“Often I sit alone at night, staring with the eyes of the mind into the blackness of an unborn time, and wondering”
-Horace Holly, H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines[1]
Personal Prisons as Instructors in Imperialist Literature
Characters in imperialist literature at the end of the 19th century often end journeys with a sense of doubt instead of definition. These characters, however, do not start their journeys as blank slates. Several of them begin their travels already flawed. Images of limiting structures, both on physical movement and psychological growth, underpin this theme of characters restricted by their own evils.
Whether it be the ruins of a once great civilization in She, a collection of impaled heads in Heart of Darkness, a cave in King Solomon’s Mine’s, or a decrepit calaboose in The Ebb Tide, these works all show people confined by monuments to their sins. As European imperialists travel to the most exotic quarters of the Earth, their personalities are kept static by bad habits and myopic outlooks. Racism, greed, and false senses of racial superiority keep the most capable Europeans locked in provinciality. Even when confronted with opportunities for growth, characters choose to repair their flawed views instead of adopt new perspectives contrary to the nationalism, religion, and culture they hold dear.
In The Ebb Tide, Robert Louis Stevenson depicts a deeply flawed trio of beachcombers attempting adventure. Far from typical seafaring heroes, these three are the rejects of European society. Huish, a cockney Londoner, resembles widespread British anxieties of what clerk jobs would do to English men. His small frame, unsophisticated accent, and slimy personality seem the most unsettling when he vows to see Attwater and “chuck this vitriol in his eyes”.[2] Huish’s anger and shortsightedness keep any ambition, if he ever had one, at bay from him. John Davis is a drunkard captain with a checkered past. His alcoholism led him to sinking a ship and his daughter’s death. He drinks to erase the memory of that day, but ends up being a slave to alcohol and greed in the form of a decade’s worth of pearls. Despite the possibility of using his nautical acumen to secure a new and legitimate life, Davis remains a slave to his greed and drinking habits. Robert Herrick imprisons himself with laziness. Having attending one of the best universities in the world, he finds himself languishing on an island in the South Seas continuing a “career…of unbroken shame”.[3]
These three men could have been contributing members of their societies, either closer to home or serving abroad. The scene where all three seek refuge from nature’s harsh elements in a derelict prison, however, shows the men at their most pathetic. Herrick, Huish, and Davis make the choice to seek out the prison for the comforts it will give them in the short term. In much the same way, their imprisoning habits ward off long term growth for short term satisfaction. Herrick does retain certain noble qualities despite his self-destructive tendencies. In the prison that he chose, he cannot help but exhibit flourishes of the educated lifestyle he could have lived. The Latin words and classical music Herrick inscribes on the walls of the calaboose show some vestiges, at least in him, of potential for growth. Despite being so far removed from British ‘civilization’ and society, Herrick tries to retain a bit of his Western education in his island of exile.
The significance of the beach itself is not merely aesthetic. By living on this strip between extremes the trio’s aspirations and true habits are contrasted as starkly as their landscape. The open sea’s ebb and flow symbolizes the ultimate freedom, but it remains unused up to this point. Indeed, transit and nautical movement act as hallmarks of positive characters while settling in exotic islands leads to laziness or rapacity. An Outcast of the Islands’s Lingard acts as a role model to Williems while on the sea, teaching him skills that could make him an honorable man. While Lindgard consistently remains a good merchant in transit, characters like Willems, as well as Kayerts and Carlier from An Outpost of Progress, and Heart of Darkness’s Kurtz all are destroyed by prolonged temptations of the land’s resources. On Ebb Tide’s beach the whole world’s possibilities constantly go in and out with the tide before the trio. Yet, for the beginning of the novel, they choose to waste away on the beach trapped between a sea of possibilities and an island of ignominy.[CTL1]
Instead of a prison of trepidation, She by H. Rider Haggard shows characters confronting the fear of a crumbled British empire in the city of Kôr. Leo and Holly set off on their journey as the epitome of privileged, British adventurers taking advantage of a new era of exotic excursion and empire building. Kôr contrasts with this era of New Imperialism as a symbol of the mighty capital fallen from supremacy. As Holly enters the ruins of the city, he describes it flatteringly as holding the precursor to a rail system. This hallmark of modernity and English life would have quickly linked Kôr to England in a fundamental way for the contemporary British reader. With this relationship established between Kôr and England, Haggard’s portrait of the last inhabitant of Kôr bodes all the more ominously for British readers. Junis writes “Kôr is fallen! And her mighty works and all the cities of Kôr”.[4] As Holly and Leo sleep in the tombs of their imperialistic forefathers, the New Imperialist drive to conquer is given a new connotation. Instead of ending in a vast collection of British subjects, it ends with a man held prisoner by the mad avarice of his people in the dark catacombs of a dead state.
Empire’s material greed runs throughout Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines as a driving factor for the protagonist’s every action. While Allan Quatermain, Henry Curtis, and John Good do have a selfless motive in the form of saving Good’s brother, Quatermain is finally convinced to risk the journey with the assurances of material security for his son regardless of Quatermain’s success. The prospect of success itself proves irresistible. To a grizzled, old, underpaid elephant hunter, the just reward for a lifetime of struggle is worth enough at his age to outweigh the journey’s seemingly insurmountable danger. Before the deus ex machina escape, the dark tunnels of Loo’s mountains represent a deadly prison punishing the adventurer’s greed. As Quatermain himself describes, “We were cut off from all echoes of the world – we were as already dead”.[5] The silence and darkness of the tunnels force Quatermain to reflect upon the folly of his greed. As to the diamonds he almost died for, Quatermain says that “we should be glad to exchange them for a bit of food or a cup of water, and, after that, even for the privilege of a speedy close to our sufferings”.[6] This fictional episode mirrors, in a very small way, some of the true consequences of European powers attempting to extract diamonds from Africa. For Quatermain’s trio, their prison cum tomb was defeated by a bit of derring-do. The near-fatal experience did, however, inspire Quatermain and the others to question the assumptions of greed and capitalism. In this way, their journey from prisoners to their own assumptions to changed heroes complete in the Modernist sense.
By contrast, Heart of Darkness’s Kurtz is not edified by his prison. During his time in the Interior of Africa he remains an unreformed prisoner of his myopic views on race and utilitarian philosophy. To him, whatever means were used upon native Africans were justified by the profits of ivory extraction. Rather than be horrified at the violence he commits, or even indifferent, Kurtz relishes it. This is made clear when Marlow happens upon Kurtz’s array of native, shriveled heads displayed on spikes. These ornaments were not meant to ward away outsiders. Instead Marlow attests that “they would have been even more impressive, those heads on stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house”. [7] Kurtz ordered the heads so that they would greet his glances as he surveyed his yard. He was not only a man comfortable with brutality, he enjoyed it. In this way Kurtz stands out from other characters as a self-made prisoner by being singularly at ease with continually reinforcing his virulently racist and myopic perspective while eschewing most contact with European agents that would exacerbate his behaviors. Kurtz unapologetically and individually maintains racist philosophies while being surrounded by Africans probably contradicting his expectations of ‘barbaric’ natives if he took a moment to question his beliefs. In a prison of impaled heads, Kurtz lives and dies an unchanged believer in white racial supremacy and the paramount importance of showing constant, consistent profits to his company no matter the cost.
These characters react differently during their confrontation with personal prisons. Some grow in the experience, while others require more time to appreciate their own transformations. Though their recognition of symbols’ effects varies, the majority of these characters gain insight from their journeys that cause them to question assumptions. In this sense, doubt earned by introspection is the ultimate accomplishment.
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