Collections Essay Colonialism / Desire / European / Psyche / Psychoanalysis

Question 1

Order of Paragraphs

Answer 1

1. Presentation of colonial lands as desire
2. Presentation of childlike desires / not brought up by Western cultural values
3. Desires for violence
4. Sexual desires
5. Otherness?
6. ‘Other’ representation of colonial instincts

Question 2

1. Presentations of colonial desire in landscapes (6)

Answer 2

• “Yellow sand breaks in the low lands, by the many tall trees of the pine family”
• “Exceedingly marvellous arches”, “road went sublimely on”, “The grandeur of the whole view is beyond my imagination”
• “Diamonds” & “buried treasure”
• “Treasure Island”, “treasure” synecdoche of wealth, power etc
• “King Solomon’s mines” deep buried and unconquered desires
• Quatermain only able to “pocket a few” whilst Treasure Island loot remains on the Island –> Thus desire is maintained in the colonised lands, and is not compatible in western society

Question 3

Presentation of childlike urges (5)

Answer 3

• Jim a “boy” and a “young lad”
• GA Henty stories of the ‘Colonial Boy’: With Clive in India & Under Drake’s flag
• Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys, “Islands present a childlike space which boys can easily circumnavigate”
• Haggard presents childlike urges through the Kukuana people as they “ran”, “howled”, “leaped”, “spun” and “made horrid faces”
• -> “Savage” or just childlike/not brought up under European cultural criteria

-Ania Loomba: “Association between European male adulthood, civilisation and rationality on the one hand, and Non-Europeans, children, primitiveness and madness on the other”

Question 4

Violence (4)

Answer 4

• Large section of KSM’s focused on the war scene which is also glorified: “Forefront of the battle”, “Roman emperor”, “Ingoldsby legends”
• Jim shot the coxswain as “pistols went off”, and he “ducked”, “snatched” and “dashed” -> monosyllabic verbs for excitement
• Sacrifice of Kukuana people: “Hundreds of bodies” lay out comparison with the sacrifice of the Greys, one was “horrible”, the other “honourable”
• Jeckyll & Hyde: Hyde displaying the “evil side of nature”, “smote” a woman in the face, “trampled over the body of a child” and murdered Sir Carew

Question 5

Sexual (6)

Answer 5

• Anne McClintock - “Native lands became a pornotropic for European imagination, a fantastic lantern into the mind, from which Europeans could project their forbidden sexual desires and fantasies”
• “Sheba’s breasts”
• Rebecca Stott noted how the map of KSM’s represented a female body, which the white colonialist must explore, adventure into and ultimately conquer
• Kukuana women made to “dance” and “sing sweet songs” before one of them is chosen and killed
• Kukuana chief’s son claims: “She shrinks from the sight of my little plaything before she has even tasted it”
• -> Interrelationship between violence & sexual oppression

-Majority of Hyde’s violence is aimed towards women: “Trampled” over the body of a little girl and “smote” a woman in the face

Question 6

Other? (8)

Answer 6

• Edward Saïd’s Orientalism proposed the idea of the “other” as a means of entrenching the coloniser’s sense of superiority, he described the “other” as something “alien, non-western, and therefore inferior”
• KSM’s “leaped, howled, spun and made horrid faces” –> Monosyllabic & polysydention: Simplistic natives

-White Man’s Burden, Rudyard Kipling
“half devil and half child”

Really inferior though?
Kukuana present social hierarchy: “title”, “debt”, “chief” and “king”

Pirates in Treasure Island: “Ragingly drunk till they could no longer speak”

Timothy Reiss analytic referential model of learning - exogenous subjective cultural criteria inevitably a western readership

as Ignosi explains, despite “some hundred bodies” laid out, “the ways of black people are not as the ways of white men, nor do we hold life as high as ye”

Same reason we view Quatermain killing “nine elephants” for a “wonderfully fine lot of ivory” as barbaric but at time was viewed as part of civilised colonial expedition

Question 7

Colonised as presentation of European instincts (4)

Answer 7

• Freud’s Civilisations and its Discontents: civilisation repressed pleasure principle (sex & violence) and this is unleashed in uncivilised environment
• Jeckyll described as his “better self”, “moral side” and able to “plod along in the public eye with a lot of genial respectability” (Public = civilisations influence) VS Hyde as “monstrous” and “sent forth alone to do his good pleasure” (Pleasure principle)
• Jeckyll describes transformation as akin to a “schoolboy stripping off his lendings and skipping headlong into the sea of liberty”

Violence of Jeckyll portrayed in battle scenes of Treasure Island & KSM’s
Sex portrayed in undertones in KSM’s and Stott’s opinion that they are conquering a woman to find the diamonds