In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad extrapolates a complex understanding of the colonial project from the particular experiences he’s had dealing with its pursuits in the Congo, coupled with his  outsider status as a Pole who has attained British citizenship and chooses to write in his third language, English. As a part of the project, he cannot wholly condemn it, but he doesn’t try: he simply explodes it for the farce that it is and decries its corrupting influence upon even the noblest of souls, this latter epitomized in the fall of Kurtz. Seventy years later, the fall of Kurtz as a marker of the corruption inherent in the colonial enterprise was still salient enough that Francis Ford Coppola reworked Conrad’s story in the film Apocalypse Now, setting it instead in the colonial contemporaneity of the Vietnam War. Kurtz is, in both works, the central character without being the protagonist or narrator, and most fully epitomizes the connection between the ethical forthrightness and moral bankruptcy a colonial power-structure enables. For Kurtz believes himself ethically sound, but the distance this creates between his position and any connection to humanity creates a resounding hollowness that he cannot bear.
Heart of Darkness famously inspired T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” The latter both quotes the former in its epigraph and, more conspicuously, takes its name from Marlow’s inference about Kurtz that the “whisper” of the deepest jungle “echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core” (Conrad 152-3). This is significant because one of the few concretes the viewer of Apocalypse Now learns about Kurtz after his fall is that he reads poetry aloud; within the space of the film, this is only exhibited by his reading of “The Hollow Men.” Coppola thus uses the poem to point out the continuity between Conrad’s Kurtz and his own: they are empty, hollow men who have been robbed of their souls by “the horror” of colonial necessity (Conrad 171). Each instance of Kurtz has “kicked himself loose of the earth” and floated free of the standards and mores of society; it is for this reason, despite his effectiveness, that the top brass of Apocalypse Now want him dead and those of Heart of Darkness want him removed from his post.
But Kurtz is aware that he is hollow in both Conrad’s and Coppola’s versions. In Heart of Darkness, his knowledge that he is dying is based less upon his physical state than the certain knowledge that he is losing his humanity. He agrees to leave, in part, because he knows it will mean his death; he has become too entangled with the darkness at the heart of the jungle and the further he travels from it the closer he comes to his own death. As he leaves, his life is “ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time” just as “the brown water ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness” (168-9). This is perhaps the greatest difference between Conrad’s Kurtz and Coppola’s: Conrad’s Kurtz dies as he leaves the darkness, while Coppola’s Kurtz dies in the midst of its depravity. Both men know that they cannot leave, but while Conrad’s Kurtz allows his life to wane as he’s pitifully taken from the core of his strength, Coppola’s Kurtz wants to be taken while standing firm, to die a warrior’s death. Both men, driven wild by the pursuit of an inherently corrupt project, maintain their humanity only by denying the godhead to which that corruption has entitled them. They ultimately regain their humanity at the very end only by losing it in death, but by choosing of their own free will to do so.

Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. New York: Pocket Books, 2004. 63-184.

At the very heart of Jamaica Kincaid’s coming-of-age novel, Annie John, sits a rather short chapter entitled: “Columbus in Chains”. Aside from the obvious commentary on Columbus’ colonization of the West Indies contained within the title, this chapter includes a very supple disembroiling of the subtle vagaries of power within the post-colonial landscape of the islands. The delicately interwoven structure of her self-interrogation not only provides insight into Annie John’s own chafing against external control, but also advances a framework for understanding some of the more abstruse colonial paradigms.

The chapter opens innocuously enough in the middle of a school day. As the “Anglican church bell struck eleven o’clock,” Annie John announces she has been made prefect of her class and awarded a book, Roman Britain, both as rewards for “taking first place over all the other girls” (72). The narrative tangent in which this exposition is accomplished, however, does the double duty of altering the colonial landscape. Britain under the Romans was itself a colonized entity, and one whose culture was dramatically shaped and reshaped over hundreds of years by colonizing powers, starting with the Romans. This frames the establishment of the Anglican church within Antiguan society more solidly as an inherited institution both left over from the colonizers and culturally accepted, much as British culture has picked up and carried forth many of its own colonially inherited institutions. Annie’s soft spot for Ruth, “because she was such a dunce and came from England and had yellow hair,” forces the reader to wonder if Annie’s condescending attitude is colonial in nature (73).

The question of Annie’s colonial tendencies is made more difficult by her further commentary upon Ruth’s position in Antigua. When Ruth fails to answer a question about West Indian history, Annie declaims:

I could hardly blame her. Ruth had come all the way from England. Perhaps she did not want to be in the West Indies at all. Perhaps she wanted to be in England, where no one would remind her constantly of the terrible things her ancestors had done. (76)

Annie’s sympathy does not miss the fact that the answer to the question is Euro-centric in nature, as evidenced by her dislike of Columbus. She understands the shifting power dynamics of post-colonial interaction in seeing that Ruth “had a lot to be ashamed of,” but “it was hard for us to tell on which side we really now belonged—with the masters or the slaves” (ibid.). While she is perhaps naïve in being “sure that if the tables had been turned we would have acted differently,” her lack of retributive thoughts exhibit a mind separating itself from a purely colonial framework (ibid.).

