Myths of Authority in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and ’s Headhunter

Victor Kennedy Pedagoska Fakulteta Univerza v Mariboru 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Abstract

Conrad’s Kurtz is often seen as the personification of the “darkness” Marlow discovers, a twentieth century icon of evil that has been used again and again, as in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Kurtz’s evil is his extreme authoritarianism in the name of civilization and “progress,” an evil particularly apt to the century that produced Hitler and Stalin. This view of Kurtz is rather simplistic, however, since Conrad uses him in a complex and ironic way: Marlow, and the reader, are both attracted and repelled by Kurtz. The danger resides in what Frank Kermode defined as the difference between myth and fiction: “Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change.” It is tempting to read Kurtz and his later incarnations as mythical figures of internal evil, as Dracula is a mythical figure of external evil. Heart of Darkness is not, however, a “total and adequate explanation of things as they are,” but a “fiction. . . for finding out,” and the best modern versions of Kurtz follow this model. Timothy Findley is a Canadian novelist whose Headhunter (1993) is a postmodern parody of Heart of Darkness; the title is a pun on psychiatrists, a twist on the idiom “head shrinker,” and an allusion to the heads mounted on poles surrounding Kurtz’s compound in Heart of Darkness. His novel questions the authority we have granted the medical profession in the late twentieth century by examining Kurtz, a psychiatrist who abuses his power over his patients as Conrad’s Kurtz abused his power over the “savages” of Africa.

On a winter's day, while a blizzard raged through the streets of Toronto, Lilah Kemp inadvertently set Kurtz free from page 92 of Heart of Darkness. Horror-stricken, she tried to force him back between the covers. The escape took place at the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, where Lilah Kemp sat reading beside the rock pool. She had not even said come forth, but there Kurtz stood before her, framed by the woven jungle of cotton trees and vines that passed for botanic atmosphere. "Get in," Lilah pleaded—whispering and holding out the book. But Kurtz ignored her and stepped away. (Headhunter 3)

The opening paragraphs of Timothy Findley’s 1993 novel Headhunter combine a journey across time, space, and texts with the enduring power of the myth of Conrad’s corrupt authority figure. It’s a sobering thought that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has become one of the normative texts of the late twentieth century; a glance at the August 18, 1997 issue of the New Yorker magazine, for example, reveals no fewer than three references to Heart of Darkness in three separate articles. Adaptations of the novella are almost too numerous to count. Such rewriting of seminal texts has become a staple of postmodern fiction, and studying the process and results of rewriting a staple of postmodern criticism. I will briefly examine some of the forms rewriting can take, and show how Findley has taken Conrad’s critique of colonialism in Africa and applied it to postcolonial Canada. Finally, I will compare two passages that demonstrate how descriptions of paintings, Kurtz’s painting of his intended in Heart of Darkness and an elaborate revision in Headhunter, capture the symbolic and thematic hearts of darkness in each work. Revisions can take several forms, including parodies, tributes, and sequels. Parodies, or “subversive sequels,” tend to be shorter than the original, while “contemporary revisitations” like Headhunter, in deconstructing character and situation, can be many times the length of the original. Revisions transform the original on several levels, including plot, character, theme, scope, attitude, typology, and language. Plot and theme can be transformed, even inverted, to reflect different ideologies and values, narrative situations, and focalizations; characters can be the same in different situations, or transformed into doppelgängers, as in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. The attitude of the narrative can be supportive or subversive, and the language of the narrative can be modified by style, irony, and voice. A.S. Byatt’s Possession shows how modern texts may “possess” works of an earlier era: as in Mary Shelley’s short story “Transformation,” “transformation” is literally “possession.” Traditional parodies use the same characters, actions, setting, and plot as their originals, but with an ironic tone; sequels and prequels use the same characters and settings, but in a different time and with different actions (a good example of a parodic sequel is Thackeray's Rebecca and Rowena, a comic continuation of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe); revisions may use elements of the same story, characters, and actions, but described from a different point of view; metafictions and postmodern pastiches, such as Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Chatterton, use intertextuality and allusion to create a seamless web stretching endlessly into the past and future; critical analysis is in many aspects an analytical form of rewriting, an abstract recreation of a fictional world; plagiarism is just another form of rewriting; some critics even argue that each reading of a text is a rewriting, just as each performance of a drama is a rewriting, as anyone who has seen Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves as Hamlet can attest.1 Even Heart of Darkness revises earlier texts. In 1890, inspired in part by Stanley's account of "darkest Africa," General William Booth of the Salvation Army wrote In Darkest England:

[W]hile brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa, is there not a darkest England? Civilization, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley found existing in the great Equatorial forest? (11-12)

