Read an Excerpt

Empire and the Animal Body

Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction

Wimbledon Publishing Company

OTHERNESS AND ORDER

Imperial Adventures

At the outset of his 1980 Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, Martin Green summarises the political investments of adventure fiction:

[T]he adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were, in fact, the energising myth of English imperialism. They were, collectively, the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night; and, in the form of its dreams, they charged England's will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer and rule.

To Green, adventure constitutes a meeting point of literature and politics. Tales of derring-do in foreign lands reflected and promoted Britain's developing colonial interests and burdened the 'light reading of Englishmen' with some heavy ideological baggage. Far from a discovery of the postcolonial moment, this textual politics was an overt and self-conscious commitment for many practitioners of adventure fiction, most notably in the second half of the nineteenth century when the height of the British Empire saw a proliferation not only of sporting texts, but, connectedly, of imperial adventures. The poet and distinguished Indian civil servant Alfred C. Lyall, writing in 1894 of the 'expansion of British enterprise' across Africa, the South Sea Islands and India, commented that 'the Novel of Adventure [...] is drawing copious sustenance from these outlying regions'. Comparably, in a survey of Literature of the Empire (1924), the literary historian E. G. Salmon anticipated Green's conclusion as he addressed the political undercurrents of adventure, rather more flamboyantly, in a rhetorical question: 'How far have action and thought been inter-related? To what extent have the pen and the printed page fostered or supplemented the daring of the sailor, the soldier, the statesman, the settler?'

Central to this relation of thought and action was an emphasis on the association of national destiny and character formation, especially with a view to encouraging the kind of virtues and disciplines necessary to success in Salmon's inventory of imperial vocations. Commonly mixed in with this in adventure fiction are depictions of evangelical Christianity as a vital component of Britons' sense of their empire's civilising mission and an aspect of the wider schooling of a predominantly male readership. As Salmon expressed it, boys 'gain most of their information, apart from what they are taught at school, from the stories which they read; and this fact lends a new responsibility for the fiction which is produced for them'. The genre was understood, therefore, as more than just fictional entertainment. Andrea White in her analysis of Joseph Conrad's engagement with the 'adventure tradition' maintains that 'adventure fiction, like travel writing, was perceived as primarily factual, reliable reporting within a narrative enacted by fictional or semi-historical characters'. Geographical and historical details as well as more specifically vocational information on the practicalities of life overseas emphasised these stories' ideological importance; the sense that they are somehow 'true to life' lending authority to their proimperial didacticism.

Consequently, adventure fiction is a key site for investigating the strategic formations of colonial discourse. Nonetheless, studies of the genre have been few and far between with critical works generally confined to the same handful of 'classic' texts (and, indeed, considering the variable literary quality and sheer quantity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adventure fiction, a measure of neglect is hardly surprising). Such prolific and popular figures as Henty and Ballantyne have received scant academic attention and Fenn none at all; Paul du Chaillu, a figure widely celebrated and vituperated in his lifetime, has stimulated just three recent full-length articles and a sprinkling of brief paragraphs and occasional footnotes in longer works on Victorian exploration. Haggard studies in comparison have been relatively abundant if rather limited in range: King Solomon's Mines and She in particular attracting a steady flow of scholarly articles from a range of theoretical positions, most regularly gender and postcolonial studies. But although Gerald Monsman's monograph H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier (2006) has to some degree extended the scope of Haggard research beyond these core texts, the vast majority of his more than sixty works remain entirely untouched by scholarship. Buchan, the most accomplished literary craftsman of these authors, has suffered a similar fate to Haggard. The Thirty-Nine Steps and Prester John, for example, have remained consistently on the academic radar while the majority of his texts have slipped off screen, although an edited collection John Buchan Reassessed (2009) has expanded Buchan scholarship considerably. Joseph A. Kestner's Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915 (2010) meanwhile has added a welcome theoretical gloss to reflections on the form as a whole, but for the most part with attention restricted to the same narrow corpus of texts: Ballantyne's The Coral Island, Stevenson's and Conrad's romances and the usual Haggard suspects.

In approaching a literary form that seems to correlate directly with Britain's imperial interests, there has also emerged a tendency among some scholars to stress an overarching simplicity that serves to remove the necessity for close textual analysis. Linda Dryden, for instance, claims that:

Imperial romances represented simple escapism: its appeal lay in the ability to transport its readers away from everyday concerns and to immerse them in uncomplicated exotic romance. It was pure escapism, laced with patriotic overtones and a zeal for imperial adventures.

