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Configurations of Imperialism and Their Displacements in the Novels of Joseph Conrad

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Configurations of Imperialism and Their Displacements in the Novels of Joseph Conrad Configurations of imperialism and their displacements in the novels of Joseph Conrad. Marcus, Miriam The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1665 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] Configurations of Imperialism and their Displacements in the Novels of Joseph Conrad Miriam Marcus Queen Mary Westfield College Ph . D. 9 ABSTRACT This thesis examines certain configurations of imperialism and their displacements in the novels of Joseph Conrad beginning from the premise that imperialism is rationalised through a dualistic model of self/I*otherN and functions as a hierarchy of domination/subordination. In chapters one and two it argues that both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim configure this model of imperialism as a split between Europe/not-Europe. The third and fourth chapters consider displacements of this model: onto a split within Europe and an act of Ninternalu imperialism in Under Western Eyes and onto unequal gender relations in the public and private spheres in Chance. Each chapter provides a reading of the selected novel in relation to one or more contemporary (or near contemporary) primary source and analyses these texts using various strands of cultural theory. Chapter one, on Heart of Darkness, investigates the historical background to British imperialism by focusing on the textual production of history in a variety of written forms which comprise the diary, travel writing, government report, fiction. It considers how versions of (imperial) history/knowledge are constructed through the writing up of experience. In chapter two, on Lord Jim, the hero figure is analysed as a product of the imperial ideology and the protagonist's failure is explored through the application of evolutionary theory. Chapters three and four, on Under Western yEes and Chance, investigate displacements of the imperial model: the failure of an Nenlightenedn Western Europe to challenge Russian imperialism in Poland forms the basis for reading Under Western yEes with Rousseau's writings and a nineteenth-century history of the French Revolution. Chance presents a further displacement of this model in its relocation of imperialist imperatives in the sexual/gender inequalities practised in the mother" country. 2 CONTENTS Introduction Chapter One: Heart of Darkness or What Marlow Didn't Know Chapter Two: Lord Jim Under a Darwinian Lens: A Novel Without a Hero Chapter Three: Under Western Eves or What Is To Be Done? Chapter Four: Bringing Empire Home in Chance. Bibliography 3 Introduction This thesis examines configurations of imperialism and their displacements in the novels of Joseph Conrad starting from the premise that imperialism is rationalised through a dualistic model of self/Notherli which functions as a hierarchy of domination/subordination. It argues in chapters one and two that both Heart of Darkness (1899,1902) and Lord Jim (1900) configure this model of imperialism as a split between Europe/not-Europe. The third and fourth chapters consider displacements of this model: onto a split within Europe and an act of Ninternalhl imperialism in Under Western Eves (1911); and onto unequal gender relations in the public and private spheres in Chance (1914). Within the following exploration the different aspects of power relations will not be presented as simply reducible to each other, as each possesses its own history, particularity and complexity. But each aspect is also related to the others 1) as elements in the texts of one author and 2) as arising out of a particular historical moment. This historical moment provides a frame in which elements that are, at once, discrete and related can be contained. The analysis of the texts chosen is informed by various strands of contemporary literary theory which takes in postcolonial, new historical, feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, as well as applying aspects of textual analysis. These theoretical methods allow a reading of Joseph Conrad's texts which entwines the analysis of the historical particularity out of which he wrote and the historicising of theories current at the time he was writing. This approach avoids one current critical orthodoxy which indicts Conrad for failing to function as a post- World-War-Two spokesman for colonial liberation. This type of criticism tends to read his texts Nprospectivelyu placing him as a postcolonial writer manQué whose writings approach the lineaments of a critique of imperialism, but ultimately refuse what they uncover by relapsing into an 5 (albeit) equivocal endorsement of the imperial system. In contrast to this trend, my purpose is to place Conrad's writing in a retrospective frame, in relation to the intellectual and political developments which informed