Booth’s earlier comment on Stanley’s book, “Upon the pygmies and all the dwellers of the forest has descended a devastating visitation in the shape of the ivory raiders of civilization,” (11), and his repetition throughout In Darkest England of the word “horror”, foreshadow the plot, theme, and language of Marlow's tale.2

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The obvious question arises, what are the limitations of rewriting? Rewriting as a term loses its effect if it is expanded too far to include too many terms, such as “reading.” How far is too far? Is a performance of a play, or a reading of a novel, a valid use of the term “rewriting”? Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Parody, for example, provides many valuable insights into postmodern writing, but subsumes nearly all forms of rewriting under the term “parody.” ! 2 See Tim Youngs’ paper, in this volume, for an account of Stanley’s famous and disastrous expedition. !

! 2! Ninety-one years later, Timothy Findley’s Headhunter revises the theme and images of Heart of Darkness, moving the setting from the Congo to Toronto. In her study of Findley’s novels, Moral Metafiction, Donna Pennee notes, “In a reading at McGill University, Montreal (26 November 1987), Findley stated that he ‘never got over [his] first reading of Heart of Darkness’. . . [T]he ‘true lie’ that Marlow tells becomes of as much interest in Findley’s work as the content of Conrad’s novel” (109). Instead of the Congo River, Findley’s journey traverses an inner landscape, the boundary between sanity and madness, as he moves Conrad’s story from Africa to a Toronto psychiatric hospital. Findley’s Kurtz is not a European ivory trader with guns, but a psychiatrist armed with modern mind-altering drugs. While setting and time are changed, however, the main theme, the examination of the effects of the unrestrained exercise of power, is the same. While Moral Metafiction predates Headhunter, Pennee’s title still applies to Findley’s techniques and objectives: Headhunter’s fictional Irish literary critic Nicholas Fagan says “All books are a conjuring. . . a conjuring of humankind and the world that we inhabit. Conrad was not the first to conjure Kurtz—and not the last. He was merely the first to give him that name. . . Kurtz is with us always. . . I don’t think you can blame yourself for that. The human race cannot take a single step, but it produces another Kurtz. He is the darkness in us all” (261). In The Literature of Guilt, Patrick Reilly studies thematic and moral differences between Victorian and modern literature, arguing that Heart of Darkness is one of the pivotal texts in the development of the modern world view, which is based on two contrasting kinds of epiphany. At the climax of Heart of Darkness, Marlow experiences the second kind, the “dark epiphany,” or the realization of guilt. Of the difference between the modern and the Victorian epiphany, Reilly writes: “All shall be well. We are right to be shaken when we quit the protective pinfold of this fiction for the shocking and pitiless disclosures of modern literature” (6). In “Heart of Darkness: a choice of nightmares,” he writes “[T]he voyage of discovery is used to carry complacent European man into the heart of his own filthy civilization and to expose the sham of its masquerading philanthropy” (46). The “choice of nightmares” is the same for both Marlow and the reader: “Great sinner or nonentity: that this choice produced appalling consequences as the century advanced makes it the more important that we recognize it in one of its earliest, most artistically significant manifestations” (46). In other words, we, like Marlow, have to choose between the fiery, active devil, Kurtz, or the flabby devil of the company and the civilization it represents: “The final lesson is not the excellence of the west, but its hubristic enslavement to twin delusions: that it has conquered the darkness within itself and is, accordingly qualified to dispel it in others” (47). Most readers today consider Heart of Darkness to be a critique of colonialism, the opposite of what Susan Rubin Suleiman terms an “authoritarian fiction,” although some critics have seen no irony in Conrad’s narrative voice, no struggle between received wisdom and personal experience in Marlow’s tortured self-examination, and claim that the novella is merely another example of authoritarian western hegemony. Patrick Brantlinger sees Heart of Darkness as “social Darwinist racism ”in which “Conrad's Marlow himself declares that only in the 'red' places on the map of Africa is any ‘real work’ accomplished” (“The Nineteenth-Century Novel and Empire,” 562). “Imbued with social Darwinist ideas about race, both explorers’ [Henry Morton Stanley and James Thomson] journals and the novels that imitate them reinforced the myth about Africa as ‘the dark continent,’ land of fetishism, slavery and cannibalism. . .. In Heart of Darkness Conrad does not challenge the stereotype, but instead challenges—through the powerful theme of Kurtz's ‘going native’—-the assumption that European civilization is superior to African savagery” (573-574). This clearly ignores Marlow’s genuine fascination with the wild rituals during the night of Kurtz’s escape, his admiration for “the barbarous and superb woman” who appears to lead Kurtz’s followers, and his admiration for the cannibals who forbear to eat the pilgrims and himself, a forbearance that surely challenges the stereotype, at the expense of the Europeans.3 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 A similar debate raged over the ill-fated “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1993, which displayed nineteenth-century photographs of Africa that were condemned as racist; the

