II. Design Debauchery: The Context of Class in Paisley Shawls

The story of shawls in Britain is a fascinating one: shawls were generally used for protection against the weather. However, the advent of the Cashmere shawl transformed the humble garment into a fashion accessory. As Cashmere shawls became the rage in Europe and Britain, British manufacturers were prompt to begin manufacturing shawls “in imitation of the Indian” in centres at Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley. Sir Walter Scott, Scotland's national bard, in The Surgeon's Daughter (1827), praised the Paisley shawl, observing that “that there is some way of knowing a thing that cost fifty guineas from an article that is sold for five; but I venture to say there is not one out of ten thousand that would understand the difference” (287; ch. 29).

As one might imagine in the cases of original artefacts and copies thereof, there was an overt economic gap between those who purchased the genuine article and those who purchased the copies. Shawls from India were expensive fashion accessories in Victorian Britain. For wealthy ladies, having a shawl from India thus ensured a public presentation of style, as well as a way of exhibiting their disposable wealth. An article by Suzanne Daly, for example, highlights that in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, a “coarse” dissolute Irish woman could pass for “an English lady in reduced circumstances” only on the basis of having in her possession “a real Indian shawl – un veritable cachemire.” Daly's reading emphasises the way in which possession of Cashmere shawls anticipated one's social standing. As the protagonist of the novel Lucy Snow remarks significantly, “I feel quite sure that without this ‘Cachemire’ she would not have kept her footing in the pensionnat for two days: by virtue of it, and it only, she maintained the same a month” (86; ch. 8).

Ordinary women from the lower-middle and working class, however, found it convenient to purchase cheaper imitations manufactured at Norwich or Paisley, which were widely known as “imitation India shawls” or sometimes simply as “Paisley” shawls. These shawls were popular and mostly highly affordable; as Charles Knight observed in Household Words (1851), “the shawls of Paisley. . .are for the comfort and the decent ornament of the humblest in the land” (123). Thus, a class context, which an average twentieth- or twenty-first century reader is at risk of overlooking, was subtly manifest in Collins's construct of the Paisley shawl in Armadale.

The upper and upper-middle classes often jeered at Paisley shawls and their ordinary patrons. Textile critics, in particular, many of whom were connected with the Design Reform movement (an important precursor of the Arts and Crafts movement), felt that imitation shawls were a travesty of the ancient and skilfully designed Cashmeres.Footnote ⁵ However, even as their discussion followed established criteria of textile production, as articles of dressing close to the lived experience of the working classes, imitation shawls were sometimes at the centre of a class snobbery. A report in the Journal of Design and Manufactures (1851), edited by Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave, for example, came to observe that the “tendency to substitute inferior imitations for the superior realities” formed one of the “evils which so darken our manufacturing position and prospects.” The author further suggested that the “struggle. . .to produce a sham Cachmere or Norwich shawl for a few shillings, and thus placard the backs of the female population with a sort of material falsehood” was not only an aesthetic nuisance but it also had crucial social implications. One could easily prove, he observed “that there is some damage even to good morals in the long run to the housemaid, who, parading in a Glasgow printed shawl affects to pass for her mistress in a cachmere one” (“Shams and imitations” 10). The excerpt goes some way to demonstrate how textile valuation was far from straightforward; although these writings were purportedly “quality assessments,” it was often the case that discussions of textile manufactures furthered a sense of social hierarchy. In these lines, for example, it is not difficult to see how the serious business of textile imitation is rendered adversely as an abstract of social emulation.