his lived experience, his creative imagination and its written recording. This involves contextualising Conrad's writing within an emerging historical moment, reading his texts with the writings of his contemporaries and forbears to produce a more radical Conrad than is sometimes allowed for. Conrad's affiliation with a particular intellectual and cultural tradition will be investigated in this thesis by reading each of the four selected novels with one (or more) contemporaneous primary source. These explorations will serve to focus his writing's confluences with and divergences from a "mainstream', dominant ideology and its more radical or oppositional inscriptions. In addition, putting Conrad's texts • into dialogue" with other contemporary texts indicates something of the multiplicity of voices which speak within and against the 'dominant ideology" (I adopt this rather monologic term for convenience sake). Reading Conrad with his (near) contemporaries in a number of disciplines (history, natural science, feminism) therefore produces both a methodology and an historical/cui1ontext in which to "view" his novels. Part of each chapter of this thesis registers the repetition, differently inflected, of the pseudo-scientific theories, arising out of the theory of "natural selection', which were applied to, and formed the basis of, theories about 'race'. Thus I will examine how 'scientific" theory provided the underpinning for an idea of the superiority of the white (European) race, and the legitimation for the colonial/imperial enterprise and its theorising, as well as for the different models of power relations, one of which - gender relations - will be of relevance here. 6 Chapter one, on Heart of Darkness, investigates and. provides the historical background to British imperialism by focusing on the textual production of history in a variety of written forms which comprise the diary, travel writing as "conquest narrative" (in Mary Louise Pratt's term), government report, fiction. H.M Stanley's Diaries (written 1874-77), his account of the founding of the Congo Free State (1885) and Roger Casement's 1904 Report on Belgian atrocities in the Congo are read alongside Conrad's own fictional configuration of imperialism in this novel in order to think about how versions of (imperial) history! knowledge are constructed through the writing up of experience - how the event in some way becomes its recording - and how a particular written form affects what we can know and what we don't (want to) know. Chapter two reads Lord Jim focusing both on the failure of Jim's attempt to take on the heroic persona as presented in the imperialist-inflected. adventure story, and on the related difficulties of genre that the novel displays viz, the famous "split" between the two parts. Following a hint from Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots, I discuss how the "plotting" of Darwin's theory of natural selection in The Ori gin of Species (1859) could be used to "plot" an alternative narrative trajectory in Lord Jim and to ask what are the implications for the presentation of Jim as a different type of hero: an "evolutionary" hero. Is such a construct possible? If not - what is Jim? While the chapter on Heart of Darkness considers the textual production of history in its making, the chapter on Under Western Eyes investigates an historical tradition which has been textually produced and which has influenced the contemporary crisis out of which the novel arises. Homi Bhabha has written that "colonialism is the dark side of Enlightenment" and Under Western Eyes, I suggest, uses the figure of Razumov - doubled by that of Haldin - to probe the history of Europe since the Enlightenment in an effort to understand its failure: specifically the failure of a 7 so-called enlightened Western Europe to prevent an act of u jnternal ll imperialism in the partition of Poland and the subsequent autocratic rule of, especially, Russia. This act is discussed as the first of the displacements of the model of imperialism set up in the first two chapters. This chapter reads Razumov/Haldin with some writings of Rousseau and with Hippolyte Tame's history of the French Revolution (1876-85) in order to focus on the legacy of Enlightenment thinking and revolutionary practice in the making of modern society - a debate to which Under Western E yes makes its vexed contribution. A further displacement of the model of imperialism is investigated in Chance, the central focus of the final chapter. It will be argued that within this novel, Conrad effectively re-locates imperialist imperatives, where the contradictory, unequal structures of the imperial ideology in relation to the colonised subject are replicated (and refracted) in the gender inequalities in British society. Chance is first placed in the context of debates about the place of women in the public and private spheres - Olive Schreiner's and Rebecca West's writings are used as exemplary texts here.
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