Lismahago's captivity: transculturation in 'Humphry Clinker.' (novel by Tobias Smollett)

England's colonial possessions seem very far away in Smollett's Humphry Clinker The novel concerns a domestic journey not only in that its path takes it across the domestic spaces of England and Scotland, but also in that it focuses on a domestic group--a household organized around familial relations. This essay wil argue, however, that even within such spaces the problems posed by colonial expansion can be perceived, and that, furthermore, it is precisely those problems that provoke the anxiety over the dissolution of English domestic self-sufficiency that is Humphry Clinker's most persistent concern. The primacy of this concern may not be immediately apparent, embedded as it is in a more legible anxiety over England's changing class structure. But, by concentrating on the novel's representation of colonial relations I not only want to make visible the growing connectedness of English and colonial society in the period but also to reveal the work the novel performs to neutralize any textual evidence of this increasing interdependence, and to erect instead a compensator fantasy of English self-sufficiency. This fantasy of self-sufficiency, of an impenetrable national identity, seems to me one of the most durable legacies of the eighteenth century, and to hold a central place in the organization of Smollett's novel.

I want to begin with the story of a journey that reverses the usual trajectory of colonial expansion--with Captain Lismahago's voyage back from the Native American tribe that adopts him, to the heart of English domestic space as Tabitha Bramble's husband. Captain Lismahago's return is only the novel's most graphic example of the intrusion of the colonial world into English domestic life. Like Lismahago, numerous new commodities made their way back from the New World during the first half of the eighteenth century. To cite one of Smollett' own lists, "Sugar, rum, tea, chocolate, and coffee" all became part of everyday English life during that first phase of imperial expansion.(1) As James Bunn notes, "Tea and porcelain now seem so iconistically English that one must recal ... [that] what seems to be the very soul of Englishness might recently have been imported and assimilated by a syncretic culture."(2) The influx of these substances, then, was one of many material tokens that intimated that England's colonial expansion not only had created syncretic cultures in the colonial arena, but might also challenge England's idea of itself as a coherent, homogeneous society.(3)

In Smollett's Humphry Clinker, published in 1771, one can judge the gravity of such a challenge through the narrative's vision of the dangerous consequences o inter-cultural contact. The novel's anxiety about the economic changes wrought by merchant capitalism centers on the transculturation of England threatened by the foreign luxury goods that mercantile trade brought back into the country. For the text, these luxury goods are most exemplarily food stuffs, whose penetration of individual digestive tracts replicates the penetration of Englis culture by its supposedly subjugated colonies. Indeed, "By far the largest grou [in percentages of total imports during the period] is that which the officials describe as 'grocery' and which consisted of tea, coffee, sugar, rice, pepper and a variety of other tropical, semi-tropical or oriental produce."(4) The growing necessity of such imports undermined England's claim to national self-sufficiency, especially during the period in which Humphry Clinker was written: "Between 1765 and 1774 ... homegrown supplies [of food] were insufficient to meet the needs of a growing population."(5) I will argue that Smollett's novel views these economic developments as threatening--it figures the process of inter-cultural exchange as a kind of poisoning, newly possible a the domestic table.

Alongside this fantasy of incorporation, in which cultural difference is fantasmatically transformed into a foreign object looking to take up a destructive residence inside English bodies, we can read a compensatory defense of English national identity. The problem of how to assimilate, or acculturate, other cultures, economically or socially, is redacted into a problem of oral consumption: to avoid becoming the other, one must simply avoid eating the other. I will argue that Humphry Clinker enacts a strategy of literalizing, and thus attempting to neutralize, the cultural anxiety surrounding transculturation. Into its insistently corporeal and oral figurations of changing patterns of economic consumption I want to read a nascent fantasy of disconnection--a means by which England could disentangle itself from the cross-cultural connections of mercantilism. Yet behind that fantasy, I believe the novel envisions the collapsing distinctions between foreign sites of capita accumulation and domestic spaces of consumption.

I: LISMAHAGO'S TRANSCULTURATION