by Jeremy R. Strong

The character Caleb Williams comes increasingly to mirror the character Ferdinando Falkland in more obvious ways throughout William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794) until finally becoming so like him that Caleb’s efforts to destroy Falkland also destroy himself. I believe that this fatal mirroring takes place due to, as Andrew J. Scheiber calls it in his article “Falkland’s Story: Caleb Williams’ Other Voice”, “the fateful wedge of Calebs “curiosity”” (259). I will discuss the different ways in which Caleb slowly becomes a reflection of Falkland and finally, how his becoming so like Falkland is the reason that the novel ends in despair for both men.

Caleb Williams seeks to master information in the same way that Mr. Falkland seeks to master social interactions and reputation. Caleb is obsessed with discovering Falkland’s secrets, as Scheiber puts it “Caleb attempts strategically to insinuate himself into his master’s confidence” (261). It is this curiosity and persistence that ends up causing Caleb to suspect Falkland of murder and influences him to let nothing take more precedence than discovering the truth of the matter, as in Chapter 6, when Caleb uses the opportunity of the house fire to attempt to discover the secret Falkland is keeping in the trunk. Caleb narrates that he arrived in Mr. Falkland’s private rooms “by some mysterious fatality” (Godwin 210) and several lines later that he knew “not what infatuation instantaneously seized me” (Ibid). Here Caleb is thwarted in his attempt to have confirmed with physical evidence his suspicions about the guilt of Falkland when he is interrupted by the man himself, who puts a pistol to Caleb’s head and threatens him. However, this interaction is the spark that sets in motion the dangerous game of cat and mouse that makes up the remainder of the novel and also sets Caleb on the self destructive mission of striving to know Falklands mind, a mission that forces him to become more like the object of his obsession than he realizes and as Sue Chaplin suggests threatens to destroy them both:

Falkland’s ancestral home catches fire and Caleb firstly resolves, like a dutiful servant, to rescue Falkland’s valuables. Caleb’s insatiable curiosity, however, turns him instead to a locked chest in a private closet which he believes contains Falkland’s confession to the murder of Tyrrel. Caleb chooses to preserve not the symbols of Falkland’s authority, but the deadly secret that threatens to destroy Falkland and Caleb (122-123).

Simple curiosity (which is one of the most powerful forces in human nature) aside, the psychological reasons that Caleb becomes obsessed with Falkland and Falkland’s power are key to understanding the mirroring that takes place in the novel. Gary Handwerk discusses the importance of understanding the novel in psychological terms in his article “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams”;

“Caleb William’s narrative structure is obviously allegorical; it translates the larger terms and conditions of political justice into the personal relationship of power between Caleb and his master and mentor, Falkland. Recognizing this, however, does not provide a precise answer for just how the allegory works, especially for how Godwin’s choice to foreground psychology and to put issues in moral terms affects the political message (if any) of the text” (944).

            Handwerk here is discussing the relevance of the moral themes in the novel to the overall political message Godwin is attempting to convey in the narrative, but his comment that the narrative structure of the novel is an allegory for the power struggle between Caleb and Falkland is helpful to the purpose of this paper, which sets out to prove that by so attempting to equalize with Falkland “his Master and Mentor” (Ibid), Caleb is trying to use the political system in the same way that Falkland does; Williams in effect becomes Falkland, or at least, a reflection of Falkland.

Before Caleb does become Falkland’s doppelganger though, he goes through a progression of steps in the novel that bring him closer and closer to completing his horrible metamorphosis. And, before attaining an equal footing with Falkland, as Handwerk points out, Caleb “struggles as a righteous individual against the system whose representative or agent is Falkland, but he finds no opportunity for justice within politicized institutions” (945). Therefore, according to Handwerk, Caleb does at least in the beginning of the novel have the qualities of a righteous individual. It is because of the lack of justice in the system that Caleb has to rely increasingly on mimicking the behaviour of his former master. There are numerous examples of key points in the novel when Caleb takes action that I argue may have been inspired by Falkland’s previous behaviour. One of the best comparisons of such points in the novel is to juxtapose the treatment of the Hawkins’s by Falkland as compared to the treatment of Mrs. Marney by Caleb. Mr. Falkland knowingly lets the Hawkins’s be sent to jail and finally to be executed for the crime of murdering Tyrell, a crime we know that Falkland himself is guilty of. This act is cruel and unusual in that Falkland could have saved the men by admitting his guilt; Falkland keeps silent to selfishly preserve himself from the law. In the case of Mrs. Marney, Caleb hears that she is imprisoned due to her unknowingly having provided assistance to a criminal, himself the dreaded Caleb Williams. This becomes remarkably similar to Falkland’s behaviour, as we learn that Caleb does not turn himself in (his doing so would undoubtedly affect her release) but rather chooses his own self preservation (Godwin 369).

Another very interesting example of how Caleb takes his cues from Falkland’s behaviour is exampled by a comparison of the restraint shown by both men. Falkland, despite the threat that Williams imposes, throughout the novel keeps him alive. This is one of the more interesting aspects of the book, as Godwin early on establishes for Caleb and for the reader that Falkland is willing to kill to preserve his reputation. Why then, would Falkland suffer Williams to live, when Caleb is undoubtedly a liability to Falkland for almost the entire length of the novel? I argue that Caleb, tested certainly to the limits of human endurance and with much less to lose than Falkland, (as he, Caleb is already presumed the worst kind of human being) exercises the same kind of restraint in refusing to harm Falkland physically. This is behaviour he has observed of Falkland, that of using violence upon ones enemies only as an absolutely last resort.

If for the purposes of this argument we can see mirroring as temporarily or permanently “becoming like” or “becoming” another person, then the ending of the novel contains this becoming for both Falkland and Williams. Handwerk presents this key moment in terms of the revised ending and its psychological complexity:

In revising the ending of Caleb Williams, Godwin created one of his most brilliant and memorable narrative passages, its psychological complexity intensified by the way that it startlingly reverses the previous momentum of the novel not just once, but twice – first by Caleb’s triumph in court, then again by his sense of the emptiness of that victory (945).

This triumph by Caleb is his finally becoming Falkland by using the same tools as Falkland, the Law and his spoken eloquence, to achieve victory. Likewise, Falkland becomes Caleb as the victim of such powers, his physical weakness perhaps substituting itself for the political weakness that earlier in the novel kept Caleb imprisoned or a fugitive. Then, as Handwerk has pointed out, Caleb is immediately reduced again to a victim, this time mirroring the way in which Falkland’s triumph over Tyrell was really his own downfall.

The final court scene is also important in demonstrating how Caleb has come to mirror Falkland in his mastery of words and argument, both of which are crucially important to the outcomes of the courtroom scenes. Of this, Handwerk writes that:

Caleb’s moving speech manages to chart a third course, one that allows him to maintain his benevolence and impartiality towards Falkland. Even as he accuses Falkland, he vindicates his master’s character and intentions, rebuking his own “folly and cruelty” in choosing to confront Falkland in court and publicize his guilt. (Ibid)

This can be compared with the scene in which Falkland is the star witness at his own trial, and the applause that greets his acquittal is the expression of “rapturous delight” (Godwin 173). Caleb has in effect become Falkland here, by becoming the suspected villain who moves an entire courtroom to high emotion and by doing so achieves victory. Handwerk sees evidence that Caleb’s mirroring of Falkland in this way stems from obsession:

Caleb remains locked in an obsessive identification with Falkland because he can find no place for himself within the historical narrative he has constructed to vindicate Falkland. Rather than becoming an impartial spectator or a reliable narrator, Caleb simply exchanges roles with Falkland in an ongoing ideological spectacle (950).

And further reason to identify the courtroom drama with the two main characters becoming mirror images of each other, is the fact that “Caleb accepts the role of villain in this revised tragedy, re-enacting Falkland’s melancholy mourning for the other as victim and for himself as the unwilling agent of political injustice” (Handwerk 955). And not only do Caleb and Falkland come to mirror each other physically and in their actions, but also they even feel the same way:

“I now see that mistake in all its enormity. I am sure that, if I had opened my heart to Mr. Falkland, if I had told to him privately the tale that I have now been telling, he could not have resisted my reasonable demand” (323). This fault is Falkland’s as well; Caleb’s one remaining accusation is that Falkland likewise failed to trust him: “You began in confidence; why did you not continue in confidence” (Handwerk 948).

There are other ways in which the two characters come to mirror each other, or as Andrew J. Scheiber calls them, other “parallelisms” (256) that “bind Caleb and Falkland together” (Ibid). Some of these “parallelisms” (Ibid) draw the two characters so closely in tune with one another that it is as though Godwin has created a single person, split into two bodies. As Scheiber notes in his article:

In Chapter 1 Caleb spends a paragraph describing the circumstances of his birth and early years, and briefly notes his general interests and inclinations as a child; in Chapter 2 the same is done for Falkland. Caleb then describes, in the respective chapters, his own physical stature and then that of his master (they are both small and by appearance unathletic) (page 2). 

 Some examples of my own of how eerily the two seem to measure up one against the other; in the courtroom scene at the end Caleb begins to rely on his intellectual abilities (Godwin 431-432) the same way that he recalls, in second hand stories of Falkland, that Falkland had done the same in situations such as the early disagreements with Mr. Tyrell (87-90); Caleb mirrors Falkland in his inability or his refusal to find a female partner; Caleb mirrors Falkland by escaping from prison (294), the same way that Falkland had narrowly escaped going to prison (172); Caleb mirrors Falkland by using his powers of conversation when faced with violence, such as in the woods when he is affronted by Gines (301-302) and the other robbers just as Falkland does on social occasions with Mr. Tyrell (80-81); Caleb will do anything in his power to save his reputation, resorting to disguise, other means of employment, trying to leave the country, etc. just as Falkland was willing to kill and let others die, all to save his reputation; Caleb becomes like Falkland in the end when his entire will is bent on crushing Falkland, just as Falklands entire will was bent on crushing Caleb; Falkland becomes like Caleb when he is old and infirm and his body becomes crippled and useless (429-430), just as Caleb was reduced to an inform state both in prison and when beaten by the men in the woods (302); Falkland uses Caleb’s allies against him by spreading word to Laura through pamphlets about his true identity (402). This is very similar to how Caleb tried to use Forrester to his advantage, planning to leave the employ of Falkland (242); Caleb becomes obsessed with repairing his identity, for he does not want to go down in history as a villain, just as Falkland is concerned with his reputation as a great man to a fault; Falkland keeps secrets, hidden in the trunk. Caleb keeps secrets hidden in an anti chamber behind his room; Caleb begins the novel spying on Falkland, and as the novel progresses, the tables have turned and Falkland is the one keeping tabs on Caleb. In all of these ways the two characters become almost as one in the mind and perhaps this is why at the end of the novel, it seems as though neither of the two is truly victorious, as their dependence on each other seems almost that of father and son.

 Having established that the two characters do in fact mirror each other, I would like to discuss reasons why this may be so. Why does Caleb strive in a way to “become” Falkland? What does Godwin accomplish by having this moral twinning occur? Was his intention to show us that reliance on the political engine and the law do not always translate to truth and justice? Handwerk writes that:

Paradoxically, this reading suggests that Caleb’s error is his failure to step outside those circumstances and outside the legal system in order to seek a personal reconciliation with Falkland: “The direct and private confrontation of truth with error, testing the power of truth, is what Caleb should have attempted, but did not (943).

So if Caleb did indeed fail to deal with the situation of Falkland properly by resolving the conflict between the two of them personally and privately, what could his reasons be for doing so? We know that Caleb spends most of the novel in refusal to publicly accuse Falkland of the murder. Indeed, even when imprisoned, Caleb insists only on his own innocence and not on the guilt of his former master. I contend that it is Caleb’s fatal curiosity that drives him onward even in the face of annihilation. Andrew J. Scheiber’s article supports this theory as in it, when discussing Caleb and Falkland and their symmetry he writes of Caleb that “in the third paragraph of Chapter 1 he names the “spring of action which…characterized the whole train of my life”: his “curiosity.”” (256).  He, Caleb, is determined to figure out, through trial and tribulation if necessary, the truth of Falklands past, whether by discovering evidence or by forcing Falkland to a confession through his unbreakable spirit. It is this deadly curiosity that pulls the two characters so closely together. Caleb’s inquisitiveness and his awe of Falkland draw the two together until they are forced to collide in such a way that destroys Falkland and forces Caleb to acknowledge the reflection of Falkland in himself and therefore his similar moral failings. Handwerk’s theory agrees with this summation:

Failing to recognize the allegorical resonance of his own life, Caleb allowed his impartiality to be corrupted by his sense of self and by his emotional reactions to Falkland. Despite his belief in his own purity of purpose, he fell short of an adequate faith in the efficacy of his own appeal to reverse the predominance of power over ethics (948).