Given that writings such as the above articulated an association between imitation shawls and class mobility, the Paisley shawl in Armadale functions as a significant trope. Recent scholarship has emphasised the way in which the proliferation of sensation fiction posed concerns about social divisions, where triple-decker novels reproduced in affordable single-volume “yellow-back” formats all but eroded the boundary between genteel and working-class readerships. As Alfred Austin complained in 1870, such works of fiction and their diverse readerships effectively made “the kitchen and drawing room kin” (424). The manufacture-based report quoted above suggests however, that the democratisation of print was not necessarily limited to books alone. As forms of printing, the production of textiles was also considerably invested in breaking down the preserves of class and taste – an aspect that Mansel's remark, as mentioned at the start of this essay, implicitly acknowledges.Footnote ⁶ In this regard, Dallas Liddle's observation that many sensation novels highlight that both personal and class identity in contemporary Britain were “potentially subject to manipulation, misrepresentation and outright theft” (97), prefigures the way in which the Paisley shawl was a prime example of how class-defined identities were open to contestations and appropriations through material artefacts.

In this respect, Collins's use of the Paisley shawl – which I am suggesting was identified with the labouring classes and situations of relative penury – was appropriate. However, what is more important is that Collins seems to repeat the over-determined narration of social emulation contained in the shawl almost verbatim, in the figure of Lydia Gwilt as, the maidservant clad in a Paisley shawl “affect[ed] to pass for her mistress.” The association between domestic servants and Paisley shawls was widespread. To give one example, while Indian Cashmeres are considered expensive gifts in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (both William Dobbin and Jos Sedley give Cashmere shawls to Amelia), the Paisley shawl is mockingly described as a “Caledonian Cashmere” and is depicted unflatteringly as part of a servant's attire in Pendennis (514; ch. 49).

Lydia's role in the novel is necessarily characterised by her career of domestic servitude. She worked for Mrs Armadale in the early, pivotal part of the novel, and it is a history that becomes key to the novel's plot. As an adult, too, she assumes a subsidiary position as a governess in the Milroy household. The stereotypical account of servants wishing to become the mistresses is revealed and exploited as her career unfolds: Lydia's desire to marry the son of the house, Allan Armadale, is a variation of the aspiring and sexually transgressive servant. Further, when she gains employment with the Milroys, Collins once again dramatizes a scenario in which Lydia is portrayed as a temptress, creating a putative ménage a trois involving the wife, the female employee, and the master of the house.

By locating and relocating Lydia in various positions of domestic servitude, Collins seems to draw from a typecast representation of female domestic servants. In this regard, the narrative carefully emphasises the menial and subservient nature of Lydia's domestic duties at the Milroy household. “She would try me past all endurance” (284; bk. 3, ch. 11), Lydia complains of Neelie to Mrs Oldershaw. Regarding the Major, who is a “poor dear harmless old gentleman,” Lydia admits that “I am always ready to make his breakfast.. . . I can always find things for him when he loses them.. . . I never yawn when he proses” (285; bk. 3, ch. 11). Lydia also reports that she is asked by Mrs Milroy to “bring her things. . .from different parts of the room,” even when “she evidently did not want them” (285; bk. 3, ch.11).

It is also significant that Lydia's “extreme elegance and beauty” (80; bk. 2, ch. 1) is developed throughout the novel, but within the domestic situation, these qualities are translated as undesirable and dangerous. Mrs Milroy, who mistakenly believes that her husband is in love with Lydia, muses, “Older and older, and thinner and thinner!”. . .“The major will soon be a free man; but I'll have that red-haired hussy out of the house first!” (312; bk 4, ch.1). As the reader knows, Mrs Milroy's conviction is pure fantasy; nevertheless, her sexual angst, which echoes a broader class concern, succeeds in driving Lydia out of her service. In this regard, servants wishing to marry their masters have received recent critical attention. While Elizabeth Langland influentially argued that female servants succeeded in marrying their masters in eighteenth-century novels, Elizabeth Steere has refuted that notion.

But Lydia is not a passive figure in the novel, as she also explicitly represents a threat. The Chartist movement, with its demand for voting rights, a secret ballot and a “no property” qualification to democratise the lower House of Parliament was more or less over by the time Collins was writing Armadale, but its spectre still haunted the ruling class. Jonathan Loesberg, in this regard, has persuasively argued how sensation fiction was deeply associated with the discourse around reform bills of the 1850’s and 1860’s in which fears of class dissolution formed a prominent issue.