This attitude is more forward-thinking than that of Miss Edward or her classmates, and is acknowledged by Annie’s being “way ahead” of the lesson being drilled (77). Her joy in seeing “the usually triumphant Columbus, brought so low,” is not born of malice so much as rejection of a tyrannical colonial perspective (77-8). This is borne out by the inscription she places below it, stolen verbatim from her mother’s description of the recently enfeebled but autocratic Pa Chess: “The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up And Go” (78). The reader cannot fail to see the irony of Annie’s inscription being written in Old English lettering, nor the significance of its being “a script I had recently mastered” (ibid.).

If Annie’s prize at the front end of the chapter begins the close examination of colonial effects, her punishment at the back end complements it. After being berated for “defaming one of the great men in history, Christopher Columbus, discover of the island that was my home,” Annie is denounced as “arrogant” and “blasphemous” for refusing to feel ashamed of her actions (82). But why should she? Unable to accept the cultural norms of the former colonizers, nor of the colonized who reinforce them, she naturally rebels. Stripped of her post as prefect in favor of a “disgusting model of good behavior and keen attention to scholarship … the odious Hilarene,” Annie is forced to copy the first two books of Milton’s Paradise Lost (73,82). The educated reader understands that Milton’s epic provided an epistemological framework for English identity well into the 19th century, and cannot fail to note the  admonition against fighting a dominant paradigm contained within the first two books. Thus transmission of the colonial project comes full circle from the Anglican bell. At chapter’s end, Annie goes home to extract comfort from her parents for having to bear the post-colonial burden; but instead of solace, condolence, or cheer she finds  the blind eye, the deaf ear, and the crocodile smile of deceit. Even her home has been colonized, and for this reason she must leave it behind.

Works Cited

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: The Noonday Press, 1997.

That Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a biography is given in its subtitle. That it is a work of fiction is equally undoubtable. Yet this seeming contradiction of purpose—to be at once a biography and a work of fiction—it is one of the primary concerns of the text to ameliorate. When Orlando suddenly becomes a woman in the middle of Chapter 3, the orgulous pomp of the ‘biographer’ in preparation for the announcement draws the reader’s attention to the particular dichotomies Woolf is collapsing, and to the nature of her project to do so.

Orlando begins inauspiciously, casting immediate doubt upon his gender by declaring that “there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it” (13). This dubious beginning remains unfulfilled throughout Chapter 1, as Orlando’s sexual prowess increases steadily, finally exploding with the treachery of the Muscovite Princess. The narrative break between chapters serves to reframe the biography in more uncertain terms. Although attempting to plod “in the indelible footprints of truth” and “state the facts as far as they are known,” the biographer acknowledges the “dark, mysterious, and undocumented” nature of the story to come and thus loses some of the reader’s trust in its veracity (65). But the simple admission of fault serves also to generate a different variety of trust in the reader, and one not dependent upon the objective truth-value of the biographer’s statements. Woolf is beginning to expose the narrative role of the biographer and, by having her speak plainly of her flaws, to open within the reader the recognition that even biographical narratives are subjectively framed.

To speak of subjective framing, however, requires an examination of what might hold together the disparate collection of observations and extrapolations, verifiable proofs and inventive reimaginings that is subjectivity. For Woolf, the “clay and diamonds,” the “rainbows and granite” that compose human nature are combined by the single thread of memory (77). Memory is the capricious seamstress who “runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither,” holding “lightly stitched together” the assortment of facts and figurations that compose a human life (78). The biographer relies periodically upon memories to fill in details for which there is no documentation, leaving “lamentably incomplete” some of the most important episodes in Orlando’s life (119). “Often it has been necessary” the biographer claims, “to speculate, to surmise, and even to make use of the imagination” to fill in a “hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger through” (119). Despite this, as the tale approaches Orlando’s transformation, the biographer feels confidant that “so far, we are on the firm, if rather narrow, ground of ascertained truth” (131). But exactly here it gets hairy, for “nobody has ever known exactly what took place later that night” (ibid.).

Contradictory accounts of memories of purported witnesses and suspect-seeming paperwork fail exactly to corroborate each other as Orlando enters another “profound slumber” of seven days (132). To complicate matters further, the “seventh day of his trance” marks a “terrible and bloody insurrection” in which foreigners are killed or jailed, Orlando’s ducal signifiers stolen, and he left for dead (133). “And now again obscurity descends,” the biographer cries, desiring to conceal from the reader the difficult fact of Orlando’s impending metamorphosis (134). It is only because the “Gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer” prevent its concealment that the reader feels confident in the improbable truth to be told (ibid.).

