Language – The Literature Blog

Wuthering Heights: Reverse Colonialism and the Imperial Gothic Tradition

Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?’
– Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p.40.

In Gothic fiction of the Victorian period, concepts of the racial other become inextricably linked with fin-de-siècle fears of imperial decline and subsequent degeneration. More specifically, characters that are denounced as racially distinct are often viewed as figures of abjection and fear; they are the ‘marauding, invasive other[s]’ in which ‘British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms’.[1] This monstrosity is accentuated through a denouncement of the racial other as recidivist, linked intimately to notions of both moral and physical degeneracy. However, this degeneracy in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights not only internalises fears of Victorian England’s ‘devolution’ into a more primitive and morally degraded state of being, but more widely comes to critique and accentuate the increasing fragility of the British empire itself. This Victorian Gothic work is an example of the ‘imperial Gothic’, playing on Victorian anxieties.[2] In their respective representations of the racial Other, the texts come to highlight anxieties surrounding Victorian societies supposedly morally supreme status, presenting images of reverse imperialism to accentuate the decline of the British empire.

Anxieties surrounding colonial decline are clearly accentuated in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a novel which Susan Meyer argues acts as ‘an extended critique of British Imperialism.’[3] Heathcliff, an orphan of ambiguous racial origin, becomes the embodiment of the racial ‘Other’; his social position and actions threaten the rigid imperialistic class structures engrained in the fabric of the rigid model of the Victorian family home, as well as the position of England as colonial superior. Throughout the novel, Heathcliff is repeatedly collocated with notions of racial inferiority; he is frequently compared to darkness and criminality, his uncertain race alluding to a supposedly corrupted underlying spirit.[4] These notions of otherness are first accentuated through Heathcliff’s introduction to the Earnshaw family. Nelly declares that:

We crowded round, and, over Miss Cathy’s head, I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk- indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s – yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.[5]

From his very introduction, Heathcliff is displaced as a figure of ‘Otherness’ that is scarcely acknowledged to even belong to the same species as those surrounding him. His ‘black’ hair, coupled with his ‘dirty’ and ‘ragged’ appearance (p.25), places him entirely at odds with the middle-class Earnshaw children. Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity consequently becomes associated with the dirt that masks his face, contrasting starkly with the white skinned ‘purity’ of Catherine and Hindley.[6] Heathcliff’s otherness further becomes demarcated through the Earnshaw’s inability to comprehend his speech, resulting in the denouncement of Heathcliff as merely speaking ‘gibberish’ (p.25). It is in the adjective ‘gibberish’ that racial superiority is ultimately compounded; in speaking ‘gibberish’ (p.25), defined as ‘unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing; nonsense’, Heathcliff finds himself silenced through a racial prejudice that denounces his voice as unimportant ‘nonsense’. [7] In doing so the Earnshaw family, including Nelly, attempt to silence Heathcliff under the colonial gaze; the family denounce Heathcliff as racially inferior in order to affirm their own colonially superior social position.[8] As Susan Meyer observes, Heathcliff finds himself ‘pronounced upon as if he were a specimen of some strange animal species’, ‘subjected to the potent gaze of racial arrogance deriving from British imperialism.’[9] Through this gaze, Heathcliff finds himself marginalised and consigned to social and class inferiority.

However, although treated as an inferior racial other, continual interest in Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial ancestry accentuates the liminality of his position and the threat this poses to the surrounding gentrified families. Throughout the novel, Heathcliff finds himself continually collocated with countries synonymous with imperial resistance and political uncertainty.[10] These fears are clearly evoked in Nelly’s speculations; she tells Heathcliff that he is ‘fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?’ (p.40). At the time of Wuthering Heights’ publication in 1847, both India and China proved to be countries fraught with colonial uncertainty. Although the British empire had almost entirely established political control in India, English rule in China had been marred by the effects of the Opium wars. The subsequent decline in trade left England with far less confidence surrounding their ability to control and assimilate countries into their once burgeoning empire.[11] Through a collocation of Heathcliff with an ancestry closely tied to notions of colonial decline and uncertainty, Nelly’s narrative essentially gives voice to ‘prospect of an alliance’ between the two countries ‘and the possibility of their joint occupation of Britain.’ [12] In the suggestion of Heathcliff’s families purported wealth, which would ultimately give him the ability to buy up both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights for as little as ‘one weeks income’ (p.40), Brontë highlights the possibility of the conqueror becoming the conquered by countries before considered colonially inferior.

These economic fears appear to be realised on Heathcliff’s return, who subsequently subverts and monopolises the imperial gaze that once consigned him to racial inferiority. In his power over both the Linton and Earnshaw families, Heathcliff seemingly confirms Nelly’s conjectured anxieties. Revelling in his new position of economic power, Heathcliff enacts his revenge on his ‘colonisers’ and invokes a course of reverse imperialism. Through this reversal, Heathcliff’s position as racial ‘other’ provides him with the liminality to rise above and conquer those once considered his colonial superiors. This inversion is not only demonstrated through his economic ruining of Hindley and the stripping of Linton’s family home, but also in Heathcliff’s horrific oppression of Isabella Linton. Isabella, once superior to Heathcliff, finds herself subjected to a radical class inversion in the hands of her captor/husband. Isabella, who once looked from a position of social superiority on the man who looked ‘exactly like the son of the fortune-teller’ (p.34), finds herself oppressed by the same colonising gaze that she once deployed to belittle her husband. As Isabella is subjected to Heathcliff’s gaze, Brontë describes Heathcliff as looking upon her ‘as one might do at a strange repulsive animal: a centipede from the Indies, for instance’ (p.76). This results in Isabella turning ‘white and red in rapid succession’ and using ‘her nails’ to free herself from Cathy’s grip (p.77). Isabella, reduced under the imperial gaze inflicted upon her, becomes a figure collocated with animalism. She is not only colluded in the passage with both a ‘centipede’ (p.76), but is also denounced as a ‘tigress’ (p.77) by Cathy for her animalistic clawing of her arm in an attempt to escape Heathcliff’s gaze. Paralleled thus with the wildlife abundant in the West Indies Isabella finds herself, in the same way as her husband, ‘pronounced upon as if [s]he were a specimen of some strange animal species’.[13] Through this reduction, Heathcliff’s monopolisation of the imperial gaze is complete; his ability to wield this gaze, coupled with the class liminality provided to him through his ambiguous racial ancestry, subsequently allows him to enact his legal domination over the colonially superior figures that become the embodiment of the British Empire in the narrative.