The threat of class mobility is particularly prominent in Lydia's case. Although we know that she was an orphan brought up by the lowly and immoral Oldershaws (following which she worked in the Armadale household), as a mature woman, Lydia is charming and sophisticated. Music scholar Ruth Solie has argued that the amateur pianists at home in the mid-century preferred pieces that were “brilliant but not difficult,” citing the example of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (117). In dramatic contrast, Collins's anti-heroine appreciates and enjoys playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, a piece that demands considerable skill - as is evident in its passionate final movement. Lydia's cultural sophistication is advanced to the extent that she even comes to patronise Allan Armadale, a representative of landed gentry, regarding his musical taste. Following a performance of Bellini's opera, Lydia vents, “Armadale's stupidity showed itself, even in such a simple matter as taking a box. He had confounded an opera with a play, and had chosen a box close to the stage, with the idea that one's chief object at a musical performance is to see the faces of the singers as plainly as possible! Fortunately for our ears, Bellini's lovely melodies are, for the most part, tenderly and delicately accompanied – or the orchestra might have deafened us” (556; bk. 5, ch. 2).Footnote ⁷ She further criticises Allan Armadale's blanket rebuke of “foreign music” as a sign of “an Englishman's exasperating pride in his own stupidity, wherever a matter of Art is concerned” (557; bk. 5, ch. 2).

Seen in the context of Victorian political reforms, Lydia's adoption and imitation of middle- and upper-class tastes and manners, then, represents the very real fears of democratization. Yet Collins's vision is far from superficial or myopic, and his creative instinct too inventive to simply rehearse class-typecasts at face value. For Collins, Lydia's shawl is metonymic of the less prosperous classes, but he uses it as a double-edged weapon, to enact a characteristic play of “subversion and containment” as Jenny Bourne Taylor has suggested (24). In this regard, while it is true that Lydia's shawl is a clear marker of her penury and her putative social class, it is not necessarily an emblem of apathy or indifference. Instead, given the rebellious sprit of the times explicit in reform movements and anti-imperial insurgencies, the shawl comes to symbolise resistance in imaginative ways.

In this respect, if the Paisley shawl was widely denigrated and undermined as mass-produced and of “cheap” manufacture, these were the very qualities that allowed Lydia to interrupt the controlling gaze of Midwinter and Brock. As the duo exchanged correspondence to trace the movements of “the woman in the red Paisley shawl” very often their main obstacle is that, in spite of its striking and prominent colour, copies of the shawl were to be seen everywhere.Footnote ⁸ At one point in their investigation, Midwinter writes to Brock with a sense of heightened discovery: “I am quite sure about it now” he states, “those women are two, and not one.” Brock, slightly more aware of women's fashion, chides him with a touch of irony, “Need an old man like me remind a young man like you that there are thousands of women in England with beautiful figures – thousands of women who are quietly dressed in black silk gowns and red Paisley shawls?” (106; bk. 2, ch. 2).

The trope of mass production also lurks stealthily in Collins's wider narrative strategy. As real situations are forecast in dreams, the name Armadale is ceaselessly repeated and rehearsed, and identities are falsified at the blink of an eyelid, the reader of Armadale is called to exercise caution, to align their reading process with an experience of everyday shopping – to judge what is fake and what is real. The original reader of Armadale, for whom the distinction between Cashmere and Paisley shawls was common knowledge, for example, would have been quick to identify that, like her shawl, Lydia herself represents a counterfeit character. Indeed, Lydia skilfully manipulates the urban and commercial contexts of copying and duplication to her own advantage as she tells Midwinter “I don't choose to be mistaken, for a woman who may be a bad character because she happens to bear, or to have assumed, the same name as mine” (283; bk. 3, ch.11). In his Introduction to the Penguin edition, John Sutherland has insightfully observed that Lydia's anonymity has been achieved by “wholeheartedly embrac[ing] the century's new-fangled. . .technological inventions” (viii). As Lydia eludes detection and control by taking trams and rails, her shawl too – a product of the updated technology of the Jacquard loom that had dramatically increased the nature and scale of textile production – forms an important part of the “modern” narrative.