Thus a soft mythology springs up to lull the reader into believing the statement to come: the Ladies Purity, Chastity, and Modesty all “with gestures at once appealing and commanding” attempt to cast upon Orlando their various veils to conceal his change (135). Declaring, each in turn, “speak not, reveal not,” “rather than let Orlando wake, I will freeze him to the bone,” and “I do not see,” the three Ladies bid the Truth “come not out from your horrid den” (135-6). It is no accident that Woolf makes these three embodiments of so-called feminine virtue into deceivers, concealers, and secreters of truth. Their inability to gain purchase over Orlando in the face of the clarion demands of Truth, Candour, and Honesty is made the more potent by the revelation that as “he stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpeters pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman” (137). For Orlando is a new kind of woman, one who is equal part man and whose “form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace” (138).

Still the Ladies “peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches” (ibid.). Despite having become a woman, “in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been” (ibid.). The Ladies are defeated and cannot win credence because Orlando’s memory “went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle,” and thus provide the narrative continuity needed to engender an indisputable truth-claim (ibid.). In using memory rather than empirical evidence to connect the present to the past, Virginia Woolf has in this passage subverted not only the demands of biography that it be non-fictional, but also the gender paradigms that demand the primacy of physical bodies as evidential states of natural proclivities. The skilled way in which she examines the strengths of a dichotomy before tearing it asunder only serve to make her arguments solid in a way they couldn’t be if she were setting up straw-men. Further, the mythos surrounding Orlando’s transformation both neatly severs the tightrope between the dichotomies of man-woman, past-present, and fact-fiction, and also provides a solid platform upon which to begin discussing newer and more inclusive frameworks.

Works Cited
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando; a biography. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1928.

Manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity … is simply a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
– T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”
The final section of “The Waste Land” is a benediction adapted from the Hindu Upanishad, invoking the thunder god Prajapati’s command to “Control yourself,” “Give,” and “Have compassion” (Norton 2307).  “The Peace which passeth understanding,” Eliot says, “is a feeble translation” of the chant with which he ends the otherwise bleak and disheartening poem (Eliot 2308n). Seen through the author’s own lens, “The Waste Land” becomes a dire warning about the need to revitalize the modern spiritual Waste Land and regenerate its fecundity. When Harold Bloom points out that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a vision of Eliot’s Waste Land, “of a world without authentic belief and spiritual values,” he may as well be making the same claim for George Orwell’s 1984. Both novels present bleak dystopian futures engendered by a failure to address Eliot’s pressing questions, and both Big Brother and the World Controller claim to fulfill the commands of the thunder god for their respective societies (Bloom 2). Beginning backward, then, at the most promising and hopeful moment of Eliot’s poem, Huxley and Orwell systematically pervert his sacred blessing in order to create the framework for their ghastly visions.

The last command of the thunder god becomes the first of Oceania. For Orwell, “Control yourself” thus becomes a hyperbolic command issued absolutely from a sick and twisted godhead, not for the good of the individual, but to ensure homogeneity. In a world in which “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized,” conformity becomes not only a normative standard, but a necessity (Orwell 4). Aberrance is intolerable and, while “nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws,” the mere flicker of a non-conformist thought is punishable by death (Orwell 8).

For Huxley, quite the reverse is true: it becomes the taboo command of the old order and a sign of social perversion to leave a desire unfulfilled. This results in a “precarious state of unconditional freedom” in which feeling and desire have no more meaning, through their lack of context, than they have in 1984 (Baker 117). Mustapha Mond, the World Controller of Brave New World’s World State, explains the concept as follows:

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (Huxley 50)

This “calm well-being” is controlled by erasing interpersonal connection, limiting education, and pharmaceutically constraining behavior. In this way Huxley has tacitly prefigured 1984’s central Party slogan: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

Granted that this command is understood and applied by the World State as well as the Party of Oceania, the obvious next question is: what freedom is given? In the World State, freedom is understood in terms of license or freedom from unfulfilled desire: “people get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get” (Huxley 264). In Brave New World, the thunder god’s command to “Give” becomes the universal application of hedonistic conformity. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning,” says Mond, and to keep the wheels turning in perpetuity is the ultimate goal (ibid. 273). The society of Brave New World, says critic William Jones, is “built on Community, Identity, Stability” (3). If “every change is a menace to stability,” then change itself must be regulated (Huxley 269). The result, as previously noted, is a “sweeping repudiation of the past” and a focus on the hedonistic impulses of the present (Baker 117). Mustapha Mond tells the protagonists “we haven’t any use for old things here” (Huxley 262). He means, in Baker’s words, that the World State has a “need to seize control of the historical record, not to rewrite it, as in Orwell’s 1984, but to remove the concept of history itself from human consciousness” (Baker 123). So history becomes abolished.

