs—and by extension Carey—learn to disavow aspects of their English inheritance while reconciling other parts as integral to a uniquely Australian identity.
Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs chronicles the story of the titular hero, a transported convict, who returns from a penal colony in Australia to his native England in an attempt to recover his childhood past and to visit his adopted son. Loosely based on Charles Dickens’ Abel Magwitch, a marginal character who nonetheless serves as a pivot around which various plots hinge in Great Expectations, Jack Maggs offers a postcolonial response to its Victorian counterpart, one that challenges Dickens’ depiction of imperial dynamics by reconfiguring the liminal convict figure as the central protagonist. We learn very few details of Magwitch’s past in Dickens’ novel, whereas Carey allows an imaginative rendering of a convict’s history to unfold throughout Jack Maggs using a complex, typically postmodern narrative structure. Two stories are interwoven in the narrative present in Victorian London: Tobias Oates, a character modelled after Charles Dickens, mesmerizes Jack Maggs and encourages him to recall details of his life, especially in colonial Australia, through a series of painful flashbacks, while in alternate, italicized chapters Jack Maggs remembers his childhood in London through a series of letters he writes to the man he calls his son, Henry Phipps, who turns out to be unrelated to him and modelled on Dickens’ main character, Pip, who is chosen to inherit Magwitch’s fortune.
Through these flashbacks and letters, a more complete picture of Maggs’ life story gradually emerges throughout the novel, and as it does, Maggs and Oates engage in an increasingly frantic skirmish over who will give voice to what amounts to a remarkable story. This competition to tell the story serves as an allegory for the novel itself, in which Carey as an Australian writer reimagines elements of his British predecessor’s plot in order to recuperate the image it offers of his native country. In an interview Carey indicated that he set out to write Jack Maggs as a way to examine the complicated feelings Australians possess regarding their nation’s origins. He explains:
Then one day, contemplating the figure of Magwitch, the convict in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, I suddenly thought THIS MAN IS MY ANCESTOR. And then: this is UNFAIR! Dickens’ Magwitch is foul and dark, frightening, murderous. Dickens encourages us to think of him as the “other,” but this was my ancestor, he was not “other”. I wanted to reinvent him, to possess him, to act as his advocate. I did not want to diminish his “darkness” or his danger, but I wanted to give him all the love and tender sympathy that Dickens’ first person narrative provides his English hero Pip. That’s where I started. The journey itself is, of course, far more complicated. (Author Q&A, n.d.)
As Carey’s comments suggest, his own fictional reinvention is an act of both advocacy and homage, both a critique and an expression of “love and tender sympathy”, John O. Jordan describes the complexity of this balancing act well: “Carey’s novel displays sympathy, perhaps even love, toward its predecessor text. Despite the postcolonial violence it enacts symbolically on his life and books, Jack Maggs holds Dickens in a rough but affectionate embrace” (2000: 300). In reimagining Dickens’ portrait of Magwitch, Carey not only draws attention to the omissions in Dickens’ novel, but he also adopts a style that has been labeled Dickensian. His first-person renderings of Maggs’ story and use of a Victorian setting simultaneously call attention to his indebtedness to Dickens and to the original story.
Yet as Carey claims above, the act of reimagining is complicated. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp has argued persuasively that due to its complexity, Carey’s novel does not neatly fit into the well-known paradigm in which “the empire writes back” to the metropole; 1 instead, she suggests that Carey’s narrative strategy inverts the familiar opposition between home and colony and anchors his novel in an Australian, rather than a British, literary tradition (2005: 258). Given the limitations of the writing back paradigm, a more useful model for understanding Carey’s novel within a postcolonial framework may be the one offered by recent work on settler colonialism, which examines societies in which Europeans have settled and attends closely to the dynamics of metropolitan and colonial relations and to the interactions between settler groups and indigenous populations. 2 Although Carey’s novel does not address encounters between settler communities and indigenous peoples, in part because the bulk of the novel takes place in London, it does emphasize the ambivalence with which settler societies negotiated complex ties with a mother country as they “simultaneously resisted and accommodated the authority of an imperialist Europe” (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995: 4). In this essay, I examine how such ambivalence is played out in Jack Maggs on multiple levels, both through the process of simultaneous resistance and accommodation that goes on as Jack Maggs and Tobias Oates struggle for ownership of Maggs’ story, which breaches the gap between England and Australia, and through the analogous process whereby Carey comes to terms with Dickens’ depiction of Australia’s ancestral history and offers his own re-interpretation of this classic story. Domesticity plays a crucial role in these complex negotiations because it is through an understanding of what “home” means that Jack Maggs—and by extension Carey—learn to disavow parts of their English inheritance while reconciling other parts as integral to a uniquely Australian identity.
