Maria Edgeworth’s Déjà-Voodoo: Interior Decoration, Retroactivity, and Colonial Allegory in The Absentee
Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne
Volume 20, no. 3, Spring 2008
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the fictional representation of interior decoration as an allegory of internal colonialism in Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812). Edgeworth’s fiction satirically exposes the fashionable interior space and temporalization of regional space that are the outdating and anachronizing of Ireland by imperial England. In examining how this occurs, my essay adapts the syncretic religious cult of voodoo to an Irish colonial context. I use the term “déjà-voodoo” to describe Edgeworth’s allegorical practice, which meets the act of imperial anachronizing with the spell of Irish cultural memory, reclaiming outdated, unfashionable, or defunct forms of Irish culture, making them present, and resignifying them with new meaning. The Absentee suggests that the transformative energies of post-eighteenth-century historical fiction come not from the project of modernization, but “from déjà-voodoo,” which counters the English anachronizing of Irish culture with the transformative powers of retroactivity, conjoining historical reflection with interior decoration, revival, and revaluation.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Architecture Design” include:
Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design and Building Projects under Catherine the Great
by JENNIFER MILAM (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
The Architectural Design of Beckford’s Vathek
by SANDRO JUNG (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
The Literary History of the Sash Window
by RACHEL RAMSEY (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
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