Once again, as Baker’s comment hints, Orwell takes a cue from Huxley and runs with it. History is the child of language, and whereas in Brave New World history is erased, language has begun to suffer. In the World State, because of increasingly vague usage and continual redefinition, “language has virtually lost its meaning and few speakers in this model world of scientifically engineered precision realize how unscientific and imprecise their words really are” (Meckier 39). In contrast, the Newspeak of 1984 obtains absolute precision by a thorough and scientistic deletion of vocabulary and meaning; history is perfectly mutable—thus meaningless—as a result of the conditioning set in place to destroy language itself.  “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought,” the linguist Syme declares, “every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller” (Orwell 53). The thunder god’s command to “Give” has, in Oceania, become the gift of freedom from conscious thought. Thus language in both societies becomes artificial, stagnant, dead; the utter destruction of language also destroys by design the ability to think outside the normative roles dictated by society.

The critic Roger Fowler quibbles with this, arguing that extreme linguistic determinism as found in Newspeak creates dispositions rather than limitations upon thought, and is “inherently impracticable” because of the “normal process of invention, semantic enrichment and natural change” (106). He claims that “Newspeak is a fallacy and Orwell knows it,” but his arguments fall flat because he cannot suspend his disbelief in the absolute power of the Party (Fowler 93). Fowler, like Winston, believes in objective truth; his extension of this belief to Orwell, however—perhaps because of Orwell’s political sympathy with his main character—is unfounded. Orwell, having picked up the ball from Huxley’s own exploration of the power of language, has taken the postmodern linguistic turn. Meckier further claims that “it is this awareness of the relation between the perversion of language and the rise of centralized authority that constitutes Huxley’s main contribution to distopian (sic) literature” (40). That the pivotal role of language in maintaining control is made explicit only in 1984 is merely a result of Orwell having read Huxley’s novel and integrated his methods.

The first command of the thunder god, and last to be addressed, seems the most difficult to warp into a dystopian curb on humanity. However, the genius of  Huxley and Orwell has been to simply appropriate the role of the thunder god for their societal godheads. “Have compassion” or “Sympathize,” at their roots, mean “to feel with, like, or the same as” another, and to act accordingly. What is the obsession with conformity and pathological fear of heterogeneous thought patterns in 1984 but a requirement that every Party member think, act, and feel alike? What is the objective of the Bokanovsky Process, the Central London Hatchery, or the distribution of soma, except a universal conditioning? Certainly not all members of society are equal. World Controller Mond asserts that “the optimum population … is modeled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water, one-ninth above” (Huxley 268). In other words, social stratification and oppression of the majority by the elite are both natural and necessary for the maintenance of order. Goldstein’s social divisions in 1984 are numerically nearly identical (Orwell 209). Brave New World’s Gammas and Epsilons are treated much like 1984’s proles, the only difference being one of definition and degree. In both novels, language and history are altered beyond recognition or use in the name of society. Where Jones argues that “society’s stability has made true affection impossible,” a counterpoint might be made that the impossibility of true affection is what has, in the worlds of both novels, created a stable society (5).

In the dystopian waste lands of The World State and Oceania, the commands of the thunder god are thus appropriated by the ruling bodies and turned into corrupt instruments of control. In visualizing the results of Eliot’s neglected Waste Land, Huxley and Orwell make plain the ultimatum contained therein and effectively amplify his portentous admonition to attend to humanity’s spiritual health. As Meckier makes clear, “neither the unlimited intercourse of Brave New World … nor the total repression … of 1984” is a viable solution to the question posed in “The Waste Land” of what to do with the spiritual detritus of a world seemingly gone mad (50). What is made clear is that Eliot’s Waste Land is real, is dangerous, and requires the strength of humanity to overcome its destructive impulses. Huxley and Orwell have spun Eliot’s self-styled mythical method into the future, and their moral about the danger of manipulating history and language is caught up in “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender/which an age of prudence can never retract” (Eliot 403-4).


Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 1-6.
Baker, Robert S. “History and Psychology in the World State: Chapter 3.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 115-124.
Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. F. 8th ed. Ed. Stallworthy, Ramazani. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. 2295-2308.
Fowler, Roger. “Newspeak and the Language of the Party.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: George Orwell’s 1984, Updated Edition. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2007. 93-108.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, 1946.
Jones, William M. “The Iago of Brave New World.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 3-6.
Meckier, Jerome. “Utopian Counterpoint and the Compensatory Dream.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 33-60.
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949.
Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. F. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

“Milton bequeathed to the world a text on which were inscribed the cultural commandments of being, and Mary Shelley set out to break those stone tablets and to expose the illusory nature of bourgeois individualism.”
—John B. Lamb, “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Milton’s Monstrous Myth”

The unnamed narrator in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness famously claims that, for Marlow, “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze,” (Conrad 67). But Heart of Darkness is itself a framed narrative,  leading the reader to question the epistemological foundations of the tale and poetically pointing up one of the main functions of framing, namely to distance the reader from the identity of the teller and focus her attention on the narrative itself. Just as it would have been difficult for Conrad to write those words without thinking of Frankenstein, it is difficult to read them without extrapolating the lesson from Conrad’s text to Mary Shelley’s. For while Shelley’s famously framed narrative directs the reader ever inward through its multiple narrative frames, the story at the very center, Milton’s Paradise Lost, is the one Shelley seems to question the most. Milton’s myth of the fall provided much of the epistemological grounding for the linguistic-cultural rules of identity in nineteenth century England, and Mary Shelley uses her troubled characterization of Victor Frankenstein and his dæmon to quietly explode this problematic and monologic foundation by carefully exploring its limitations.