Such negotiation and accommodation takes place throughout the novel as Maggs writes his way into an understanding of his past and his identity. Anthony Hassall has written that “In Jack Maggs . . . the business of writing is insistently foregrounded. The book is full of the actual mechanics of Maggs’s and Oates’s writing” and that while this is a consistent thread through Carey’s other novels as well, “no other work is as deeply concerned as Jack Maggs is with the actual processes by which novelists gather, transform, and inscribe their material” (1997: 131). Carey attends so closely to the processes of writing in part to dramatize how narratives can serve both as mechanisms for oppression and as vehicles for resisting and challenging the colonized position. The key trope he uses to do so is a recurring image of disappearing text. Specifically, Carey invokes the trope of invisible writing to dramatize the question of who Jack Maggs’ story belongs to—Oates or Maggs, Dickens or Carey, England or Australia. Even as Maggs wrote his life story he watched as “these fresh lines fade, first to lilac, then to white; until, that is, they became invisible” (Carey, 1999: 81). 3 Maggs’ use of invisible writing and his need to encode his story in a backwards script that he “wrote fluidly, as if long accustomed to that distrustful art” could be interpreted as a metaphor for his own voicelessness and disenfranchisement (81). His intended reader is instructed to squirt lemon juice on the pages and then view them through a mirror. The convoluted nature of both the writing and the reading processes here potentially suggests the liminality and inaccessibility of Maggs’ own narrative and the degree to which ownership of his story is contested and shrouded in secrecy. Yet at the same time, Maggs’ invisible writing is fluid and powerfully subversive, since it allows him to express otherwise overwhelming emotions while retaining control over his own story. Carey seeks to reclaim this story for Maggs and for Australia through his own act of revision.
This reclamation occurs in Jack Maggs as the protagonist struggles to reconcile an idealized image of English life and domesticity with the realities he encounters once he returns home to England from colonial Australia. Schmidt-Haberkamp suggests that in Jack Maggs, “the adventure narrative is framed by domesticity”, but I would argue that the emphasis and importance of these two aspects is inverted—domesticity trumps adventure (2005: 257). As long as Maggs believes in the domestic idyll offered in the pages of English fiction—the same idyll that blinds Dickens’ Pip—Maggs remains colonized. Carey introduces this idea through a tic douloureux that ripples Maggs’ cheek with intense, intermittent pain; Maggs learns to interpret the tic as the physical manifestation of a “Phantom” that acts out each time Maggs relives an old memory and awakens the corresponding emotional trauma that characterized the original event. Once the idyll offered by fiction is gradually eroded leading up to the climax of the novel, Maggs exorcises the Phantom that harasses him and is able to return to his adopted home in Australia to live a happy and prosperous life. As Hassall has noted, “Carey’s comparison of New South Wales and England is foregrounded in the final pages of the book, which resonate back through the narrative, decisively altering it” (1997: 134). The crucial shift at the end of the novel in how Maggs regards England and its domestic heritage corresponds to Maggs gaining ownership over his own story and is emblematic of Carey’s efforts to reclaim the Australian narrative from Dickens’ original text.
Dreaming of an English home
From early on in the novel, Jack Maggs is hungry to embrace all aspects of English domesticity and the rituals and practices he associates with home. As Alice Brittan explains, “Dickens’s Magwitch claimed ‘some part’ (311) in Pip’s household goods; Carey’s Maggs would claim all of England and every object in it” (2004: 51). Indeed, Maggs harbours nostalgic and idealized images of his homeland, England, and in particular, of English domesticity. Such idealizations are rooted, not in his own childhood experiences and realities, but rather, in the fictions he has read by English authors. The important effect of such fictions is evident in one especially significant flashback to his past that occurs while Maggs is being mesmerized by Oates; in this case, Maggs remembers one of the brutal floggings that were a ritualistic part of his everyday life in penal Australia (as evidenced by the jagged scars that mar his back). In order to survive these horrific experiences, Maggs evokes memories of “the long mellow light of English summer” (350) that he imagines as emblematic of a distinctively English domestic idyll. Such an idyll serves to counteract psychologically the violence of his torture:
The flies might feast on his spattered back; the double-cat might carry away the third and fourth fingers of his hand; but his mind crawled forward, always, constructing piece by piece the place wherein his eyes had first opened, the home to which he would one day return, not the mudflats of the Thames, nor Mary Britten’s meat-rich room at Pepper Alley Stairs, but rather a house in Kensington whose kind and beautiful interior he had entered by tumbling down a chimney, like a babe falling from outer darkness into light. Clearing the soot from his eyes he had seen that which he later knew was meant by authors when they wrote of England, and of Englishmen. (350)
Ironically, “the home to which [Maggs] would one day return” is a mere illusion. The affluent mansion in Kensington that is at the centre of this memory is the first home that Jack Maggs was sent into for the purposes of stealing silver plate. Maggs’ memory of this event, however, is clearly idealized. Rather than recalling his own terror at being forced to engage in a criminal act or the violence with which he was forcibly stuffed down the chimney so that he could help commit this act of robbery, Maggs remembers this experience as a moment of rebirth, in which “his eyes had first opened”, bringing him symbolically “from outer darkness into light”. His entry into this idealized domestic space—a space that evokes what “was meant by authors when they wrote of England, and of Englishmen”—serves as a highly symbolic moment within the novel and offers an elusive ideal to which Maggs continually strives to return. Importantly, the context in which Maggs remembers this event also highlights an English domestic idyll in direct contrast to the pain and suffering associated with colonial life. Maggs fetishizes this moment throughout his life, and the movement of the novel largely centres on the process whereby he comes to terms with its falsity and learns to value an alternative domestic ideal, one that is rooted in Australian rather than English life.
