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- Creator:
- Alexander, Jacen Rynae
- Description:
- Reading “The Clerk‟s Tale” can be a frustrating experience, for it seems to mean something, but—even barring modern sensibilities from the analysis—it seems confused or even self-contradictory in its conclusions. Is it the ideal marriage or not? A little overboard or a lot? And what of Walter‟s thematic connection to God, if there is any? For that matter, does Griselda equate Job? Is she to be emulated or not? What of the Clerk? Yet analysis of the primary characters and their narrator can yield some interesting points about marriage, love, entitlement, sovereignty and, ultimately, despotism: the wife‟s unthinking acquiescence to the husband‟s tests justifies spousal abuse, and as royalty their twisted dynamic justifies the worst kind of tyranny. Therefore, this thesis will use theories and examples of modern tyranny and abusive relationships to examine Walter's disturbing power over Grisilde.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Iverson, Rebecca Anne
- Description:
- The textual, biographical and historical inquiry into Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre will center on the explicit and implicit Christianity of the novel and how it was possibly influenced by Charlotte Bronte's own unconventional religious perspective. The questions that I will explore deal with the brand of Christianity and social idealism with which Bronte was brought up, and how this is reflected in the text. Biography here is used to evaluate Bronte's attitudes concerning a multitude of Christianities, both prevalent and fledgling during the mid-eighteen hundreds. I will contextualize her faith, in hopes of broadening and enhancing our understanding of the text, and thus challenge aspects of the readings by critics who see her apparent feminism as a direct challenge to Christianity, (which they construe as a singular and monolithic social phenomenon). In chapter one I will contextualize Charlotte Bronte through the religious and social climate of her time and her own beliefs as they are revealed in her biography and letters. I will focus on the varying religious motifs of the novel as they are exemplified in the main characters. Chapter two will center on the character of St. John Rivers. Chapter three with Edward Rochester. Chapter four concerning Jane Eyre. At this point in my research, I have come to believe that Bronte studies in the recent past and present (1970's on) focus mainly on the feminist aspect of Jane Eyre while the Christian component is often marginalized or misunderstood.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Stock Stotler, Darlene
- Description:
- A study of equivocation will yield that this practice commanded a vast amount of attention during the Renaissance, the time period of 1450-1600, in which Jesuitical equivocation was an ongoing phenomenon. The practice became part of the Renaissance era's ideology; however, since the Greek suffix "logy" signifies "the study of," the term ideology is not as specific, nor does it explain the role ofJesuitical equivocation in relation to the Renaissance as accurately as another term: the episteme. A brief discussion of the episteme is necessary to discover its relevancy to the puns William Shakespeare used in his Porter Scene in the tragedy Macbeth. An episteme (Greek for "knowledge") is most clearly defined by the new historicist scholar Michel Foucault as a verbal device that involves "[a] network ofdiscursive practices--of thoughts, concepts, and cultural codes-dominant during a given historical period; and ... the rules governing the transformation of those practices" (Murfin 149). Placing an emphasis on the phrase "rules governing" is extremely illuminating in identifying the interplay between the Jacobean monarchy that held public disdain, and executions of, Jesuits. The persecutions forced subjugated Jesuits to the point that ordinances, such as confessions, needed some form of protection, hence Father Henry Garnet's treatise regarding equivocation . This imbalanced reciprocity of a monarchy instilling fear in religious leaders illustrates Foucault's "transformation of ... practices" and is the basis of the Foucauldian concept of the episteme. Applying Foucault's theory to the Porter Scene reveals the way Shakespeare's satirical puns mirrored the Jacobean episteme of the blatant hatred directed at Catholics and the Jesuits.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Sergi, Stephanie Lynne
- Description:
- In this thesis, I seek to resolve the debate over Tiresias’s ability to unify The Waste Land by offering a new perspective—Tiresias as a Modernist Maypole. I propose that Tiresias’s inability to perfectly coalesce the different voices and themes within the poem is not due to an authorial failing but is instead an imperfect unification that may suggest a modernist view of unity. In short, the thesis focuses Tiresias in regards gender, prophecy, and mythology. This thesis argues that Tiresias fails to completely unify The Waste Land; nevertheless, it also maintains that he can, in fact, fuse the poem’s fragments in an unusual way. Tiresias allows for a nuanced view of the poem’s structure by suggesting incomplete connections hidden in the numerous vignettes. An image of a maypole can illustrate this modernist view of unity. A traditional maypole consists of a fixed pole that has ribbons or streamers extending down from the top, and the end of each ribbon is held by a person. Then, the people dance around the pole weaving the ribbons together. In contrast, a modernist maypole would lack some of these ribbons, and others may be frayed or torn. In The Waste Land, Tiresias is the stationary maypole; however, some of the ribbons connecting him to the other characters in the poem are either torn or missing. In true modernist fashion, the maypole, Tiresias, unifies the work by suggesting what it might have been.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Martinez, Lauren Elizabeth
- Description:
- Originally published in 1898 in serial form, The Turn of the Screw has undergone many incarnations. The short story was published again, complete with a preface, in Henry James’s New York Edition, 1907-1909. The version I have chosen to use, edited by Robert Kimbrough, is based directly on this edition: “The first section of the present volume contains the only critical edition of The Turn of the Screw ever published and is the first modern text to follow the New York Edition, the one which had James’s final authority” (Kimbrough, ix). Kimbrough includes the notes that accompanied the serial version, as well as several of James’s personal letters about the story as well. Rather than choose sides and argue for or against the Governess’s sanity, I am studying James’s stylistic choices not to solve the debate over the ghosts’ existence, but to determine how, lingusitically and rhetorically, James created this unanswerable dilemma. Richard A. Lanham’s Analyzing Prose will serve as a starting point for my stylistic analysis, and I supplement with Aristotle’s theories of rhetoric. James wrote in his New York edition preface that this story is “a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the “fun” of the capture of the witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious” (120). My interest lies not in what ambiguity he created, but rather in how.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Kroll, Rebecca
