Summary of "The White Man's Burden"

Link

Above is Shefali's summary of "The White Man's Burden," the poem by Rudyard Kipling.  This poem was published about the same time that Heart of Darkness appeared in Blackwood's Magazine.

The picture above is of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, the calvary unit that he commanded in Cuba.  About three years after this picture was taken, Roosevelt became President of the U.S..  He succeeded William McKinley who had been assassinated. 

What is Colonialism?

It's easy to confuse orientalism and colonialism (and imperialism), so I thought that I would complement my entry on orientalism with an entry on colonialism. 

By the way, the picture above is a still from the 1984 film A Passage to India, an adaptation of the British writer EM Forster's novel.  This novel is set during the time when India was a British colony struggling to become independent.  In the scene pictured above, the Englishwoman Adela Quested (the sometime fiancee of colonial civil servant Ronnie Heaslop) is traveling to the Malabar Caves.  She is riding with Dr. Aziz; later she will falsely claim that he tried to rape her in the cave.  This will result in a trial and Dr. Aziz's humilation.  Ironically, Adela was initially very sympathetic towards India and its people.  For more information about this movie and a clip from it, see this link:

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/37349/A-Passage-to-India/overview


To distinguish among the three terms...orientalism, imperialism, and colonialism....

Orientalism (that is, the meaning that literary critic Edward Said has popularized) is more about how Westerners interpret the East.  In other words, orientalism is the belief that Westerners are better able to interpret the East and Easterners and that Easterners cannot interpret or represent themselves on their own.  Orientalism leads to Westerners' interpreting the Other to suit themselves. 


Imperialism and colonialism, on the other hand, are political and economic terms.  The former, imperialism, refers to one country's political, economic, and sometimes cultural domination over another.  Colonialism, the latter, refers to the practice of settling a country as the British settled in America (before we became independent), India, or their territories in Africa.  However, the British were not the only colonizers.  The Romans, the French, and the Spanish, to name three nationalities, colonized various regions.  For more information about this distinction, see this link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/

This timeline from the University of Iowa will give you a broad overview of how many nations were involved in colonialism:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~c016003d/Resources/Imperialismtimeline.htm

Or you may prefer these statistics from Mt. Holyoke:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/colonies.htm

Otherwise, the timelines can be fairly overwhelming.  Below is one professor's timelines that cover the British Raj and India's struggle for independence:

http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/indiatml/indiatml3.htm

http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/indiatml/indiatml4.htm

Here is the BBC's timeline for Africa.  Note that it begins in prehistoric times.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1624_story_of_africa/page96.shtml

Below is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's timeline on the Guinea Coast, an area that includes some of Nigeria.  It covers arts and culture as well as politics and economics, but it seems to be the most detailed and authoritative timeline that I've seen:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/10/sfg/ht10sfg.htm

Finally, here is a timeline on the Congo that covers both the colonial era and independence:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/hhanson/241/congotimeline.html

The BBC's timeline is more detailed:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1072684.stm

Even if we focus on the settings of Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, ignoring every other former colony, there is still much to investigate on this topic.  I will conclude by making one more distinction.  First published in 1898 (in serialized form), Heart of Darkness is a colonial novel since Conrad wrote it at a time when Belgium still occupied the Congo and Britain had a considerable empire.  Conrad himself lived in the Congo for a very short period.  Things Fall Apart, on the other hand, is a post-colonial novel even though Achebe wrote it in 1958, just *before* Nigeria became independent.  Achebe is from the colony that became Nigeria, and even though the novel is set in the 1890s, he depicts Okonkwo from the perspective of a member of his ethnic group (Igbo).

For more information about post-colonialism, see this link:

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html

As this article's author states and the example of Things Fall Apart demonstrates, we use the term post-colonial a little more loosely than one would imagine.  However, it is still a useful term, and a distinction between Conrad's perspective and Achebe's must be made and maintained.

Almayer's Folly

I think I know what one of my summer projects will be....to read (and reread) more of Conrad's novels.  This week I read his first novel, Almayer's Folly.  I wish that I had been able to find a picture of one of the covers, but I couldn't find one that was the right size.  The picture above is from the Earth Hope Action Network's site and shows one of the rivers that run through the island of Borneo.  Below is a map as well to show you where it is.

Here is a map of the island itself from Orangutantrop, another conservation site.