And so finally the curiosity and worship that has driven Caleb to the moment of crisis with Falkland has helped Caleb only to realize the same monstrous nature of Falkland as something that also exists within him. Of the novels ending Handwerk writes that:

Its emotional tone makes Caleb’s sympathy for Falkland extremely suspect, for it derives less from a detached, historical understanding of their relation than from a problematic identification with Falkland and even with his power to oppress. As the postscript continues, Caleb virtually becomes Falkland; he inherits his role as ruthless oppressor, passing on to him the role of innocent victim. Caleb sees himself as all that he has accused Falkland of being, a murderer (323) and an execrable criminal (325), even claiming that he should more mercifully have “planted a dagger in his heart”(as Falkland did to Tyrrel) than humiliated Falkland (150).

Also echoing these sentiments and best summing up the purpose of this paper in arguing that Caleb and Falkland end up mirroring each other to the mutual downfall of each other is Sue Chaplin’s conclusion in her article “A Supplement: Godwin’s Case for Justice” about the results of Caleb’s efforts:

Caleb’s eloquent juridical rhetoric does convince the court of Falkland’s guilt, but at the very moment that justice appears to have been done according to the law, Caleb suddenly sees in the defeated, decrepit, dying Falkland the other he has constantly misrecognized. This isn’t to say that Caleb wishes to re-assert Falkland’s legal authority over him, or that Caleb doesn’t deserve his victory over legal tyranny. Rather, it suggests that there is still some remainder here, something beyond the court room, some sense in which justice remains to be done. Caleb finishes in mourning for Falkland (123).

Godwin has created in Caleb Williams characters that reflect the utmost concerns of humanity; truth, justice and the inner turmoil within every person over mortality and legacy. Artfully, he crafted Caleb Williams and Ferdinando Falkland both in turn as hero and villain and skilfully wove their interconnectedness into a compelling narrative. This investigation into the mirroring between the two men has unearthed a correlation between Caleb’s fatal curiosity and the struggle for power that runs as an undercurrent throughout the novel and has proven the negative psychological effect of the associated guilt and its ruinous effect on both men. 

Works Cited and Consulted

Handwerk, Gary. Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb 

            Williams. ELH, Vol. 60, No. 4, Winter, 1993, pp. 939-960. Johns Hopkins 

            University Press.

Scheiber, Andrew J. Falkland’s Story: Caleb Williams’ Other Voice. Studies in the Novel,

 (17:3), Fall 1985, 255-266.

Chaplin, Sue. A supplement: Godwin’s case for justice. European Romantic Review

            Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2008, pages 119–124. 

Barker, Gerard A. The Narrative Mode of “Caleb Williams”: Problems and Resolutions. 

            Studies in the Novel, 25:1, Spring 1993, p.1-15.

Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. Eds. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley. Broadview

 Press Ltd. 2000.

by Jeremy R. Strong

In his article “Forging post-colonial identities through acts of translation?” David Winks contends that Ella’s process of reciting the poetry that motivates the plot of Myal also amounts to the “appropriation of the subject’s body” and also results in a “schism of the subject” (70). Winks points out that this schism is the same type of “manichean dichotomy” that is positioned by Frantz Fanon as capable of causing alienation and splitting or dividing of feelings of loyalty and basic personality (70). I argue here that the division of space between the internal and external of the subject and between domestic and natural environments can be further explored through the prevalence of doorways in the text and that such a reading supports Winks’ argument that Ella is a fragmented personality unable to reconcile the division of her “mind and body” (70). The main difference between my reading and that given by Winks is that while his reading closely relates the experience and practice of language to the project of colonization and to the resistance of it (such as his discussion of when Mrs. Holness decides to speak in Patois or more formal English), my reading focuses on the act of seeing as the access point to resisting dominant narratives but also as a technology of dominance and control. In this sense, I read spectral viewing through doorways as a sort of dissociative act that displaces the subject outward, and set this against the re-orientation or pushing inward of the subject by dominant colonial, patriarchal or similar hegemonic representative forces. My return to an examination of the gaze is conducted here in the spirit of Heather Smyth’s resistance to a pattern for scholarship that relies too heavily on the “liberatory dynamic of creolization” as the dominant mode of examining Caribbean diversity in her article ““Roots Beyond Roots”: Heteroglossia and Feminist Creolization in Myal and Crossing the Mangrove” (2). As Smyth points out, creolization can mask “gender and sexual ideologies” that have operated against women in what amounts to a project of heterosexual dominance (2). Smyth, like Winks, focuses in closely on the narrative and structure of the text; the main difference being that while Winks mostly diagnoses Ella and several of the other characters in Myal, Smyth gestures to a feminist politics of social change. In not ignoring the potential disruptions to personality or the ideologies of sex and gender in Myal, I hope to use literary representations of sight to uncover what remains unseen in the narratives of Ella and Anita’s experience.

Myal is a text that cries out for a multitude of different interpretations, through its occasionally ambiguous use of narrative style and even temporally disruptive alterations to perspective. One consistent aspect of the text however, is its focus on seeing and on being seen. In particular, I believe that the novel focuses on conventional forms of framing viewpoint, such as windows and doors—in a rather unconventional way—as a technological extension or perhaps form of mediation, that displaces human subjectivity, particularly Ella’s. As Tom Gunning points out in his essay “To Scan A Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision” in The Spectralities Reader, “A ghost puts the nature of the human senses, vision especially, in crisis” (216). Ella’s collected sensory experiences, as extensions of her embodiment, are depicted throughout the novel as existing upon the edge of such a crisis. Near the beginning of the novel, Brodber gives the reader immediate reason to equate the doorways and windows not only with Ella’s ability to see and be seen, but also with physical limits seemingly imposed, or at least reinforced upon her. For example, the doorway separating the classroom from the play area outside becomes “Ella’s recess spot. She would go no further than the door when teacher let the class out” (10). Her “standing on the concrete during recess, year in year out” certainly seems representative of the liminal nature of Ella’s mixed heritage, much like that of Antoinette in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, but is also directly correlated with the practices both of seeing and of being seen: the other students and the teachers “stopped seeing her and she stopped seeing them” (10-11). So before Ella has her own encounter with spectral representations later in the text, she literally embodies the specter herself as a liminal schoolyard haunt. Perhaps it is the copious amounts of time spent moulding her body to the contours of the doorway that give Ella unique capacities for seeing and displacing perspective through these types of frames.

Windows also figure prominently in the novel as technologies of observation, behind which the observer can exercise power over perspective that implies direct correlations to gender and sexual freedom. Examples of this come both through Ella’s ability to perceive osmosis happening to leaves through the classroom window, and her frequent and repetitive focus on Peter Pan. The focus of the narrative on Ella’s ability to understand the concept of osmosis as, “the process by which a thin substance pulls a thick substance through a thin cell wall”, seems to imply Ella herself is subject to similar assimilative forces of the racial politics of identity, without directly addressing them (11).

The frequent allusions in the text to Peter Pan are also directly connotative of the window as a technology disassociating Ella from real people. It seems then that the correlation of the window to sexual freedom for Ella is that it implies a limited inward gaze, represented by her ability to see inside the leaf and also into the realm of her fantasy. Her relationship to Selwyn then, should be read in terms of what its fantasy appearance conceals. When Ella first travels to Baltimore, the men available to her are only “adult Peter Pans”, of which Selwyn is a distinct representative (46). Selwyn’s jovial nature proves to be but a thin cover for his colonialist embodiment of whiteness and his project of cultural possession (his play) that finally seem to drive Ella to characterize herself in the third person as a sexual object, a “mulatto mule” (84). The limits to sexual freedom imposed by Ella’s indeterminate racial status can be contrasted with the freedom enjoyed by “lily white, English and high” Maydene Brassington, who moves through the story, penetrating Grove Town without spatial restraints (13), or with Reverend Simpson’s ability to measure and judge the worth and projects of the members of the community, including Maydene, often through his windows. The reverend also has access to cultural memory of “six hundred years ago”, which gives him confidence and phallic power within the community (38). Both Maydene and Simpson notably use windows to gaze upon real people, thereby making the window a technology of association while Ella makes it a technology of disassociation through fantasy. In this case, the gaze implies a sexual power when directed outward and a sexual insecurity when directed inward.

While windows demonstrate the variety of sexual limitations placed upon the characters, the doors in the text are interesting in that there seems to be a gendered limit to the access implied by the separation between inner and outer spaces. An example of the gendering of access is demonstrated through Anita and Euphemia’s horrifying experience of Ole African coming to threaten them with his scarecrow presence in the doorway:

“She saw that the greenish early dawn, the colour of young boiled breadfruit, was coming through the door which was now wide open and that a scarecrow was hanging from top to bottom in the doorway, its arms stretched out so that it seemed as if he were a rugged cross” (40).

The scarecrow in the form of a cross could imply that women are to be kept indoors and that religion is a system of enforcing this particular form of embodied slavery. Immediately after Euphemia sees Ole African, Reverend Simpson tells her “the house [i]s now safe” (41). This focus on marking out domestic spaces as safe, returns attention to the doorway as an inherently unsafe place that leads to the definitively dangerous natural world, at least dangerous in that sense to women. Unlike the window, the space of the doorway can be more readily transgressed; but working in tandem with the windows in the novel, the doorways are a form of technology that can have a disassociating affect on identity. This takes physical form in the text when Anita’s face “changes to that of an old woman and she beg[ins] in her stupor to moan and groan like Miss Gatha” (73). This physical change follows immediately on a description in the novel of the “doors and windows” of Grove Town being closed during the day, something that starves Anita of oxygen (72). Here, Anita is shut out from the safe spaces of the homes of others and so the doorways alter her physically. Anita’s experience seems in direct opposition to the way in which doors solidify male identity; Mass Levi seems able to use doorways to his advantage, shutting his family out of the privy, where through access to text he is able to increase his power (74). Levi is similarly able to pierce the windows of the human eye in ways that simply don’t seem available to Ella or Anita. In Chapter 5, he turns this power on Miss Madeline by staring “silently at her until she lifted her eyes to him”, at which point he is able to completely dominate her and from which point on she averts “her eyes from him” (32). So just as windows and doors prove their capacity for disassociation in the novel, they are perhaps as remarkable for the way in which they allow gender and sexual authority to be reinforced.

In this early investigation, I hope to have shown that the windows and doors in Myal clearly invite the reader to question the construction of identity, not only in terms of the politics of visibility, but also from the perspective of gender and sexuality. This allows for further investigation of the obeah ceremony around which Myal is constructed, as a practice both moved by and through embodiments of sexual and gender politics and requiring for its successful completion both solid and fractured identities.

Works Cited and Consulted

Adams, Michelene. “‘the Half has Never been Told’: Revisioning West Indian History in Myal.” Journal of West Indian Literature 18.2 (2010): 160-80. Web. Accessed February 6th, 2015.

Blanco, Maria Del Pilar and Peeren, Esther, Eds. The Spectralities Reader Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Forbes, Curdella. “Redeeming the Word: Religious Experience as Liberation in Erna Brodber’s Fiction.” Postcolonial Text 3.1 (2007). Web. Accessed February 7th, 2015.

Hutchings, Kevin D. “Fighting the Spirit Thieves: Dismantling Cultural Binarisms in Erna Brodber’s Myal.” World Literature Written in English 35.2 (1996): 103-22. Web. Accessed 8th February, 2015.

Khair, Tabish. “‘Correct(Ing) Images from the Inside’: Reading the Limits of Erna Brodber’s Myal.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.1 (2002): 121-31. Web. Accessed 6th February, 2015.

