The Big House in William Trevor’s and Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction

Abstract

The relationship between Ireland and Britain is historically as fatefully entangled as that between Korea and Japan. As a symbol of colonial rule by the British in Ireland, the Big House is close to private life of Irish people, so it can be compared to Japanese-possessed civil houses where Japanese civilians lived in Incheon, Mokpo, Gunsan, and Pohang during the Japan’s colonization over Korea. However, British domination of Ireland took place over a longer period of time and shared the same language, so the remnants of Irish colonization were deeper and more difficult to shake off than those in Korea. Guy Felihmann defines the Big House as “the crucible in which two civilizations failed to melt, and yet became inseparable bound together.” The unconditionally antagonizing nationalism toward the colonizer is likely to make a shadow without acknowledging the other s reality in the Anglo-Irish writer Bowen s view. As an Irish patriot who lived most of his life in Britain, Trevor punishes the British past through the tragic lives of the British Irish landlord family. However, mixed with forgiveness and punishment from an Irish perspective, the lyrical beauty of a harrowing history is found in his fiction, This contemplative and flexible attitude toward the colonization is also a foreshadowing of future transnational discourse.