A submerged metaphor for the book market can also be identified in Armadale’s use of the imitation shawl as a trope. Concerns about a proper readership were expressed in Collins's essay “The Unknown Public” published in Household Words, in which he drew a distinction between real literature and its slapdash imitation, and correspondingly, between authentic and normative readers and a “monster audience of at least three million” (221) “which lies right outside the pale of literary civilisation” (219). Authenticity was thus necessarily a moral valuation for Collins. Given this perspective, Sundeep Bisla's argument that a “woman in white” being substituted for a “lady in white” in Collins's novel of the title may be regarded as a covert representation of the author's anxieties about the piracy of his works by mid-nineteenth-century American publishers, is significant. Indeed, the notion of the imitation of clothing across class lines as a means of subversion seems to be an obsession with Collins. In No Name (1862), a key conversation between Magdalen and her maidservant Louisa reflects the revision of roles between mistress and maidservant.Footnote ⁹ In addition, Rosanna Spearman's nightgown emerging as a red herring for Franklin Blake in The Moonstone also emphasises the point that for Collins, dress was a significant and exciting, yet complex and uneven attribute of class.

III. The “Eastern Question”

If the Paisley shawl was a representation of the working classes, as I am arguing here, it also enjoyed another important association – its links with India. There is little reference to India in Armadale except for the implicit allusion contained in the Paisley shawl – but it is an important one. Sutherland has remarked on the significant point that Armadale is set in the West Indies in the years between 1832 and 1837, just after slavery was abolished in the British Empire. However, it is also equally true that Collins wrote for a public for whom the major imperial event was the Mutiny of 1857, and there is little doubt that the rebellion loomed large in the minds of his readers. As Caroline Reitz has argued, “with articles from the Mutiny to the Maoris running during Armadale’s serialization, Cornhill collectively ponder[ed] England's responsibilities as the center of an expanding empire” (92). The January 1865 issue of Cornhill featured a retrospective account by a Mutiny survivor, just pages away from Armadale’s instalment. Entitled the “Story of My Escape from Futteghur,” Gavin Jones's blood-curdling Mutiny chronicle, in fact, could easily pass for a “sensation” narrative.

That the Paisley shawl, in spite of its manufacture in Britain, was seen as an Indian-inspired textile can hardly be in doubt. Both Cashmere and Paisley shawls were commonly known as “India shawls” and “imitation India shawls” respectively, a point that reveals how their socio-linguistic elicitation was tied to the subcontinent.Footnote ¹⁰ The Paisley shawl's primary point of appeal, the pinecone or the “inverted mango” pattern, copied Cashmere shawls, and in his 1904 study, Matthew Blair, “Chairman of the Incorporated Weaving, Dyeing, and Printing College of Glasgow” emphasizes that “no imitation [shawl] that did not include the design of Cashmere shawls was considered true to art” (30). The way in which imitation textiles (including shawls) obsessively copied the “pinecone” of the Cashmere shawls is also criticized in Ralph Nicholson Wornum's influential essay entitled “The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste” published in the Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of All Nations following the 1851 exhibition. Wornum, who was a friend of Ruskin and Keeper of the National Gallery, complained in some chagrin that “it would seem our manufacturers, or rather the whole body of manufacturers of the west of Europe, dare not deviate from” the “conventional style of [the] Cashmere pattern” (VIII). John Irwin, pioneering historian of shawls, also endorses how “the history of shawls is inseparable from the larger subject of Indo-European artistic influences.”Footnote ¹¹ The commercial advertisements for imitation shawls during the nineteenth century reflect how imitation shawls were constantly associated with their Indian originals.