Frankenstein’s most external frame consists of the monologic epistolary Robert Walton begins to his sister as he embarks on a journey to the North Pole. “No incidents have hitherto befallen us,” Walton writes at the last point he is assured his letters will reach England, assuring the reader that the monologue is still uninterrupted and stasis remains unbroken (Shelley 917). After this point, his addressing the letters “To Mrs. Saville, England” does little more than effect a pretended readership for his tale, pointing out that it has become monologic not only for its lack of actual response in the text, but also because of its lack of anticipated response (ibid.). Epistolary is typically not effected in monologue, and this discrepancy highlights the similarity of voice throughout the rest of the narrative; as Walton’s epistolary becomes a transcription of Frankenstein’s narrative, which further encapsulates the dæmon’s self-history, the reader transitions seamlessly because the voice fails to inflect. As Beth Newman suggests, “Frankenstein does not offer us multiple narrators in order to provide multiple points of view, each of which expresses the unique psychology of the character who tells a given story” (143). Instead, the monologue continues and the framed narrative “further blurs the distinctions between the voices of its narrators … whose stories sound the note of self-justification so loudly that they immediately invite suspicion” (Newman 146).

This suspicion is further cast upon the self-justificatory nature of Milton’s own monologic text, located in the center of the dæmon’s narrative of his own education. Reading it as “a true history” of “an omnipotent God warring with his creatures,” it strikes in him a parallel reinforced by Frankenstein’s journal of his own creation and results in the sole epistemological grounding for his concept of identity.(Shelley 978). He first identifies with Adam, and finally with Satan, incidentally utilizing the Creator/creature model to fallaciously identify Frankenstein with Milton’s God. His yearning for an explanation for his own identity seems finally satiated by Paradise Lost, but it is incomplete; while he “has been shaped by a cultural myth in which the fallen can be only Adam or Lucifer,” the dæmon’s history mirrors neither and the benevolent God envisioned in Milton bears little but circumstantial resemblance to his own creator (Lamb 303). Lamb further suggests that the novel is a “fable of false identity” in which “having a self … depends upon being defined as an object in a world that is already given over to a cultural system of signs” in which Paradise Lost occupies a central, though dangerously limiting place (Lamb 308). Unlike Adam or Lucifer, the dæmon’s only fall has been into the linguistic and cultural hegemon, and his error not “rebellion against the father,” as in Milton, “but in his mistaken assumption that his ‘nature’ was a thing that he could ‘willingly’ choose” (Lamb 303). But this assumption needs further unpacking.

In first approaching Victor Frankenstein, the dæmon adduces his only ontological episteme to mollify his maddened creator: “remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed” (Shelley 960). His invocation of Adam recalls Frankenstein’s earlier desire that “a new species would bless me as its creator and source” as well as the dæmon’s initial Adamic rapport in being “apparently united by no link to any other being in existence” (Shelley 933, 978). But while the dæmon comprehends that Adam had “come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature,” in opposition to being “wretched, helpless, and alone,” he fails to remove his own creator from the place occupied by God (Shelley, 978). This implies a monolithic failure of the epistemological confines of the Miltonic myth, one that is further exacerbated by the dæmon’s  struggle to fit himself into the character of Satan. “Like him,” the dæmon observes, “when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me” (ibid.). But the dæmon is also “naturally benevolent, as Satan is not, and received with horror and contempt solely because of his physical appearance” (Oates 546). He shrewdly discerns another difference in that “Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him,” yet he still cannot discard the mask of Satan as unfit.

