Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1989)

Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. At a time when new historicism is sometimes ahistoricism, when cultural materialism is often unrelated to literary analysis, what a splendid book this is to have. Firmly grounded in ample readings in social history and everywhere informed by a matchless familiarity with Victorian literature, Brantlinger's study exemplifies cultural studies at its best and most productive. Setting out to map development of imperialist ideology, primarily in adventure tales, travel narratives, novels, and histories, he shows that discourse of imperialism is a vital enabling factor in expansion of empire in nineteenth century. From Marryat's maritime tales of 1830s through Thackeray's India, literature of Botany Bay, and Orientalist fantasies of latter quarter of century, we arrive at Brantlinger's stunning genealogical chart of myth of Dark Continent--Europe's idea of Africa, in all its darkness and its horror. Let me give some idea of supple readings that culminate in a refreshing insistence that we see (to use Conrad's word from his Preface to The Nigger of Narcissus) dreadful ambiguities of Heart of Darkness, a text which resists uniform interpretation as exposure of atrocities in Congo or as ephemeral impressionism. Perhaps most significant imperative of Rule of Darkness is that we put aside a narrow definition of imperialism as late nineteenth-century acquisition of new territories by European nations. Brantlinger insists that early and mid-Victorians expressed imperialist ideology in their writings and that imperialism understood as an evolving but pervasive set of attitudes and ideas toward rest of world, influenced all aspects of Victorian and Edwardian culture (8). But this set of attitudes and ideas undergoes profound change throughout century, as he demonstrates in his analysis of a shift from hopeful evangelical reform of savage to a sense of decay, decadence, and loss about improving enterprise at end of century. In-between (among other things), Brantlinger shows that Frederick Marryat's tales set pattern for the imperialist adventure fiction that flourished from seafaring writers who emulated him in 1830s ... down to Haggard, Stevenson, Kipling, and Conrad (49), and that literature of Botany Bay expresses contradictions characterizing the entire literature of emigration and colonization. Were emigrants themselves outcasts, social misfits, criminals? If so, how could they be viewed as vanguard of an Empire whose goal was nothing less than semidivine, redemption of nonwestern world from darkness and barbarism (113). The posing of this question exemplifies what is particularly good about Brantlinger's study, his identification and sustained elaboration of deep contradictions embedded in all imperialist discourse. What's also especially fine about Rule of Darkness is level-headed use of Foucault's theories of power and surveillance. Unlike many critics who spin disciplinary designs at drop of a narrative hat, Brantlinger, in his readings of Philip Meadows Taylor's Confession of a Thug (1839) and of Sir Richard Button's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855) produces persuasive evidence that knowledge is power, that panoptic revelation of Indian Thuggee by Anglo-Indian police and anthropological surveillance of western science, produce and reproduce imperial domination. …