I think that I have probably included enough about the setting of Almayer's Folly. 

This novel is the story of Almayer, a Dutchman who has lived all of his life in the colonies.  (He was born in Java, a part of Indonesia, which was then a Dutch colony.)  At the time the story begins, he is a middle-aged merchant whose ambitions have always gone astray.  In fact, he had married his wife in the hope that he would inherit her foster father's considerable wealth.  (He does not.)  He is waiting for a younger man, the son of the sultan from Bali, to return from an expedition.  This expedition, he hopes, will give him enough money to leave Borneo for the Netherlands.  He fantasizes that he and his beautiful daughter, Nina, will enjoy Europe...and that he can leave his wife behind in the colonies.  Dain Maroola, the younger man he is waiting for, on the other hand, has fallen in love with Nina and wants to bring her with him to Bali.  Nina loves him madly, and her mother is more than happy to spoil Almayer's schemes.

Below is a blogger's photograph of a Balinese wedding:

In some ways, Almayer's Folly is a very modern novel, especially if you are used to reading 19th century British novels like Jane Eyre or Pride & Prejudice or David Copperfield.  Almayer has failed at life, and the narrator makes it clear that his neighbors laugh at him, take advantage of him, or both.  His wife, a Filipino, is clearly contemptous of him even as he looks down at her in a passive aggressive way.  Nina is much more sympathetic towards her father, but she has chosen to align herself with her mother, in part because of the way she was treated as a young girl by Europeans.  Nina is also very resilient, and I really like the way that Conrad depicts her as skillfully rowing here and there as she needs to. 

In 2004, there were plans for a film version of Almayer's Folly.  It hasn't made it to imdb.com, but here are some links to stories about this production:

http://www.balifilm.com/almayer.htm

http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Saturday/Columns/2454977/index.pda

http://www.lebrocquyfraser.com/index/film.php?id=8&status=4

Apparently it is still in development!

Reading Heart of Darkness Continued

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Above is a picture of the Thames River at dusk.  Because Heart of Darkness begins and ends on the Thames, I thought that this image would work quite nicely.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism is actually almost twenty years old, but it's a useful introduction to the book and to ways of reading it. 

Twenty years ago (the late 1980s) literary studies was undergoing a great change as ways of reading and writing about literature became more systematic and self-conscious.  This resulted from the (relative) popularization of literary theory.  Literary theory predates the 1980s, of course, but during this decade theory became more and more important to literary studies. 

Before I go further, I want to emphasize that I am reviewing this book because Heart of Darkness is complicated.  There is no one way to read it.  Moreover, Conrad's style can be difficult because he is evoking the atmosphere of the Congo and its psychological impact on Marlow (the original narrator).  Also, Conrad wrote at the end of the 19th century, a time before film and the internet.  His work truly is "betwixt and between"...between older, more elaborate novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens & others like Thomas Hardy *and* later, more direct novels by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald or impressionistic novels by Virginia Woolf.  When I first read Heart of Darkness (in a course on the 19th century British novel), I remember being shocked at how short this novella was.  It looked very different a few years later when I read it in a course on Conrad and then again when I read it at the beginning of a course on the modern British novel. 

Heart of Darkness: A Case Study focuses on five different theories that were popular at the time (1989).  These theories are psychoanalytic (focusing on psychology), reader-response (focusing on the reader's response to literature), feminist, deconstructionist (attempting to take apart the text and discover its structure & contradictions), and new historicist (placing the text in its historical and cultural context).   If this book were to be revised today, I suspect that deconstructionism and reader-response theory might be replaced with queer studies and post-colonial studies.  Here is a link to an essay that takes a more post-colonial approach:  http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/conrad/pva52.html  This situation reminds me that there is no one way to read a piece of literature.

The book actually begins with a short biography of Joseph Conrad and an introduction to his work.  I'm going to save time here by linking to a general biography:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jconrad.htm

What's most important to know about Conrad is this.  He was Polish at a time when Poland did not officially exist because it was ruled by Russia and Germany.  (He grew up in the Russian Empire.)  English was his third or fourth language, and he traveled the world as a sailor before becoming a writer.  At first, his writings were not popular, but they became popular and even influential.  Many later writers admired his work and the view of the world expressed in it.

By the way, like many 19th century novels, Heart of Darkness was first published in a magazine over three issues.  Here's a link to a college's web site that has this version:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/darkmenu.htm

To finish, I'd like to mention what each section focused on in Heart of Darkness. 