Although Maggs returns to England a wealthy man, having already purchased a home in London on Great Queen Street that resembles the Kensington mansion (in addition to having a mansion of his own back in Australia), his return is nonetheless grounded in an illusion that disavows the realities not only of his home country, but also of his past identity as a thief. While Maggs’ memories of “home” are shaped by powerful myths about domesticity that are promulgated through English fiction, the realities of his life there are in direct opposition to these myths. In the memory described above, Maggs ignores his birth into destitution in “the mudflats of the Thames” or the ragged home in which he grew up with a belligerent adoptive mother—the “meat-rich room in Pepper Alley Stairs”. Far from “kind and beautiful”, these actual homes from his childhood are more closely aligned with the violence, brutality, and exploitation he experiences in the colonies than with the domestic idyll he creates in his imagination.
Maggs is rescued from his first home in the mud-flats by Ma Britten, who adopts him for self-serving purposes and raises him in her home in Pepper Alley Stairs. Often called “the Queen of England” by her young charges, Ma Britten provides an allegorical figuration for Mother England, hence mirroring the paternalism implied in the relationship between Britain and “her” colonial outposts. Just as England “adopted” the colonies for exploitative purposes—in pursuit of wealth, natural resources, and space for unwanted populations, including convicts, single women, and the poor—Ma Britten adopts the infant Maggs in order to exploit the child for material gain by enculturating him into a life of crime. Eventually, Maggs internalizes her explanation that deception and crime are integral to his being; he accepts that he must become a thief because “it was what he was raised to be” (117). This correlation between identity and deception is further underscored by Maggs’ name, which evokes the slang term, “magsman”, which in Victorian parlance referred to a confidence trickster (Schmidt-Haberkamp, 2005: 253).
Critics of the novel have overlooked the parallels Carey draws between the false benevolence attached to Britain’s “parentage” of the colonies and Ma Britten’s parentage of Jack Maggs, despite the fact that she plays an important part in creating the demons that possess Maggs throughout the novel in the form of the tic douloureux that ripples across his face intermittently. This connection is reinforced in a significant passage wherein Percy Buckle, Maggs’ employer, critiques the practice of penal transportation, which results in his sister being transported for an unnamed crime. Buckle explains, “. . . but I never did forget that day, God help us all, that Mother England would do such a thing to one of her own” (98). The image this sentiment evokes of the fiendish mother devouring her own young is frequently raised in connection to Ma Britten, a hardened woman who cares for three children including her biological child, Tom England, her adopted son Jack Maggs, and her business partner’s daughter, Sophina Smith. 4 One especially poignant example of her cruelty arises when Maggs and Sophina conceive a child together at a tender age. Upon discovering this, Ma Britten ruthlessly aborts the fetus, cruelly lashes Maggs for his role in the conception, and then makes Tom show Maggs the fetus in the sewage drain. The image of the fetus with a wound on its cheek literally scars Maggs for a lifetime; as Maggs records his own history, readers learn that the tic douloureux that afflicts his cheek stems from his memories of Ma Britten’s violent brutality in aborting his unborn child. During one mesmeric session, Jack confronts the memory of seeing his dead baby and he weeps as he realizes that “His sweet little cheek is cut open”, while simultaneously “clutching at his own cheek, and dragging down on the flesh with his broad square nails”. This moment reveals to Oates and to the reader that “It is the same wound” (223), one that Maggs clings to as the only remaining vestige of his son.