! 3! In contrast, Mary Kingsley, who was actually there at the time, wrote in her diary:

“[S]tay at home statesmen. . . Think that Africans are awful savages or silly children— People who can only be dealt with on a reformatory penitentiary line. This view is not mine. . . But it is the view of the statesmen and the general public and the mission public in African affairs” (Birkett 174). “I do not believe the African to be brutal, degraded, or cruel. I know from wide experience with him that he is often grateful and faithful, and by no means the drunken idiot his so-called friends, the Protestant missionaries, are anxious, as an excuse for their failure in dealing with him, to make out” (178-9).

Conrad’s Kurtz has become for many the personification of the “darkness” Marlow sets out to discover, an icon of evil borrowed many times, as in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (although Marlon Brando’s Kurtz is a much flabbier devil than Conrad’s). The nature of Kurtz’s evil is his extreme use of authoritarianism in the name of civilization and “progress,” an evil particularly apt to a civilization that produced Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and others. This is a curiously ironic twist, given the fear expressed by other characters in Heart of Darkness, and indeed by characters of earlier novelists, of “going native,” as a euphemism for losing all self-control. A classic case of blaming the victim, this fear is a common theme in Victorian, modern, and post-colonial fiction. Charlotte Bronte’s Mr. Rochester fears “going native” and justifies his cruel behaviour to Bertha as a reaction to her own weaknesses; Jean Rhys gives the other side of the story in The Wide Sargasso Sea; Conrad’s Marlow blames Kurtz’s downfall on his participation in unnamed “unspeakable rites”; and Timothy Findley’s psychiatrist goes native in a different sense by giving in to his delusions of power.4 Seeing Kurtz as such an icon is dangerous and simplistic, however, since Conrad uses him in a complex and ironic way: Marlow is both attracted and repelled by Kurtz. The danger resides in what Frank Kermode has defined as the difference between myth and fiction:

We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive. In this sense anti-Semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth; and Lear is a fiction. Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. (The Sense of an Ending 39)

The temptation is to read Kurtz, in all his various incarnations, as a mythical figure of internal evil, as, say, Dracula is a mythical figure of external evil. Heart of Darkness is not, however, a “total and adequate explanation of things as they are,” but a “fiction. . . for finding out,” and the best of Kurtz’s modern versions follow this model. Timothy Findley is a Canadian novelist whose work continually questions authoritarian hierarchies. Headhunter is a consciously post-modern parody, in Linda Hutcheon’s sense of the word, an ironic inversion of Heart of Darkness. Findley distances himself from the debate about race; he borrows characters and theme from Conrad, but not context, despite the arguably postcolonial setting of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! exhibition closed early; Jeanne Canizzo, the curator and author of the text, was verbally and physically assaulted by “students” outside her classroom. The “students” were never charged or reprimanded; to do so, said the Principal of Canizzo’s college in a television interview, would deny them their freedom of expression. Canizzo, however, lost her teaching job at the University of Toronto. ! 4!Charlotte Bronte’s early story, “A Leaf from an Unopened Volume,” set in an African colony, has a frame narrative and includes black rebellion and heads cut off and displayed on stakes (Meyer 52-56).!

