Many critics have praised Peter Carey’s literary reimaginings (including but not limited to Jack Maggs) for his ability to construct a text that faintly gestures to its source text while simultaneously obliterating ties to that original. Although Jack Maggs obviously corresponds to Magwitch as Phipps does to Pip, Carey writes with the “intent to subvert his models” (Krist 624). Many critics concetrate on the relationship of Jack Maggs to the Victorian themes of its source — or rather target — text, Great Expectations. Carey perhaps digs deeper than Dickens, and one reviewer notes Carey’s propensity for finding characters on the margins of society to pull into the center of the text, highlighting “the once unspeakable — homosexuality, prostitution, extramarital pregnancy, backstreet abortions” (Landon 240). Reviewers also comment on the text’s highly psychological slant, introduced in large part by way of Carey’s Tobias Oates, a chaacter meant to stand in for Dickens himself. Victorian psychology became increasingly interested in unconscious character traits, Carey utilizes a more complex (and admittedly more modern) understanding of psychology. In her review, Kathleen J. Renk explores this mixed use of psychology in regards to Oates:
Like the Victorians who used mesmerism as a way to understand and perhaps control the subconscious world, Oates enters Maggs’s subconscious replete with dark Phantoms. Like a Victorian explorer, he mesmerizes Maggs in order to “map’’ Maggs’s world, in much the same way as he maps London’s world of the poor. [63]
Other writers have explored the postmodern and postcolonial aspects of Carey’s text. Laura E. Savu considers this very connection, likening the way in which Carey “allows for the colonized other to take control of his story” to a text such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, in the way that they both “supply the suppressed point of view” of their primary character (127). As a text that moves its focus and sympathies from the nation of colonizer (Britain) to the colonized nation (Australia), Carey’s novel does more to rewrite the British historical characterization of Australia than to rewire the original text (as is perhaps clearly his aim). Some reviewers examine the postmodern threads running through Carey’s text, such as the multiple points of view presented. In Renk’s article, she asserts that Carey’s use of many narrators, including three women, helps to “reveal the imperial mindset that excludes” figures such as women from its textual history (66).
Questions
1. How does Carey’s psychological material work as a reimagining or rewriting of Victorian interest in similar topics? How does his invocation of ghostly figures differ from their use in other Victorian texts?
2. Does Carey’s text succeed as a novel that wants to rewrite a national history, “concerned with the right of the colonial to map his ‘own’ world and mind”? (Renk 65)
3. What is gained in bringing historically marginalized topics such as homosexuality, or abortion (topics which are notably ignored in Victorian literature) to a text that remains focused in the original historical moment?
4. Why might Carey have selected to incorporate Dickens into his own story? Is it merely to literalize the biographical aspects of Dickens’s work, and if so, why configure Dickens as a bizarrely cold and manipulative character?
References: Works Cited and Consulted
Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Krist, Gary. "Classics Revisited." Hudson Review 51.3 (1998): 623-630.
Landon, Philip. "Book reviews: Jack Maggs." Review of Contemporary Fiction 18.2 (1998): 239-40.
Pfeil, Fred. "Ghost of Dickens Past." Nation (1998): 27-8.
Renk, Kathleen J. “Rewriting the Empire of the Imagination: The Post-Imperial Gothic Fiction of Peter Carey and A.S. Byatt” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Savu, Laura E. “The ‘Crooked Business’ of Storytelling: Authorship and Cultural
Revisionism in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs” Ariel, Jul-Oct2005, Vol. 36 Issue p.127-163
Last modified 1 March 2004