#patrick brantlinger

[clove-pinks]

Portrait sketch of William Makepeace Thackeray by Samuel Laurence, 1848 (British Museum).

The 1840s saw the advent of the modern tourist industry and Thackeray was one of many Britons who in that decade flocked to the Holy Land and the Pyramids. (Though it was not until the 1860s that Cook’s Tours began plying the waters of the Nile, Thomas Cook first ventured into the tourist business in 1841.) On board his P&O steamer Thackeray found that all the British excursionists were reading Alexander Kingslake’s Eothen, just published—a book addressed to another eastern traveler, Eliot Warburton, whose The Crescent and the Cross was also published in 1844. The redoubtable Harriet Martineau took ship with friends in 1846 to the East, publishing Eastern Life, Present and Past in 1848—a volume R.K. Webb describes as containing “travels and a torrent of philosophizing,” both utilitarian and Unitarian.

— Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914

The Temple of Dendera, Upper Egypt, by David Roberts, 1841 (Art UK)

[marryat92]

Foreshadowing the boy-heroes of Henty and Kipling, Marryat’s midshipmen escape from home and school into realms of adventure which promise freedom but instead place them on a lowly rung of a complex pecking order of sailors, officers, and gentlemen—at the pinnacle of which stand family, country, and God. In The Settlers in Canada, Alfred Campbell says that “a midshipman’s ideas of independence are very great,” but the navy is the wrong place to realize those ideas: “I had rather range the wilds of America free and independent,” he tells his family, “than remain in the service, and have to touch my hat to every junior lieutenant.” Alfred’s discontent is, however, not quite typical, and he is happy enough when later promoted. Though there is usually a moment when Marryat’s heroes regret what they have left behind, it passes quickly.

— Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914

Nelson's Flagships at Anchor, Nicholas Pocock, 1807.

[transmutationisms]

helloo, do you have any book recommendations that talk about the racial/political dimensions of cannibalism?

the delectable negro: human consumption and homoeroticism within us slave culture, by vincent woodward (2014)

insatiable appetites: imperial encounters with cannibals in the north atlantic world, by kelly l watson (2015)

renaissance ethnography and the invention of the human: new worlds, maps, and monsters, by surekha davies (2016)

the captain and 'the cannibal': an epic story of exploration, kidnapping, and the broadway stage, by james fairhead (2015)

taming cannibals: race and the victorians, by patrick brantlinger (2011)

the village of cannibals: rage and murder in france, 1870, by alain corbin, tr. arthur goldhammer (1992)

[lesbianaglaya]

Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, Patrick Brantlinger

[cantodogargula]

O que é Gótico Imperial

O Gótico Imperial, mais do que ser uma vertente literária, é um grande espelho do contexto sociopolítico da Era Vitoriana.

O medo do “outro” é um assunto recorrente na literatura. Para o Gótico Imperial, no entanto, essa figura do estrangeiro é muito mais do que um tema, é sua principal ferramenta. Todo e qualquer tipo de arte é um ato político. Isso porque, independente de ser uma pintura, uma escultura, uma obra de ficção ou autobiográfica, a arte transmite o contexto sociopolítico no qual ela está…

[fatehbaz]

Critical discussion theorising Arctic and Antarctic Gothic has focused typically on one pole or the other [...]. Yet Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe all engage with the same generic tradition, a way of writing about the extreme and uncanny space at the end of the world. In their texts, ice creates a negative space, which gives rise to supernatural beings [...]: the albatross, Frankenstein’s creature, the Polar Spirit. [...] [E]xamine [Jules] Verne’s Captain Hatteras. While this novel is predominately a scientific adventure set on an Arctic voyage [...], examining it in a Gothic context gives voice to its underlying anxiety: the tension between ‘civilisation’ and nature, between empire and other.

In Patrick Brantlinger’s formulation, ‘Imperial Gothic combines the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism with an antithetical interest in the occult.’ [...] [I]n imperial Gothic ‘Western rationality may be subverted by the very superstitions it rejects’. In imagined polar space, however, Western rationality is confronted by its irrational obverse. This is visible in the way that Hatteras and his crew traverse waters haunted by previous expeditions [...] with a gloomy hint of fatalism, particularly given prominent discussion of the tragic final expedition of John Franklin. The Franklin expedition set off in 1845 with much fanfare to sail through the Northwest Passage [...]; the search for the missing ships and crew led to reports of cannibalism, which shocked the British public. For the nineteenth-century British public, the anxious awareness [...] brought about by the imagination of polar space exposes the fallacy of ideals such as heroism, civilisation, and progress. [...]

[T]he South Pole represented a ‘dark other’ for European travellers: ‘thee alien planet -- the antihuman, the monstrous’. In ‘Rime’, this alien quality of polar space is emphasised in Coleridge’s glossing [...]. Colreidge’s poem imagines the icy water near Antarctic in much the same way [Captain James] Cook describes them. [...] In Coleridge’s poem and the works influenced by it -- Poe’s novel set in the Antarctic and Shelley’s novel set in the Arctic -- we can identify similar polar Gothics, and which pole becomes less important. [...]