Maximin, Collette. “”Distinction and Dialogism in Jamaica: Myal by Erna Brodber.” Caribbean Quarterly 46.1 (2000): 46-60. Web. Accessed 7th February, 2015.

Rahming, Melvin B. “Towards a Critical Theory of Spirit: The Insistent Demands of Erna Brodber’s Myal.” Revista/Review Interamericana 31.1-4 (2001). Web. Accessed 7th February, 2015.

Smyth, Heather. “‘Roots Beyond Roots’: Heteroglossia and Feminist Creolization in Myal

and Crossing the Mangrove.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12 (2002): 1-24. Web. Accessed 7th February, 2015.

by Jeremy R. Strong

On January 27th, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. As the years have passed, attention to and interest in events of commemoration has increased remarkably, as it becomes clear that relatively soon, the last surviving witnesses and victims of Nazi directed genocide will pass away. Commemorative stories about Auschwitz and other sites of Nazi genocide, are prominent feature stories in late January in part due to the efforts of The United Nations in 2005 to declare January 27th “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”. I argue that this commemoration both carries on an inarguably important tradition of Holocaust remembrance and also signifies a sort of witness absence panic driven by the nature of the aging population of survivors. In other words, such symbolic annual events, as well intentioned as they are, problematize the remembering of the Holocaust by situating it firmly as event, and not as experience. This is apparent in the emphasis placed upon the “anniversary” of the liberation of Auschwitz, 70 years as of Tuesday January 27th, 2015. Many news reports and historical accounts, by drawing attention to the passage of time between the date of liberation and today, place temporal focus on the tradition of memory itself, rather than on the complex span of time (6 years) during which the Holocaust unfolded upon its most direct victims. This essay focuses on the two extremes of presence and absence in photography in order to help situate how conscientious global citizens can remember the Holocaust without forgetting the individual victims of it. To that end, I find it useful to first examine a sort of hyper-presence that super-cedes the bounds of individuality in subject photography, before draining the art of the photograph of all subjectivity to highlight what is lost between the two forms. In doing so I turn to a very recent image of a Holocaust survivor visiting Auschwitz and juxtapose this image with two landscape photographs examined by Ulrich Baer.

The first photograph requires contextualizing, not only for its concerning generalization of victim identity, but also for the fact that it seems to represent the normal approach taken in media documentation of the memorialization of the Holocaust. The example photograph shown here (see Figure 1) accompanied Rex’s Murphy’s commentary of Saturday, January 31st, when he wrote the following in a short piece for the National Post:

January 27th was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most infamous beyond infamy of the Nazi factories of torment and death. It was here the “blood-dimmed tide” unleashed by Hitler reached its most swollen, where a million Jews went in unspeakable humiliation and pain to their end. Anniversaries, perhaps especially those of the most grim event, provoke recollection, and in the case of the Holocaust in particular are meant to reinforce memories. “Lest we forget” is not an idle injunction. Some things have to be remembered (National Post, Murphy). Murphy’s commentary is itself significantly problematic for its focus on the statistics behind Auschwitz, drawing attention to the “million Jews” exterminated in an all too common quantifying of Auschwitz as an infamously noteworthy event, as though numbers alone are the determining factor. A tendency towards this form of numerical based discourse supresses and limits the individuality and divergent nature of human experience, and, in the case of Murphy’s piece on Auschwitz, completely ignores the survivors, despite the fact that one of them is utilized for the image that accompanies the article, but is nowhere named.

The nameless man in the photograph becomes only a symbol for the memory of Auschwitz as event and not a person who experienced its terrifying landscape and the devastating tortures and humiliations Murphy alludes to. My concern about this issue began to mount when two hours of carefully searching the Internet to learn the man’s name were spent in vain. The only distinct piece of identifying information I was able to find to link to this man’s photograph, was the stock footage numbering of the photo service that owns the image, imprinted in the bottom left corner. The eerie nature with which this photograph inadvertently re-perpetrates the numbering of the survivor is to me the absolute epitome of the uncanny, forcing a sort of cognitive dissonance to take hold of my experience of the kind but sad face of this man as also a spectral representation of the many dead, invisible and unnamed victims of the Holocaust. This figure demands of the spectator the same kind of “responsibility and answerability” implied by Derrida’s theorization of ghostly subjects in Specters of Marx, as outlined by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren in The Spectralities Reader (33). In a sense, this man is a hyperreal figure because he is drained of personal identity, yet represents so much in his standing in for the millions of victims mentioned by Murphy. He carries the weight of the dead in his face, conjured by the words of the article but also the responsibility of representing the countless unseen and never mentioned survivors; he is nobody and everybody all at once.

News media is vast in its expanse and not all writing and documentation about the Holocaust can be specifically survivor oriented of course, but I would argue that the responsibility lies as much with the consumer of media as with its publisher to identify areas of harmful oversight. Just as some reporting ignores the individual, perhaps in the service of “the story”, some is distinctly in the service of chronicling human individuality and recuperating lazy, profit-motivated reporting like that demonstrated by the National Post article cited above. Perhaps the best example is Matthew Fishbane’s January 2014 collaborative project and article, “Soon There Will Be No More Survivors”, published for the online magazine Tablet. The article makes use of a digital presentation featuring photographic portraits of living survivors by photographer Jason Florio and includes simple but candid descriptions of the survivors, as they are now, most of them in their precarious mid-nineties. The stated purpose of the entire endeavour is, as Fishbane indicates, to draw attention to the human beings behind stories of human rights abuse; as the by-line for the project clearly indicates, “We say people must remember theHolocaust in the future, but we’re ignoring its victims today”. As vastly different as Fishbane’s approach is from that of the National Post, the two similarly represent the Holocaust through the presence of the human face and body, up close and surrounded by the markers of human society.

Ulrich Baer draws attention to a very similar problem to that identified by Fishbane, only by using a completely different methodology. In Baer’s essay “To Give Memory a Place: Contemporary Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition” he writes of the way in which the very word Holocaust, “triggers a surge of derivative and familiar mental images, most of which originate with a number of news photographs taken by the Western Allies in 1945 after the liberation of camps in Austria and Germany” (423). The “familiar mental images” that Baer is drawing attention to are most notable in their difference from the landscape photographs that are the subject of his chapter in The Spectralities Reader. That difference is clearly marked for me in the focus of most of these news photographs on three basic types of image: People, living, dead, or about to die; objects infused with traumatic human significance; and remarkable devastation to man-made structures, spaces and cities. A good example of how these types of images make up the most prevalent depictions of war can be seen in Yevgeny Khaldei’s book Witness to History, a famous compilation of war photography in which there is not a single photograph that doesn’t depict one of the types of images mentioned above, if not all three at once. This demonstrates an understanding—if only through the methods of cataloguing war photography—that the human form, or forms of the human, or the human formed, are necessary to contextualize events. This seems sensible at first; after all, how are we to learn from a human past that is devoid of us? However, Baer’s reading of the landscape photographs of Dirk Reinartz and Mikael Levin suggests that it is precisely the tendencies to remember based only on presence that allow us to ignore the illusory experiences of the vanished. The standard for images of spaces that have been marked by mass killings, Baer explains, are “oversaturated referents of ruin: crumbled buildings once built to kill and now maintained and “museumized” for purposes of commemoration; the scraps of barbed wire; the memorial stones” (419-20).

Confronting the standard role that photography plays in the process of witnessing is an important tradition for Baer to mark, before moving on to assert that the photographs of Sobibor and Ohrdruf “force us to see that there is nothing to see there; and they show us that there is something in a catastrophe as vast as the Holocaust that remains inassimilable to historicist or contextual readings” (420). In other words, the palpable absence present in both of these images is somehow more telling of the events of the Holocaust than any narrative, more explicit than any image of nameless starving and skeletal forms and more vastly unfathomable than Rex Murphy’s insistence on victim quantification. The image of Sobibor, as Baer notes, forces us to question, “why does nothing grow in the sandy patches at the front?” (416). I would argue that further to this, the vacant space, retaining only the spectral scarring of human presence, forces us to wonder what doesn’t grow because of the sandy patches at the front. Which lives will never take shape between the past and the present, filled with the joy and with the sorrow that mark our little time on earth? Which families are never to branch out, like the limbs of a tree to press into the thickening forest of the human story? And which individuals will never leave some trace of their presence, never alter the future, never see man walk on the moon, never become dancers, never get divorced or never regret the choices they could never make? These kinds of frustrating and unanswerable questions are all that can be asked in the space of “the photographed void” that expose both historicist and formal approaches to these photographs as “insufficient” (420). These types of questions are not raised by the hyperreal image of the nameless man shown in the National Post or by the more carefully considered individuals in the Florio photos.

Despite the unique, grave and unexpected philosophical access to the Holocaust granted by the landscape photos, they still cannot (as Baer asserts through reference to Hannah Arendt) explain or show “the abyss opened by the Nazis’ crimes” but only “place us in relation to it” (420-21). Viewing the two photographs then, is a sort of displaced experience of traumatic space; displaced both by time (we can’t be then) and space (we are not there), but also by the unconquerable impossibility of the absent experience of the victim. Our experience in relation to an experience that can’t be lived causes the cognitive dissonance that makes the empty landscape fill with meaning. But the various meanings that do occupy this experienced space are traumatic memories of what never was, and so at best, as Baer points out, they are “enigmatic” in recalling “scenes of death and destruction” (421-22). The stake of Baer’s reading of trauma photography’s power to reorient the viewer position in relation to a historical event begs a return to the question of what the best approaches to represent and confront the Holocaust might be given the encroaching reality of the looming disappearance of the “last survivors and witnesses” (422). This is of course a time-sensitive question, and Baer indicates the danger of any impression that “Hollywood creations, national and local museums” and “television”, ensure there will be “very little difficulty in remembering, representing, and communicating the Holocaust” (422). It is exactly the confidence in the accessibility of the Holocaust experience that hides that experience from view, even while the closest access point, the survivors, are living among us all around the world.

With this discussion motivated by the destabilizing absences that inhabit landscapes, it makes sense now to turn briefly to the very nature of landscape itself. Is landscape automatically infused with spectrality through its possession by and of absence, or is there a required precondition or event specific to that space? In the introduction to Part Five of the Spectralities Reader, “Possessions: Spectral Places”, Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren indicate that haunting attaches itself to place through “specific events—often cataclysmic” that have occurred in those spaces previously, a great example being the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that informs much of Anthony Vidler’s essay “Buried Alive” (395). But they also draw attention to a more everyday experience of haunted space, through their example of Freud’s finding “alienation in the recognizable” during a walking tour of Italy (396). Freud marks out his experience, based on the repetition of continually stumbling upon the same red-light district, as uncanny, though no discernible cataclysmic trauma took place there, aside from what he calls the “unintended recurrence of the same situation” (396). It seems then that an uncanny experience of place such as is depicted in Freud’s situation requires some kind of presence to appear first to the person who later experiences the trauma. In Freud’s case, this could be the “painted ladies”, the “narrow street” (implying the close proximity of the buildings) or the “excited” attention (396). In a very similar sense, in his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living among Spectres”, Giorgio Agamben’s insistence on the spectral status of Venice, depends first on the physical presence of a cadaverous Venice (473). He defines the specter as that which is made of “signs, or more precisely of signatures, that is to say, those signs, ciphers, or monograms that are etched onto things by time” (474). But what about spaces whose spectral nature is actually defined by the absence of all of those things, such as the landscapes discussed by Baer? What also do we make of the landscape photograph more generally, that which is void of all human trace save the presence of the camera and everything that such presence is connotative of? Is such connotation the “signature” or “etching” enough to bring us into contact with unintended recurrences of traumatic memories that then seep in and give a menacing quality to landscape absence?

In writing of Reinartz and Levin’s reliance on the landscape tradition more generally, Baer claims “it is the unavailability of referential markers, and not information that could be embedded in historical contexts, that is captured in these images as the truth of history” (423). In other words, trauma could be effectively remembered and honestly depicted by absence, and the most haunting manifestation of spectrality is not that which we can follow or detect through trace, signature or sign, but that which seems to present none, yet nevertheless exists as a palpable absence within a landscape. Baer taps into this idea when he discusses Levin’s father’s war diary and its focus on the fact that there was nothing to see in an abandoned SS camp and that the nothing Baer was seeing, was everywhere (426-7). Nothing is precisely what can draw attention to everything.