Remembering Adam’s “supplication to his Creator,” the dæmon cannot help but bitterly curse his own creator, but it also puts him in mind of the duties Frankenstein owes him (Shelley 979). “Misery made me a fiend,” the dæmon declares to Frankenstein, “yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver [human kind]” from the unspeakable horrors of his rage (Shelley 960). His subsequent supplication to Frankenstein mimics Adam’s to God in hope that its cultural currency will carry with it enough tender to supply his request and rescind his emotional destitution. In demanding companionship, the dæmon requires merely the ability to engage in a sympathy he is denied among humans, from the only being capable of rendering him this service. Frankenstein initially accedes, acknowledging “that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness” (Shelley 961). The dæmon exists, however,  at “the very limit of the economy of sympathetic exchange,” and is ultimately unable to overcome his own creator’s disgust at the Malthusian population calculus implied by being granted a companion (McLane 976). The failure of Frankenstein to complete his creature’s request, upon the fear that it will result in exactly the exhortation of God to Adam and Eve within the Miltonic paradigm, provides the final crack in the mask of his false godhood. If he cannot view his own creation outside the “uncanny valley” for him, then Victor Frankenstein is undoubtedly human and undeserving of his dæmon’s supplication (Mori 33). Further, he is below human, a “demonic parody (or extension) of Milton’s God” (Oates 545).

The unalterable disappointment of being forever denied companionship finally allows the dæmon to shatter his subscription to the Miltonic role of Adam. Because of his unworkable episteme, however, he now attempts once more to wear the mask of Satan. “Evil thenceforth became my good,” he brazenly declares, echoing Milton’s fallen angel, “I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen” (Shelley 1032). But as his remorse at the end displays prominently, the dæmon has not become more satanic, but “by degrees, with the progression of the fable’s unlikely plot, the inhuman creation becomes increasingly human” (Oates 545). He has displayed a “patient, unquestioning, utterly faithful, and utterly human love for his irresponsible creator” throughout the course of the novel, whereas Frankenstein has become “increasingly inhuman, frozen in a posture of rigorous denial” of responsibility to his creation or culpability for the effects of the former upon the lives of himself and others (ibid.). While Frankenstein unconscionably blames himself for nothing other than the act of creation and refuses to find himself answerable to the simple accountabilities it implies, his dæmon’s love for his maker goes unrequited and his sole need to become less monstrous, to be loved, remains denied.

In a final shattering of the cache of Miltonic signifiers, the dæmon has become both wiser and more magnanimous than his creator, but as a result of emotional privation also more capable of depravity. He is Anti-Adam, surpassing his creator in all regards. But he is unable to be Lucifer either, to engage in the hubris of remorseless depravity and to truly make evil his good. Thus the center of the tale, “Milton’s monstrous myth,” does not hold (Lamb 306). But the rest of the narratives do hold together as a complex framework to keep Milton’s epic in the center. “Explicit in the narratives of Walton, Victor, and the monster is Shelley’s recognition that subjective self-representation is infiltrated and controlled by culturally predetermined ideas of personality,” and as an ensemble they provide the tools to unpack the unworkable epistemic ontology of Paradise Lost that causes the dæmon so much grief (Lamb 318). Like Conrad’s tale, the meaning is not in the center within the heart of darkness that is Milton’s monologic myth, but in the enveloping, “one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine” (Conrad 67).



Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. New York: Pocket Books, 2004. 61-184.
Lamb, John B. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Milton’s Monstrous Myth.” Nineteenth Century Literature Vol. 47. No. 3 (Dec. 1992): 303-319.
McLane, Maureen Noelle. “Literate Species: Populations, “Humanities,” and Frankenstein.” ELH Vol. 63.No. 4 (Winter, 1998): 959-988.
Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Trans. Karl F. McDorman, Takashi Minato. Energy Vol. 7. No. 4 (1970): 33-35.
Newman, Beth. “Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein.” ELH Vol. 53. No. 1 (Spring, 1986): 141-163.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel.” Critical Inquiry Vol. 10. No. 3 (March 1984): 543-554.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2A. 7th ed. Ed. Abrams, Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000. 907-1034.

Jane Austen’s Emma opens descriptively, immediately painting a detailed portrait of the personal, familial, and socio-economic attributes that go into making up one’s basic character. It is important that this task be accomplished so immediately because Emma is at root a coming of age story; to effect this purpose from the beginning, the reader must begin with a completed character sketch—fully realized in all its particulars—before stasis is broken and the dramatis personae begins to be malleable. But despite this perfectly-rendered opening, the character of Emma Woodhouse doesn’t really change in any fundamental way. The question becomes how to make sense of a coming of age story in which very clear maturation occurs without any essential alteration of temperament.

Emma Woodhouse is “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition” with “the power of having rather too much her own way” and a tendency to “think a little to well of herself” (1). She is “the cleverest of her family and due to her mother’s early death has been “mistress of the house and of you all” since the age of twelve (23). Living in a town that “afforded her no equals” of social stature (2), she has become a “fanciful, troublesome creature” with a habit of playing in the lives of those around her with little regard to consequences (5). Her father believes, rightly, that she “never thinks of herself, if she can do good to others,” but his understanding is only “in part”: Emma’s triflings cause more harm than good despite noble intentions because she still thinks of others as objects instead of individuals (7).