Frankenstein opens with Walton’s letters [...]. His hopes for the voyage north are suffused with the language of Romantic fervour [...]. This opening passage serves to associate the scientific voyage to understand magnetism with the sublime [...]. Walton has fallen into a generic trap, projecting the trope of the Romantic North onto his experience. Angela Byrne establishes the North as a productive European Romantic space with its own colonial assumptions and tropes, ‘uncivilised and wild, yet also the perfect location for scientific enquiry’. [...]

The Franklin expedition fascinated the public because of its mysterious disappearance, and because each small discovery evoked and evokes a sense of horror, from Rae’s report in the mid-nineteenth century to the exhumation and published photographs of corpses in the late twentieth century. When the Admiralty released Rae’s report to the press, notable figures including Charles Dickens and Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane Franklin, openly censured Rae’s account, arguing that Royal Navy men would never resort to an act so unnatural as cannibalism. Indeed, echoing common sentiments, the virtues of the polar explorer are articulated by Henry Morely: ‘Let us be glad, too, that we have one unspotted place upon this Globe of ours; a pole that, as it fetches truth out of a needle, so surely also gets all that is right-headed and right-hearted from the sailor whom the needle guides.’ Dickens went so far as to argue (without any evidence) that ‘no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves.’

For him, as for many others, the Franklin party was a symbol of empire, and the thought of cannibalism in connection with it was simply incomprehensible, a dreadful and intolerable reflection. As if to underscore this point, Dickens and Wilkie Colhns wrote a play based loosely on the Franklin expedition that put forward a more acceptable narrative, The Frozen Deep (1856). In the play neither cannibalism nor Inuit appear [...]. Collins’s later novelisation of the play concludes, ‘He has won the greatest of all conquests -- the conquest of himself. And he has died in the moment of victory. Not one of us here but may live to envy his glorious death.’

Like The Frozen Deep, Hatteras was another of the earliest fictional works inspired by Franklin’s fate. Verne was fascinated by the story, which prominently feature in the French press at the time. In the novel, the Franklin expedition serves as a frame for the trip to the pole. On the voyage north, the ghosts appear in the text immediately after the doctor reflects on the lost expedition. [...] Verne’s description of cannibalism points to the destablising truth that Dickens and others could not face: namely that civilisation is only a veneer [...].

---

All text above by: Katherine Bowers. “Haunted Ice, Fearful Sounds, and the Arctic Sublime: Exploring Nineteenth-Century Polar Gothic Space.” Gothic Studies. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[larktb-archive]

“While the missionary project was well intentioned and couched in terms of the ‘upliftment’ and ‘moral redemption’ of the San, it was predicated on breaking down their way of life and altering their view of the world to facilitate their incorporation into colonial society. As Patrick Brantlinger notes, ‘humanitarian ideology was almost always a variant of white supremacism.’”

- Mohamed Adhikari, Anatomy of a South African Genocide

[this-thing-of-darkness]

As in countless conservative diagnoses of social evils so in Marryat’s, language is a key source of symptoms–the words other people use, quite apart from what they have to say, express the inner rot at the heart of the body politic. Marryat’s opinion of the reformed Parliament thus looks forward to Thomas Carlyle’s condemnations of the “National Palaver”, while it also recalls Edmund Burke’s analysis of the French Revolution as insane ideological and linguistic froth subverting traditional institutions–“the polluted nonsense of… licentious and giddy coffee-houses” undoing the silent “work of ages.” At the heart of all authoritarian politics lies the desire to abolish dialogue (particularly the language of others), to use words strictly in the imperative mode, to call forth acts of heroism and devotion. This desire seeks to subject “every possible language, every future language, to the actual sovereignty of [a] unique Discourse which no one, perhaps, will be able to hear.”

Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness Note the reference to "pollution", a recurring theme in European classist discourse.

[essaynook]

In Knowing the Oriental, Edward Said analyzes an attitude he calls “orientalism.

In Knowing the Oriental, Edward Said analyzes an attitude he calls “orientalism.

In Knowing the Oriental, Edward Said analyzes an attitude he calls “orientalism.” Then, in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, Patrick Brantlinger applies this concept to the novel Heart of Darkness (see Chapters 6 and 9). In two to three pages (excluding title and reference pages), discuss the application of orientalism to Conrad’s novel. First, explain in your own…

[gaywitchtwins]

The growth of Empire and the scramble for Africa (along with the anthropological data this generated) meant that late nineteenth-century horror could provide more exotic terrors for its readers. Thus emerged what Patrick Brantlinger has termed 'Imperial Gothic', a mode which dramatizes civilization's encounter with the primitive—journeying 'to the far reaches of the Empire, where strange gods and "unspeakable rites" still had their millions of devotees'.

— Mighall, Robert: A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares. p.  136

I am a bit reluctant to apply this to the modern era, mind, but I firmly do believe that it’s a concept we shouldn’t disregard either, given the current political and cultural anxiety, and the tendency of the dominant power to Other marginalised groups - and how does one best Other a group if not by making them not just metaphorically, but literally monstrous?