The extent to which shawls enjoyed a metonymic correlation with India is nowhere clearer than in John Ruskin's vitriolic attack on Cashmere shawls in his 1858 lecture entitled “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations.” Ruskin began by discussing art and society and by comparing Scottish and Indian aesthetics, to pose the question “whether those rude chequers of the tartan, or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the cashmere, fold habitually over the noblest hearts?” He finds the answer to be self-evident:

Ruskin's assertion, delivered at the Kensington Museum in January 1858, the same month the British sieged Lucknow in response to the Indian uprising, reveals that not only were Cashmere and Paisley shawls widely metonymic of the subcontinent, but also that their meaning was shaped by the account of colonial rebellion in that period. Such an emphasis goes some way towards explaining the apparent paradox that Collins employs a pretty, feminine dress accessory to invoke a sense of terror and fatality in Armadale.

The theme of the “red Paisley shawl” is carefully nurtured and developed in the novel. The first narratorial reference occurs as we hear that Lydia is on her way to meet Mrs Armadale, and Brock meets a “neatly dressed woman, wearing a gown and bonnet of black silk and a red Paisley shawl, who was a total stranger to him, and who inquired the way to Mrs Armadale's house” (70; bk 2, ch. 1). While her figure and walk are attractive, the description communicates a sense of unease: Brock “looked after her as she bowed and left him, wondering who Mrs Armadale's visitor could possibly be” (70; bk. 2, ch. 1). The premonition present in the narrative is realised as the visit is fatal to Mrs Armadale, who is said to die of a nervous illness soon after meeting her mysterious visitor. Interestingly, John Sutherland observes that Collins's description, “wearing a gown and bonnet of black silk and a red Paisley shawl,” was added in proof. Sutherland further notes that “these articles of clothing are to feature significantly later as hallmark clues to Lydia Gwilt's identity” (Collins, Armadale 686 n10).

As we know, the figure in the Paisley shawl instigates another death, that of Arthur Blanchard of the Armadale family, who once again sees Lydia “neatly dressed in black silk, with a red Paisley shawl over her shoulders.” Like Brock, he too is struck by “the rare grace and elegance of her figure,” and we are told that, “he felt a young man's passing curiosity to see her face” (79; bk 2, ch. 1). Things turn out quite differently, however: Lydia attempts to commit suicide by jumping overboard the steamer and is saved by Arthur, but Arthur “who had never known an hour's illness since he was a child,” dies within a fortnight of the incident. In both Mrs Armadale and Arthur's cases, the cause of death is deliberately mystified, and in both cases, the woman in the Paisley shawl is the implied instigator. The eerie association is noted by Midwinter and Brock, who begin to survey her movements, and the former, at a crucial point, wonders, “That woman. . .that woman wore a black veil, a black bonnet, a black silk gown, and a red Paisley shawl – Can it be the same? Is there a fatality that follows men in the dark? And is it following us in that woman's footsteps?” (105; bk. 2, ch. 11) The description of the shawl here achieves symbolic proportions, as it emerges as a portent of death, an awful sublime of terror.

Literary forms are dictated and fashioned by current issues. To the original readers of Armadale the Paisley shawl's accompanying discourse of terror would have resonated with the collective memory of the Indian rebellion. In a recent reading, Lillian Nayder has argued that in Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, rebellious wives and daughters were likened to Indian sepoys in that they were “unnatural and ungrateful who typically deserve to be punished for their transgression” (32). The implicit invocation of the Mutiny plays out in comparable ways in Armadale, and it has significant repercussions for Lydia's character.

