Under Water: a Novel with Critical Introduction
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UNDER WATER: A NOVEL WITH CRITICAL INTRODUCTION A Dissertation by AMBER N. FOSTER Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, M. Jimmie Killingsworth Committee Members, Janet McCann Lucia Hodgson Sarah Gatson Head of Department, Nancy Warren August 2015 Major Subject: English Copyright 2015 Amber N. Foster ABSTRACT Under Water is a literary novel that follows the life experiences of Jess, a solo female scuba diving instructor living and working on Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. She learns of the death of her father on the same day she is responsible for the death of a diver under her care. She leaves the island shortly thereafter, only to return five years later at the disappearance of George, a friend and father figure. In the Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature, Mary Ellen Snodgrass defines utopia as a search for a "good place," or "a longing that haunts the unconscious . [a] desire for respite, a stopping place." Similarly, Jess' search for a "good place" structures her quest make a home for herself in Honduras even after experiences of trauma and loss. The critical introduction to the novel includes two research articles in the field of nineteenth-century women's travel narratives and transnational utopian fiction. The first, "Nation as Utopia in Pauline Hopkins' novel Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self and The Colored American Magazine," takes an intratextual approach to Hopkins' serial utopian novel in order to resituate African American serial texts within a larger network of national utopian thought. The second, "Science, Utopia, and Mary Kingsley's Narratives of Travel in Africa," expands upon imperialist considerations of nineteenth-century women's travel writing to show how Victorian women travel writers deployed utopian discourse as a means to negotiate their gendered subject position. The primary aim for both my critical and creative work is to contribute to ongoing efforts to show how women writers deployed utopian thought as a means to situate themselves within circulating national, scientific, or literary communities. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................. iii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... iv 1. INTRODUCTION: UNDER WATER, TRAVEL, AND UTOPIA .............................. 1 Endnotes ....................................................................................................................... 12 2. NATION AS UTOPIA IN PAULINE HOPKINS' OF ONE BLOOD; OR, THE HIDDEN SELF AND THE COLORED AMERICAN MAGAZINE ............................. 13 Endnotes ....................................................................................................................... 28 3. SCIENCE, UTOPIA, AND MARY KINGSLEY'S NARRATIVES OF TRAVEL IN AFRICA ...................................................................................................................... 30 Endnotes ....................................................................................................................... 50 4. UNDER WATER (A NOVEL) .................................................................................... 52 Part I: Descent .............................................................................................................. 52 Part II: Actual Bottom Time (The Dive) .................................................................... 159 Part III: Ascent ........................................................................................................... 230 5. CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 302 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................... 304 iii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. "Along These Streets were the Shops and Bazaars." The Colored American Magazine, 1. ......................................................... 20 Figure 2. "They Were Probably Far in the Desert when Herod's Soldiers Entered Bethlehem." Reprint of "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" by Luc Olivier Merson, 1880. The Colored American Magazine, 88. ....................................................... 25 iv 1. INTRODUCTION: UNDER WATER, TRAVEL, AND UTOPIA The conventions of both utopian and travel narratives have long been interconnected in the Western literary imagination. Real journeys and imagined ones are structured on a traveler's ability to depart from his/her place of origin, observe a new society, and return to report on what he/she has learned. This critical introduction considers how my own fictional travel narrative, Under Water, negotiates with the conventions of the travel genre through my creative exploration of the utopian aspects of travel. I include two scholarly articles in the field of nineteenth-century utopian studies as an origin story, of sorts: the first looks at how African American utopian novelist Pauline Hopkins' intratextually deployed utopian discourse as a means to imagine the future nation; the second examines Victorian travel writer Mary Kingsley's narratives of travel in Africa through the lens of the conventions of nineteenth-century utopian thought. In revealing both the past and present ties between travel narratives and utopian discourse, I emphasize how utopian thought can function as a means for women writers to work through complex discourses of personal identity, mobility, and nation. The subjective, second-hand nature of knowledge and experience gained through travel has resulted in the travel narrative's reputation as the literature of Empire. As Debbie Lisle explains it, travel writing "reproduces a dominant Western civilization from which travel writers emerge to document other states, cultures, and peoples."1 The continued popularity of travel writing has caused many to ask if it is possible not only to produce anti-colonial travel texts, but to move "beyond imperial eyes"2 in our critical 1 approach to the genre. Justin Edwards finds the recent work by writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Philips as representatives of an emergent form of travel writing, one which "resist[s] categorization"3 by "transform[ing] the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place, and subjectivity."4 Fictional and non-fictional traveler's tales by Western writers remain immensely popular (the recent movie- adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's Wild is just one example), yet the unequal power dynamic between the privileged Western observer and the object, landscapes, and people described remains a point of contention in postcolonial critique. Only recently have critics begun to explore how travel narratives engage with the idea of utopia as a means to both reinforce and subvert colonialist discourses. In The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, Lisle claims that many contemporary travel writers present visions of a multi-cultural, globalized world that are inseparable from a nostalgia for colonized conditions. They invoke "dreams of a future multicultural utopia, and . nostalgic memories of innocent and uncorrupted destinations." 5 In Lisle's view, travel writing "reproduces the same discourses of difference that hold our prevailing view of the world in place,"6 yet she does not circumscribe the potential of the genre to do more to acknowledge cultural difference in future iterations. In his study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's travelogues, Yaël Rachel Schlick criticized the binary nature of many critical responses to women's travel writing, noting that "critics writing about the travel experience of women have navigated between 2 conceiving of women's texts as an antidote to a male-dominated, imperialist genre (seeing a link between patriarchy and Empire), and viewing texts by women as lamentably reiterating all the politically and morally problematic gestures of the colonialist text."7 Along the same lines, utopian discourse in travel writing questions this binary perspective by reminding us of the longstanding historical function of utopian literature as a vehicle for social and political critique. According to Schlick, the "utopian dimension" of travel writing has "[the] ability —due to the liminality of the traveler's situation and of the text she produces —to revise and reimagine the world, to question and destabilize, as Jacques Rancière puts it, what is 'generally known as reality.'"8 If the traveler is by nature a liminal being, able to "question and destabilize," it follows that the utopian aspect of travel narratives grants the capacity to challenge dominant preconceptions about race, class, gender, and nation. My methodology is grounded in recent critical inquiries into the broader applicability of utopian theory to women's writing. In Utopia as Method, Ruth Levitas reworks the idea of utopia as the "desire for a better way of living and being."9 She writes: This analytic rather than descriptive description reveals the utopian aspects of forms