The power of traumatic memory to manifest in seemingly empty space, in one sense reveals that a reconsideration of absence might be required, as Baer’s landscape photographs serve as more thoughtful areas of inquiry into the tradition of Holocaust memory than the close up image of the unnamed victim does. As Baer points out, the paradox is “that “landscapes” are never found in nature, but are the products of “our culturally specific ways of seeing” (427), which make them similar to unnamed photographs of Holocaust victims in that unfortunate sense, which in turn demonstrate a culturally ingrained tendency to see survivors as numbered victims. People see landscapes as filled with spectral absences, and this fact alone could bring the spectator into a confrontation with the uncanny. It is important however, that spectrality does not becomes as forcefully embodied in living presence as I have argued takes place through the National Post’s use of a Holocaust survivor as stock image and not an individual. With Holocaust survivors an increasingly dwindling population, the stakes of acknowledging not only their experiences during the holocaust, but during their lives now, have never been higher.

Figure 1: This Image of an unnamed Holocaust survivor accompanied the Murphy opinion piece in The National Post, on January 31st, 2015. Note the echo of the Auschwitz camp serial number on the sash in the watermarking of the source photograph.

Sean Gallup via Getty Images

A member of an association of Auschwitz concentration camp survivors walks through the infamous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ entrance gate after laying wreaths with other members at the execution wall at the former Auschwitz I concentration camp on January 27, 2015 in Oswiecim, Poland. International heads of state, dignitaries and over 300 Auschwitz survivors are attending the commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on 27th January, 1945. Auschwitz was among the most notorious of the concentration camps run by the Nazis during WWII and whilst it is impossible to put an exact figure on the death toll it is alleged that over a million people lost their lives in the camp, the majority of whom were Jewish.

Gallup, Sean. Getty Images. Image No. 462335536. GettyImages.ca. Accessed January 31st, 2015. Web.http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/member-of-an-association-of-auschwitz- concentration-camp-news-photo/462335536?Language=en-GB

 

Works Cited

Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Contemporary Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Peeren, Esther and Pilar, del Maria, eds. Bloomsbury, New York: 2013. Print.

Blanco, Maria Del Pilar and Peeren, Esther. “Possessions: Spectral Places Introduction” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Peeren, Esther and Pilar, del Maria, Eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Fishbane, Matthew. “Soon There Will Be No More Survivors”. Tablet, Tabletmag.com, Jan. 27th, 2014. Accessed January 28th, 2015. Web.

Murphy, Rex. “Rex Murphy: Remembering Auschwitz and the enormity of evil”. The National Post online. Web. Accessed Saturday, January 31st, 2015. <http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/31/rex-murphy-remembering-auschwitz- and-the-enormity-of-evil/>

by Jeremy R. Strong

“Our people have rituals and ceremonies meant to bring us vision. I have never participated in any of them, but I have seen things. I have been lifted up and out of this physical world into a place where time and space have a different rhythm. I always remained within the borders of this world, yet I had the eyes of one born to a different plane. Our medicine people would call me a seer. But I was in the thrall of a power I never understood. It left me years ago, and the loss of that gift has been my greatest sorrow. Sometimes it feels as though I have spent my entire life on a trek to rediscover it.”

 —Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse

The Canadian literary landscape is currently seeing an unprecedented surge in popularity for indigenous fiction that is distinctly decolonial, supported by a vibrant and engaged national readership. Authors such as Leanne Simpson, Richard Wagamese, and Waubgeshig Rice are producing novels that simultaneously operate within the British colonial literary tradition while still asserting cultural autonomy and drawing attention to social injustice. A strong tradition of postcolonial literature, both Canadian and global, has contributed in laying the groundwork for contemporary minority literary art to bring to light some of the injustices of the past and the struggles of the present. This essay will explore one particular conduit that postcolonial gothic writing has helped broaden in the ongoing struggle for voice in a field too long dominated by the white male heterosexual tradition; that conduit is an alternate mode of accessing literary experience and expression through the senses. The western scientific and literary traditions have long focused on the visual as an arena in which science and spirituality intersect, but the critical emphasis—as María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren point out in The Spectralities Reader—has mostly been on “the body’s limitations (and the need to overcome them)” (200). Exploring sensory experience in two texts, Erna Brodber’s Myal and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand, demonstrates that memory plays a key role in informing assemblages of embodied identity, removing many of the bodily limitations imposed by western colonialism. Erna Brodber’s Myal provides readers with a primarily visual experience of early twentieth century colonial Jamaica, while Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand thoroughly tests the limits of the olfactory system against the backdrop of late twentieth century Canada. The two novels fall at different ends of a wide spectrum of twentieth century postcolonial literature; from the bleak and strife-riddled experiences represented through Ella’s fragmented identity in Myal to the projection of resilient and self-reinforcing cultural identity through Artemis in When Fox Is a Thousand. Examining the differing sensory engagements of these two main characters—both how they access memory and experience the world around them—reveals minority feminine embodiments are assemblages capable of vital resistance against the slow march of western imperialism and its advancing of minority cultural genocide. I find fiction the most useful source through which to explore these ideas; as Edward Said writes in his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, “stories…become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the insistence of their own history” (xii). The two novels document different stages of decolonizing embodiment through their sensory incorporation of memory into the assemblages that make up their respective characters. While the field of the visual is both imposed and repurposed through the spectral in Myal, Lai’s novel serves as document of the expanded gothic landscapes made available to contemporary Canadian authors through the sense of smell. 

Before investigating the treatments of the senses in the two novels, it is first useful to establish why using the term assemblage in a postcolonial gothic context is useful. In her book Deleuze and the Postcolonial, Simone Bignall argues that Deleuze’s work is “part of an alternative tradition of Western thought that offers potentially non-imperial conceptualisations of sociability, motivation and self-comportment” (79) and that the Deleuzian assemblage establishes that a body is “not a discrete entity defined by stable boundaries and a set of fixed characteristics; rather, it is an assemblage of components bound into a coherent form, but this bodily consistency is only ever temporary and is always shifting” (83). Understanding Ella and Artemis as assemblages invites investigating memory as one of the primary actants in the always-shifting notion of the embodied subject. Bignall makes a strong case for why one might consider the Deleuzian assemblage (and in turn Spinozan ethics of embodiment) in a postcolonial context:

While one’s identity constantly shifts and transforms according to social context and particular constitutive relations, such becomings are only ever partial and incomplete, since one is never affected all at once in one’s entirety: some continuity of identity is retained. This is true also of cultural encounters occurring with the colonial collision of communities: each body is transformed by the meeting, and old traditions and concepts shift and change as new connections are formed which alter the internal consistency of each body. (88)

What is needed in further exploring Bignall’s use of Deleuzian assemblages for postcolonial theory is to focus in closely on exactly how “continuity of identity is retained” even while “each body is transformed” (88). What first seems to be a paradox is actually logical if these ideas are examined through the lens of memory, as memory can be used to both interpret and drive sensory experience. In the first line of the first chapter of Culture and Imperialism, Said asserts: “appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present” (3). Memory, as a primary method by which an individual directly accesses his or her past, is the primary actant in the assemblage of postcolonial identity; therefore, how a given individual accesses memory and how writers choose to depict such experiences are crucial to dynamic understandings of postcolonial embodiment and the uncanny. The act of remembering, after all, can be thought of in terms of its familiarity. Though one could certainly remember something inaccurately, it is generally assumed that memory channels some former experience, whether direct or indirect. The changeable nature of Ella and Artemis, as well as their shifting understandings of the landscapes they inhabit, make their surroundings uncanny to them and perhaps make them uncanny to the reader. The narratives constructed around Ella and Artemis also bring forth “sublime terror”, such as that discussed by Alison Rudd in relation to Shani Mootoo’s novel He Drown She in the Sea (16). Memory becomes the key actant informing these postcolonial gothic assemblages as: “individual response[s], shaped by national, cultural, historical, political and social influences, to objects or events that arouse […] frightening” (17). The investigation of Myal and When Fox Is a Thousand that follows takes into account the fact that assemblages capable of generating a decolonizing discourse depend in two very unique ways on the senses, which in turn “are subject to the reach of sensory communities across cultures and societies” (Vannini 7).

            In Erna Brodber’s Myal, the visual is both how Ella is persecuted by white and black communities for her hybrid identity, but also the doorway through which she is able to access the spectral realm. Though to some readers the uncanny elements of the text might arouse sublime terror, for Ella they are her only means of escape from the oppressive colonial forces represented by the authority of the Christian churches and by her husband Selwyn Langley. In essence, narrative primacy in Myal is placed upon how individuals are seen and what and how individuals see. Ella in particular has a unique relationship to the visual portals and reflective surfaces in the text, such as the eyes, water, mirrors, doorways and windows. In his book Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy, Neil Ten Kortenaar gives some attention to the focus on the ocular in the novel: “at recess, Ella would often stand at the door of the classroom and ‘stare into space’ (10). Not surprisingly, the solitary child whose gaze turns inwards seeks solace and escape in books” (138). I agree with Ten Kortenaar’s conclusion that Ella suffers from “mental disassociation” driven by her mixed-race status, and that reading could contribute to her fractured sense of identity (138-9). I also feel that Ella’s memories are deeply influenced, if not actively colonized by the stories Ten Kortenaar points out she reads obsessively, such as Peter Pan. However, I think that it might be important, in the context of the same scene Ten Kortenaar reads, not to underestimate what a more nuanced understanding of Ella’s positioning and her seeing could mean not only for her psychological state, but also for her embodied experience throughout the novel.

Ella makes the liminal space of the doorway, “her recess spot” from which position her teachers and classmates “stopped seeing her and she too stopped seeing them” (10-11). But while Ten Kortenaar reads Ella’s tendency to “stare into space” as a form of introversion, I see reason in the text that this “space” could be considered Ella’s access point to the landscape of an alternate reality that denies the colonial project. Her standing in the liminal position of the doorway refuses the indoctrinating mental process of the classroom and the tightly controlled bodily conditioning of the outdoor play yard. There are also indications later in the text that Ella was incapable of properly seeing her inner self when she was younger due to a “gauze barrier” (80). Brodber’s use of gauze in this instance—a medical supply for covering wounds—seems designed to indicate that Ella’s inward eye was blinded in her youth. This barrier, when finally stripped away, allows Ella to thoroughly investigate the construction and partitioning of her various identities and its removal drives her to an outburst of alliterative madness, when she tells Selwyn “Mammy Mary’s mulatto mule must have maternity wear” (84). 

What Ella does see when she stares into the alternate reality I am proposing is the world in which Obeah operates. Even while simplified colonial notions of white and black identity are being imposed on her and causing identity crisis, Ella still seems to have access to what David Howes, in his introduction to the book Empire of the Senses, terms “indigenous sensory values” (11). Howes notes that these values persist in “situations of culture contact (whether colonial or postcolonial)” and that any time period of “great cultural change will be a time of sensory confusion” (11). The novel depicts the world that encompasses Obeah as one that exists in denial of the top down discourse of instruction and diminution assumed by colonial authority. Ella looks across into this world and sees “the scarecrow high in the air walking as if on two roots of cane sugar” and the sight triggers a cultural memory of Ole African that transcends Ella’s individual memory and resonates with that of all the children of Grove Town, who had been “hearing about him for centuries” (55). Selwyn sees Ella’s fear of Ole African as trivial and considers it “delightful theatre”, though “the memory of it” sends “a sharp electric shock through her body” (55). Ella’s experience of the threatening potency of Obeah in the text is echoed by other characters that participate in some fashion in colonial projects and are threatened or harmed for doing so. For example, Anita is assaulted by the mysterious stones while she is practicing her English Major Scales in Chapter 5, but cannot see her attacker, feeling that her highly visible “beautiful fifteen-year-old body” is the likely cause of such an assault (29). Euphemia is horrified when “the sight [of Ole African] dawned on her and she saw that the greenish early dawn, the colour of young boiled breadfruit, was coming through the door” (40). In all three cases, the women are in some way experiencing a form of the sensory confusion proposed by Howes. However, their sensory experiences of seeing are also reflections of the power of cultural memory to inform embodied experience.

