Flax

Abstract

Abstract Using James Gibson’s concept of affordance, this chapter shows how the eighteenth century’s paternalistic reformulation of Anglo-Irish relations originated in and disseminated through the material process of altering the flax plant into fine, white thread. Female flax dressers and spinners came to be portrayed, like flax itself, as a natural, colonial resource that could be incorporated into the linen industry’s imperial mechanism. However, a new materialist reading of beetling, scutching, and bleaching reveals that flax did not always align with this domesticated ideal. In William Hincks’s plates on the linen industry and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), the material subtext of violence intimates Irish women’s active resistance to industrial control. Likewise, the damaging process of bleaching flax affirms the way in which English marketing of white linen correlated to a congealing racism of English ethnic superiority, as seen in Cottage Dialogues (1811), Sketches of Irish Character (1829), and more subversively in Ellen Taylor’s laboring-class poetry.