IL COLONIALISMO INGLESE
La prima metà del diciassettesimo secolo vide lo stabilizzarsi delle prime colonie inglesi nel Nord America: i Padri Pellegrini salparono alla volta del New England nel 1620.
Queste colonie attrassero un grande numero di rifugiati dalla persecuzione religiosa. I coloni inglesi si insediarono anche nelle Indie occidentali e tutte queste colonie svilupparono ben presto semi-autonome forme di governo, soggette solamente alla superiore autorità della corona britannica.
I regni di George I e del suo successore George II furono periodi di grande espansione coloniale, durante i quali l'Inghilterra venne ad un conflitto di interessi con la Francia in India ed in Nord America. La colonizzazione britannica in India fu nelle mani della East India Company, che prosperò coll' accresciuta domanda di The di qualità, di seta e di cotone. Dapprima la East India Company aveva solo intenti commerciali, ma ben presto divenne effettivamente padrona dell'India cacciando via i suoi rivali francesi.
La rivalità in Nord America ebbe altre conseguenze, poiché i francesi possedevano i territori che oggi sono l'est del Canada. Questa rivalità portò alla "guerra dei sette anni", che finì con il Trattato di Parigi (1763) quando il Canada divenne britannico e la Gran Bretagna ottenne ulteriori vantaggi in India e da altre parti del mondo.
Questi furono trionfi dell'espansione mercantile che posero le fondamenta per la crescita all'estero della potenza dell'Impero Britannico, ed all'interno della nazione portarono benessere e ricchezza con la crescita dell'industria.
La politica britannica durante la seconda metà del diciannovesimo secolo tese a preservare la pace sia in Europa che in America, e l'Inghilterra non fu coinvolta in alcuna guerra nell'intero periodo. Questo fatto e l'enorme espansione dell'Impero resero possibile un rapido progresso economico.
L'espansione coloniale continuò. Nel 1857 il governo dell'India fu trasferito dalla East India Company (che fu formalmente abolita) alla corona.
Nel 1877 la regina Victoria divenne imperatrice dell'India. I grandi insediamenti del Canada, dell'Australia (originariamente una colonia penale) e della Nuova Zelanda furono tutti dotati di autogoverno nella seconda metà del diciannovesimo secolo.
La colonizzazione inglese dell'Africa dell'est e dell'ovest fu dovuta soprattutto al commercio più che al possesso territoriale. In Sud Africa l'occupazione inglese del Capo di Buona Speranza seguì le guerre napoleoniche e le colonizzazioni dei Boeri vennero ben presto in conflitto con i coloni inglesi.
Per liberarsi dall'ingerenza britannica i Boeri fondarono uno stato indipendente (il Transvaal) che venne di nuovo in conflitto con gli inglesi nel 1899 a causa della scoperta dell'oro. Con questo episodio piuttosto inglorioso viene a finire il regno della regina Vittoria e nel 1907 il Sud Africa divenne un dominio autogovernantesi.
Oggi le colonie inglesi rimaste dominio britannico sono tutte indipendenti e fanno parte del Commonwealth.
THE COLONIALISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
JOSEPH CONRAD
Joseph Conrad is one of the most famous writers who dealt with the agressiveness, seen as a man’s natural instinct, and the racism.
His real name was Jòref Teodor Konrad Naclez Korzeniowski. He was born in 1857 in Ukraine and he was the son of Polish noble parents, both of whom died when he was twelve. He lived for some years with a maternal uncle in France. In 1874, because of his dream to travel on the sea, he went to Marseilles and joined a French merchant ship. After four years he joined the British Merchant Navy. He learned English and sailed all over the world, especially to the Far East. In 1886 he took the Master Mariner’s Certificate and in 1890 he went up the River Congo, an experience that disturbed him deeply. In 1895 he left the British Merchant Navy and married Jesse George. In the same year he published his first novel: “Almayer’s Folly”. He settled in the south-east of England where he devoted himself to writing until his death in 1924.
He wrote three great novels, which are “Nostromo”, “The Secret Agent”, “Under Western Eyes”, and short stories (or novellas) like “Heart of Darkness”. However, his works didn’t bring financial success.
Because of his life at sea, most of his works deal with adventures and exotic countries but he’s not a romantic writer. In fact he doesn’t have a positive opinion about man’s life: his characters have to fight both with hostile external forces and their unstable inner nature. The result is a suffering and uncertain existence. So, pessimism pervades much of Conrad’s fiction together with a careful study of the human soul and its psychological individualism. For these reasons, we can say that Conrad is one of the modern novelist, even if his style is still traditional. In his works he tries to underline the small importance and the small validity of social values and conventions in a different situation from our society like in exotic foreign places, where man puts in evidence his more brutal and instinctive aspects. Conrad mostly uses the first-person narrator to represent human consciousness convincingly and vividly. Moreover he wants to show how each person interprets the reality in a different way and that everybody has an own mentality behind an external facade. So, the person who tells the story generally lives in the novel and doesn’t express Conrad’s point of view. Conrad often uses a “double character”: he creates two characters which are different but at the same time similar. Conrad gives a great importance also to details and exactness, influenced by Flaubert’s style.