! 4! Toronto. His title is a grotesque pun on the psychiatric profession, a twist on the expression “head shrinker,” with an allusion to the decapitated heads mounted on poles surrounding Kurtz’s compound in Heart of Darkness. The novel questions the authority we grant the medical profession by examining a psychiatrist, Kurtz, gone mad with power.5 Findley's novel challenges the reader to deconstruct an already self-deconstructing text. Headhunter inverts the binary pairs of traditional fiction and morality: reality/fiction, authority/anarchy, sanity/madness, good/evil, age/youth, civilization/nature. In the end closure is denied, although the escaped fictional characters return to the book, which is then put away, in an ending that enforces fictionality, intertextuality, and narrative disengagement, reminiscent of the epilogue of the Manager of the Performance in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. In the fragmented reality of Findley’s Lilah Kemp, an ex-librarian and psychiatric outpatient, characters leap out of books and take on a life of their own. As well as Kurtz, Lilah’s escapees include Jack the Ripper and Otto the arsonist, who burns down the library where she works; at one point in the novel she produces for Marlow, another psychiatrist and Kurtz’s antagonist, a pair of tiny shoes left behind by Peter Rabbit. For Lilah, fiction impinges on reality, just as for Findley’s reader the narrative is constantly interrupted by its insistent intertextuality (and for the Torontonian, the destruction of famous landmarks). Headhunter creates a nightmarish world of the near future, like that of Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, in which Kurtz, a megalomaniac psychiatrist, oversees covert experiments with a docility-inducing drug named Obedion. The subjects of his experiments are the neglected children of wealthy parents, who are given complete control over their drugged and passive children (a more initially successful version of Humbert’s dream of drugging Lolita with his purple pills). Findley’s Kurtz follows Conrad’s in the discovery that in the absence of restraint, absolute corruption results. In Headhunter the incongruity of Heart of Darkness reenacted in 1990s Toronto and the incongruity of the coincidence of two competing psychiatrists being named Kurtz and Marlow combine to result in the incongruity of a world of moral inversion wherein the “mad” are moral and the “sane” are immoral. In this absurd world wealthy parents prey on their children, and the government covers up a plague caused by the escape into the environment of a bioengineering experiment, claiming that birds are the carriers of a new AIDS-like virus, and compounding the problem by instituting a program of chemical spraying and poisoning of all animals by “D-squads” (a scenario eerily reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s claim in the 1980s that trees cause acid rain). This is one image of darkness in Headhunter—throughout the novel there is the sound of the pattering of dead birds falling on skylights. Anyone who objects to the official line is diagnosed as mad, locked up and sedated. The symbolic heart of the novel is a triptych painted by one of Kurtz’s schizophrenic patients, entitled The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs, containing images and symbols of death which are viewed with fascination by Kurtz and with horror by Marlow:

The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs was eighteen feet long and painted on three separate canvasses. The centre panel was ten by eight and the others four by eight. It could be displayed, as now, flat from end to end, or it could be shown as triptychs are shown in churches, with the shorter panels shown at an angle. The figures in the painting were gathered in a darkened blood-red chamber, the chamber itself contained and limited beneath a gilded arch6 that spread from end to end of the picture.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5!The same is true of Findley’s other novels, , where God and Noah represent corrupt authority, and Mrs. Noah and Satan are figures of justice and renewal, and , where the army, authority, and heterosexuality are corrupt, and disobedience of rules and homosexuality are morally privileged.! 6!Given Findley’s playful use of allusion, intertextuality, and cultural icons, one wonders if this may be an allusion to McDonald’s golden arches, a comment on the insanity of global acculturation to inanity.!

! 5! In the centre panel, three men sat at a low, white table. One of these men had his back to the viewer—and his was the only figure fully seen. The others were partially obscured by the table itself and by three standing figures—one of whom had both arms raised and with what appeared to be a severed leg—not human—in his hands. The focus of attention was a shallow metal basin into which all six men were gazing. It could not be said they were staring—only gazing, and the feeling this gave was one of casual horror. Lying in the basin was what appeared to be a monkey’s head, partially wrapped in a blood-stained cloth. A large white dog stood in the foreground—bull-like and shark-eyed—its muzzle reddened, presumably with blood. In the left hand panel, a bleeding male torso was suspended from somewhere out of sight beyond the golden arch. Two white dogs, more like pigs than bulls, and hairless as the others, were lying on a ledge that was strewn with golden straw. Below them on the floor, another white dog was nervously pushing its snout towards a human hand that was reaching from the darkness at the painting’s edge. In the right side panel, two more white dogs were seated with their backs to the viewer, yearning upwards in the direction of a metal table on which a young man was stretched in agony. His back was arched and one knee was raised and both his arms were held out to prevent whatever was going to happen to him next. His head, with its eyes filled with terror, was thrown back over the table’s edge towards the two watching dogs. Beyond the table, two men stood in conference— one bending forward to support the raised left leg of the supine figure. At the extreme edge of this panel, the buttocks and one leg could be seen of a departing figure—someone either fleeing from the scene or going away to do the bidding of the others. The whole of the chamber was bathed in red and gold light—fading into a tunnel of smoke and shadows, some of which spilled out almost into the foreground. Later, Kurtz would discover that tar was the medium used to create this darkness. And at the far end of the chamber, visible to some degree in each of the panels, the walls were topped by wooden stakes—each one bearing a white-faced, grimacing human head—severed and bleeding. Kurtz was mesmerized. Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful. It told him there was nothing in the whole world of madness that was not the property of sanity as well. The figures told him that—with their golden skin and their tangible flesh. Their inflammatory nakedness was an open invitation to join in what could only be seen as the beauty of madness—and the gift of power that madness bestows. (70-71)