The first and  most continuous victim of Emma’s meddling is Harriet Smith, a seventeen year-old girl with no family to whom Emma has attached herself in order to “improve her … detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society … form her opinions and her manners” (14). The line following this in which Emma considers the task “an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming … her leisure, and powers” is strikingly revealing of Emma’s blithe indifference to her new friend’s independence and humanity (ibid.). Indeed, Harriet Smith is a mere ornament to Emma’s perfection, “exactly the young friend she wanted—exactly the something which her home required” (16). The verbiage is clear: Emma needs some new thing to play with, and considers the rest of Highbury fodder for her high-minded tinkering, with Harriet the lucky benefactor. Talked out of a desirable engagement with someone within her social station and into love with someone several steps above it, Harriet is both emotionally and materially wronged by Emma’s project while unable to see her faults for what they are. When this scheme falls apart because “she had taken up the idea [of making Harriet a match] and made every thing bend to it,” (91) she acknowledges that “the first error and the worst lay at her door” and “it was foolish, it was wrong, to take so active a part in bringing any two people together” (93).

But this revelation is less than it seems. Emma still believes herself to know the wants and needs of her fellows, and especially of Harriet, better than they know themselves; she has simply learned to avoid the behaviors of a matchmaker, not the pretensions and condescensions of a demiurge. This pattern continues throughout the novel. From her accidental torture of Jane Fairfax through her conviction that “Mr. Knightley must never marry” and into her casual encouragement of Frank Churchill’s affections and (mis)management of Harriet Smith’s emotional state, Emma learns from the pain and misfortune levied upon herself and others only that her actions need alteration, not her judgments or attitudes (154). It takes until two-thirds of the way through the novel for Emma to ask of herself, “does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?” (225). Mr. Knightley, to whom this question is addressed as much as herself, answers, “not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.—If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it” (ibid.). His commentary is necessary to display that even through such a revelation, Emma again does not change. Her nature remains as it always has been, only this time she gains a further understanding of herself and her limits instead of an artificial delimitation of her actions.

The remainder of the novel is occupied with Emma’s newly-broached internal voyage. “Her heart had been long growing kinder toward Jane,” and reproving herself for her insensible and cruel neglect of who should have been a natural friend (260); upon being charged by a blushing Harriet of being able to “see into everybody’s heart,” she even speaks aloud to this fawning admirer her doubt of “having any such talent” (278). But this is simply the beginning of the deluge in which Emma’s coming of age begins, for upon her realization that “Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself,” Emma realizes her foolishness “with a clearness which had never blessed her before” (280). She gives herself innumerable demerits for “how improperly … how inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling … [with] what blindness, what madness” she had conducted all her actions toward her friend, and accepts the likelihood of losing Mr. Knightley to her as a proper penance (ibid.). In order “to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under … the blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart,” for Emma, “was the first endeavor” going forward (283).
Thus she begins to examine herself, for the first time, as she has previously examined others, and finds herself “most sorrowfully indignant; ashamed of every sensation but … her affection for Mr. Knightley.—Every other part of her mind was disgusting” (Austen 284):
“With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody’s feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing—for she had done mischief. She had brought evil on Harriet, on herself, and she too much feared, on Mr. Knightley” (ibid.).
Emma is harshly, but fairly critical of herself in exactly the manner that Mr. Knightley has always been, and as a result comes to an understanding of herself far greater than anyone but he has previously shown. In conversation with him, she displays this new knowledge of self in the most self-effacing terms, calling herself “doomed to blindness” (292) which causes her to act “in a way that [she] must always be ashamed of” (293)because her “vanity was flattered” (294). In responding to this new Emma, Mr. Knightley becomes encouraged to profess his love where, for an earlier and less self-conscious iteration of Emma Woodhouse, he may not have.

Thus happily ends Jane Austen’s coming of age story of the twenty-first year in the life of Emma Woodhouse, the question of how to develop a character without altering her basic makeup solved by the old Socratic injunction to “know thyself”. Emma develops it’s eponymic heroine by forcing her to turn inward the extraordinary spotlight of understanding she has spent so long training upon others. By first altering her actions, then further her sympathies, and finally her intentions, she proceeds through several layers into an analysis of herself that leaves her lower tendencies inalterably changed while allowing her naturally decent character to shine through in more appropriate ways. In this way the reader is brought along with Emma on her internal journey and the story given, instead of lacking, further depth and complexity.


Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. Stephen M. Parrish. New York. W. W. Norton & Co. 1972.

The barbarian girl in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians serves as a link between the ‘civilized’ society of the Empire and the ‘savage’ world of the barbarians, as much for the reader as the Magistrate. For the reader, she functions as a conduit into the most private spheres of the Magistrate’s soul as he struggles to comprehend the meaning of barbarity and civility both in the societies surrounding him and within the wilderness of his own desires. He is unable to discover exactly what it is he sees in the barbarian girl: why she haunts his bed and his dreams, and why the boundaries of intimacy with her seem at once variable and fixed. This does not, however, prevent the reader from gaining an understanding of the self-other relation that lays bare Coetzee’s commentary on the possibility of a civilized or civilizing colonial process.