“HEART OF DARKNESS”
“Heart of Darkness” is considered one of Conrad’s masterpieces, written in 1902. The story was used also in the important film “Apocalypse now”. Conrad finds the condraddiction of the civilization of these populations with the cruel methods used by the civilized men. The originality of this book is the aspect of hypocrisy of the colonialism, based on his personal experience. He sailed up the River Congo in 1890 and this travel helped him to know his own personality in a better way and after that he became pessimistic about the nature of the “civilised” man.
The story is set at the end of the 19th century and it’s told by Marlow, a seaman who is waiting to leave London on a boat called “Nellie” with other men. He talks about his travel in Congo with a Belgian company for the ivory trade. Once in Africa, at the Company station near the coast, he’s horrified by the cynicism and the cruelty of the colonists and disappointed by their inefficiency.
Company’s best agent, Kurtz, who stays in the heart of the continent, seems to be seriously ill and so Marlow has to bring him back to civilization.
Around this man there’s a sort of legend: every person talks about him in a positive way. For example, they say that he’s “a very remarkable person”, “an emissary of pity, and science and progress”. He has also become an idol for the natives through strange savage rites. Finally, Marlow, fascinated by this figure, meets him and they go back to the coast. However, Kurtz dies before arriving. The last words he says are: “The horror! the horror!”. When Marlow returned to Belgium, he talks to Kurtz’s fiancée about what had happened but he lies to her, saying that Kurt’s last words were her name.
In his story, Conrad underlines the hypocrisy of the colonists who are with Marlow. While, at the beginning, they adored Kurtz like a perfect and wise man, now that he has realized what the colonisation really is, they want to get rid of him. Western society has created the idea of the civilizing mission of the white man only because it’s useful for its own wealth and prosperity.
When Conrad went to Congo with a Belgian Company, King Leopold II of Belgium pursued his economic interests in Congo in the hypocritical name of philanthropy and anti-slavery, “to reduce the primitive barbarism”.
The title “Heart of Darkness” is referred to the dark and unknown continent that is Africa but also to the mistery and profundity of man’s soul and personality. So, Conrad wants to analyse and discover the phenomenon of colonialism but at the same time he wants to put in evidence the true self of the white man, that is savage and instinctive. We have a “journey into the self”.
Kurtz, who lives far from our society, destroys all the values and conventions commonly accepted and satisfies his basic instincts, subjecting the black population. He loses self-control and abandons himself to the “darkness”: this is an example of moral nihilism.
So, we have the colonist’s duplicity: they’re divided between the humanitarian ideology and the economic exploitation, but they are also fascinated by power and by the style of live of the natives.
Most of the story is narrated in the first person by Marlow but it’s begun and ended by another seaman who is listening to him on “Nellie”. Moreover, some events are narrated by some colonists or by Kurtz. So, we have a complex structure, with continuous changes of point of view. It permits to have a psychological realism. There are a lot of symbols, in parallels (between Marlow and Kurtz) or in oppositions (black and white, light and darkness).
For Marlow, black has positive connotations: it’s referred to a primitive environment and its people. White is associated with the colonialism and its violence and hypocrisy.
Language is characterized by idiomatic speech, by irony and also by Marlow’s difficulty in explaining his experiences, that is underlined by the use of vague and disturbing adjectives like “unspeakable”, “unimaginable”, “inscrutable” and so on. These words create a sense of mistery and horror: it seems impossible to discover the meaning of the evil Marlow sees. This penetration into man’s most primitive self, which connects the civilized and the primitive, is an anthropological element that anticipates psychoanalysis and the Modernism.
With this novel Conrad reveals all his disappointment and his disgust towards Belgian civilization of Congo. There is the echo of English campaign against Leopold III but also a denunciation against the protectionism of all European states towards Congo: it is important that each character of the book comes from a different State. The ship that takes Marlow to Africa is French, the captain of the boat is Swedish, Kurtz’s assistant is Russian, Kurtz is German with French father and English mother. All Europe is accused of exploitation of Congo and its people, so the title “heart of darkness” must be referred to the whole of Europe that obscures the pure heart of Africa with its civilization and its culture. Marlow in fact, at the end of his voyage, comes back to Europe because he realizes that the true heart of darkness is into his civilization and not into Africa. Europe is personified by Kurtz, a man of great ideas of development and great plans of colonization, who only in front of death realizes the evil and his defeat.
The British Victorian colonial experience was especially reflected in the works of two writers, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling; while the former criticised the Empire since it was based on absolute economic exploitation, the latter exalted imperial power and believed in the “burden” of the British, who, as the elected race, had to carry civilisation all over the world and establish their government based on honour and dignity.
To serve your captive’s need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild -
Your new – caught, sullen peoples
Half devil and half child.
Kipling wrote “epics rather than novels”; his major works Kim and The Jungle Books are a series of episodes held together by a central character: Kim and Mowgli, who both represent the “citizen of two worlds”. Kim is between India and England, and Mowgli between the village and the jungle but at the same time they bridge two different worlds. Kipling placed a great deal of his divided love for India and England in these to characters, who are citizens of the Empire, just like himself.
In the short stories he often exploited the device of the “frame story”, a narrative form popular at the turn of the century. This technique reacted against the omniscient narrator in favour of a more ambivalent vision of the world; the story is told by a fictional character in different situations: in an army camp, on board ship, in an Indian hut; the “frame situation” is well described and this generally allows the writer to provide an ironic comment on the central story that follows.
Style
Kipling was a master in the handling of language: both his poetry and prose show his love for words and his ability to use them to convey feelings and emotions and portray both exponents of the British ruling class and the natives.