Despite the fact that the 1857 rebellion was one of many that took place in India, it was unexpected and unforeseen. As Jonathan Small, in Conan Doyle's the Sign of Four described, “One month India lay as still and peaceful, to all appearance as Surrey or Kent, the next there were two hundred thousand black devils let loose” (350; ch. 12). Many Britons, similarly to Small, believed that the Empire was a benevolent project whereby Britain, as the “mother” country, administrated and directed the native population for its own good. In this view, the rebels were seen as an ungrateful band, a handful of “fiends” devoid of any political motivation. Typically, for instance, the Times (10 June 1858), reported how “hundreds of women and hundreds of children [were] massacred at a number of stations throughout the country with a ferocity which seems to have been innate in the perpetrators.” The criminalisation of the Indian rebels sometimes met with resistance but most attempts to view the rebellion leniently were considered unpatriotic, as Lord Canning's mocking nickname “Clemency Canning” indicates.Footnote ¹²

If we see Lydia's Paisley shawl as being symbolic of the East – her history in the novel poses a similar dilemma comparable to the account of the vexed Indian sepoy. Lydia is depicted as a hardened criminal who poisons her husband and who actively plans other homicides; but there is also an undeniable logic, a humanistic appeal that props her characterisation. Mrs Oldershaw taps into this alternate account when she advises Lydia that,

Oldershaw's version of Lydia's past introduces the question of “gratitude” and the attached narrative of “treachery” – the same concerns that haunted the British during the Indian rebellion. Significantly, in Oldershaw's account it is Lydia, rather than Allan or Mrs Armadale, whose claims to justice have gone unheard. As Oldershaw explains in the space of a few pages, “Mind, I don't dispute that the old lady's heavy debt of obligation, after what you did for her in Madeira, is not paid yet”; “after all the miseries and the dangers you have gone through” she continues, “If [the son] takes after his hypocrite of a mother. . .Judas Iscariot has come to life again” (159;161; 163; bk. 4, ch. 1). Clearly, the enumeration of the wrongs committed against Lydia is praiseworthy here in its recovery of the unfortunate history of a vulnerable 12-year-old who was first exploited and subsequently abandoned. Sutherland has suggested that her exploitation in the Armadale household was also sexual (xvii). Lydia then corresponds to, and forms a parallel with, the difficult and ambiguous predicament of the Indian rebel whose representation was defined by a discourse of violence that also successfully worked to obscure their real reasons for rebellion. As Patrick Brantlinger observes in Rule of Darkness, “blaming the victim” was a common pattern that supported all imperialist rules.

Lydia's shawl, as a metonym for India, is also remarkable for its specific colour. British dominion was marked in red in Victorian cartography, which goes some way in explaining why Collins clothes his heroine in an overtly conspicuous red shawl, when most of her actions call for secrecy. Maps marked in red also formed a common narrative in Indian discourses. According to the historian Stanley Wolpert, the warrior king of the Punjab, Raja Ranjit Singh is said to have cautioned that “sab lal ho jayega!” (“all will go red one day”) pointing at a Company map (108). In Flora Annie Steel's “Mutiny” novel On the Face of the Waters (1897), a native servant muses how he had that “sneered with others in the current jest that the maps were tinted red – i.e. shown to be British territory – by savings stolen from the sepoy's pocket” (31; ch. 3). Red, of course, was also the colour of violence and spilt blood – as best evident in Arthur Conan Doyle's title A Study in Scarlet. At a time when colonial rebellions formed a pressing concern, Lydia's shawl contained associations of British imperialism and the attendant rebel violence. As Brantlinger insightfully points out, 1857 was a “red year” that called for a “red revenge,” as titles of several Mutiny novels demonstrate (200).

IV. “This, That and the Other”

A focus on Lydia's shawl raises a number of questions: as a Briton, why would Lydia want to support a colonial rebellion in which she should naturally side with the British? The key context here is of class. While it is true that she is British (“Gwilt” is a Welsh surname) and in those terms clearly belongs to the “imperial” race, it is also true that the labouring and the poorer classes were sometimes denigrated in racial terms, as best demonstrated in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861).Footnote ¹³ Given this history, John Barrell's exploration of Britain's relationship with the East in terms of a triangular model – involving class and race - offers some useful insights. Barrell introduces a three-cornered model of what he calls “this, that, and the other” in which the Self and Other are polarities, but where the middle category of “that” is of the “pariah” or outsider within the Self. Thus while the East is seen as a threat and an Other, rather than forming a binary, Barrell offers a triangular model in which additional divisions within the Self are acknowledged. “There are the cities of London and Westminster; there is the East End; and there is the East,” he explains: “There is “this”, and there is a something hostile to it, something which lies almost invariably, to the east; but there an east beyond the East, where something lurks which is equally threatening to both” (10–11). For Barrell, the threat of “Orientalisation” (which is simultaneously a conceptual category in terms of power-play, as well as evocative of the colonised East) is articulated through a range of symbolisms represented by material objects such as the “turban” or “opium” associated with the subcontinent. The use of these objects (operating as forms of Orientalisation) also simultaneously refers to a weakening or loss of socio-political power defined by a distance from the dominant centre.