As Meyer thus comes to argue, ‘the “vivid and fearful” scenes in Wuthering Heights, of which Charlotte Brontë complained, are primarily scenes in which the ugliness of starkly wielded colonial power, usually exercised in areas remote from the reach of British law or putative moral standards, is enacted through Heathcliff’s fearful reversals.’[14] It is in this way that the novel proved so horrifying to its Victorian readership; Heathcliff’s enactment of ‘fearful reversions’, as well as his meteoric rise, threaten the imperial superiority engrained in the social and moral values of the British Empire. However, Meyer further suggests that this threat is felt most sharply through the location of Heathcliff’s reversions being in England.

References
Featured Image– Illustration by Fritz Eichenberg, as taken from the 1943 Random House edition of Wuthering Heights. See Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; London: Random House, 1943).

[1] Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’ in Dracula: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Glennis Byron (London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1999), pp.119-145, p.121.

[2] The term ‘imperial Gothic’ was first introduced by Patrick Bratlinger. For more background information on the term, see Patrick Bratlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880- 1914’ in Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions, ed. Lyn Pykett (London: Longman, 1996), pp.184-210.

[3] Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p.100.

[4] For more information, see Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York City: D. Appleton and Company, 1895).

[5] Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000), p.25. All further references to Brontë s text are to this edition, and page numbers will be presented parenthetically.

[6] Throughout the novel, Brontë continually deploys light imagery to contrast the racial ambiguity of Heathcliff with the purity of the middle-class Earnshaw and Linton families. The use of dirt and mud is once again evoked at the start of Chapter 7 on the return of Cathy to Wuthering Heights. Cathy’s passage from ‘savage’ (p.36) to gentrified is starkly contrasted with Heathcliff, who is described as having ‘thick uncombed hair’, ‘clothes […] which had seen three months’ service in mire and dust’, and a ‘beclouded’ visage (p.37).

[7] Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/gibberish [Accessed 17/03/2018]

[8] In postcolonial theory, the imperial gaze is often defined by the observed finding themselves defined in terms of colonially superiors own set of social systems and moral values. From this perspective, the imperial gaze thus infantilizes the object of the scrutiny whilst simultaneously denouncing the observed as racially and socially inferior. This is the concept of the imperial gaze, as first introduced and subsequently developed by E. Ann Kaplan, that this blog post will focus on and expand in relation to the supposedly racial inferior monopolising this gaze to enact discourses of reverse imperialism. For more information on the imperial gaze, see E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism and the Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, 2012).

[9] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.97.

[10] Not only is Heathcliff associated with India and China in the novel, but also with the American Civil War. As Lockwood conjectures of Heathcliff’s meteoric rise in fortune, did ‘he earn honours by drawing blood from his foster country [?]’ (p.67). This, as Susan Meyer contends, further places Heathcliff into a discourse of ‘successful colonial rebellion’. For more information, see Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.114.

[11] For more information, see Ross G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[12] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.114.

[13] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.114.

[14] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.118.

Written by Steph Reeves.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

The Robin Hood Tradition: Tensions and Bonds in The Early Modern Ballads

‘Were thou not my maister…/
thou shuldis by hit ful sore;/
get the a man wher thou wille,/
for thou getis me no more.’
-Robin Hood and The Monk, ll.59-62.

In the early modern ballads of the Robin Hood tradition, homosocial bonds are almost continually compromised by tensions surrounding masculinity and power. These tensions are seen throughout both Robin Hood and The Monk and Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne; such conflicts are most interestingly presented through the characters, and arguments, of Little John and Robin Hood respectively. In both ballads, Little John and Robin Hood’s friendship becomes compromised mainly by power struggles, as often instigated and challenged by Robin Hood himself. These struggles consequently lead to vulnerability and dissolution within the outlaw community.

In Robin Hood and The Monk, Robin instigates tensions between himself and Little John through his attempts to assert authoritarian control. Written in around 1450[1], the ballad is far removed from the later gentrification of Robin Hood, yet Robin still possesses an undeniable authority over the band of outlaws.[2] He declares that ‘Litull John shall beyre my bow, Til that me list to drawe’.[3] The use of the modal verb ‘shall’ accentuates his belief in his authority; in using a modal verb, which ‘expresses necessity or possibility’, Robin propounds Little John’s compliance as already accepted.[4] In this case, Little John is reduced to ‘a squire rather than a fellow’[5], a depreciating position that Little John clearly refutes. Little John declares ‘were thou not my maister…thou shuldis by hit ful sore; get the a man wher thou wille, for thou getis me no more’(l.59-62). As Bernard Lumpkin argues, ‘In his rebuke, Little John rejects the language of fellowship and substitutes for it the language of hierarchy…such words vividly convey his shame and bitterness over the demeaning role Robin Hood has made him play.’[6] This ‘language of hierarchy’ is exemplified by John’s use of ‘man’, which in turn suggests servant, as well as ‘maister’. In using these terms, Little John exemplifies his lower status to Robin. However, although defining himself as subordinate to Robin in this way, Little John refuses to remain in such a lowly position. Power, therefore, becomes the key area of contention between the two men, causing tension in the homosocial community.

