from the Keough-Naughton Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Irish Research Council. Taylor has taught English and Irish Studies at Notre Dame, University College Cork, and Boston College and has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eire-Ireland, Tulsa Studies, Persuasions, and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Her research specializes in eighteenth-century studies, Ireland, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.
Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830, and reported the following:
Page 99 is part of the chapter on Flax, which details the steps in the eighteenth-century Irish linen manufacture, Ireland's sole and most important industry in the century. It takes part in my wider analysis that the introduction of linen as a proto-industry in Ireland contributed to Britain's paternalist model of Irish colonialism: namely that British influence could improve and civilize Irish character. The discussion on page 99 focuses on industry improvements to make the linen bleaching process more efficient, specifically the addition of alkaline chemicals like sulfuric acid. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the whiteness of Irish linen became an increasingly important selling point, as the addition of alkaline solutions streamlined the industry's final step of bleaching flax. Although sulfuric acid ostensibly improved the bleaching process in comparison to older, more time-consuming processes involving buttermilk, the acid ultimately altered and damaged flax's naturally brown fibers at the molecular level. As I write on page 99: "When flax is bleached, when it sheds its brown oils in response to an oxidizing agent, it loses some of its matter and is permanently, irrevocably altered--a fact that implicitly extends to ideas about white fabric's correlative cultural ideal: purity" (99).Learn more about Irish Materialisms at the Oxford University Press website.
Yes, the Page 99 Test does work for my book. The example displayed on page 99 (bleaching flax in the linen manufacture) effectively demonstrates one of my central arguments: that material details metaphorically correlate to wider socio-cultural processes in Britain's colonial wheelhouse (in this instance, bleaching flax and cultural cleanliness). This page marks an important step in the book's wider story, which moves between coins, linen, mud, and pigs. Page 99's discussion exemplifies that the way materiality was treated in Ireland speaks to the ways the Irish character was colonized under a British government. Readers jumping to page 99 might be surprised, but they would get a sense of the book's new materialist methodology--of reading the metaphoric resonance of real, material details--and this new methodology's relevance for Irish studies.
Irish Materialisms argues that small material details mobilized big ideas in colonial Ireland. On page 99 the two extremes of this paradigm come together: the smallest material object discussed in the book (a molecule) and perhaps the biggest or most controversial idea in the argument (race). In the pages that follow, I move from discussing to the whiteness of flax linen to the deemed necessity of "cleansing" or "whitening" the Irish character, as expressed in British ideology, from its lazy, slovenly, "piggish" nature to the civil, white, and implicitly more "human" ideals of English society. That Irish flax could be treated with outside forces and bleached into whiteness implicitly said the same of Irish character: that it could be whitened, Anglicized, and improved through sometimes violent processes. Thus, the way objects were discussed in colonial Ireland mattered in powerful ways, as something as small as a flax molecule can articulate. As I argue throughout the rest of the book, reading matter deeply not only helps us better understand the functionality of colonial stereotypes, but it also guides us to retroactively read Irish colonial resistance with and through those same materials: coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs.
--Marshal Zeringue
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