Englishness

                                                                 

What is Englishness? According to StefanCollini, Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at Cambridge and one of the academics who have been thoroughly exploring the issues of national identity and history, it is useful to consider how national identity is constructed to understand the elusiveness of this notion. Collini argues that the members of a nation build a collective identity by sharing some common features which are not characteristic of other nations, in other words, that two components are necessary: commonality and distinctiveness. He also  believes in “English Pasts” and that just one entity cannot be called “the English Mind.”

If one focuses on the elusiveness of this notion, one realises that the elusiveness is in great measure due to the fact that history can reshape one’s national and cultural identity considerably. This issue is, for example, explored in Ishiguro’s novel “The Remains of the Day”, in which he contrasts Englishness as it was before the World War Two with the confusion as to what Englishness is going to represent in the time to come. Ishiguro’s main character, Stevens, had a clear sense of his national identity before the war, but the changes that have come after it, perhaps most significantly the shift of power between Britain and the US, have forced him to redefine himself as an Englishman and come to terms with it.

Furthermore, the perspective is also very important as it significantly influences how one perceives Englishness. It will never represent the same for an English person and one who belongs to another nation. This is something that Forster tries to explain in his metaphor of Englishness as sea. He says how people talk of “the mysterious East” and then states that the West is mysterious itself, even though “the other”, as Said terms Eastern cultures in Orientalism, may look at it in a way one looks at sea from a distance. The point is that it is easy to make judgements about another nation when they are based on superficial knowledge, but if one knew all the not-so-obvious characteristics of that nation one would find it much more difficult to understand and define its nature.

Finally, in this day and age which has brought the phenomenon termed globalization, grasping of what one’s true national and cultural identity is often represents a real challenge. When it comes to defining Englishness, it can be seen as even more difficult if we think of Professor Collini’s definition of national identity. The English language has practically become lingua franca, English literature represents a significant part of the world literature, and on the other side, the English themselves have been under the influence of other cultures, perhaps most of all the American culture. It seems that once quite clear lines of distinction between nations are getting blurrier every day which leads people to perceive some other nation’s nature, and sometimes their own, through  previously established understandings of them which are often more belonging to the past than to the present, and in the case of Englishness these understandings are also often more related to the perception of the upper class and aristocracy than common people as they tend to be more represented in the media.

* These are my thoughts on Englishness based to a certain extent upon the information found in an article in the Economist describing Professor Collini's work.