[baredmirror]

By contrast, reverse colonization narratives are obsessed with the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic. The ‘savagery’ of Haggard's Amahaggers and Wells’s Morlocks both repels and captivates; their proximity to elemental instincts and energies, energies seen as dissipated by modern life, makes them dangerous but also deeply attractive. Patrick Brantlinger has linked this interest in the primitive to the late-Victorian fascination with the occult and the paranormal, and by extension to the Gothic. The primitive and the occultist alike operated beyond or beneath the threshold of the 'civilized’ rational mind, tapping into primal energies and unconscious resources as well as into deep-rooted anxieties and fears. Brantlinger identifies a body of fiction he terms 'imperial Gothic’ in which the conjunction of imperialist ideology, primitivism, and occultism produces narratives that are at once self-divided and deeply 'symptomatic of the anxieties that attended the climax of  the British Empire.’

Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”

[clove-pinks]

Imperialism/the Atlantic World/the British Empire forever swirling in my mind, and a lot of times I think—who was benefiting from it, exactly? Not the people of the metropole surely, surrounded by prison hulks, desperation and poverty everywhere, the population disenfranchised.

There's a bit in "Diary on the Continent" where Marryat is noting the complaints of a man who thinks that England is ruined in 1835:

what's the good of things being cheap when nobody has any money to purchase with? They might just as well be dear. It's a melancholy discovery, sir, this steam. [...] Country ruined, sir—people miserable thrown out of employment, while foreigners reap the benefit; we sell them our manufactures at a cheaper rate; we clothe them well, sir, at the expense of our own suffering population.

"We sell them our manufactures at a cheaper rate": you mean like the way Britain deliberately undercut and destroyed Indian textile industries? (But the lower class British workers aren't exactly enjoying the prosperity).

When Patrick Brantlinger wrote of "the peace and national prestige enjoyed by [Marryat's] first readers in the 1830s and 1840s" I think, hunh?? The same decades Louis Parascandola described as full of strife and insurrection in Puzzled Which to Choose? Parascandola is right, by the way: a more astute reader of Marryat, and much more aware of his world. All of the escapist literature and historical fiction in Marryat's day speaks to the desire to escape a brutal modern world.

[marryat92]

Patrick Brantlinger's book Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 has been a great asset to me in examining themes of imperialism, racism, and colonialism in Captain Marryat's works, as well as placing him in his context of Victorian cultural and literary history. It's slightly dated at this point (originally published in 1988), but still very relevant.

But Brantlinger unfortunately treats Marryat as primarily a writer for children, and he also just hates the guy. He tends to read him without nuance, flattens the moral ambiguity of his stories, and at one point he refers to Marryat's literary colleagues who were also ex-Royal Navy (Frederick Chamier, William Nugent Glascock, William Johnson Neale, etc.) as his SEAGOING CRONIES. (I put the book down and started laughing, at that point.)

There is a light-hearted anecdote in The Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat about Marryat having some improperly cured animal hides on display in his home, which then attracted insects, as told by his daughter Florence—who clearly loved her father but was not above making fun of him. (After angrily insisting that nothing was wrong, Captain Marryat finally admitted the problem and sent the infested hides to be treated).

Brantlinger assumes that it is "perhaps some satisfaction for the modern reader" to learn about this incident, which also cracks me up. Like, there was no need to include this in a literary analysis, but he is just filled with glee to think of some embarrassment happening to Marryat.

[trans-sweden]

   Orientalism and Heart of Darkness In Knowing the Oriental (ATTCHED), Edward S

   Orientalism and Heart of Darkness In Knowing the Oriental (ATTCHED), Edward Said analyzes an attitude he calls “orientalism.” Then, in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, Patrick Brantlinger applies this concept to the novel Heart of Darkness (see Chapters 6 and 9). In  three pages (excluding title and reference pages), discuss the application of orientalism to…

[marryat92]

Marryat’s midshipman novels recreate his years of excitement. Frank Mildmay is the most directly autobiographical, but The King’s Own, Newton Forster, Peter Simple, and Mr. Midshipman Easy also look back nostalgically to an age of youthful adventure when heroic action was almost routine. They imply that the peace and national prestige enjoyed by their first readers in the 1830s and 1840s are founded upon valiant deeds that comprise the glory of British history. “Let the author, a sailor himself,” says Marryat in The King’s Own, “take this favourable opportunity of appealing to you in behalf of a service at once your protection and your pride.”

— Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914

Sketch for 'The Battle of Trafalgar, and the Victory of Lord Nelson over the Combined French and Spanish Fleets, October 21, 1805', by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, 1833.

[marryat92]

Despite their moments of regret, then, Marryat's prodigal sons are glad to be rid of home and school. They nevertheless discover rigorous substitutes for home and school on shipboard. School on shore is usually an unpleasant affair in his fiction, but Marryat often points out that the public schools were tame compared to shipboard education of the brutal sort. Older midshipmen bully the younger ones without stint; as Jack Easy puts it, "the weak go to the wall."

— Patrick Brantlinger on Frederick Marryat's naval fiction, in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914

The Midshipmen's Berth, (detail), Charles Random.