The barbarian girl first appears in a dream, long before she is brought into town. Neither the reader nor the Magistrate yet know that the dream girl whose “face between the petals of her peaked hood” will become the barbarian girl he takes into his bed, but the description of her facelessness is already candidly sensualized (9). At his first recalled encounter with her, The Magistrate’s interest seems something other than purely administrative, though his verbiage is to that effect. “I know I am beating about the bush,” he acknowledges during the tender interview in his office, and proceeds to offer her employment and shelter under his care (26). The reader feels the strange admixture of inappropriate sensuality and fatherly compassion, but its queer innocence is felt in his confession that “the distance between myself and her torturers … is negligible” (27). He then begins to colonize her with his demand, “Show me your feet … show me what they have done to your feet” (28).

Throughout the sequence of descriptions wherein the Magistrate washes the barbarian girl’s feet, it becomes clear that this is a penance he has undertaken to make up for the savagery inflicted by the Empire upon a helpless people. Though explicitly characterized as sensual through the use of phrases like “gripping her firm-fleshed calves” (ibid.), “squeezing, stroking, moulding,” and “up the backs of her thighs,” the washing and cleansing ritual is also rhythmic, hypnotizing, and rapturous in its effect upon the Magistrate (30). He feels “no desire to enter” her body, but comprehends that even to “feed her, shelter her” is also to “use her body … in this foreign way,” no less it is to help her (ibid.). The dreamless oblivion into which he falls upon completing the washing ritual is “like death … or enchantment, blank, outside time” (31). He finds solace not only in physically correcting the barbaric practices perpetrated on the barbarian girl, but also showing her that the colonizing process can be gentle and unviolent, if still degrading in its didactic imposition of a foreign will. In the process, he alleviates some of his own guilt at participating in the depravity of the colonial venture.

It becomes clear to the Magistrate that “until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood, [he] cannot let go of her” (ibid.). His understanding that she has become an object of self-discovery for him disturbs him. Despite the fact that he “relieved her of the shame of begging and installed her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid,” this is hardly less shameful due to his history of philandering (32). He does this for his own purposes, to keep her near for his “inexplicable attentions” (33). However, after the cleansing ritual when they lay together, “the erotic impulse, if that is what it has been, withers,” and his hand, “caressing her belly, seems as awkward as a lobster” (ibid.). He is unable to fully use her in any sense; he understands “what to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another” (34).

Then, “the dream comes back,” and in its minute changes the reader can finally see the barbarian girl for what she is to the Magistrate: an occupied figure lacking identity and requiring charity from him (37). He struggles to humanize the barbarians by granting them homes with stoves and intuitions of commerce; likewise, he begins to accept that they too possess feeling, virtue, and human frailty. In admitting their victimhood to the “guile of shopkeepers” and the “litany of prejudice,”  he civilizes the barbarians in their native state and debases the cruelty of his own people. Despite this, his paternal impulse still carries with it an implicit colonialism (38). In translating these paradigms to his interaction with the barbarian girl, however, he begins to comprehend his complicity:
“With this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret … for the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack you way into the secret body of the other! … I behave in some ways like a lover … but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate” (43).
This passage marks a change in which the Magistrate begins to understand the colonial space between himself and the torturers: “it is I who am seducing myself, out of vanity, into these meanings and correspondences … I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!” (44).

The magistrate’s inability to see the barbarian girl’s face in his dream manifests itself as an inability to recognize her in a foreign setting, to think of her face enough to sketch it, or to remember her face among the other prisoners before she was left behind. Her facelessness and his inability to desire her are rooted in the same frustration: he is unwilling to fully commit to the self-other distinction, and thus unable to class her with either side. It is only when he extends to the barbarians his recognition of their equally valid thoughts, histories, and values that he is able to see her face in his dream as he has “never seen her, a smiling child, the light sparkling on her teeth and glancing from her jet-black eyes” (53).

Having turned this corner, the barbarian girl becomes just a girl and the Magistrate fully recognizes as a colonial enterprise the strange mix of sensuality and paternalism he has felt for her. In order to distance himself from this process, which he now regards as ultimately flawed in even its most intimate details, he physically distances himself from the territory he has colonized: he sleeps separately from the girl, decides to bring her back to the barbarians, and risks his own people in the process. It is only en route that he finally accepts her advances because they are now on equal terms. Furthermore, he avoids telling her that he would like her to come back with him until such a point as he has “crossed the limits of the Empire” into the land of her people, where she is the empowered and he the subject (70). His inability to articulate the reasons for his desire, and her consequent denial, bring full circle the alienation of the colonial process. Coetzee makes clear the centrality of the nuanced power dynamic through this crucial episode of the story, and in the process discloses an implicit critique of barbarity and civility as context-dependent social constructs.


Works Cited

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.