Tobias Oates describes Ma Britten as “shadow, passion, hurt, an inky malignancy in Jack Maggs’s dreams” (250), and indeed, this description offers an apt rendering of the extent to which Maggs’ repressed memories of Ma Britten nonetheless haunt him throughout the novel. When he seeks her out immediately upon arrival in London, arriving on the doorstep of her home, she casually rebuts him, invoking the penalty that will be imposed upon him if his return is discovered: hanging. In fact, we learn that brutality is central to Ma Britten’s livelihood since Maggs was transported—she is now running a successful business selling her “famous” abortion pills. This occupation provides a powerful metaphor for the sinister side of the domestic idyll. In her home-based business, the seeming gentility of what happens in the private sphere is undermined by its more sinister consequences, as the following description of what one of her clients encounters makes clear:
. . . a small room, decorated rather excessively with lace and flounces, and an almost violent looking wallpaper. There was a single window, large and arched, which was covered with two layers of white muslin. There was very little light from that source, but there were various lamps burning, and several ornate mirrors, and it was, as a result, a bright and determinedly happy little room. Three women were already seated here, though none looked up when Mary Oates entered. This collective expression of shame went hard against the intention of the decorations, emphasizing the dishonour the latter were presumably intended to disguise. (314)
Here again, domestic accoutrements are intended to cover over “shame” and “dishonour” in a similar manner to the way Maggs’ memories of home suppressed the pain of the flogging. The excessive décor of the room acts as an overcompensation for the shame and sadness it houses despite its seeming gentility. The multiple layers of muslin that cover the windows and block out much of the light attempt to belie the “determinedly happy” aspect of the room, drawing attention to the illusion of light, the illusion of respectability. The description of the wallpaper as “almost violent” similarly suggests the explosive quality of the room and the suppressed emotions of the unfortunate women who haunt it. Other details in the room, particularly “a rather troubling engraving which depicted Napoleon’s army in grotesque and bloody disarray” above the marble fireplace evoke the violence and pain associated with Ma Britten’s business transactions, which are conducted down the hallway in “a small plain room containing little more than a high leather couch and a straight-backed wooden chair” (314). The marked contrast between the over-determined décor of the parlour and the ascetic quality of the office similarly highlights the novel’s contrasts between domesticity and its counterpart, violence, and brutality.
Just as he disavows his real homes as well as the cruelty of the family who raised him, Maggs disavows his own family by blood—namely, the two sons born in Australia whom he leaves behind. Instead, he fetishizes an idealized future with his adopted son, Henry Phipps. Before he returns to England, he envisions a charming relationship with Henry, one that is consistent with his domestic illusions: “When I was imagining my lovely English summers—and I did meditate on this subject an awful lot, my word—I would be suffering the mosquitoes and the skin-rot, to mention two of the least of my discomforts, but I would oft-times make a picture of me and Henry puffing our pipes comfortably in the long evenings” (317). This image of Maggs and his supposed son smoking by the fire evokes a sense of idle leisure that is linked to the wealthy lifestyle Maggs first witnessed in the Kensington mansion. However, despite these hopes and dreams, Henry Phipps rejects Maggs outright, disavowing a relationship with him. Percy Buckle intimates Phipps’ discomfort with Maggs as a father figure when Buckle says: “Sir, I see that you do not wish to play the part that he has written for you. You do not wish to sit around his fire eating cakes and drinking brown ale” (294).
As these examples make clear, Maggs believes fervently in a kind of picture-book image of his native England. This is apparent in another highly symbolic passage in which Maggs and other passengers disembark from their coach, The True Briton, and must walk in ankle deep mud as it descends a slippery hill. One can only imagine what the other passengers are thinking about this inconvenience, but Maggs’ response is typically idealized: “It was, he observed, as pretty a scene as you would see in all of England—the land divided by hedges into fields and orchards, and the whole picture, with the Cathedral in the middle and the Morvan Hills of Wales in the distance, ‘was worth the price of twice the mud’” (264). Maggs possesses an emigrant’s nostalgia for home that clouds his judgment and encourages him to believe in the myths promulgated by fiction.
Ironically, though, the means for Maggs to come to terms with his fraudulent ideals and eventually face reality is to become an author himself. Indeed, writing proves cathartic for him, as suggested by the following passage describing his escape into the house on Great Queen Street where he recounts his story for Phipps: “A minute later, he climbed across the roof, carrying all his turbulent emotions with him to the abandoned house next door. Here he wrote page after page, pouring all his feelings into that secret history. He slept two hours on the settle, and when he woke he began again: Dear boy . . .” (164). Of central importance to Carey’s novel is the recreation of a past for Jack Maggs, and it is through the reconstruction of his protagonist’s childhood that Carey reveals the complicated process of accommodation and resistance that finally results in Maggs’ recognition of the failings of English domesticity, but also in his adoption of some features of English life that allow him to recreate a new home in Australia.