As the key actant in Ella’s assemblage, vision-oriented memory proves capable of generating a distinctly anti-colonial discourse through interactions with Obeah in the novel. As Tabish Khair points out in The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, Obeah should be underscored for its otherness and as a “site of potential resistance and hence alterity” to the west, as opposed to Myalism, which is “a site of ‘creolisation’ — by definition, a potential site of collaboration and opposition” (129). In this sense, the novel first gestures towards a more violent decolonial project through the spectral but also physical threat of Obeah practices, though the efforts of the Myalist characters in the text, like Reverend Simpson, triumph as the dominant influence and creolization becomes a stand-in term for colonization. The implications for the female characters of this cooperation with the western world are made quite clear at the end of Myal, when Ella returns to embrace her destiny as a fully indoctrinated western school teacher, a zombie who will create more zombies: “Now with the end of the war about a year old, Ella came back to Grove Town, the same staring person who had lived there before. Only she was now Miss Ella, the new female school teacher […] This time her staring had a clearer pattern” (96). Ella questions Reverend Simpson as to whether or not she is to teach the children that the world is “made up of zombies who cannot think for themselves” and the Reverend turns the question back on her to ask if she has ever “been zombified” (107). This conversation alludes to the fact that although Ella may have at one time been able to access the memory of a cultural tradition more distinctly resistant to colonial projects, she is now, like the other Myalists, thoroughly creolized. Brodber’s text, despite revealing many negative realities for female colonial subjects, does provide an early exploration of embodied decolonial resistance through the ways in which Ella sees the world. Ultimately though, Howes “indigenous sensory values” seem reduced and regulated by the end of the novel, as does memory as actant in Ella as a decolonial assemblage.

While Brodber’s novel demonstrates first the possibilities and then the limitations of the sense of seeing for the decolonial assemblage, Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand serves as evidence of the expanded gothic sensory landscape through its unique use of the olfactory sense. Lai establishes the sense of smell as the primary means by which her characters experience their present environment and also how they remember the past. For example, the character Artemis is boarding a bus when she trips into the lap of the Fox, disguised as an “Asian woman who was growing out her dyed blonde hair” (113). Artemis is sure that she has “seen the woman before” and when Fox helps her up, Artemis thinks “she smell[s] chicken on the woman’s breath” (113). In the wider context of the novel, the chicken smell recalls both an earlier passage depicting cooking in a T’ang Dynasty kitchen, but also the predatory nature of the Fox herself. In her essay “The Witch’s Senses”, in Empire of the Senses, Constance Classen points out that the sense of smell has long been considered “inferior and subservient to the masculine gaze” (70). However, once “brought within the irrational, feminine domain of the witch […] sight was degraded until it resembled one of the lower senses” (76). Though the witch Classen discusses is a western construction that should be distinguished from the Chinese Fox legend, the feminizing and lower ordering of the sense of smell seems common to both traditions. In his book Transgressive Transcripts: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Chinese Canadian Women’s Writing, Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu examines the capacity of the characters to cross such traditional boundaries in the novel, arguing that Lai “constructs an exclusively female/feminine space to accommodate more complex issues of diaspora, history, hyphenation and sexuality” (54). Fu notes that the three tales in the novel are “progressively interwoven” until they are “reterritorialize[d]” by Lai and ultimately serve to break down dualisms (55).  So Lai’s heavy focus on smell throughout the novel likely represents more than just the simple oppositional challenge to patriarchal colonial authority that the seeing in Myal does. This begs the question of how smell contributes to the formation of Artemis as a more complex decolonial assemblage than Ella.

Despite her uncertain romantic life and seemingly unsupportive relationship with her family, the olfactory stimulated memories that haunt Artemis serve as a more potent actant in her decolonial assemblage. These memories are complexly woven into the experience of two other characters in the novel, troubling the ability of the reader to solidify identity as a definite individual form. In The Senses in Self, Society and Culture, Vannini, Waskul and Gottschalk make it clear that: “The embodied self is both the material basis and reflexive outcome of perceived sensations and sense making practices” (85). This makes smelling, scenting and the quality and measure of odor the primary means of connection between past and present in Lai’s work. A decolonial assemblage in this case is also a sort of hauntology—of ancestral or cultural memory—and so this is the primary reason it is logical to measure Artemis alongside Ella. While such a hauntology seems primarily to operate in opposition to the western imperial project, I propose that any assemblage that truly has decolonizing power will also attack the sentimentality of cultural memory. This occurs in When Fox Is a Thousand when Artemis accompanies Eden to his apartment for the modeling session, and he throws an old Chinese garment at her. The garment represents the unpleasant weight of cultural obligation. Artemis feels it “limp and as heavy as a body” (31), as much a burden to her as Ella’s mother’s skin colour is in Myal. Here, smell triggers an unsavory response to cultural heritage when Artemis is exposed to the “stink of mothballs […] strong and poisonous […] The smell of mothballs was the smell of China” (31). In Colin Davis’s “Etat Present: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms” in The Spectralities Reader, he discusses Abraham and Torok’s interest in how the “undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about their distant causes” (54). I argue that the smells of China in the text are exactly where such disturbances are revealed. A decolonial assemblage is a grouping of actants with the collective capacity to resist directed embodiment within a postcolonial context, whether that embodiment is through a forced cultural sentimentalization (in this case perhaps an orientalization) or through assimilative structures.

Artemis and other characters do experience smells that recall China in distinctly pleasant and nostalgic ways in the text. Many intimate moments with lovers are set against pleasant odours of the cooking of savory meats like chicken, juicy vegetables like Daikon, and spices such as cinnamon. Artemis is also placed in positions in which the smells of colonialism are presented to her. These smells are depicted in more neutral terms, and Artemis is given the opportunity to reserve judgment of them until she has decided if they represent a positive presence or not. One of these key moments comes when Saint drapes his jacket over Artemis’s shoulders during the rally for the victim’s of the Tiananmen Square massacre (89). This garment could be read as symbolic opposite to the ancient Chinese smock that stinks of mothballs through its capacity for olfactory memory replacement. The smells of Saint’s jacket are connotative of a western-capitalist-patriarchal narrative, reminiscent of motorcycles, Wall Street, and cowboy culture. Lai writes, “Someone draped a heavy black leather jacket over her shoulders. It was lined and the leather was soft and smelled of cattle, tannin, and fashion magazine men’s cologne” (89). When Saint drapes Artemis in the jacket, he guides her away from the rally, through “an ocean of dark heads”, as if to show her that she does not have to be Chinese, he can protect her from embodying that identity (90). Artemis ultimately rejects these overpowering smells of the west, even though she and Saint later have a one-night stand. The sexual release she achieves with him is described in terms reminiscent of monotony and Artemis allows her mind to drift to thoughts of her former female lover. When her and Saint make love, they rock “back and forth like a wooden horse with stunned eyes” and at the moment or orgasm, Artemis is on the verge of sleep, her focus on the “sagging futon, preserving the curved indentation” of Diane’s spine (122). The “stunned eyes” are interesting, as they recall the moments in Myal when Ella is described as staring; rather than indicate vapidity or self-reflection however, the staring for both characters indicates the ability to access another plane of cultural knowing. But unlike Ella, Artemis—perhaps through her less constrained sexuality—becomes a decolonial assemblage resistant to both the forced embodiment of her cultural history and also resistant to efforts of assimilation into dominant western culture. Her interactions with Saint are useful markers of the dynamic and powerful role the olfactory plays as actant in the novel, versus the limitations placed on the ocular in Myal. It is therefore significant that in the same scene that Artemis simultaneously accepts and rejects Saint as lover, the identical smell of mothballs is “for the first time […] comforting”; and also significant that immediately following this one night stand Artemis decides to travel to China (122-23).

In her essay “Questions of Voice, Race and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand”, Charlotte Sturgess asserts that border crossing is “clearly a political practice in Lai’s writing, not just a way of combining cultural attributes” (190). This is both a literal and figurative crossing of borders in the novel, from the opening travels of Artemis and Mercy across the US-Canada border to the ability of the Fox to embody human form. When it comes to the border between eastern and western culture however, the frequency and intensity with which smell allows Artemis to adapt her embodied reality without succumbing either to oriental romanticism or to western imperialism make When Fox is a Thousand a more optimistic text for the place of minority women in the colonial landscape than that presented in Myal. Ella’s access to collective cultural memory seems limited to the visual sensory experiences that are condoned and directed by colonial enterprise, itself focused on the categorization and cataloguing of bodies based on appearance. Nevertheless, as I have argued, earlier in the novel, Ella is able to maintain a connection with a form of cultural memory that operates outside of colonial history through her spectral seeing. That she is frightened and even threatened by what she sees influences her embodied reality; and her dissociative state—although a threat to her own well-being—also makes her a decolonial assemblage capable of derailing patriarchy by denying Selwyn the submissive, creolized partner he desires. Both texts can be read as document of decolonial feminine assemblages, within which sensory-guided memory operates as an integral actant. Jaishree K. Odin best captures the use of reading postcolonial texts through the lens of certain characters as decolonial assemblages in the book Hypertext and the Female Imaginary. Odin writes: “works that hold together different, sometimes contradictory worlds make [assemblages] effective in conveying experiences of minority cultures that unfold at the pressure points of the social and the political” (104). Accessing sensory driven memory as an important actant in decolonial assemblages invites questioning what other actants might coalesce to inform postcolonial gothic embodiments and how those embodied realities might subtly resist contemporary and ongoing legacies of the colonial project.

Works Cited and Consulted

Adams, Michelene. “‘the Half has Never been Told’: Revisioning West Indian History in 

Myal.” Journal of West Indian Literature 18.2 (2010): 160-80. Web. Accessed 

February 6th, 2015. 

Bignall, Simone, and Patton, Paul. Deleuze and the Postcolonial. Edinburgh: Edinburgh 

UP, 2010. Ebook. Web. Accessed March 27^th, 2015.

Blanco, María Del Pilar and Peeren, Esther, Eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and 

Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Malden; Massachusetts: 2013. Polity Press. Print.

Brodber, Erna. Myal: A Novel. London: 2014 (1988). Waveland Press. Print.

—. Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. London: New Beacon, 1980. Print.

Colebrook, Claire. Deleuze. London: Continuum International, 2010. Ebook. Web. 

Accessed April 11^th, 2015. 

Davis, Colin. “Etat Present: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms” in The Spectralities 

Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Peeren, Esther and Pilar, del María, eds. Bloomsbury, New York: 2013. Print. 

Forbes, Curdella. “Redeeming the Word: Religious Experience as Liberation in Erna 

Brodber’s Fiction.” Postcolonial Text 3.1 (2007). Web. Accessed February 7^th,

2015.

Fu, Bennett Yu-Hsiang. Transgressive Transcripts: Gender and Sexuality in 

Contemporary Chinese Canadian Women’s Writing. New York: Rodopi Press, 2012. Print.

Howes, David. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford; New York: 

Berg, 2005. Print.

Hutchings, Kevin D. “Fighting the Spirit Thieves: Dismantling Cultural Binarisms in 

Erna Brodber’s Myal.” World Literature Written in English 35.2 (1996): 103-22. Web. Accessed 8th February, 2015.

Joo, Hee-Jung Serenity. “Reproduction, Reincarnation, and Human Cloning: Literary 

and Racial Forms in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.1 (2014): 46-59. Web.

Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts From Elsewhere. 

New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Print.

—. “‘Correct(Ing) Images from the Inside’: Reading the Limits of Erna 

Brodber’s Myal.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.1 (2002): 121-31. Web. Accessed 6th February, 2015.

Kortenaar, Neil Ten. “Literacy in the World not Ruled by Paper: Myal by Erna Brodber” 

in Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print. 

Lai, Larissa. Salt Fish Girl. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002. Print.

—. When Fox is a Thousand. Toronto: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995 (2009). Print.

Lai, Paul. “Stinky Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa 

Lai’s Salt Fish Girl.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 33.4 (2008): 167-87. ProQuest. Web.

Maximin, Collette. “”Distinction and Dialogism in Jamaica: Myal by Erna Brodber.” 

Caribbean Quarterly 46.1 (2000): 46-60. Web. Accessed 7^th February, 2015.

