Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull's Other Island

Abstract

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull's Other Island Kathleen Ochshorn Seen from a twenty-first-century perspective, Bernard Shaw's 1904 play John Bull's Other Island is remarkably resonant. The Englishman Broadbent and the Irishman Larry Doyle, partners in a Westminster civil engineering firm, travel to rural Rosscullen and come up with a land development scheme. Broadbent's plans are grand in scale: "We'll take Ireland in hand. . . . I shall found public institutions: a library, a polytechnic (undenominational, of course), a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. . . . The round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored." 1 Local characters will be tourist attractions. He envisions a Disney-like Ireland, an Irish Epcot. The hilarious battle between the forces of modernization and tradition depicted in Shaw's play is being enacted rather seriously in contemporary Ireland, particularly in the republic. In 2004, a hundred years after John Bull's Other Island was written, six and a half million tourists visited Ireland; it was listed as the number one golf destination in the world. 2 A cultural battle erupted in 2005 over the government breaking ground for a highway near the historic site of Tara, the seat of the high kings. As several Irish scholars wrote in a letter to the Sunday Independent, "Ireland's premier landscape, an icon of our nationhood, is about to suffer an act of vandalism that will see a four lane motorway, a large intersection and undoubted secondary developments obliterate its landscape. All in the name of progress." 3 Colm Toibin noted in the New York Times op-ed section that "[a] place of myth and mystery will look like anywhere. It is called modernization." 4 John Bull's Other Island is a play full of irony, with stereotypes established and undermined, most points of view ridiculed, and little hope offered of a realistic solution to the puzzles of poverty and development. Shaw seems to be the puppet master, hanging over the stage, getting a dark laugh from his absurdist piece. The very occasion for the play, William Butler Yeats's [End Page 180] invitation to Shaw to write a piece for the Irish Literary Theatre, may be the underlying source of much of the irony. As Shaw famously wrote in his 1906 "Preface for Politicians," his play "was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentiment of the real old Ireland" (443). From the outset, this play was built on these contradictory impulses. Asked to commemorate the Irish Revival, which he abhorred, Shaw ended up satirizing the Irish and the English. Tracy C. Davis has contended that Shaw's plays are "a prolonged meditation on the dilemma of colonization, never achieving postcolonialism because institutions of power are not dismantled. . . ." 5 But in John Bull's Other Island, Shaw manages to define and ridicule colonialism; anticipate the nature of a postcolonial Ireland; and imply the difficulties of a free trade, neocolonial economy, where individual and national interests are subverted by the all-powerful forces of development and transnational commerce. Shaw satirizes a particular vision of economic development, largely presented by Broadbent, who also plans to stand for Parliament. The critique prefigures the writings of other colonial and postcolonial writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, whose scathing book A Small Place presents a similar view of a postcolonial economy based on tourism in another former British colony, her native Antigua. 6 Just as Kincaid describes a Hotel Training School built to provide labor for the tourist industry, Broadbent envisions a nondenominational polytechnic to teach efficient development and sort out the best ways to make money. Keegan observes of Broadbent that "[h]e is efficient in the service of Mammon, mighty in mischief, skillful in ruin, heroic in destruction" (606–07). Shaw...