Power tensions in the ballad also result from the archery competition between Robin Hood and Little John, which itself articulates the masculine aggression underpinning the outlaw community. In the early fifteenth-century, archery was seen as ‘the weapon of lesser men’[7]; it was often seen as the choice weapon of the yeomanry populace. However, archery competitions were often seen as a way of showcasing prowess and masculine dominance. In Robin and Little John partaking in a competition, masculine aggressions and tensions are thus underlined; it is with Little John’s success that Robin incites tension into the seemingly peaceful forest setting. Robin Hood ‘seid schortly nay’, ‘lyed Litus Jon’ and ‘smote hym with his hande’ (l.55-56); in denouncing Little John as a liar, Robin clearly refuses to admit his inferior position and the loss of the archery competition to one of his fellow, yet simultaneously ‘lower’, outlaws. Furthermore, in the active verb ‘smote’, defined archaically as the ‘a heavy blow or strike’[8], Robin appears to berate Little John for winning, verbally and physically attacking him and consequently blemishing his archery prowess over Robin himself. This berating arises once again in Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, where Robin Hood sets out to destroy any sense of superior prowess that Little John possesses. Robin remarks that ‘it is noe cunning a knave to ken’[9], suggesting that Little John has no more skill than Robin in deducing whether strangers be friend or foe. As remarked in the ballad itself, ‘often words they breeden bale, that parted Robin and John’ (l.43); as a result of this, both ballads become ‘a full statement of the danger of conflict within the band’[10], accentuating tensions of power and masculinity and the effect of this on the cohesive homosocial community.

Such dangers are accentuated through Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne; In the ballad, the tensions are more seriously positioned. Dissolution within the outlaw gang becomes marked by death and extreme violence. As Stephen Knight argues, this makes the ballad ‘a partner piece to Robin Hood and the Monk’[11]; Just like the previous ballad, Little John and Robin are left fundamentally more vulnerable after parting company. Once again, it is Robin who instigates the disbanding, taking offence at Little John’s attempts to protect him. From the opening stanza’s of the ballad, it becomes apparent that Robin’s characterisation has been elevated further than in Robin Hood and The Monk; his dream, in which he is ‘beete and binde’ (l.9) by ‘two wight yeoman’ (l.7), aligns Robin with the Medieval Romance genre, in which the heroes find themselves indulging in dream-like prophecies.[12] This elevation in characterisation is made further apparent through Robin’s overt awareness of his masculinity; Robin sees Little John’s remarks to be attacks upon his position as lead outlaw. He declares ‘A, John, by me thou setts noe store’, ‘how offt send I my men beffore, and tarry myselfe behinde?’ (l.37-38). In this, it is clear Robin takes Little John’s words as an accusation of cowardice, rather than ones of protection and allegiance. In the use of the prepositions ‘behinde’ and ‘beffore’, Robin, like Little John, ‘rejects the language of fellowship’ for ‘the language of hierarchy’[13]. Robin repudiates the notion of being one who delays the action, as ‘tarry’ suggests, refusing to be seen in any way as subordinate in masculinity to John. Moreover, in the use of ‘my men’, Robin once again compounds the notion of Little John’s inferiority; in his rebuke, Robin reduces Little John once more to a servant as opposed to his fellow, an action reminiscent of Robin’s similar treatment of Little John in Robin Hood and the Monk.

Robin’s preoccupation with cowardice highlights the multi-faceted nature of power dynamics amongst the outlaws; preoccupations with masculinity and courage become the focal point of tension in the homosocial community. It is this that fundamentally weakens the group, leaving the community vulnerable to attack from false foresters, as embodied by Guy of Gisborne, and the corrupting force of the Sheriff. As Lumpkin argues, ‘The medieval ballads thus reveal Robin Hood’s band as a dynamic community’, in which ‘the limits of individual power are continually negotiated’ and ‘the potential for the tyranny of one man is lessened by others who act, as it were, as checks and balances.’[14] It is apparent, then, that tensions arise from Robin’s supposed superiority over the group; it is up to characters, such as Little John, to advise and placate Robin, reminding him continually of his place amongst his fellow yeomen.

References
Featured Image: Illustration of Robin Hood and The Guy of Gisborne.

[1] Although the exact dating of The Monk is unclear, this essay will take 1450 as its contextual basis for analysis.

[2] Robin, although possessing certain levels of elevation in character, does not become gentrified until The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, written by Anthony Munday and produced by the Admiral’s Men in 1599. See Anthony Munday, ‘The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp.303-402

[3] ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp.31-57, p.38, l.37-38. All further references to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

[4] Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/shall [Accessed 28/02/2017]

[5] Bernard Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, ed. Thomas Hahn (Boydell & Brewer: Cambridge, 2000), pp.141-151, p.146.

[6] Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, p.146.

[7] Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Archer (Boydell & Brewer: Suffolk, 1985), p.1

[8] Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/smite [Accessed 26/02/2017]

[9] ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997),pp.169-184, p.174, l.39. All further references to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

[10] ‘Introduction to Robin Hood and the Monk’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997),pp.31-36, p.33.

[11] ‘Introduction to Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp.169-172, p.171.

[12] In the Medieval Romance genre, heroes experiencing prophecies and dreams was a common trope which elevated the position of the heroic characters. Such elevation can be seen in Medieval romances such as Guigemar, who receives a prophecy from an ambisexual stag after fatally wounding the animal with an arrow. See Marie De France, ‘Guigemar’ in The Lais of Marie De France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin, 1986),pp.43-55.