Morgan, David. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of 

Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Print.

Odin, Jaishree Kak. Hypertext and the Female Imaginary. Minneapolis: University of 

Minnesota Press, 2010. Print.

Odjo, A. Lassissi. Between the Lines: Africa in Western Spirituality, Philosophy, and 

Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Oliver, Stephanie. “Diffuse Connections: Smell and Diasporic Subjectivity in Larissa 

Lai’s Salt Fish Girl.” Canadian Literature.208 (2011): 85,107,201. ProQuest. Web.

Rahming, Melvin B. “Towards a Critical Theory of Spirit: The Insistent Demands of Erna 

Brodber’s Myal.” Revista/Review Interamericana 31.1-4 (2001). Web. Accessed 

7^th February, 2015. 

Rahv, Philip. Literature and the Sixth Sense. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Print.

Roberts, June E. “The Location of Spirit Thievery” in Reading Erna Brodber: Uniting 

Diaspora through Folk Culture and Religion. Connecticut: Praegar Publishers, 2006. Print.

Rudd, Alison. Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and 

New Zealand. University of Wales Press, Chippenham, 2010. Print.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 

1994. Print.

Schab, Frank R. “Odor Memory: Taking Stock.” Psychological Bulletin 109.2 (1991): 

242. Print.

Smyth, Heather. “‘Roots Beyond Roots’: Heteroglossia and Feminist Creolization in Myal

and Crossing the Mangrove.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12 (2002): 1-24. Web. Accessed 7^thFebruary, 2015.

Sturgess, Charlotte. “Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of 

Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand.” Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák, Eds. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Print.

Vannini, Phillip., Waskul, Dennis D., and Gottschalk, Simon. The Senses in Self, Society, 

and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

by Jeremy R. Strong

            The quest for the Sankgreal in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is very much Sir Galahad’s show. The quest begins with his arrival at court and ends with his ascending to heaven. Sir Launcelot plays a pivotal role in the tale of the grail, however, as he does in the whole of the Le Morte. The journey of Sir Launcelot to achieve the Sankgreal often parallels, intersects and compliments that of his son Galahad’s. Throughout the books of the grail quest however, Launcelot is shown repeatedly and repetitively to be unworthy of fully achieving the Sankgreal. Though, for a sinner, he does pretty damn good in being allowed to see the Sankgreal. I argue in this paper, that Launcelot is used in Malory’s Morte as the ultimate example of how misbelief can touch any man, no matter how great and that ultimately this can prevent ascension to the kingdom of God.

            Launcelot is aware that his sin makes him unworthy to lay claim to the “fayre ryche swerde” (498) that comes down the river, mounted in “rede marbyll” (498). When the King comments that the sword ought to be Launcelot’s, the knight replies “Sir, hit ys nat my swerde. Also, I have no hadiness to sette my honde thereto, for hit longith nat to hang by my syde” (498). The fact that Launcelot personifies the sword could be coincidental, but me thinketh not. First, the sword is mounted in red marble, a detail that becomes important when we later see the Sankgreal, or holy vessel “coverde with rede samyte” (576). We might connect these and other objects in the tale that are marked by the colour red, such as the white shield with its cross of always fresh blood and the dripping spear. The colour red has well known connotations with religious devotion, martyrdom, and most tellingly, in relation to the Morte, to the feast of Pentecost. So Launcelot by personifying the sword and giving it agency in deciding whose side to hang by, comments directly on his own unworthiness to be honored by Christ.

            Why Launcelot is unworthy is perhaps not as simple as his not being a virgin. When sir Gawayne speaks with the ermyte about his vision, the ermyte tells him that the “hondred and fyffty bullis” (541) are the knights of the round table and that “the three bulles whych were whyght” (542) represent Sirs Galahad, Percivale and Bors de Gaynes. The third white bull has a spot, “the thirde, that had a spotte, signifieth Sir Bors de Gaynes, which trespassed but onys in hys virginite – but sithen be kepyth hymselff so wel in chastite that all ys forgyffyn hym and hys myssededys” (542). So here we can see that transgression is not enough to keep one from the grace of God, that instead, something aside from merely taking pleasure in sexual union is at play. We might examine the word myssededys in this instance, both because it is used in the plural and also signifies by definition “an offense, a transgression, misdeed; sin, crime” (MED). If Sir Bors has committed multiple offenses, he has been forgiven. This could include not only his sexual union with the daughter of King Braundegorys (468), but the impure thoughts that led to it and replaced the rightful deed of worship. In that case, Sir Bors never repeating the sexual act is not enough to keep him in God’s grace, but also his thoughts and intentions being clean.

            The argument that Sir Bors might not succumb to temptation only because he is not equally tempted becomes invalid in the midst of the quest for Sankgreal. After the priest explains his vision to him, Bors is tempted by “the fayryst lady that ever he saw, and more rycher beseyne than ever was Quene Gwenyver or any other astate” (550). He subsequently denies her, and she plummets to her death amongst “twelve jantilwomen” (551), continuing the religious repetition of the number twelve throughout the sections dealing with Sankgreal quest. Bors has therefore passed the test that Launcelot continually fails, and that is refusing the love of a woman of great beauty. In fact, Launcelot is only chaste on his grail quest because he is apart from Guinevere and indeed resumes his love affair with her immediately upon his return, as the book of Le Morte saith (588).

            Launcelot wears a hair shirt during his grail quest, perhaps both to continually remind him of his sins and to keep him from thinking lustful thoughts of Guinevere. That such a device is only a band aid solution, is made abundantly clear by the events of the text. Galahad needs no such physical accoutrements or reminders of faith on his journey for the Sankgreal, because he is pure not only in body, but in mind as well. This is why he is able to embark on his quest without a shield. His faith is rewarded when he is provided with one that belonged to the son of Joseph of Arimathea (507). Launcelot spends much of his quest in a sort of purgatory, as his wearing the hair shirt continually reminds us, the “heyre pryked faste [syr Launcelots skynne] and greved hym sore” (535). This purgatory comes very near to literal towards the end of the quest, when Launcelot “felle to the erthe, and had no power to aryse, as he that had lost the power of hys body and hys hyrynge and syght” (577). This is a direct result of his daring to enter the room of the Sankgreal, assuming that his pure intentions at that moment are enough to allow him to do so. God answers, as Launcelot “felte a breeth that hym thought hit was entromedled with fyre, which smote hym so sore in the vysage that hym thought hit brente hys vysage” (577). 

            Sir Percivale’s reclusive aunt, the “Quene of the waste landis” prophecies in Merlin’s place, stating that Galahad will “passe hys fadir as much as the lyon passith the lybarde, both of strength and of hardines” (522). Here, “hardines” must mean something more than strength, and given the context of the Sankgreal quest I would argue that this word is used by Malory as “faith: requiring resolution or courage” (MED). In the context of the Sankgreal quest, Launcelot’s failure is in not being truly resolute in seeking Christ. His hair shirt serves only to remind readers that he is not pure of thought.

            We are given access to how few men, including the nights of the round table, bear just tribute to Jesus Christ in their thoughts. Sir Percivale, in his journeys in the mountains, when he assists the lion against the serpent, is “one of the men of the worlde which most beleved in Oure Lorde Jesu Chryste, for in tho dayes there was but fewe folkes at that tyme that beleved perfitley” (526). I argue that Launcelot’s great sin is not his lust for Guinevere, but rather his doubt of Christ. Any other sin that touches him, including this lust, is the direct result of his lack of faith.

            Launcelot’s knighthood is not questioned in terms of bodily prowess. It is the spiritual lack in him that prevents him from achieving the Sankgreal. This is directly stated in the text, by the recluse lady that accosts him as he passes under her window “as longe as ye were knyght of erthly knyghthode ye were the moste mervayloust man of the worlde” (537) she sayeth to him and then goes on to describe his incredible error in siding with the wrong knights at the tournament between king’s Eliazar and Augustus. When she finishes berating him, she says simply that he is “fyeble of good [byleve and] fayth” (537). Adding “myseaventure” (537) to the adjectives describing Launcelot and his exploits, the recluse then warns him that he risks a “falle into the depe pitte of helle, if thou kepe the nat the better” (537). Directly following this encounter, Launcelot is punished by the chance encounter with a mysterious black knight, in which that knight “smote Sir Launcelottis horse to the dethe” (538), then passing on without further incident. In the sudden slaughter of the horse we see the opposite of the gifts of arms granted to Galahad. God has punished the unbeliever.

            If the quest for the Sankgreal establishes Launcelot as a religious miscreant, that is, one who is of incorrect or incomplete belief, and if Launcelot is aside from the three knights who achieve the Sankgreal, the best man the kingdom has to offer, this is important to the way in which the rest of the book is read. This is something that hasn’t been overlooked by scholars. 

            Kate Dosanjh discusses the fact that many scholars have identified the ending of Le Morte Darthur as tragic. She also points out that while Launcelot’s unconsciousness is generally regarded as “punishment” (64), in relation to this scene “scholars tend to gloss over the specific nature of the punishment and Launcelot’s exact sin” (64). Her interpretation of Launcelot’s encounter with the grail is that he has come so close to God, that the passage is “reminiscent of several biblical passages in which people in the Old and New Testaments meet with God, most notably, Moses’s experience on Mount Sinai” (64). Essentially, Dosanjh sees Launcelot’s punishment not as his coma, but instead as his being “forced to awaken and re-enter the world” (64). Though she does go on to describe Launcelot’s relapse into his former behavior with Guinevere, Dosanjh seems to herself gloss over Launcelot’s sins, particularly in relation to the quest for the Sankgreal. 

            Though Dosanjh has paid due attention to the possible subtleties of Launcelot’s encounter with the grail, she too glosses any great discussion of his sins. I have and still propose that Launcelot’s great sin is his lack of faith in Christ and not his succumbing to temptation. The worldy errors made by Launcelot are made because instead of believing in everlasting life, he seems to put his faith only in what he can see, hear and touch. 

            Sir Bors returns to court at the end of the Sankgreal and brings Launcelot an important message from his son: “Sir Galahad prayde you to remembir of thys unsyker worlde, as ye behyght hym whan ye were togydirs more than halffe a yere” (587). Here, the use of the word “unsyker” is likely to mean the opposite of “spiritually safe” (MED) and is a final warning to Launcelot that his faith must be directed to Christ and not the physical world. That this line hearkens the reader back to the final conversation of father and son on the boat, also serves to remind us of Launcelot’s demonstrating at that time his inability to pray directly to Christ himself. He had asked that Galahad “pray to the [hyghe] Fadir that He holde me stylle in Hys servyse” (575). Though Galahad is often easily paralleled to Christ by critics, I hold that here Launcelot is putting his faith in his son as an earthly being that will win him salvation, as opposed to opening his own heart to Christ. His lack of faith in Christ could even be exemplified in this scene by his lack of recognition of his sons spiritual accomplishments. He praises his son for “so hyghe adventures done, and so mervalous stronge” (575). This focus on physical strength demonstrates the weakness of Launcelot’s sense of scope.

            Another critic that has identified the difficult position of Launcelot within the text is Kenneth J. Tiller, in his essay ‘So precyously coverde’: Malory’s Hermeneutic Quest of the Sankgreal”. Tiller’s insightful essay argues that Launcelot “appears to embody a mode of reading that incorporates both the spiritual and the secular” (88). Unlike Dosanjh’s claim that Launcelot’s twenty four days in a coma are his time in a sort of heaven, Tiller believes that this “trance-like state” (88) is “emblematic then, of his liminal status between literal and allegorical reading” (88). 

            Tiller’s general argument is that the entire quest for Sankgreal is Malory’s inviting “readers to undertake a hermeneutic quest into the ambiguously concealed meaning of the Grail quest” (84). In other words, as the grail is a puzzle to the knights on the quest, so too is “each segment” (84). Most compelling is Tiller’s assertion that Galahad himself “seems to become the path itself, and hence the hermeneutic system of the Grail quest” (86). His detailing of how the various knights are frustrated in trying to get close to Galahad is wealthy evidence for his claim.

