UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Heintzman, Alix
Dept./Program:
History
Year:
2013
Degree:
M.A.
Abstract:
This thesis considers the relationship between the British Empire and the tropical landscape by investigating the portrayal of jungle in popular children's literature and educational materials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The newly popularized jungle images communicated crucial values about imperial power and the natural world. But more than merely recasting the tropes of imperialism that have been identified in other genres, jungle literature enabled a particular kind of discourse that intertwined lessons about power and lessons about nature. The children of the British Empire were taught how to conquer, control, and scientifically know the natural world as a crucial part oftheir education as imperial citizens. This thesis will examine the discourse ofjungle in children's materials as a layered set of ideas that reveal and reflect larger cultural ideologies.
The first chapter attempts to provide a broader historical context for the jungle literature and to offer an explanation for its sudden popularity and slow decline from the 1860s1930s. It argues that the jungle appeared as an important trope in the 1860s due to the coming together of three intersecting strands of cultural history: the mounting interest in children's education and publishing, the expansion of Britain's tropical empire and the potential threats to that empire, and the increasing significance of scientific naturalism as a way ofviewing and understanding nature. Chapters 2-4 each deal with a physical and ideological piece of the jungle: animals, natives, and landscape. Their order mimics the way children themselves imaginatively explored the aspects of jungle.
Chapter 2 focuses on jungle animals, and argues that jungle animals were a particular kind of powerless but enthralling object whose manipulation could express both power over nature and the need for power over peoples. Chapter 3 considers the jungle "natives" as they are portrayed in this material. Encounters with jungle natives did more than the repeat the racist tropes of empire-they phrased racial inferiority in terms of rationalized facts about the natural world. By using nature itself to define non-white peoples, the trope of racial inferiority was made into an immutable part of Western nature-knowledge. Chapter 4 is concerned with the underlying jungle landscape and climate. It contends that the jungle landscape simultaneously provided threats to European expansion and the motivation to continue tropical expansion. The conclusion traces the decline ofjungle literature, and attempts to draw together these themes into a cohesive image of the tropical fantasies that shaped British children at the climax of imperialism.
The first chapter attempts to provide a broader historical context for the jungle literature and to offer an explanation for its sudden popularity and slow decline from the 1860s1930s. It argues that the jungle appeared as an important trope in the 1860s due to the coming together of three intersecting strands of cultural history: the mounting interest in children's education and publishing, the expansion of Britain's tropical empire and the potential threats to that empire, and the increasing significance of scientific naturalism as a way ofviewing and understanding nature. Chapters 2-4 each deal with a physical and ideological piece of the jungle: animals, natives, and landscape. Their order mimics the way children themselves imaginatively explored the aspects of jungle.
Chapter 2 focuses on jungle animals, and argues that jungle animals were a particular kind of powerless but enthralling object whose manipulation could express both power over nature and the need for power over peoples. Chapter 3 considers the jungle "natives" as they are portrayed in this material. Encounters with jungle natives did more than the repeat the racist tropes of empire-they phrased racial inferiority in terms of rationalized facts about the natural world. By using nature itself to define non-white peoples, the trope of racial inferiority was made into an immutable part of Western nature-knowledge. Chapter 4 is concerned with the underlying jungle landscape and climate. It contends that the jungle landscape simultaneously provided threats to European expansion and the motivation to continue tropical expansion. The conclusion traces the decline ofjungle literature, and attempts to draw together these themes into a cohesive image of the tropical fantasies that shaped British children at the climax of imperialism.