[13] Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, p.146.

[14] Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, p.147.

Written by Steph Reeves.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Immortality and Transcendence in John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale

‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death’
–Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, l.51-52.

The wish for transcendence adopts an arousing vision for the second-generation Romantic poets, as they strongly believed in the healing power of the imagination and the ability to escape real life with their creative thoughts. Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers a theory for creative transcendence in one of his famous passages in Biographia Literaria (1817). He establishes a harmonious relationship between the ideal world and the real world: ‘[the imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create: even where this process is rendered impossible’.[1] Shortly after Coleridge’s work was published, poets including John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley shed a new light onto the transcendent powers of poetry. Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) explores the transcendent influence of the human mind through the presence of nature as an immortal symbol. The use of imaginative transcendence from a real world to the ideal in both poems exposes the transition of multiple other binaries. The wish to transcend between the real and ideal can question whether the human imagination is subject to the limitations of human experience.

In Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the bird is presented as an immortal icon. The speaker admires the happiness that the nightingale possesses: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot/ But being too happy in thine happiness’.[2] The nightingale embodies an excess of joy which is incomparable to the speaker’s. The superlative ‘too’ portrays the extremity of the nightingale’s immortality, invoking an excess of emotion onto the speaker. The overbalance of pleasure from a natural object links to the themes encompassing the Sublime. In The Prelude, William Wordsworth recognises nature’s superiority in the lines:

‘The Power which these/
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus/
Thrusts forth upon the senses.’[3]

The all-consuming ‘Power’ of the bird’s songs in Keats poem invokes a raw emotion that shows how the transcendence is initiated by a Subliminal, aesthetic experience.

Whilst the nightingale is an immortal entity, it is also a bird of darkness. The dark imagery in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ resembles the death-wish of the speaker; there is ‘no light’ (l. 38) except from where the breeze causes the trees to part. The stanza is full of absences and presences caused from the transcendence from reality to the ideal, reflecting the glimpses of life and death:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
…
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
(ll. 41-52)

Keats’ bird is invisible in the shadowy forest of ‘embalmed darkness’, resembling the death-wishes connected to the transcendent thoughts of the speaker. The dark imagery plunges the speaker into confusion; he ‘cannot see’, blinded by the powers of his imagination. Furthermore, he addresses the nightingale as ‘Darkling’ to emphasise his loneliness in a dark world. Although the nightingale is immortal in the ideal world, Keats is suggesting that when combined with the real world, the bird brings deathly connotations because of its black colour. He views death as a welcomed prospect; ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death’. Death to Keats seems partly desirable because of the mortality of the world he lives in. The presence of the nightingale in reality makes him see death as an escape to release him from his troubles. The dark symbolism of the nightingale draws a close association between life and death, which blurs the boundaries between the two.

Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ contrasts the immortality of the bird with the reality of mankind to remind us of the permanent sorrow in the world, emphasising the human desire to escape it. The speaker wishes to ‘fade far away’ from the death and decay of the real world:

‘Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan’
(ll. 21- 24)

The verb ‘dissolve’ stresses Keats’ desire to disappear from the destructive world around him. The added emphasis of ‘dissolve’ in parenthesis separates the word away from the rest of the stanza; resembling Keats distancing himself from the decay of reality. Furthermore, the imagery of the miserable men visualises a world of grief and suffering that is not apparent in the nightingale’s world. The sensory ‘groan[s]’ interfere with the beauty of the nightingale’s song that ‘Singest of summer’ (l. 10). This contrast grounds Keats in the realms of reality and stops him from transcending. The regular rise and fall of the iambic pentameter syllables arguably represent the sound of a heartbeat; further keeping Keats connected to the physical body whilst transcending to an idealised state. This suggests that the mortality of the world cannot be escaped even if mankind wishes to be free. With regards to Keats’ poetry, Bernice Slote summarises that ‘because of the particular poetic quality of his life, Keats’ poems are nearly always viewed autobiographically’.[4] Contextually therefore, it is likely that Keats is referring to the death and sickness occurring in his life at the time he wrote the ode. His family’s misfortunes and impending struggle with tuberculosis enabled Keats to envision a world surrounded by life’s suffering and decay. This belief is exemplified in his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818:

‘I compare human life to a Mansion of Many apartments… [in which occurs the] sharpening of one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man- of convincing one’s nerves that the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression.’[5]

The degenerated earth that Keats lives in opposes the nightingale’s infinite life; as the bird ‘wast not born for death’ (l. 61). The age and decay of the real world in Keats’ ode contrasts with the state of the bird to suggest that mankind is inferior. Combining the world of imagination with the real world is important to Keats because without imagination, the real world is confined to ugliness. On the other hand, merging the two worlds with the speaker’s imagination shows how one cannot simply transcend into the other. Earl Wasserman argues that Keats’ juxtaposition of immortality and pain emphasises the instability of reality, ‘for the perfection of the nightingale’s happiness underscores an uneasiness of the poet’s’.[6] In a universe of suffering and pain, seeing the nightingale triggers the speaker’s imaginative thoughts. Keats binds a world of pain and fear by forging the ideal and real world as one: ‘Still wouldst though sing, and I have ears in vain-/ To thy high requiem become a sod’ (ll. 59- 60). In these lines, Keats is implying that even with the joyous sounds of the nightingale, death inevitably still surrounds him. It is not a jubilant celebration of life but a ‘requiem’ for the dead.

Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ highlights his awareness of the transcendent power of art when he rides on the ‘viewless wings of Poesy’ (l. 33). Furthermore, Keats transcends beyond admiring the nightingale when he notes that ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’ (l. 29). The nightingale is no longer an aesthetic beauty but a metaphor for poetic inspiration. For Keats, the power of poetry is not the only motivator for his transcendent experience. The poem’s rich imagery of intoxication emphasises a desire to escape into a world of hallucinogenic bliss. The imagery of the ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ (l. 17) suggests that alcohol is an overwhelming factor to the quality of Keats’ thoughts. The plosive alliteration is onomatopoeic and captures the action of sparkling wine fizzing. The ‘winking’ is suggestive of bubbles forming and bursting, which personifies the alcohol as opening and shutting like an eye. This can allude to Keats’ imagination flitting from reality to the ideal through the influence of alcohol. The ode begins with ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’ (ll. 1- 2) to suggest that the speaker is drinking to escape his misery. The decadent start of the poem concentrates on the suffering of the speaker, through the repetition of the first-person determiner ‘my’ to emphasise the speaker’s unstable state of mind. The ‘drowsy numbness’ adds delusion and portrays the real world as blurred and uncertain. Furthermore, Keats uses Greek myth in his ode to express his desire to transcend from the uncomfortable reality of modernity. Greek myth is used to describe the transcendence of Keats flying to the nightingale ‘Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards’ (l. 32). In Greek myth, ‘Bacchus’ is the god of agriculture, wine and fertility; encompassing the earthly consciousness of the real world. To ‘not’ use reality as a way to transcend to the ideal suggests that alcohol is an insufficient source of inspiration for his imagination. John Strachan disapproves of Keats’ work, describing it as ‘neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium’.[7] In disagreement with Strachan’s criticism, the intoxication of the speaker in the ode can be seen as a symbol of the real world’s chaos as opposed to the poet himself. Keats criticises the self-indulgence of mankind and shows its interference with the poetic inspiration.

References
Featured Painting: Joseph Severn, Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath, 1845, Oil on Canvas, 114 x 97cm, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

[1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. The Floating Press (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2009) pp. 365- 366.

[2] John Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4^th ed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012) pp. 1464- 1466 (l. 6) (All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text).

[3] William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4^th ed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012) pp. 554- 558.

[4] Bernice Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1958) p. 4.

[5] Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May, 1818 in Keats, John. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

[6] Earl Wasserman. The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1953) p. 188.

[7] John Strachan, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on The Poems of John Keats (London: Routledge, 2013) p. 39.

Written by Emily Warren.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

How Orientalism operates in Game of Thrones

‘Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.’
–Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (London: Penguin, 1995)

Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism suggests that the West imagines, emphasises and distorts cultures of the East. Even though his book was published nearly 40 years ago, the idea of the East being portrayed in this way can still be seen in popular culture today, more precisely in the popular book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, written by George R. R. Martin and the TV adaption Game of Thrones, created by David Beinoff and D. B. Weiss. To summarise Orientalism, Said suggests there are three definitions to the word. The first being a term for anyone who teaches or writes about the Orient in an academic sense. Secondly, he views it as a way of thinking based on the distinction between the Orient and the Occident. Thirdly, it is a way of the West gaining control and authority over the Orient. These concepts and portrayals of the East are a man-made concept, according to Said, that have been cemented over time. Game of Thrones covers these definitions in different ways.

Landscapes
In the series A Song of Ice and Fire, there are two main lands: Essos and Westeros. Although these names can be easily associated with the East and West, the TV adaption provides visual representations of the contrast between the continents. The architecture used in different cities and towns is inspired by certain parts of the world which provides viewers with associations of places they know.

In the north of Westeros, the House of Stark reside in Winterfell. The dark, stone buildings are similar to English and Scottish castles, making the connection between Westeros and Western Europe. In the novel, A Game of Thrones, Daenerys pictures the land she is from, whilst she is living in the East: ‘somewhere beyond the sunset, across the narrow sea, are a land of green hills and flowered plains and great rushing rivers, where towers of dark stone rose amidst magnificent blue-grey mountains’ (Game of Thrones, p. 26.) Daenerys captures the essence of Winterfell and portrays it as a place similar to English country sides and Western Europe.

Moorish architecture — Moorish Architecture

The landscape in Essos demonstrates Said’s theory most clearly. Firstly, the city of Qarth is full of wealth and detailed architecture. With inspiration from the Middle East, such as Morocco, and focuses on arches, walkways, marble stone and detailed mosaic it illustrates a landscape associated with the Other, in contrast to the West. The architecture allows Qarth to be a place of magic and mystery for Western viewers and readers, due to its associations with the East. Here, Daenerys must tread carefully as many characters are suspicious and untrustworthy. Characters such as the Warlocks, who practise magic, live in Qarth which is unsurprising as the East is often portrayed as being magical and mysterious, which links to the exoticism. These are cultural norms different to ones seen in Westeros. On the other hand, the rest of

thumbnail_DorneImage3 — Dorne, Game of Thrones

Essos portrays the other aspect of the Orient, where the East is depicted as being caught in the past and a fragment of its former glory. Said describes the Orient as a place of ‘romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’ (Orientalism, p. 1). This relates to Daenerys’ experience of travelling through Essos as the landscapes are ‘haunting’ due to their contrast to the West. The East often shocks Daenerys. For example, when she experiences the fighting for pleasure at her wedding to Khal Drogo she is ‘frightened’ (Game of Thrones, p. 97) Said’s use of the word ‘exotic’ also reinforces the differences between lands in Westeros and Essos; the people and land in the continents differ so greatly that the East appears exotic to the West.