Barrell's model is especially useful in understanding the role of Lydia in Armadale. She easily fits into the middle category of “that,” as she is explicitly “Orientalised” in both senses of being socially marginalised as well as through her adoption of Oriental commodities (her use of opium or “drops” and the Paisley shawl).Footnote ¹⁴ My discussion however, resists the somewhat static stance of Barrell (where the points of the triangle form a fixed structure of power), to suggest that the middle position, simultaneously defined by its proximity to and distance from the Self, actually contained a dynamism, and, in that process emerged as expressive of subversive power.

For Barrell while the Self and Other are defined by a clear antagonism reliant on spatial and political “distance,” it is also significant in terms of an abstract “power nexus” where proximity to the powerful centre is considered desirable. I would suggest that in this respect, the middle position emerges as an interesting site; simultaneously oppressed and oppressing, it is a space where, it would seem, ideological loyalties are suspended and undecided. Functioning within a model of “triangulation” (where two entities team up against an increasingly less powerful third), Barrell's conception of “that” therefore can subversively regulate the power of the Self. The location of “that” in such a view develops as wielding the utmost power – inasmuch as it has the influence to tilt the very basis of opposition defining the centre and its oppositional Other.

It is also the case that the middle and “undecided” category (where we have placed Lydia) has the power to choose a model of belonging – in this case, either the Self or the Other. According to Homi Bhabha, the pariah always expresses a desire to imitate the authoritative Self. Yet it is also possible that instead of being repelled, the middle category could be attracted to the Orient – an espousal through which it would seek to differentiate itself, to finally display itself with Orientalism as a form of rebelliousness (reiterated by the East's recent history of violence).

Bhabha has famously contended that “imitation” or “mimicry” of the colonised formed an important agency, in which the nature of “imitation” – of being the real self, “but not quite” – could be immensely subversive (123). In Armadale, Lydia's Paisley shawl, by virtue of its being an imitation shawl, suggests a sense of attempted replication or mimicry (of being the “real thing” and yet not quite) and thus explains itself as a site of rebellion against the existing social order. It is possible then, that if the imitation shawl in Britain appropriated Indian “designs” and executed them within a domestic arena, it also carried with it a distinctly recalcitrant and refractory discourse, which was in some ways, quite significant for the less privileged at home.

The way in which the Indian rebellion did not always generate a negative response at home, for instance, has been highlighted in the archival research of R. J. Morris, who demonstrates that although Ireland took an active part in imperial practices, a section of the Irish nationalists found the Indian Mutiny (against the English as they saw it) very attractive.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, Lillian Nayder contends that “not only did racial conflict in India expose class differences in England,” it also highlighted “the sense of division at the heart of the national enterprise of empire” (Unequal 101). In support of her argument, Nayder has drawn attention to the fact that in Collins's early novel Antonina, or The Fall of Rome (1850) the Roman response to Gothic aggression was mixed rather than uniform.

The complex framework of class representation and its links to the Indian Mutiny demonstrates that the Paisley shawl in Armadale permitted Collins to simultaneously caricaturise working-class experiences, and, to critique those very typecasts. The shawl's inherent links with India also made it possible for Collins to raise questions about Britain's imperial role, and the varied significance it held for the marginalised classes at home.