From Buchan to Johns: Thematic Variety in Imperial Adventure Fiction
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Academiejaar 2008-2009 From Buchan to Johns: Thematic Variety in Imperial Adventure Fiction Promotor: Dr. Kate Macdonald Masterproef voorgelegd aan de Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte voor het verkrijgen van de graad van Master in de taal- en letterkunde: Engels door Kevin Denoyette Denoyette 1 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I should like to thank Dr. Kate Macdonald for her unwavering support, guidance, and – above all – patience throughout this project. She has been graceful in assisting me as I clumsily encroached on her area of expertise, provided erudite commentary whenever it was needed, and I could not have asked for a better mentor. Secondly, I feel obliged to briefly mention my elephant man, Mark Lillas, for his persistent motivation through the summer months and his enthusiastic – albeit limited – proofreading. Denoyette 2 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................... 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................................................................... 2 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................. 3 1. THE ADVENTURE NOVEL: RISE AND RECEPTION .............................................................................. 4 1.1 AN EMERGING READERSHIP ........................................................................................................................... 5 1.2 AUTHORS AND OPPORTUNITIES ...................................................................................................................... 6 1.3 A NEW GENERATION OF READERS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF EMPIRE ...................................................... 13 1.4 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................ 29 2. BUCHAN AND JOHNS: MEN OF EMPIRE................................................................................................ 31 2.1 JOHN BUCHAN .............................................................................................................................................. 31 2.2 WILLIAM EARL JOHNS ................................................................................................................................. 37 3. LITERARY ANALYSIS: RACE AND GENDER ........................................................................................ 41 3.1 RACE ............................................................................................................................................................ 42 3.2 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................ 68 3.3 GENDER AND MASCULINITY ........................................................................................................................ 70 3.4 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................ 86 3.5 FINAL CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................................... 89 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................................ 94 Denoyette 3 Introduction The main objective of this thesis is to examine the ways in which the imperial idea manifests itself in the fictional writings of John Buchan and William Earl Johns, in an attempt to demonstrate that these writers‘ relation to the idea of Empire is more than mere jingo politics and that their interpretation of the imperial idea is central to their artistic vision and the conception of their works. I also analyse the extent to which their stories adhere to or diverge from an overarching imperial framework in terms of racial prejudice and female subordination. I commence by presenting an analysis of the rise in production of the adventure story between approximately 1880 and 1920, in which I examine the various socio-economic leading up to the expansion of the literary market, while also looking at the shift in morality which accompanied moving from more religious writing to secular adventure. In order to fully understand the functionality and impact of Buchan and Johns‘ writings on society, I also examine the audience these books were written for: the young schoolboys who were to, as Bristow puts it in Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man‘s World, ―turn into the respectable individuals who could absorb the imperialist ethos enshrined in popular culture‖ (183). In the second chapter, I offer short biographies on the lives of both authors, in which I situate both writers as men inextricably embedded in the context of Empire. The final chapter – the largest one in the thesis - is devoted to a contrastive comparison between the works of Buchan and Johns, in which I focus on the issue of race and gender in order to highlight the variety of ways in which these authors experienced and expressed the imperial idea. Following my analysis, I will assess – by contrast – whether their writings can be considered empire or imperialist fiction. Denoyette 4 The Adventure Novel: Rise and Reception 1 HE following chapter aims to shed light on the relationship between popular fiction T and imperial society in the late nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the causes surrounding the rise in popularity of juvenile adventure fiction, the audience consuming this fiction, and the way in which government structures and periodicals aimed to combat the morally detrimental effects of cheap adventure fiction by displacing it with imperial values which were taken to be commendable. The ultimate aim is to come to a better understanding of the impact, in terms of their socio-cultural, educational and political function that adventure stories had on a juvenile audience, to understand how the Empire was understood by its contemporaries and how its writings made manifest the popular imperial idea, which – in the words of John MacKenzie – supported ―a world view embracing unique imperial status, cultural and racial superiority, and a common ground of national conceit upon which all could agree‖ (MacDonald 3). The massive increase in both the production and consumption of pot-boiler1 fiction and a variety of middle-class periodical publishing during the last two decades of the nineteenth century resulted from the combined effect of social, cultural, economic and political stimuli active on a macroscopic level (Keating 3; Green 220-221). This chapter identifies and characterises these influences and explains how their combined effect may affect this radical change in readership and consumption of popular fiction. Subsequently, I discuss the nature of the juvenile audience for whom these types of works were published, and look at the cultural and educational messages to be found in adventure stories. In doing so, I make use of three 1 By which I mean an artistic, literary, or other creative work produced solely to make the originator a living by catering to popular taste, without regard to artistic quality - as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. Denoyette 5 important secondary texts: Joseph Bristow‘s Empire Boys (1991), Peter Keating‘s The Haunted Study (1991), and Martin Green‘s Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1980). I An emerging readership A major influence in the increased consumption of popular fiction from 1880 onwards lies, firstly, in the creation of an audience for such a market, which was brought about largely by ―the marked rise in literacy in the 1860s and 1870s‖ (Bristow 10). Barry Reay‘s study of popular illiteracy in rural Victorian England contains statistics that validate this claim, as his results are similar to data at a macro-level for nineteenth-century England (Reay 93): Fig. 1. Average literacy rates in three Kentish parishes from 1800-1890, analogous with macroscopic findings during the same period. The used metric is signature literacy. As the graph shows, male literacy was relatively stable for the period 1750-1850, Denoyette 6 hovering either just above or below the 50 per cent mark. It was the second half of the nineteenth century which saw a marked improvement in adult male literature, with the rates roughly doubling over a fifty-year period. Female literacy followed a similar course, lagging just below that of men until the middle of the nineteenth century, then improving dramatically [. .] (Reay 93) As illustrated by the graph, there is a steep rise in literacy rates from the 1840s onwards; as a result, near the end of the century, a large majority of craftsmen and labourers had become functionally literate. Together with the fully literate gentry and city professionals and an increasingly literate working class, the foundation for a consumer market was firmly established. Determining specific causes for this surge in literacy is difficult, as the ability to read or write is often a personal and local concept that is hard to link to macroscopic phenomena. Nevertheless, common consensus dictates the existence of a direct correlation between increased literacy and higher rates of urbanization and industrialisation (Houston 199), which were brought about largely