Characterisation

The Dothraki are portrayed as savage and barbaric with limited character development, apart from Daenerys’ husband Khal Drogo. The rest of the tribe do not receive the same development that characters in Westeros do. David J. Peterson suggests: ‘Martin’s Dothraki are portrayed as violent, warlike people. They steal what they will and rape who they will, and do so often, in the course of the history.’(1) Peterson highlights their aggressive nature and how they are grouped together. Katherine Tullmann comments on how ‘the further away some cultural practises are from our own, the less likely we are to condone them. This would suggest that moral practises vary by

culture – and who are we to say they’re wrong?’ (2) Tullmann’s views link to Orientalism as the Dothraki are seen in this negative way due to having a contrasting culture to those in the West. However, although it is a different culture and way of living, yet Game of Thrones shuns it, suggesting it is wrong as we see it through the eyes of a Westerner. David J. Peterson observes the lack of voice the East have: ‘we never see the Dothraki through the eyes of the Dothraki. Though Daenerys comes to admire and respect the Dothraki, what right has she to pass judgement on them at all – as if she were explaining the ways of God to men?’ (3) This links to Orientalism as we only view the Eastern places and characters through a Western perspective. The East is only visible through the language and perspective of the West and primarily through Daenerys.

Conclusion

Even nearly 40 years on from when Said published Orientalism, his ideas can still be seen in modern pop culture and Game of Thrones is no exception. The power dynamic between Westeros and Essos is displayed in many aspects of the books and TV series, such as the landscape and how the different locations inspired Essos and Westeros. Also, the contrast in characterisation and how characters in Westeros are fully developed with complex personalities, but those in the East such as the Dothraki receive basic descriptions further shows Orientalism.

References

Featured Image: HBO, Game of Thrones

Images:
Image 1: Winterfell http://gameofthrones.hu/varak/deres/ [accessed 10 November 2016]

Image 2: Nick Ames, ‘Game of Thrones themed tour of Spain’s Moorish architecture on offer’, 4 June 2015 http://www.designmena.com/thoughts/game-of-thrones-themed-tour-of-spains-moorish-architecture-on-offer [accessed 10 November 2016]

Image 3: Marc N. Kleinhenz, ‘Dorne, A Murder of Crows: The Dorne dilemma’, 29 April 2016 http://watchersonthewall.com/murder-crows-dorne-dilemma/ [accessed 10 November 2016]

Image 4: ‘Winter is Coming’, Game of Thrones. Season 1, episode 1. (HBO, 2012)

Primary Sources:
1, George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones, (London: Harper Voyager, 2014)

2, David J. Peterson, ‘The Languages of Ice and Fire’ in Mastering the Game of thrones: essays on George R.R. Martin’s a song of ice and fire, edited by Jes Batis and Susan Johnston, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015) pp. 15-35, p. 20.

3, Katherine Tullmann, ‘Dany’s Encounter with the wild: cultural relativism in a Game of Thrones’ in Game of Thrones and philosophy, edited by Henry Jacoby (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2012) pp. 194-204, p. 195.

Freedom in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange

‘What I do I do because I like to do.’
-Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, p. 31.

Anthony Burgess’ novella, published in 1962, invites discussion on the question of what is true freedom, and how much of it should we be permitted to have? T. H. Green’s definition of true freedom includes negative freedom, as well as positive.1 This is indicative of the idea that when freedom is desired, this idea of true freedom may not be implied. Instead, he suggests a sense of freedom with limitations, in which individuals are not free to do entirely as one wishes due to the potential negative consequences of this, as the more desirable concept.

Burgess’ protagonist, Alex, demonstrates Green’s idea of true freedom, as he is initially free from coercion or restriction and regulation. He also seemingly possesses the freedom to do as he pleases, committing monstrous crimes for his own pleasure. Although, as a society, we may supposedly crave a full sense of freedom, it is clear through characters such as Alex, that this complete sense of freedom may be detrimental to the community and therefore limitations must be enforced. The character narrates that ‘what I do I do because I like to do’, exemplifying his freedom of choice at the beginning of the novella and his application of this full sense of freedom.2 On the issue of morality, Burgess tells us in his introduction that ‘The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities’.3 Through the obscenities and gruesome crimes that the protagonist and his gang commit, we learn that with freedom comes moral choice and with good comes evil. Therefore, if we, as a society, allow freedom to be used for good, then it inevitably will be used in the same way for evil.

Once Alex’s actions have been altered by the aversion therapy, the state have influenced and limited his sense of true freedom, manipulating his freedom to act as he chooses, as well as removing his freedom from coercion. However, Sumner argues that Alex’s choices were never free for him to make, as he has always been manipulated by the state. He contests that the character’s criminal actions, and even the cause of these, being the desire for criminality, are ‘socially or institutionally conditioned.’4 This idea suggests that, although Burgess depicts the authoritative state to deprive Alex of his free will, and freedom to choose to act independently, in fact, the protagonist did not possess this to begin with. Sumner argues that Alex acts against the state, as his personal form of resistance. He furthers these ideas, claiming that ‘In a social and political register, Alex is forced to choose between totalitarianism and anarchy. That choice is false and, if anything, testifies to a lack of individual freedom. If there are no good options, then individual choice is a mere abstraction; one might as well flip a coin.’5 Although the character seemingly actively chooses to behave violently and break the law, Sumner argues that this, in fact, is his choice between two options dictated to him by the authority, and therefore, he does not possess the true concept of freedom. Alex is a product of the totalitarian state and he is therefore conditioned to behave violently as his form of resistance.

References
Featured Image: Front Cover of Penguin’s 2013 edition. See Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin Classics, 2013).

1. T. H. Green in Adrian Blau, ‘Against Positive and Negative Freedom’, Political Theory, 32. 4 (2004) http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148106 [accessed 2 May 2018] p. 549-50.

2. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin Group, 1972), p. 31. All other references are to this edition and are given in parenthesis in the main body of the text.

3. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1986), p. XIII.

4. Charles Sumner, ‘Humanist Drama in A Clockwork Orange’, The Yearbook of English Studies: Literature of the 1950s and 1960s, 42 (2012) http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/yearenglstud.42.2012.0049 [accessed 1 May 2018] (p. 57-7).

Resisting Metaphorical Slavery in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

‘I should have been a careless shepherd if I had left a lamb-my pet lamb- so near a wolf’s den.’
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 216.

In its historical entity, the term slavery often invokes images associated with the horrific atrocities committed during the transatlantic slave trade of the imperial British Empire. However, nineteenth-century literature also utilized this discourse to exemplify the oppression of the domestic female worker through both their social position and in their ideology. It is in the latter use of the term that Charlotte Brontë carefully crafts a discourse of metaphorical slavery within her highly renowned female bildungsroman Jane Eyre, using the narrative of oppression to highlight Jane’s experiences as a lower-class woman.

From the very beginning of the novel, Brontë clearly deploys a discourse of metaphorical slavery to highlight Jane’s entrapment and enslavement to her cruel aunt Mrs. Reed. Forced by her social status as penniless orphan to live at Gateshead and under the continual tyranny of her cousin John Reed, Jane suffers cruelly under the families ‘reign’; she is forced to obey orders and is subjected to both physical and psychological torment. From these early years, Jane is instilled with the notion that her lower-class social status will hinder her progression in life; she is essentially informed that her penniless state will forever leave her a metaphorical slave to the upper-classes that she must serve and rely on to keep her alive through income and position. This is exemplified in Bessie’s warning to young Jane, who tells her that ‘you ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you; if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poor-house’.1 From the beginning of her life, then, Jane is subjected to adversity and metaphorical enslavement by her own relatives.

However, Jane refuses to remain in this subservient position, instead resisting the shackles emplaced on her through her lowly social position and her reliance on Mrs. Reed’s benefaction. This resistance is first displayed in her courageous outburst of anger towards her aunt, in which she declares:

‘I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if anyone asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.’
-p. 36.

Here, this resistance to her own oppression as a young woman reinforces the powerful female character Bronte desperately wanted to portray to her Victorian audience. Through Jane’s resistance, Bronte bestows a sense of empowerment within her heroine as no longer a prisoner to her social class and gender:

‘My soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.’
-p. 37.

Eyre’s defiance is a salient milestone within this bildungsroman; a step from girlhood to woman. The reader witnesses this act of insubordination to Mrs. Reed again during her final visit to Gateshead, as Jane tells her dying aunt: ‘Love me then, or hate me, as you will [..] you have my full and free forgiveness’ (p. 240). Through these displays of resistance to her early social enslavement, it is worth noting how Jane’s ill temper ceases to exist after her departure from the tyrannous rule of Mrs Reed at Gateshead. In her defiance of her aunt on her deathbed, Jane appears to free herself of the torment of her past life.

It is in Jane’s removal from Gateshead, and her later instatement at Thornfield Hall, that appears to at least superficially mark the beginning of Jane’s freedom from domestic enslavement. The blossoming romance between Jane and Mr. Rochester, which defies the opposing factions against the merging of distinct social classes, appears to suggest a transcendence of social constriction and cruelty. However, the once fiery and courageous personality possessed by Jane is almost immediately replaced by her sudden change into the trope of the submissive damsel; despite freeing herself from her past masters, Mrs. Reed and later the headmaster of the girl’s school she is educated in, Jane appears to replace these tyrannous figures with Rochester. Despite her position as Rochester’s love interest, Jane remains in the position of vulnerability and inferiority afforded to her by her lower-class working woman status; she remains indebted to Rochester for both her economic stability and emotional happiness. Examples of Jane’s metaphorical slavery to Thornfield are shown through an excerpt of dialogue between Rochester and Jane; as Rochester remarks to Jane that his ‘house is a mere dungeon: don’t you feel it so?’, Jane replies that ‘It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir?’ (p. 215). Here, Jane appears oblivious to her entrapment, remains entirely enchanted with Rochester’s privilege of wealth and class which ultimately leaves her unable to view her new life as little more than a different form of captivity.

Infatuated by Mr. Rochester, Jane’s perspective is ultimately hindered. She fails to recognize her hindered position within Thornfield as a domestic help, as well as her changed behaviour aligning her more to the position of slave and servant than a free and equal agent. As Bette London critiques, ‘instead of the exhilaration of freedom, the novel offers the pleasures of submission’; this essentially supports the concept that Jane’s enslavement to both her herself and Rochester hinders the notion of the novel being a progressive feminist text.2 Jane’s naivety results in her unable to recognize her enslavement even in Rochester’s most obvious comparisons. As Rochester remarks ‘I should have been a careless shepherd if I had left a lamb-my pet lamb- so near a wolf’s den’ (p. 216). In the comparison of Jane to a ‘lamb’, kept as a ‘pet’ and essentially enslaved to the tyranny of the deadly ‘wolf’s den’ (p.126), Jane is essentially depicted as feeble and vulnerable prey to Rochester’s tyranny. Rochester’s use of the possessive determiner ‘my’ further enables the reader to fathom an understanding of Jane’s submissive position to Rochester’s dominance as the ‘shepherd’, a relationship that further mimics the relationship between slave and slave owner.