Authorship as contestation: The struggle for the story
The recreation of Maggs’ past occurs in two forms throughout the novel: in the letters Maggs writes to Henry Phipps recalling his childhood in London, and in the revelations, mostly about his life in colonial Australia, that Tobias Oates extracts from Maggs while the latter is being mesmerized. In the quotation with which I began this essay, Maggs attributes his idyllic, unrealistic image of England to “that which he later knew was meant by authors when they wrote of England, and of Englishmen” (350). The inclusion of Oates in the narrative as a figuration for Dickens allows Carey to examine the role that fiction plays in “mesmerizing” a readership into believing in certain ideals. 5 Indeed, Maggs is literally subjected to such a process through Oates, who negotiates an agreement with Maggs wherein the latter promises to undergo mesmeric “treatments” for two weeks in exchange for the name of the thieftaker—a man renowned for his ability to find anyone, and whom Maggs wishes to employ to search for his missing son, Henry Phipps. Through the use of magnets, Oates mesmerizes Maggs and in so doing, draws out his subject’s most intimate concerns and anxieties. He initially proposes to relieve the physical pain that is causing Maggs’ tic douloureux, but these kind intentions quickly become self-serving once Oates realizes that “the criminal mind” holds a wealth of material for his own fiction. In order to ensure that he will be able to continue to mine such a resource, Oates manipulates Maggs by convincing his subject that he is plagued by a “Phantom”, which takes the shape in Maggs’ mind of a soldier from the 57th Foot Regiment, “a cockney named Rudder”, who tortured him at Morton Bay (346).
This bargain between the two men is emblematic of the process wherein Maggs, as a returned emigrant and colonial subject, must accommodate himself to the authority of the imperial centre, here represented by Oates, who tellingly explains to Maggs that “In all the Empire, Jack, you could not have employed a better carver” (305). The metaphor of carving is significant, implying both the degree to which Oates aspires to carve out a narrative from the raw material Maggs provides, thereby immortalizing the convict’s story through his own narrative inventions, while also hinting at the violence underlying these aspirations. More than once, the mesmeric sessions expose the carvings on Maggs’ back—scarring that reveals the brutality of penal Australia and the many floggings Maggs endured—and by implication, Oates’ act of carving, of dissecting his subject’s memories and fears, is similarly figured as a violation. The following passage makes this clear as Maggs reflects on the process of being mesmerized:
He could not sleep, and as his mind tried to understand what had been done to him, a familiar dread slowly took possession of his being . . . Now he could feel the Phantom pulling with his strings inside his face, long lines of cat-gut knotted to his flesh. He felt the demon stirring in his belly and everywhere about him. He imagined that horrid half-smile upon his patrician face. He did not know what was done to him, or how it was achieved. (296)
From the first time Maggs is mesmerized, he wonders at the mysterious power Oates possesses over him, accusing Oates of leaving “his insides all exposed to public view” (52). Indeed, Carey frames this relationship as analogous to other forms of colonial violence insofar as Maggs is symbolically colonized by Oates and by the Phantom that the author implants in Maggs’ mind. As the passage above suggests, as long as Maggs remains under Oates’ control, Maggs is still symbolically tethered to the triangle that epitomizes the violence of his colonial experience, here represented by the “patrician face” of the flogger.
However, as Maggs becomes increasingly wary of Oates’ power over him, he gradually begins to resist Oates and the imperial authority he represents, levelling the following accusation at the author: “Then here’s a strange thing. I never heard of this Phantom until I met you. I never saw him, asleep or waking . . . What would you say if I said you planted him inside me?” (289). Although Oates “had by now long forgotten, if he ever knew, that this wraith was his own invention, a personification of pain that he had planted in the other’s mind” (221), he maintains this fiction at Jack’s expense. But in a significant revelation toward the end of the novel, Maggs ultimately realizes the scope of Oates’ transgressions with the discovery that Oates is constructing a sensational storyline based on Maggs’ narratives that he has entitled The Death of Maggs. In Oates’ own summation of his novel, “Jack Maggs is a criminal who presumes to come home from Banishment, who, having accrued great wealth, buys the great mansion in which he will finally be burned alive” (297). As he reads about himself after stealing Oates’ notebook, Maggs has a visceral reaction that again likens the author’s act of stealing his story to the violation of a flogging: “The hairs on his neck stood on end. He had had that feeling in his gut before, that cold terror associated with the triangle. He knew his life and death were not his own. His forehead creased in a grid of criss-crossed frown marks. He turned the page” (297). By likening the experience of reading Oates’ narrative to that of being flogged, Carey implicates Oates—and by extension Dickens—in the violent brutality of colonialism. The analogy emphasizes the extent to which Maggs remains colonized while under Oates’ control and under the illusions Maggs harbours about English domesticity and home. This uneven power differential shifts only when Maggs aggressively challenges Oates by physically shackling him and forcing him to burn the manuscript in an ironic undercutting of the closure of Oates’ novel, which ends with Maggs being burned alive in his own home.