The psychoanalytic reading interprets the novel as Kurtz and Marlow's inner journey.  Kurtz falls victim to his desire for power, but Marlow comes away with greater self-knowledge.  This section was written by Frederick R. Karl who also wrote a biography of Conrad, but he does *not* talk about the connections between Marlow and Conrad.  Yes, there are connections!

Adena Rosmarin's section on reader response in turn faces the reasons why Heart of Darkness is difficult for many readers.  Specifically, there are gaps in the narrative and therefore places where the reader has to decide for him/herself what is going on and why it is important.  Conrad's refusal to tell the reader what to think appealed to readers who lived through World Wars One and Two.  WWI, in particular, disillusioned many who fought in it and lived through it.

For more information about WWI, see this site from the BBC:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/

The presence of a feminist reading of Heart of Darkness may surprise you.  Or does it?  In this section, Johanna M. Smith (one of my husband's professors at Indiana University) uses feminist theory to examine Marlow's narrative and his self-justifications about the Company, the Congo, and the women he encounters along the way.  These women include his aunt (who convinces the Company to hire him), Kurtz' African lover, and his European fiancee (his Intended whom Marlow visits at the end of the story).  Interestingly, in the 19th century, a popular type of book was the collected biographies of women.  A number of these women went to Africa, India, and elsewhere in the British Empire as missionaries, and the collected biographies encouraged young female readers to see missionary work as an ideal career.  In practice, most young women could not become missionaries, but these biographies ultimately encouraged them to go on to other careers in the US and the UK.  For more information on these collective biographies and their impact on women, see my review of Prof. Alison Booth's How to Make It As A Woman:
http://ncgsjournal.com/szlyk.htm

Now you know the other side of the story...as Paul Harvey says!

In a deconstructionist reading, J.Hillis Miller argues that Heart of Darkness is something of a parable, a story that appears to be about realistic, everyday events but reveals a hidden, cosmic truth.  He also examines the ways in which Conrad's novel is apocalyptic, that is, about the end of time.  (Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now had come out about ten years earlier.  I know that I first thought of Heart of Darkness as the novel that Apocalypse Now was based on.)

Brook Thomas' New Historicist reading places Heart of Darkness in its historical and cultural context.  Thomas also notes Conrad's thoughts on history and the extent to which a novelist is also a historian.  Conrad, the literary scholar argues, "felt that 'the reality of forms and observation of social phenomenon' in his fiction [produced] more truthful histories than those of most historians" (Thomas 239). 

In your opinion, what are the most important elements of Heart of Darkness?  Why?  Which of the five perspectives outlined above seem most useful to you?

Reading Heart of Darkness

 It's always interesting (and fun) to look at the covers of different books.  Above is a cover of the 2002 edition by Hesperus Press, a British publisher. 

In the same year, Oxford University Press published an edition of Heart of Darkness (and other tales by Conrad) with this cover.  Its editor is Professor Cedric Watts of the University of Sussex.  My professor for the 18th & 19th century novel tended to prefer Oxford UP's editions. 

This edition is from Penguin and, as you might guess from the words in the orange border, dates from the turn of the century (20th to 21st).  Penguin has made available a plethora of great novels in relatively inexpensive and durable paperback.  The editor of this version is D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, a professor from a university in Sri Lanka.

I like this image that appears to be a cover of an Ipod version.



Now I'd like to look for some older editions or possibly editions in other languages.

Now I've hit the jackpot!  Here is a picture of a cover from a Signet edition from the mid-20th century.  Unfortunately, the author of the web site where I found this picture did not include the date of the edition, but I would guess that this cover may be from the 1950s.  Although the picture appears to be aimed towards a more popular audience, the author of the introduction is Alfred J. Guerard, a noted scholar of Conrad's work and an early psychoanalytic critic.  Hmmm...things were different in the old days!


I'll close with an image of an English-language edition sold at Amazon Japan's site and an image of the edition that I used to own!  Honestly, the picture right above looks more like a painting by Constable (a British painter) than a picture of the Congo!

What do these covers have in common?  How are they different?  Do any seem like they might be influenced by Apocalypse Now?  Which may have been influenced by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's reading of Conrad's novel? (See below for link.)

http://www.cis.vt.edu/modernworld/d/Achebe.html