“Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots

Abstract

In Paul Lynch’s neo-Victorian Famine novel Grace (2017), the protagonist’s encounter with the proverbial root of all evil marks a moment of Gothic horror. Much more threatening than a single dead body, the foul-smelling, rotten potato invokes the gigantic number of corpses the blight produced during the Irish Famine of the 1840 s. Rather than a natural disaster, this must be understood as a direct result of what is often broadly referred to as ‘ecological imperialism’. This article examines the ways in which Grace positions the Famine as both concrete reality and synecdoche of colonialism. The novel traces how the potato blight, caused by the pathogen oomycete Phytophthora infestans, transforms rural Ireland into an uninhabitable wasteland, populated by dehumanised creatures that are rendered disposable. In a second step, I consider the rotten potato as metaphorical of neo-Victorianism’s larger critical potential. As critics have argued, neo-Victorianism is well-suited to intervene in selective and largely nostalgic memorialisations of Britain’s imperial legacies. To do so, however, it must properly acknowledge that the soil on which it plants – the textualities, theoretical frameworks, and methodological tools upon which it draws – is saturated with imperialist ideology to an extent that precludes any critical re-readings of the past and its bearing on the present.