Shortly after this scene, Maggs has a second significant revelation: he finally meets Henry Phipps and the violence of their encounter shatters any remaining illusions that Maggs retains about England and its domestic ideals. In a remarkable climax to the novel, Maggs and Phipps meet in the mansion on Great Queen Street that Maggs has provided for his adopted son, though Maggs has no idea that the person he comes face-to-face with is Phipps. Instead, Maggs sees the Phantom threatening to shoot him: “There, in the firelight, he beheld his nightmare: long straight nose, fair hair, brutal dreadful uniform of the 57th Foot Regiment. The Phantom had broken the locks and entered his life” (351). Although Maggs imagines his nightmare personified, in reality the figure Maggs takes for the Phantom is Phipps dressed in a soldier’s uniform. Maggs’ mistake in identifying Phipps as the Phantom arises in conjunction with a more fundamental, unwitting substitution he has made once earlier: he accepts that a portrait he has received from Phipps represents his adopted son, when in fact it is an image of King George IV. When Oates sees the framed portrait, he reflects that “The likeness had seemed familiar, he realized now, because it was George IV dressed as a commoner . . . but this little miniature was, to all intents and purposes, a copy of Richard Cosway’s portrait which Tobias had viewed, only last year, at the Royal Academy” (285).
This odd series of copies or substitutions wherein the King becomes a commoner and the son becomes the flogger is suggestive of the fraudulence of imperial authority and the degree to which Maggs must disavow or resist such power in order to free himself from the grip of the Phantom and all it represents. He does this through the help of Mercy Larkin, who leaves England with him to become his wife in Australia. It is Mercy who helps Maggs awaken to the realities of British colonialism and to a recognition that he has been betrayed not only by Oates and Phipps, but also by England and its King. Although Maggs asserts that in colonial Australia, he and other transported criminals “were beyond the King’s sight. Not even God Himself could see into that pit”, Mercy insists that because Maggs was repeatedly lashed by a soldier in the British army, “Then it were the King who lashed you” (346). Standing in for England and its monarch, the soldier who comes to haunt Maggs’ dreams as the Phantom represents the tortures that Maggs has endured under the system of penal transportation to Australia, thereby highlighting the nation’s complicity in this brutality. Such complicity is further underscored by Henry Phipps’ actions, including the fact that he has accepted Maggs’ money and written false letters over the years. Finally, when Phipps decides to disavow the inheritance Maggs offers him and to enlist as a soldier instead, he dons the uniform of the 57th Foot Regiment, hence Maggs’ mistake in conflating his presence with that of the Phantom. Phipps’ fate calls attention to the class dynamics of imperialism, in which the lowest ranking soldiers are exploited to do the most brutal work as stand-ins for king and country.
Only by resisting the power that Oates and Phipps have held over him does Maggs finally learn to reject the authority of imperial Britain and to make a break from the mother country—though not necessarily a clean one. Consistent with the theory that settler colonialism entails a complex act of negotiation, Maggs must reconcile the idealized image of English life that led him to return home from colonial Australia with the realities he has encountered there. His rejection of his ties to Oates and Phipps and his subsequent reconciliation with his Australian-born sons help to relieve him of the afflictions that have plagued him once he returns to his adopted home in Australia. The physical manifestation of his suffering, the tic douloureux, presumably disappears, and he goes on to lead a happy and prosperous life in the colonies. This shift in how Maggs regards England and his domestic inheritance corresponds to Maggs gaining ownership over his own story and is emblematic of Carey’s efforts to reclaim an aspect of Australian history that has historically been repressed.
