Bowen's Court Analysis 3

Bowen's Court Analysis 3

1. Snobbishness

   • She is proud of her ascendency
     • Highlighting family life and property
     • Naming from Henry III to Henry VI
     • Describing hersefl as "inheritor"
     • Attachment to the forniture
   • Lazy and pleasant life of rich people
   • Embracing family traditions

2. Decadence

   • Family portrays dimmed by their own age
   • Now deserted drawing room
   • Empty rooms in the house
   • Rooms permeated with memoris of the dead
   • Economic problems

3. Brave acting

   • Fighting to keep the property
     • Unaware of economic problems
     • Book keeps the house alive

4. Text as ideological self-justificaction for colonialism

   • She blames the English
   • She depicts her family and the Anglo-Irish as inhert object of the process of colonization
     • Friendship with local people
     • Removed from colonial government (decided in England)
     • Opposed to some decisions taken in England
   • Tries to insert their history into the more general Irish history to make them situation and existence better understood

5. Supporting ambivalence beyond colonialism

   • She acknoweldges relationship between Anlgo-Irish class and colonial project
     • Feared rebellion but never fought against English colonial policies
   • She narrates the story of their cultural hybridization
     • Growing love for the country
     • Aesthetic contribution to the landscape
     • Traditions of the land
     • Irish language
   • Victims of English colonialism as the Irish themselves
     • Colonialism = external imposed system
       • Shelley = only a civil servant
     • Distance and isolation = mechanism of defense
       • From the English
         • They could not oppose the government that gave them economic and political power
       • From the Irish
         • Their dispossession was necessary to ensure the Anglo-Irish political and economic power
     • Their existence = simply consequence of colonialism