Dryden's insistence on the escapist appeal of the romance, at first 'simple', then 'pure', leads her to speculate an 'uncomplicated' exoticism that jars with many of postcolonial theory's most influential and perspicacious readings of colonial discourse. Colonial engagement with the exotic through encounters with the stereotyped racial other, for example, surface as anything but uncomplicated in Homi Bhabha's Lacanian analyses of the fault lines in colonial orthodoxy. The zeal for escapism that Dryden identifies in the imperial romance in this light evokes a far more complex experience than she appears to realise and one that raises a number of important questions concerning the relation of romance and colonial power.

Clearly, adventure fiction serves not only to recruit its readers into their imperial duty, but also offers them, Dryden's view reminds us, a readerly satisfaction, the chance to escape momentarily into a more exciting world. The ideological imperatives ('patriotic overtones') of the texts coexist, despite pretensions to factual veracity, with a deliberate fictionality that hinges on a psycho-geographical dichotomy: the escape from here to there, from drab domestic confines to exotic expanses. As such, romance is the locus of a series of fantasies that merge, at least to some degree, with questions of environment: a sense of the opposition of places, usually the urban homeland and the wild colonial frontier. Indeed, the journey from the one to the other, and often back again, is commonly (though not always) the structuring movement of the imperial adventure. Necessary to a full appreciation of the literary tradition behind this spatial duality is a brief consideration of the different terms that Green and Dryden deploy to refer to largely the same group of texts, the explosion of frequently (but not restrictedly) empire-themed adventures for boys that began in the 1830s with the novels of Captain Marryat and developed through the remainder of the century and into the next in the work of such figures as Mayne Reid and W. H. G. Kingston, in addition to the figures central to this study.

'Adventure' and 'romance' have often been used interchangeably by practitioners and critics. The overlap between the terms is clearly substantial, although there is also a tension between them that illuminates some of the form's complexities. As one of romance's most important theorists, Northrop Frye, remarked, the 'essential element of plot in romance is adventure'. 'Adventure', then, describes the fundamental characteristics of 'romance' and suggests a synergy between them that may be sustained through comparison of Frye's précis of the formula of romance with Green's outline of adventure. To Frye, romance consists of three stages, a 'perilous journey', a 'crucial struggle' and the 'exaltation of the hero', a structure which evokes the key ingredients of Green's somewhat dryer résumé of adventure: 'In general, adventure seems to mean a series of events, partly but not wholly accidental, in settings remote from the domestic and probably from the civilised [...] which constitute a challenge to the central character.' From these synopses, it is clear that imperial expansion is perfectly suited to depiction as romance/ adventure. The sense of departure, struggle and the ultimate glorification of the hero provided imperialists with a readymade imaginative representation of themselves as virile, virtuous and victorious: as Green suggests, 'To celebrate adventure was to celebrate empire and vice versa.'

A notable dissenting voice from the critical association of the terms 'romance' and 'adventure', however, is that of C. S. Lewis, an embattled defender of romance in an era he felt was hostile to it. In an essay 'On Stories', Lewis expresses dissatisfaction with novels with too great a stress on 'excitement'. Taking Dumas' The Three Musketeers as his example, he bemoans the absence of 'atmosphere' and 'weather', concluding '[t]here is not a moment's rest from the "adventures": one's nose is kept ruthlessly to the grindstone. It all means nothing to me.' But while the plural 'adventures' may well indicate an overemphasis on fluctuations in plot, adventure in the singular, as a mode of writing represented here in imperial adventures, often (though not always – Henty being a notable exception) relies equally on the kind of atmosphere Lewis finds lacking in Dumas. To further complicate matters, both 'romance' and 'adventure', and the tropes and conventions they describe, extend well beyond the output of Victorian and Edwardian adventure novelists. Green's study of adventure considers such canonical figures as Defoe, Scott and Tolstoy in contrast to which boy's own adventures work, he suggest, 'at a lower artistic and cultural level'. Similarly, while romance is commonly applied to the works of Haggard, Ballantyne et al. it also refers to an extensive and longstanding body of literary endeavours, of which the imperial romance is only one, relatively critically marginal facet. Indeed, Barbara Fuchs' introduction to the critical idiom Romance makes no mention of the nineteenth-century colonial fiction that concerns Dryden, charting instead the more culturally central forms of the genre in classical, medieval and Renaissance romance. In agreement with Green's summation of the literary deficiencies of imperial adventure fiction, Fuchs is also keen to underscore a conception of romance as an artistically inferior form, beginning her study with an epigraph from Margaret Doody in which romance is described as a term used to 'allude to forms conveying literary pleasure the critic thinks readers would be better off without'. Frye asserts in similar vein that 'Romance is older than the novel, a fact which has developed the historical illusion that it is something to be outgrown, a juvenile and undeveloped form.' Rather than a discouragement to imperial romancers, this apparent, and to Frye illusory, literary naivety is a key part of its appeal, announcing the suitability of romance for the youthful readership that constituted the next generation of imperialists. It also evokes an ostensibly straightforward, uncomplicated masculinity that emerges, though as we shall see in following chapters problematically, as a core theme of imperial romance.