Rebuilding home in the Antipodes
Once Maggs relinquishes the illusions he harboured about the benevolence of English domesticity, he is free to recreate a domestic life back in Australia. One critic says of this conclusion that “Doubly unexpected, the ending is determinedly Australian and optimistic” (Hassall, 1997: 129), while another calls the ending “a surprise” suggesting that “Carey’s comparison of England and Australia is, with few exceptions, not foregrounded until the final two pages of the novel” (Schmidt-Haberkamp, 2005: 255). Yet while this turn of events does happen abruptly, Carey’s decision to conclude the novel in Australia is perfectly in keeping with the emphasis of his text. Carey claimed in an interview that “Very few modern Australians are descended from those first convicts, but I believe that they affected the character of our nation forever” (Author Q&A, n.d.). While Dickens’ novel disavows the importance of Magwitch’s impact on Australia—after all, Dickens’ convict dies before he can return to the Antipodes—Carey’s ending insists upon the appropriateness of Maggs’ reverse movement “home” to Australia and on the lasting impact he has on the colony. Although early in the novel Maggs protests against returning to Australia and insists that he is “not of that race” (340) and would “rather be a bad smell here [in England] than a frigging rose in New South Wales” (250), once he is freed of his false illusions about England, Maggs elects to return and to create a prosperous home in Australia. In Antipodal England (Myers, 2009), I have argued that British emigrants to Australia were able to preserve aspects of their national identity through the strategic transplantation of material objects and ideals associated with the domestic. With this in mind, we can read Maggs’ success in Australia not as an ironic paradox that is out of keeping with the rest of the narrative, but rather, as an illustration of how portable domesticity allows Maggs to transition to a new colonial context and to rebuild his life. 6
Throughout most of the novel, the opposition Carey sets up between Australia and England is described in stark terms: an idealized, false view of England is juxtaposed with an unwelcoming and often brutal view of penal Australia. Initially, Australian domesticity is framed as tentative and fragile, as the following passage describing Antipodean homes suggests: “In the place Jack Maggs had come from, the houses had been, for the most part, built from wood. They strained and groaned in the long hot nights, crying out against their nails, contracting, expanding, tugging at their bindings as if they would pull themselves apart” (46). As a metaphor for the impermanence of “home” for British emigrants in the Australian colonies, these wooden structures signify the tensions and violence inherent in colonial life. However, once Maggs explodes the idealized view he long possessed of England, the polar opposition between the two nations that defines Maggs’ thinking throughout much of the novel breaks apart, opening up a new space for Maggs to reimagine a home in Australia and to loosen the constraints on his identity as a colonized subject. Hassall explains this transformation succinctly:
His return to the social order which made him a criminal, which he has romanticised from afar, enables him to recognise the freedom offered by the social order of his former prison, which has itself begun to metamorphose from a penal colony into a site of liberation . . . Jack himself is finally transformed from an Englishman into an Australian, opting for the more open, generous and egalitarian Australian culture he has come to recognise. (1997: 134)
The more egalitarian mode in the colonies does give Maggs an opportunity to transform himself, but that transformation is not as simple as Hassall’s logic of substitution would suggest, given that there is no fixed national identity in Australia at the time period under discussion. Thus, rather than simply exchanging an English identity for a pre-existing Australian one, Maggs must move away from identification with England toward a variant identity that embraces hybridity—a feature of migrant cultures that Homi Bhabha (1994) and others have theorized as a form of cultural mixing that destabilizes colonial authority and celebrates newness. 7
Such hybridity is evident in Carey’s description of the life Mercy Larkin and Jack Maggs create in Australia:
And in the new town of Wingham where they shortly settled she not only civilized these first two children, but very quickly gave birth to five further members of “That Race”. Jack Maggs sold the brickworks in Sydney. In Wingham he set up a saw mill and, when that prospered, a hardware store, and when that prospered, a pub. He was twice president of the shire and was still the president of the Cricket Club when Dick hit the cover off a new ball in the match against Taree. (356)
As model community members, Maggs, and his family play a major role in domesticating the colony—here represented by the need to civilize his Australian children—and in establishing a prosperous town that is modelled on an English village. With its pubs and cricket matches, the town of Wingham resembles features of the idyll Maggs has dreamed about, and the “grand mansion” he builds helps to realize his former dreams. Whereas Oates had had Maggs dismantling an imaginary brick wall during his mesmeric sessions, essentially removing brick after brick in order to get closer to the painful truth of his experiences (222), Carey emphasizes a process of building up rather than tearing down once Maggs has returned to Australia. However, there are important differences between the English fictions Maggs harboured and this more solid, domestic reality that he creates in Australia. First, although Maggs makes his fortune in the colonies by relying on brickmaking skills and tools that were imported to Australia on the First Fleet and that allow him to replicate the mansions he revered at home in England, he abandons this building method upon his return for something new: he trades the brickworks for a sawmill and hardware store. This exchange presumably enables him to use indigenous trees to build more substantial homes than the wooden ones described earlier that threatened to implode against the colonial elements. The new form of domesticity that Maggs and Mercy Larkin cultivate is thus uniquely Australian, and it is characterized both by ties to the land and by deep communal ties. Among the most important of the latter ties are the ones between Maggs and his formerly disavowed “first two children”—the sons by blood who were born and raised in Australia. These children stand in opposition to Maggs’ fraudulent son, Henry Phipps, and to the aborted child Maggs had pined for since his own childhood. The reclamation of his Australian sons speaks to Maggs’ acceptance of cultural hybridity, and the community he and Mercy create serves as an illustration of how they reconcile elements of both their Australian and English inheritances.
