72 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
predicted it before he even opened his mouth. Slag. He doesn’t even
want to look at me any more, that’s how bad it is” (p. 65). Clearly, the
outburst she imagines her father making is saturated with the same
antipathy to otherness we have seen exhibited in various degrees of
intensity by Dorothy and others in the community. But the degree
of anger with which the utterance is made, with its grotesque pre-
sumption of sexual obligation to her own ethnic group, connotes a
provocative link between the extremely conservative values of xeno-
phobia and the unpalatable impulses associated with incest.
Phillips therefore appears to suggest that the desire for England to
remain unchanged follows an impulse that is, like incest, unhealthy
and dangerous (although it should be noted that England has of
course experienced numerous waves of immigration over the last
two thousand years at least). In his collection of short essays, A
New World Order , Phillips critiques the kind of incestuous image
of a “pure” England as a “mythology of homogeneity [... that... ]
excludes and prevents countless numbers of British people from
feeling comfortable participating in the main narrative of British
life.”^95 We could also note here the parallels that such an essentialist
conception of identity and origins presents with Gilroy’s critique of
those rigid identity politics that are more fixated upon the genetic
“roots” of individuals than on the “routes” (or physical and cultural
journeys) they experience in their encounter with modernity.^96
In Dorothy’s case, the notion of a “pure” English identity is a
myth that she, at least on some psychological level, appears to have
endorsed and invested herself in emotionally. Indeed, attempting to
subscribe to this “myth” no doubt contributes to her failure to feel
attached to the England she sees changing around her. The per-
ceived gulf that then emerges between this mythical temporality of
a “pure” England and the ever-shifting present eventually leads to a
chronic sense of isolation and the onset of psychological illness—a
deleterious “double consciousness” we also witness occurring in Eva
Stern and “Othello.” One can also observe similarities between the
insular, essentialist mode of thinking that Dorothy has partly inher-
ited from her father and the exclusive and racist politics of Rudy
Williams in Higher Ground. Indeed, although committed of his own
free will, Williams also engages in incest, having had sex with his