The triptych echoes and amplifies Marlow’s description of Kurtz’s painting in Heart of Darkness: “Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre—almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torch-light on the face was sinister” (Heart of Darkness 34). Conrad’s symbolism of the blindness of the woman carrying the light of civilization into the darkness is echoed in Findley’s Kurtz, who buys The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs for display in the lobby of the Parkin Institute, the psychiatric hospital (based on the real-life Clarke Institute of Psychiatry) of which he is the director. Patients run screaming from the building. Images in fictional paintings can reflect both social and cultural conditions, as well as characters’ interior states. The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs is an ironic inversion of the kind of painting usually seen in churches, for the viewer is invited not to participate in the suffering of a crucified Christ, but in the depravity of the executioners. The point of view in all three panels is that of an onlooker of, or even participant in, torture. In the right panel, the spectator even shares the point of view of the dogs. The heads on stakes in this painting and the explanation of the source of its “darkness” are direct allusions to Kurtz’s compound in Heart of Darkness, but the gilded arch and standing figures surrounding the supine body on the table combine elements of a medieval torture chamber and a modern scientific laboratory; the bull terriers are literary descendants of Bill Sikes’ companion in crime, Bulls-eye. They are the colour of the “whited sepulchre” in Heart of Darkness, the city of Brussels, one source of the darkness

! 6! of European colonialism. The image of pigs and bulls moves the location from sepulchre to abattoir, although here it is humans, not animals, that are slaughtered. Before the triptych is first publicly displayed, the artist, Julian Slade, explains his motive for painting such a scene: “You will see here savage acts which have been done too long in the darkness. It is my belief they should be done in the light. And to that end—these paintings” (67). As Donna Pennee notes, “Here, the horror is not ‘veiled’ as it is in Conrad’s text. . .” (“The Traffic in Children” 174). The postmodern impulse is to question or negate the hierarchical system of thought that underlies our assumptions about the nature of the world. Like Gary Larson’s cartoon “The real reason the dinosaurs became extinct,” which shows several dinosaurs furtively puffing on cigarettes, Headhunter mocks popular beliefs by showing that science and medicine are still based largely on unproven assumptions, and their codes of behaviour are subject to abuse by unscrupulous and powerful practitioners. Patricia Morley points out that “Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein [are] the archetypal texts for the century” (“A World of Monsters” 39), ironic discourses that questioned earlier beliefs and became the “master narratives” of our age. Findley acknowledges the connection; Kurtz’s assistant, the psychiatrist in charge of administering the docility-inducing drug Obedion to the children of his patients, is aptly named Dr. Shelley. He also, arguably, inverts Kermode’s notion of fiction as a vehicle for “finding out,” showing the amorality of the postmodern penchant for creating fictions for not finding out, in fact, for obscuring: at the end of Headhunter, Kurtz, the corrupt psychiatrist, succumbs to the plague and Lilah returns to her books, but Findley refuses closure of the themes and issues of his novel with the last words, “’It’s only a book,’ they would say. ‘That’s all it is. A story. Just a story’” (440). Mistah Kurtz is not dead, after all; the seductiveness of the myth of power lives on. Like the Bosnian woman interviewed by CNN (16 September, 1997) who claimed that only strong leadership could put her country back together again, we are continually lured by the myth of power in spite of all evidence of its destructive nature, and we continue to need fiction, in every generation, to help us rediscover that what we really need instead is restraint.

Works Cited

Birkett, Dea. “Mary Kingsley and West Africa.” Victorian Values: personalities and perspectives in nineteenth-century society. Ed. Gordon Marsden. London: Longman, 1990. Booth, William. In Darkest England, and the Way Out. London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1890; reprinted 1975, Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The genealogy of the myth of the dark continent.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 166-203. Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Nineteenth-Century Novel and Empire.” The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 560-578. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976. Findley, Timothy. Headhunter. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: the teachings of twentieth-century art forms. New York: Methuen. 1985. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Morley, Patricia. “A World of Monsters.” Quill & Quire 59 No 3, (March 1993). Pennee, Donna. Moral Metafiction: counterdiscourse in the novels of Timothy Findley. Toronto: ECW Press, 1991. Pennee, Donna. “The Traffic in Children.” Canadian Literature No 150 (Autumn 1996), 173-175. Reilly, Patrick. The Literature of Guilt: from Gulliver to Golding.University of Iowa Press, 1988.

! 7! Stanley, Henry Morton. In Darkest Africa; or, the quest, rescue, and retreat of Emin, governor of Equatoria. New York: Charles Scribner, 1890. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Authoritarian Fictions. New York, Columbia University Press, 1983. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.

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