This hybridity becomes the basis for combining seemingly irreconcilable opposites as “the Maggs family were known to be both clannish and hospitable, at once civic-minded and capable of acts of picturesque irresponsibility, and it is only natural that they left many stories scattered in their wake” (356). This description of the family’s legacy emphasizes Maggs’ role as a storyteller, and indeed, Maggs’ life story finally becomes public once he abandons his allegiances to the literal and metaphorical prisons that bind him (the penal colony and the English idyll respectively) and gains the freedom to articulate his story without suppression or limitation. Even then, however, Carey playfully challenges notions of hybridity and engages with the question of whether there is ever any “pure” culture, 8 as he continues to foreground the contestation that has dominated the novel over who gets to tell Maggs’ story and which version, if any, gets primacy. Carey’s presentation of the Maggs family’s legacy as “only natural” is consistent with the representation of Maggs as a compelling storyteller, someone whose naturally magnetic personality (which inadvertently attracts the attention of numerous characters) translates into his acts of authorship. 9 Although Maggs’ everyday speech is often brusque or rude, Carey grants Maggs an eloquence that gives his writing considerable power. As Jordan notes, this levels the playing field between Maggs and Oates, revealing “the writer who becomes a thief and the thief who becomes a writer” (2000: 296). As a writer, Maggs creates letters that possess a lyrical, tender quality and provide a compelling storyline that draws readers into the narration. The compelling nature of his story—both to Oates and to the reader—grants it a special status within the novel. Unlike Oates’ rendering of Maggs’ life, the fictionalized Death of Maggs, Maggs’ letters offer a heartfelt, brutally honest explanation that has a psychological depth that presumably goes beyond Oates’ sensationalized tale. Maggs’ articulation of his story and his legacy of storytelling are thus crucial to the novel, for as Andreas Gaile notes, “Stories are the exclusive carrier medium of history in Carey’s writings—his narrators’ tales and those embedded in them constitute the author’s version of Australian history” (2010: 103).
In the end, both Oates’ and Maggs’ versions of this history exist in material form, but Carey renders their relative importance very ambiguous, and he undermines Oates’ achievement in several ways. First, although Oates eventually publishes The Death of Maggs, it is only after he has presumably reconstructed the story, which Maggs partially destroys when he throws the manuscript into the river and watches as “the ink in some places washed away” (297). This image of disappearing text directly echoes earlier descriptions of Maggs’ invisible writing, hence evoking the struggle between the colonizer’s story and that of his colonized subject and questioning which story possesses authority. Later, Maggs and Oates finally burn the manuscript of The Death of Maggs, and “all those lines of gorgeous copperplate had become sheets of black crepe” as “the burnt papers rose, like black moths, as high as the ceiling” (83). The funereal quality of this scene reminds readers that Oates must reconstruct his novel from scratch, and even then Maggs’ wife, Mercy, excises the dedication pages from her copies of the published novel, adding yet another layer to the imagery of disappearing text.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the chronological sequence of events in Jack Maggs does not allow Oates’ story to take precedence over Maggs’ story. Oates’ novel is published three years after Maggs’ death, and Carey pointedly notes that “the old convict met death without ever having read ‘That Book’” (356). Rather than presenting Maggs’ story as a supplement to Oates’, Carey effectively pre-dates his convict’s story, making Oates’ novel the follow-up to Maggs’ story rather than the other way around. Schmidt-Haberkamp calls this shift “[t]he most interesting strategy in Carey’s novel”, arguing that “it claims Great Expectations as an Australian narrative, thus inverting, if not dissolving, the notion of original text and sequel that is central to the writing-back paradigm” (2005: 258). In playing around with this chronology, Carey does seem to be intent not simply on inversion, but rather on “dissolving” the binary opposition between primal text and sequel. This levelling move is also apparent when The Death of Maggs is ultimately housed in the Mitchell Library in Sydney alongside Maggs’ letters to Henry Phipps; neither version of this story is granted primacy within Carey’s novel, with Maggs’ narrative acquiring equal stature to that of the famous writer by virtue of its inclusion in the Mitchell Library. The fact that this is an Australian library offers a final recognition of Australia’s unique history and literary traditions.
In a recent collection on settler colonialism in the twentieth century, Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen assert that “imperial and settler projects and practices . . . have their ghostly afterlife in postcolonial regimes”. (2005: 16). Carey cites the haunting nature of such imperial legacies as his impetus for revisiting Dickens’ celebrated novel and examining its impact on postcolonial identity in Australia:
My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country. Looked at in this way, Great Expectations is not only a great work of English literature; it is (to an Australian) also a way in which the English have colonized our ways of seeing ourselves. It is a great novel, but it is also, in another way, a prison. Jack Maggs is an attempt to break open the prison and to imaginatively reconcile with the gaoler. (Author Q&A, n.d.)
In order to achieve such a reconciliation, Maggs must gain the upper hand over Oates at the end of the novel, just as Carey must initially turn the tables on Dickens. In so doing, Carey allows us to read Great Expectations through the lens of the postcolonial subject and to envision the world of the novel through Magwitch’s eyes. In opening up a space for such reimagining, Jack Maggs brilliantly illustrates how narratives—especially those stories that follow in the wake of empire—can play a crucial role in facilitating understanding of complex identities in a postcolonial era.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.