            Ultimately, I cannot fully agree with Tiller however, when he re-iterates Launcelot’s position as one who “moves in dual interpretations” (89) and is repositioned by the Morte Darthur as “ambivalent” (90). I find Launcelot’s position in the Sankgreal quest as a sinner fairly consistent, and all of his failed attempts in the quest ultimately failures of his spiritual nature and not his knightly prowess. When his knightly ability does fail him in the battle against the “whyght knyghtes” (536), Lancelot is “[waxed so faynt of–fyghtyng and travaillyng, and] was so wery of his grete dedis” (536). I argue that in this moment, Launcelot is not ambivalent at all, but tired of life and depressed because he hasn’t faith in anything beyond his physical ability. This also happens to be the scene in which Launcelot’s mescrauntz takes physical form, as he directs his fight against the white knights, who we discover are not sinners, but good knights.

            In drawing this argument to a close, it is useful to return once again to book II and examine more closely the events surrounding the mysterious sword brought by “[a damoisel] the which was sente frome the grete Lady Lyle of Avilion” (40). This is of course, the same sword that Galahad will wield later in book XIII. Though Balyn has been imprisoned for slaying one of the kings cousins, he is able to wield the sword. The damesel claims that only a “clene knyght withoute vylony and of jantill strene of fadir syde and of modir syde” (41) can wield the sword. It is an interesting fact that “jantill” here could possibly refer to the mother and father being non-christian, or pagan instead of simply members of nobility. As we will later see Galahad draw the sword, this invites us to question Launcelot’s christianity in the same fashion.

            It is also significant that when Merlin sets the sword in the block of granite, he “bade a knyght that stood before hym to handyll that swerde” (61) and then he laughed, saying that “there shall never man handyll thys swerde but the beste knyght of the worlde, and that shall be Sir Launcelot, othir ellis Galahad, hys sonne” (61). Merlin the prophet has seen one of the most stunning details of the text for us. That is the fact that Launcelot is fully capable of drawing the sword from the granite at the beginning of the quest for Sankgreal. He refuses, having no faith in himself, ultimately a reflection of his general misbelief in a Christ that “longith nat” (489) to be with him. And so the son treads where the father fears, into the grace of God.

Works Cited and Consulted

Dosanjh, Kate. “Rest in Peace: Launcelot’s Spiritual Journey in Le Morte Darthur.”           Essential Teacher 4.3 (2007): 63-7.

Falcetta, Jennie-Rebecca. “The Enduring Sacred Strain: The Place of the Tale of the      Sankgreal within Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur.” Christianity and Literature         47.1 (1997): 21-34.

Hodges, Kenneth. “Haunting Pieties: Malory’s use of Chivalric Christian Exempla After    the Grail.” Arthuriana 17.2 (2007): 28-48.

Hynes-Berry, Mary. “Language and Meaning: Malory’s Translation of the Grail Story.”     Neophilologus 60 (1976): 309-19.

Loomis, R. S. “The Irish Origin of the Grail Legend.” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval     Studies 8.4 (1933): 415-31.

Norris, Ralph. “The Tragedy of Balin: Malory’s use of the Balin Story in the Morte Darthur.” Arthuriana 9.3 (1999): 52-67.

Sklar, Elizabeth S. “Adventure and the Spiritual Semantics of Malory’s Tale of the            Sankgreal.” Arthurian Interpretations 2.2 (1988): 34-46.

Tiller, Kenneth J. “‘so Precyously Coverde’: Malory’s Hermeneutic Quest of the     Sankgreal.” Arthuriana 13.3 (2003): 83-97.

Weiss, Victoria L. “Grail Knight Or Boon Companion? the Inconsistent Sir Bors of             Malory’s Morte Darthur.” Studies in Philology 94.4 (1997): 417-27.

by Jeremy R. Strong

            Katherine Kearns argues in her book Nineteenth Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass, that: “realism proceeds as if there are common terms; it attaches human significance to materialities in such a way as to suggest that social and political and economic reforms are inextricably tied to spiritual well-being” (16-17). In Gissing’s The Odd Women, we see the spiritual well being of both Monica and Virginia Madden threatened due to their material dependence and desire. Monica marries Widdowson but her desire seems to be for the “two little villas, built together, with stone facings, porches at the doors, and ornamented gables” (96). She has to exercise self control and does not “allow herself to look back” (96) at the house, then proceeds to introduce the subject several times as she and Widdowson finish their carriage ride. Mildred Vesper detects this materialism in Monica and tries to warn her that she will marry Widdowson for the wrong reason, to gain “a comfortable home” (131). Monica also tells her sister Virginia about the marriage and the immediacy with which the subject of the house is raised demonstrates Monica’s focus on materiality:

   “Married?” She at length gasped. “Who — who is it?”

   “Someone you have never heard of. His name is Mr. Edmund Widdowson. He is very well off, and has a house at Herne Hill.” (132)

Monica first sees the house at Herne Hill and her marriage as a sort of “liberation” from “work” and has high hopes regarding Mrs. Luke’s property that “more than a glimpse of that gorgeous world might some day be vouchsafed to her” (139). Ultimately however, the house at Herne hill quickly becomes a trap. Widdowson is constantly insisting on confining Monica there: “shall we go home again?” he asks when they are out for a walk, and then insists “we had better go home” when Monica doesn’t agree (165). Later Widdowson proclaims “woman’s sphere is the home” (168) and his language indicates the shrinking of Monica’s freedom from the public to private spheres. Widdowson potentially threatens this earlier in the novel when he tells Monica “if I am so unhappy as to fail, how would you be anything but quite free?” (97).

            Monica’s sister Virginia’s dependence on alcohol represents materialism taken to an extreme; she is able to continually acquire and possess gin. Her focus on keeping the bottle filled is the only representation of material wealth available to her in her poverty; she is fascinated by the “convenient” fact that the alcohol can be “purchased at the grocer’s” (302). The fact that Virginia feels that “to sit comfortably at home, the bottle beside her” is the “avoidance of the worst shame attaching to [the] vice” is an acknowledgement of the precarious state of her spiritual well being in the novel (302). Her addiction is a careful balance between reality and fiction; she admits “the morning [brings] its punishment” but deludes herself into believing that “to-night’s indulgence was her very last” (302). Once the full extent of Virginia’s addiction is revealed, her earlier trepidation about Alice’s proposal that they can live on “fourteen shillings and twopence a week” takes on new relevance. Virginia’s response, that this plan will leave only “seven and twopence a week for everything — everything” could indicate a concern that alcohol may no longer be sustainable under the new budget (43). This kind of reformation of her personal economic situation causes Virginia a degree of spiritual discomfort that can be traced to her addiction, which can in turn be seen, as outlined above, as a form of extreme materialism that resonates with Kearns claims about the nature of nineteenth century realism’s connection to materiality. The description of Virginia’s features at the approach to the railway indicate her addiction to alcohol is already firmly entrenched in her simultaneous desire and trepidation: “in her eyes was an eager, yet frightened look; her lips stood apart” (46).

            Reading Virginia’s character for when her dependence on alcohol may have begun is crucial in understanding how she relates and contrasts, as an “unhealthy” looking woman, to Rhoda Nunn (39). Just before she reveals miss Nunn’s correspondence to Monica, Virginia simultaneously displays the hopeful effect a social reformer has on her while at the same time betraying again her vice: “[she] moved about with the recovered step of girlhood, held herself upright, and could not steady her hands” (56). Virginia claims Rhoda Nunn “is full of practical expedients. The most wonderful person! She is quite like a man in energy and resources. I never imagined that one of our sex could resolve and plan and act as she does!” (57). These qualities all come from internal strength of character and align Rhoda with spiritual health, something Virginia, a slave to materiality, can admire only from a distance. Virginia’s desire to attain spiritual health is also suggested by her purchasing John Keble’s The Christian Year, a tract deeply concerned with the spiritual over the material. However, the fact that she selects the book as a gift for Monica, reveals her weakness; she values the ideals but is not willing to put them into practice for herself. She is also focused chiefly on the fact that the book is “presentable” and “cost less than she had imagined” (46), revealing again her focus on materiality.

            Concern for the material world is closely related to a propensity for vice in Gissing’s The Netherworld as well. Bob Hewett is described in the text as “not a man of evil propensities” but instead as a man “guilty of weaknesses, not of crimes” (218). His weaknesses include “vanity” and “selfishness” and he maintains the attitude that he does not receive “satisfactions proportionate to his desert”; these weaknesses are described as directly related to his “attempt to profit by criminality” through the manipulation of “medals and moulds” (218). Mrs. Candy’s “rage for drink” is reaching “the final mania” and if anything is “bestow[ed] upon her; straightaway it or its value [pass] over the counter of the beershop” (248). This very much embodies the idea put forward by Kearns that a social system badly in need of reform has a detrimental affect on one’s spiritual well being. Arlene Young argues that: “the middle class achieves moral dominance in Victorian Culture” through the influence of common values (3). Two of those values include “individualism” and “industry” (3); certainly the lower or even underclass Mrs. Candy displays the propensity for both of these values, albeit severely misallocated. She is exercising the only representation of economic participation in society that is available for her to control and in doing so is destroying herself. Christine DeVine writes in a chapter devoted to The Netherworld in her book Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells that Gissing engages with “literary, sociological and philanthropic misrepresentation” (14). So if the functioning of the class system on individual characters in Gissing’s novels are attempts to battle this “misrepresentation”, it seems fair to conclude that examining novels other than The Netherworld might yield some evidence in support of this. DeVine notes “Gissing also exposes the middle-class, self serving ideology behind the sociological climate of his day that brought classification” (14); an ideology that is more manifest in the middle-class and lower-middle-class characters that inhabit The Odd Women and Will Warburton. These ideologies often seem to be revealed by characters provoked to commentary by their encounters with vice and its aftermath.

            Virginia represents a much less dire version of Mrs. Candy and the fact that her class position is higher than Mrs. Candy’s could be directly correlated with the degree to which the characters are consumed by alcohol. While Mrs. Candy is distinctively lower class and therefore unlikely to suffer what Patricia Alden calls a “psychological double bind” (10), Virginia occupies a position only slightly higher in the lower-middle-class and may be more susceptible to this conceptual phenomenon. Alden claims that writers including Gissing were “unclassed men who remained uncomfortably homeless, “wandering between two worlds” (10) and even though her discussion focusses mostly on the Bildungsroman, particular aspects of her argument may illuminate the potential psychological states of Gissing’s minor characters. For example, Virginia’s living vicariously through hope for her younger sister and self medicating with Gin, not least of all her admiration for the intellectual capacity of Rhoda Nunn, all seem to echo Alden’s claims about the psychological state even the possibility of upward mobility could bring about:

not to move up, not to escape the material limitations of a petty-bourgeois environment, not to find a way to cultivate one’s intellect and sensibility—this too amounted to a betrayal of one’s potential. In either rising or failing to rise, the individual was compromised. (10-11)

Virginia is certainly compromised in The Odd Women by her failure to rise, something that seems connected to her unsuitability for marriage and in turn seems to trigger her alcoholism. When her sisters discover she has succumbed to a vice primarily associated with the lower class, they are horrified. Alice cries out “What is the matter? What does it mean?” and Monica, slightly less charitable says to her sister “Sit down, at once. You are disgusting!” (303). When Alice again repeats her question, “what does it mean?” (304), Gissing’s emphasis invites us to question what beyond the obvious Virginia’s vice might indicate. Monica’s claiming “we’re ashamed of you” (304) could be used to direct us back to Alden’s idea of betrayal. The sisters have all been deluding themselves in some fashion as to their opportunities for different sorts of social, economic or intellectual mobility; Alice and Virginia with the ethereal school plan and Monica with the delusions of grandeur associated with Mrs. Luke (as outlined above). The betrayal here then is really the dissolution of the ideal through the abject horror of reality, which Virginia forces them all to face; the shame then, is shared by the three sisters. Monica asks Alice if she could “have imagined anything so disgraceful?” (304) and Alice’s response may be both an attempt at empathy but also an attempt to recover what dignity she can after this shared shaming: “you must remember what her life has been dear. I’m afraid loneliness is very often a cause” (304). Arlene Young identifies in her introduction to The Odd Women that: “the class position of odd women [was] precarious” and that the Madden sisters “existed in a form of domestic limbo” (14). This could perhaps help us to see that Virginia’s loneliness could be a direct result of her uncertain and “precarious” class position. Her vice in that case, the cause of disgrace and shame, can be traced through loneliness to its primary influence; the class system.