It is only in Rochester’s attempts to stop her attempts to visit Mrs Reed that Jane finally begins to resist her enslaved position; she declares ‘I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you’ (p. 251). This speech marks the first act of resistance to her master; she exerts a liberating sense of power to define herself as a servant and not just a slave. This seed of resistance, planted in her visit to her dying aunt, evolves and spreads into her greatest act of revolt; upon discovering Rochester’s falsehood concerning his married status, Jane states that ‘I must leave Adele and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole life: I must begin a new existence’ (p.303). This decision, which marks a considerably poignant part of the novel for the heroine, results in Jane abandoning Rochester’s love and her life at Thornfield Hall; she frees herself from the metaphorical chains of wealth and social standing, ‘Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours’ (p.316).

References
Featured Image- Illustration taken from Volume One of the 1890 edition of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, as published by Thomas Crowell in New York.

1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 12. All further references to Brontë’s text are to this edition and will be given parenthetically.

2. Bette London, ‘The Pleasures of Submission: Jane Eyre and the Production of the text’, English Literary History, 58 (1991), 195-213 (p. 199).

Written by Ashleigh Edwards.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Language as a Method of Control in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange

‘These grahzny sodding veshches that come out of my gulliver and my plot,’ I said, ‘that’s what it is.’
‘Quaint,’ said Dr Brodsky, like smiling, ‘the dialect of the tribe.’
-Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, p. 91.

Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is narrated by protagonist Alex and is written in Nadsat, a new language created by Burgess. This language is used by Alex to demonstrate how he dominates the streets but then attempts to retain this control when he becomes subject to a government experiment that aims to modify his violent behaviour. Nadsat acts a buffer to the graphic violence Alex and his ‘droogs’ commit. When they break into a woman’s house, and attack her, Nadsat blurs the violence to the reader. He ‘upped with the little malenky like silver statue and cracked her a fine fair tolchock on the gulliver and that shut her up real horrorshow and lovely’ 1. The language limits associations the reader would normally have if Alex spoke in ‘proper’ English due to the confusing and new words. Burgess’s use of alliteration in ‘fine fair tolchock’ creates a playful and poetic image and, as he said himself, the use of Nadsat does ‘not sound as bad as booting a man in the guts.’2 The lack of complete understanding invites empathy and sympathy from the readers towards Alex in a situation where scenes of rape and violence would normally create horror and disgust. Blake Morrison discusses the effect of the language and suggests that ‘much of the excitement […] comes not from what Alex says, but how he says it: from his slovos.’3 Morrison recognises the reader’s reaction to Alex as he becomes the anti-hero in the novel that readers sympathise with and root for. Alex also plays on the reader’s empathy by referring to himself as ‘your little droog Alex’ (ACO, p. 61), and ‘Your Humble and Suffering Narrator’ (p. 97). The use of the word ‘your’ includes the reader in Alex’s journey, even when his ‘droogs’ leave him to be arrested and he is alone. It creates a relationship between the reader and Alex. As the novel progresses, he even shortens the reference to ‘Y.H.N’ (p. 126), implying that the relationship evolves as Alex becomes more isolated. Morrison suggests that ‘Alex insinuates and allies himself so intimately with his readers (‘O my brothers’) that we end up sharing every laugh (‘haw haw haw’) and cry (‘boohoohoo’).’4 Although readers know that Alex’s actions are wrong, the combination of the confusing Nadsat language and the pronoun ‘your’ creates a relationship that blurs the reader’s moral compass thus demonstrating how language can be used to manipulate and control the reader.

Whilst Nadsat can be used for Alex to control his narrative, it is also a way to gain control in a world where he finds himself being manipulated and controlled. When Alex talks to adults in the text, he mostly uses standard English to charm them but sometimes uses Nadsat. When he is partaking in the Ludovico technique, he has a conversation about what will happen when he leaves:

‘Oh I shall go home. Back to my pee and em.’ ‘Your -?’ He didn’t get Nadsat-talk at all, so I said: ‘To my parents in the dear old flatblock.’ ‘I see,’ he said.’
(ACO, p. 87)

Here, Alex is attempting to gain some control in a situation where he is being monitored and forced to watch videos against his will. The reader’s lack of understanding leads them to believe Alex has a superior knowledge. However, in the text those in authority treat him in a patronising way. Alex uses Nadsat even more so when in distress:

‘These grahzny sodding veshches that come out of my gulliver and my plot,’ I said, ‘that’s what it is.’ ‘Quaint,’ said Dr Brodsky, like smiling, ‘the dialect of the tribe.’
(ACO, p. 91)

When he becomes aware of the aim and process of the experiment, he uses Nadsat aggressively by including more words of the language in his speech. He attempts to use an alternative language to gain back the control he has lost. Dr Brodsky’s reaction of ‘quaint’ is patronising and dismissive, highlighting how ultimately the government are in control, no matter how hard Alex tries. Keith Booker comments on Nadsat and suggests that it ‘shows the imaginative superiority of Alex and his fellows.’5 The attempt to gain control highlights that Alex believes he has superiority with a different language but whilst he may have an advantage over the readers, the adults and those in power take no notice of Nadsat. Alex uses Nadsat to try and gain back some control when victim to their manipulation.

References

Featured Image: Cover Image created by David Pelham for Penguin’s 1972 edition of the novel. See Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin Group, 1972).

(1) Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin Group, 1996)

(2) Christian Bugge, ‘The Clockwork Controversy’, The Kubrick Site [n.d.] <http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0012.html> [accessed 20th April 2018]. The rest of the quote follows as ‘But in a film little can be implied; everything has to be shown. Language ceases to be an opaque protection against being appalled and takes a very secondary place.’ Burgess has often showed distaste towards Kubrick’s film version as the violence is seen visually which takes away the element of cloaking that Nadsat achieves in the novel.

(3) Blake Morrison, ‘Introduction’ in Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. vii-xxiv (p. ix).

(4) Ibid., p. xii.

(5) Keith Booker, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 96.

Written by Sophie Shepherd
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.