Disrupting Colonial Views: Savvy Nabobs, Oriental Dreams. Colonial Appropriations in J.C. Mangan’s “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” and “The Thirty Flasks”

Abstract

Irish Gothic fiction in the nineteenth century experiences a significant yet progressive change – a move from the more brutal, physical threat present in the early forms of the genre to that of a subtle, psychological menace. Read in postcolonial terms, this signifies a change in the presence and perception of the colonized other, who now is presented as a mental danger; thus, vampires, werewolves and other physically threatening beings are left in the vault while, simultaneously, a new form of threat emerges in the shape of beings whose physical presence is conspicuously less hostile but whose psychological sphere threatens to engulf the troubled Anglo-Irish elite. The narratives of J.C. Mangan are paradigmatic of this change in so far as they already present the characteristics which later writers of the genre were to deploy. As this paper shows, by appropriating and abrogating the colonial gaze and utilizing British/Anglo-Irish perceptions of the East, J.C. Mangan manages to unveil the fact that, ultimately, Anglo-Irish fears of the Catholic other are, in fact, a product of their own paranoia, therefore, debasing their claim to both land and their appropriation of Irish identity.