            In Masculine identity in Hardy and Gissing, Annette Federico presents a compelling case that male characters in Gissing’s (and Hardy’s) work are constantly “struggling with an identity crisis as acute as women’s in turn-of-the-century England” (28). Though she does not discuss Will Warburton at all, one of her central theories is that: “in Gissing, male egoism is examined from the inside out, and the core is discovered to be not ignorance, but anxiety” (29). I have shown elsewhere, in my article “‘Grocerdom Lay Heavily Upon His Soul’: Masculinity, Misogyny and Gender Exile in Will Warburton” that anxiety motivated by class and gender uncertainty leads to erratic and disturbing behaviour. What I will now do here is nuance that argument to incorporate a brief discussion of vice and character that can be contrasted to The Odd Women and The Netherworld to further illuminate the relationship of vice to materialism under Gissing’s distinct brand of realism.

            That Sherwood Godfrey and Will Warburton are uneasy about the financial security of continuing in the sugar trade is apparent. Will confesses to Franks: “Sugar spells ruin. We must get out of it whilst we can do so with a whole skin” (7). The industry itself is described as being plagued by “perturbation” (10) and Will suffers a “good deal of uneasiness” while Godfrey becomes “despondent and [begins] to talk of surrender to hopeless circumstance” (12). If this anxiety is as Federico claims often the core of male egoism in Gissing’s novels, then it is useful to examine Godfrey Sherwood’s materialistic impulses in the novel and how they seem to drive him to participate in the drastic vice of gambling away his own and Will’s fortunes. Godfrey bring’s Will a sheet of “foolscap, one side almost covered with figures” that proves he went through over “twenty-five thousand pounds” in only three months (54). Godfrey’s speculation is described as an “irresistible impulse” (55) and in that way resembles both Virginia and Mrs. Candy’s alcoholism. What is it that drives Godfrey to go through his entire fortune of “nearly forty thousand” pounds including Will’s contribution (54)? Godfrey is consumed by materiality, an obsession partially fostered by his own class instability; a merger of Kearns idea that realism “attaches human significance to materiality” (16) and DeVine’s claiming “middle-class, self serving ideology” (14) created classification in the first place. Godfrey’s focus on the Applegarth business is not on the long term stability of the venture, but rather almost entirely on possibilities for material gain. He tells Will excitedly that Applegarth “has built himself a little observatory—magnificent telescope” (22) and admits his desire to have the same: “one might have a little observatory of one’s own” (24).

            At this stage it would be fatal to this argument to neglect Godfrey’s seeming idealism. Though it may not at first seem logical to connect the two opposing philosophies, Aaron Matz, in his book Satire in the Age of Realism, gives a nuanced discussion of Gissing’s own place between the idealist and the realist, drawing attention to the Atlantic Monthly which:

published an unsigned homage to Gissing entitled “An Idealistic Realist,” which opened by complaining that “in the vocabulary of criticism the word ‘realism’ has been soiled with all ignoble use” but specified that “Gissing was a realist controlled by an ideal.” (98)

Matz gives further examples to support a more complex understanding of Gissing’s unique form, coming to a conclusion of sorts that resonates with my reading of Will Warburton: “In Gissing’s fiction, and in the criticism it has inspired, the ancient philosophical division between realism and idealism seems rather like a porous border, a blurred and outdated margin” (99). To read Godfrey Sherwood as an idealist in the novel may seem more logical than my previous focus on his material obsession. After all, Godfrey tries to convince Will that if they take over Applegarth’s business “we might found a village for our workpeople—the ideal village, perfectly healthy, every cottage beautiful” (12). Further along in the novel, Godfrey explains his new scheme to Will:

“‘If I were a landowner on that scale,’ I said, ‘do you know what I should do—I should make a vegetarian colony; a self-supporting settlement of people who ate no meat, drank no alcohol, smoked no tobacco; a community which, as years went on, might prove to the world that there was the true ideal of civilised life—health of mind and of body, true culture, true humanity!'” (112)

This new scheme focuses in very closely on the elimination of the vices of “alcohol” and “tobacco” and presumably, a self sustaining colony such as this would also eliminate the need for money and therefore make moot Godfrey’s own vice of gambling. Here Godfrey specifically mentions alcohol in relation to an ideal that would “prove to the world” what “true culture” and “true humanity” really are, implying that the world’s then ideas of culture and humanity are misguided or unfair. Godfrey is essentially railing against the class system here but may be self delusional as he does not refer to his own vice specifically. Godfrey’s idealism is tempered when Milligan writes from Ireland that the vegetarian colony must “remain a glorious dream” (168). Godfrey then promptly confesses he cannot survive on an ideal: “to tell you the truth, the vegetarian diet won’t do. I feel as weak as a cat” and promptly invites Will out on the town to imbibe red meat and wine (168). This marks Godfrey’s return to materiality after straining upwardly against the constraints of his class and in this sense makes him a parallel of both Virginia and Mrs. Candy.

            In the three novels discussed, there are varying degrees with which the characters are able to exercise class mobility. Mrs. Candy seems rather hopelessly trapped in The Netherworld; Virginia seems both more frustratingly close to rising above her lower-middle class position and dangerously close to losing it; finally, Sherwood Godfrey seems comfortable in his middle class position and even when he loses it, retains perhaps not completely hopeless convictions that he will regain it. The most logical method of connecting an analysis of these three supporting characters has been through examining their distinct relationships with vice. I hope to have demonstrated above, the “human significance” that is tied up with “materialities” in these three novels, and that this is exemplary of, as Kearns argues, one of the primary truths unveiled by literary realism (16). She mentions “reforms” being tied up with spiritual well being, particularly “social” and “economic” (17) and though this paper demonstrates a lack of reform in these supporting characters, that is in essence the point; that there is a correlation between wider class system reform and personal reform. After all, Virginia seems rather envious of the position of Rhoda Nunn and seems to idealize her as “full of practical expedients. The most wonderful person” (57) without really having access to those benefits herself. Her and Alice can only send Monica to be reformed, and are themselves quite distanced from the project. Virginia’s insistence that they should “first of all put [Monica] in comfort and security” as well as her “unintentional exaggeration” (57) could indicate her own lack of faith in this type of social reform. And in Arlene Young’s sustained discussion of Rhoda Nunn as a woman in fiction who “finally triumphs over the conventions” (146) and also “rejects not only the role of wife, but also the most obvious of traditional ‘feminine’ employments, teaching”, we clearly see the distance Virginia, as an aspiring school teacher and advocate of marriage for Monica, has from this type of reform.

            Through examining vice as a type of extreme materialism and therefore available to characters who live even in abject poverty, such as Mrs. Candy, I hope to have confirmed the realism of George Gissing to be what Aaron Matz describes as sharing a rather “porous” (99) border with idealism. This allows examining characters such as Sherwood Godfrey, Edmund Widdowson and perhaps Bob Hewett more closely for how their particular ideologies are not easily defined and justifies reading all three of these novels and others of Gissing’s work for depictions of spiritual well being in crisis. These crises of spiritual well being, as I have shown, are a direct result of characters inability to change their position within their class or to directly participate in idyllic social or economic reforms. The result of this inability seems to have a gradation that bears directly on class and is represented through the degree to which these characters succumb to their various vices.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Alden, Patricia. Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman: Gissing, Hardy, Bennett,    and Lawrence. Univ. Microfilms Inc. Research Press, 1986.

Coustillas, Pierre. George Gissing at Alderley Edge. London: Enitharmon Press, 1969.

DeVine, Christine. Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and     Wells. Ashgate, 2005.

Federico, Annette Rose. “‘I must have Drink’: Addiction, Angst, and Victorian Realism.”   Dionysos: The Literature and Addiction TriQuarterly 2.2 (1990): 11-25.

—. Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing. London: Associated University Presses,       1991.

Gagnier, Regenia. “Freedom, Determinism, and Hope in Little Dorrit: A Literary     Anthropology.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 9.2     (2011): 331-46.

Gissing, George. The Odd Women. Ed. Arlene Young. Peterborough: Broadview Press,             2002. Print.

—. Will Warburton. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006. Print.

—. The Netherworld. Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

Kearns, Katherine. Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass.     New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and    the Victorian Dramatic Monologue.” Victorian Poetry 22.2 (1984): 139-59.

Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Cornell UP, 1994.

Liggins, Emma. “Writing Against the ‘Husband-Fiend’: Syphilis and Male Sexual Vice in the New Woman Novel.” Women’s Writing 7.2 (2000): 175-95.

Mason, Diane. The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture.   New York: Manchester UP, 2008.

Matz, Aaron. Satire in an Age of Realism. New York: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Moore, Lewis D. The Fiction of George Gissing: A Critical Analysis. McFarland, 2008.

Warhol, Robyn R. “The Rhetoric of Addiction: From Victorian Novels to AA.” Eds. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield. U of California P, 2002. 97-108.

Young, Arlene. Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and           Working Women. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.

by Jeremy R. Strong

The Colonial Threads in Science Fiction: Dissecting Anxieties in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau

Unraveling the yarns of colonial influence in science fiction opens up an avenue for rich and insightful dialogues. John Rieder, in his influential book, “Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction” (2008), defines colonialism as the expansive process through which European economic and cultural values penetrated and transformed the non-European world over the last five centuries. This perspective provides a robust framework for exploring the acclaimed work of H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and specifically the anxieties and interactions with the Beast Folk.

Edward Prendick, the novel’s protagonist, first encounters the Beast Folk from a position imbued with a sense of colonial superiority. His journey in the book reflects his shifting viewpoints about the Beast Folk. His initial observations and eventual assumptions about the Beast Folk are based on their perceived racial attributes, thus underlining his colonial mindset.

When Prendick first encounters the Beast Folk in The Island of Dr. Moreau, he describes them as having “the oddness of the brown faces of the men who [are] with Montgomery” (29). He then proceeds to compare them to non-European ethnic groups. This tendency to categorize ‘the other’ by appearance is a clear indication of his colonial viewpoint. Moreover, his interpretation of the Beast Folk speaking a “foreign language” (35), despite them speaking English, further highlights his bias in associating foreign appearance with foreignness in every aspect.

Further, Prendick’s belief in his racial superiority is evident in his quest for power over the Beast Folk. As he learns about the Beast Folk’s true nature—animals engineered to resemble men—he moves from cataloguing the Beast Folk to understanding their society and their place within his world-view, firmly rooted in British ethnocentrism. Emulating the British colonial project, he attempts to assert his dominance over the Beast Folk, ordering them to “Salute” and “Bow down” (158) after the deaths of Moreau and Montgomery. His later claim, filled with an air of superiority, that he “dismissed my three serfs with the wave of a hand” (161) reveals his adherence to his colonial mentality.

However, as the narrative progresses in The Island of Dr. Moreau, Prendick learns to feign notions of equality to gain acceptance within the Beast Folk community, thereby more securely exerting his power. Prendick transitions from viewing himself as superior to portraying himself as a mere leader among his fellows, stating, “I sank to the position of a mere leader among my fellows” (164). This significant shift is culminated in chapter twenty-one when Prendick admits: “In this way I became one among the Beast People on The Island of Dr. Moreau” (165). Through these actions, Prendick embodies the essence of colonization as described by Rieder; he penetrates the culture of the Beast Folk.

Prendick’s journey underscores a cruel truth about the colonial enterprise—it results in a shared loss of human integrity for both the invader and the invaded. His feigned equality emboldens the Beast Folk to mimic the cruelties they had previously witnessed, highlighting the inherent pitfalls of colonial attitudes.

In conclusion, the exploration of The Island of Dr. Moreau and Prendick’s interactions with the Beast Folk invites readers to delve deeper into the complexities of the colonial mindset, the racial categorizations, and the destructive nature of colonial power dynamics. Moreover, it sheds light on Wells’ motivations in writing this narrative, which has become a pivotal science fiction text intricately entwined with colonial themes.

Works Cited

Rieder, John, “Colonialism And The Emergence Of Science Fiction”. New York: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Print.

Wells, H. G. “The Island Of Dr. Moreau”. New York: Random House, 2002. Print.