Importantly, 'adventure' has etymological associations that resonate with empire and particularly with an economic discourse of financial speculation. As peter Hulme explains:

In one form or another the term has had a continuous existence from the twelfth century to the present day to refer to certain kinds of investor, originally 'merchant adventurer' – anyone investing in overseas trade – more recently 'adventure capitalist', the asset stripper who occupies in contemporary populist demonology the place of the early eighteenth-century stock-jobber. yet the interest of the word obviously lies in its overlap of the financial and the colonial, the worlds of Lloyd's lists and John Buchan, the common element being risk. It might be said that the 'pure' adventure story, which has to take place outside metropolitan Europe and preferably in as remote an area as possible, reached its apogee as the tentacles of European colonisation were at their greatest reach in the late nineteenth century.

With capitalism, in Robert young's words, as the 'determining motor of colonialism', adventure's twin significance as romantic narrative and entrepreneurial endeavour highlights the literary form's expression of imperialist ideology. Trade often features as a background to and at times as a driving force of adventure narratives, from Haggard's gruesome tales of the professional ivory trader Allan Quartermain to the gentler speculations of sandalwood traders in Ballantyne's South Seas. More far-fetched depictions of colonial riches in King Solomon's Mines or Buchan's Prester John, for example, have often been read in reference to imperial economics as vindications and celebrations of the profit motive that make use of romance with one eye on revenue. The geographical structure of romance/adventure is a movement into a space of opportunity, of untapped resources available for settlers and speculators. Adventure's educational purpose, then, is in part to provide a framework for exploitation of foreign lands; a function that relies as much on the dissemination of factual information as on a broader and at times fantastically imagined sense of economic possibility.

This emphasis on the factual, however, adds a degree of stress to the apparent congruence of 'adventure' and 'romance' and indicates a paradox at the form's core. While the addition of a didactic educational agenda to the literary structures of romance is vital to the ideological function of such writing, it also produces a disjunction that White seizes on as she develops her analysis of the relation of travel writing and the adventure tradition. 'Because of this association,' she writes, 'the credibility and respectability of the one was also attributed to the other, thus gaining for adventure fiction an influential power that [...] the Romance lacked.' Imperial adventure, then, is reinforced by its connection with travel writing, a textual form that is founded, broadly speaking, on mimetic realism: the collation and representation of ethnographic, geographical and natural historical details in the spirit of a strictly scientific commitment to factual veracity. To enthusiasts for romance, this was far from a pleasing development. Lyall, for example, looking back toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, described the origins of a 'practice, so entirely alien to the spirit of true romance, of verifying by documentary evidence the details of a story'. Later in the same article, he gives a blunter depiction of this trend: 'Realism wages war against romance.' The opposition of these two textual modes is enshrined in dictionary definitions of romance: Dr Johnson glosses the verb to 'romance' as 'to lie or forge', while the OED defines 'romancing' as 'extravagant fictional invention'. 'Romance' by these definitions is a concept fundamentally incompatible with the (supposed) literal truthfulness that constituted an element of colonial versions of the form.

To look at this internal contradiction another way, the documentary candour required by colonial discourse in its romances finds itself haunted by elements of fantasy that combine uncomfortably with these sober intentions. Magic and the supernatural are traditional components of romance and Frye, significantly, diagnoses it as the 'nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream', signalling a potential for psychoanalytic excavations that, rather than going against the grain of authorial intention, are in fact very much in the spirit of some, if certainly not all, authors of imperial romance. psychoanalytic approaches to Haggard, for example, are particularly encouraged by his preference for an artistic technique that disdained editorial refinements in favour of a swift and spontaneous prose that displays, as Monsman argues, 'powerful affinities with dreams or with such early psychoanalytic devices [...] as Rorschach tests'. Accordingly, describing his approach to romance in his autobiography, Haggard wrote that 'such work should be written rapidly and, if possible, not rewritten, since wine of this character loses its bouquet when it is poured from glass to glass'. While Haggard's work is particularly open, therefore, to interpretations that privilege unconscious longings over conscious intentions, his modus operandi is part of an aesthetic that deliberately proposes, in his argument from 'About Fiction', to 'cross the bounds of the known, and, hanging between earth and heaven, gaze with curious eyes into the great profound beyond'30 so that the romance may finally emerge, as he was to phrase it in his diaries, as 'the vehicle of much that does not appear to the casual reader'.

---

Excerpted from Empire and the Animal Body by John Miller. Copyright © 2012 John Miller. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---