- Description:
- To approach these concerns, this project seeks to provide an evaluation of the intellectual and personal relationship between authors Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke as viewed through the lens of personal correspondence. A review of selected letters demonstrates the two authors maintained an enduring relationship, one that spanned from the forties up until Kenneth Burke’s death in 1993. In other words, the authors maintained a friendship lasting roughly half their lives. To that end, this project presents a chronology of selected correspondence in order to provide an initial set up, so that scholars may encounter the letters in one place and consider the role each author played in the development of the other’s ideas.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Wrisley, Brooke
- Description:
- toogoodtobetrue is a fiction creative project containing a collection of queer short stories designed to examine the unifying and diverse experiences of a modern queer existence. Thematically, the collection seeks to create and explore the practical and affective possibilities of queer optimism, or optimism without futurity.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Soto, Erik M.
- Description:
- Statement of Intent: The intent behind Children of Immigrants is to give a voice to people who are Latinx, Chicanx, or Mexican in a country which constantly shapes our narratives to benefit the Anglo-American narrative. By writing about the culture, religion, relationship dynamics, and the clash of between Mexican and American societies, I hope to give the reader an authentic perspective of the Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx experience. Scope: The scope of Children of Immigrants is always through the eyes of someone who is Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx. Everything about the characters in these poems is a reflection of the Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx and, by extension, people who interact with this identity. Approach: Because the purpose of Children of Immigrants is to illustrate an authentic Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx experience, my approach was to mimic and write about situations and locations that helped build a foundation to this experience. This included incorporating the Spanish language, including real locations, and writing with politically charged themes. Many of the experiences I wrote about come from my personal life or tales told by friends, family members or the news.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Davies, John William
- Description:
- If Shakespeare “invented the human,” a claim made rather spectacularly by the critic Harold Bloom in a 1998 book, then the six British poets who comprised what was to become known as the Romantic Period perfected the mode. Shakespeare, in Bloom’s terms, depicted interiority in a unique way, allowing his characters to “overhear” themselves, to be self-reflective and existential (or proto-existential). Existentialism proper, along with the whole modern conception of self, has been merely catching up. It is my contention that the Romantics accelerated this paradigm shift by making the figure of The Poet highly subjective in a way it had not been before. Byron is the archetype. The “Byronic Hero” inaugurated in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and perfected in “Manfred” and “Don Juan,” is subjectivity (at least male subjectivity) personified, a titillating amalgam of ambition, weakness, androgyny, power, lust; mortality and immortality in locked combat like Jacob and the angel. Only Jacob is not an abstract, allegorical figure here. These characters are Byron, by his own admission “such a strange mélange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me". We have another name for this and it is “human nature.”
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
10. The Politics of cultural trauma and violence in Junot Díaz's The Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao
- Creator:
- Wong, Jana Lee
- Description:
- This thesis, entitled “The Politics of Cultural Trauma and Violence in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” asserts that transgenerational trauma takes place in the aftermath of the 1930-1961 reign of Dominican president Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. A history of genocide, highlighted by Diaz’s book, is also closely linked to American politics. As the main character, Oscar Cabral de León , tries to reclaim his Dominican past from his place of exile, the United States , he tries to blunt the spell of his family’s curse. This process compels him to tell his family history as part of a strategy of providing testimony. Through the recording of stories of many voiceless victims, Oscar reclaims their lost culture and lost power. Once in America, where Oscar’s family is forced to assimilate and work under extreme conditions to survive, they must find their collective history in order to face the injustices of the past and the present. This thesis also juxtaposes the fictional and historical narratives and motifs of Diaz’s novel with psychological studies that demonstrate that personal and political violence shape racist discrimination and that violent politics disrupt positive notions of self and cultural community.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Davis, Ashley B.
- Description:
- The text offers a barren landscape and desolate setting, governed by a violent zealot. We are presented with characters whose minds we cannot penetrate and an unresolved ending, with our only potential hero dying off just like the rest of them, except perhaps a little more personally. The most resistant of them all, the kid, is still annihilated by the judge despite having earned something akin to the judge’s favor at various intervals. These are the facts we have to deduce the forces at work in the text. Superimposed over the whole of Blood Meridian, the concept of evil does not satisfy, for there are too many unanswered questions. While the scholarship has shown “evil” to be a grey area in the novel, the reader can easily identify the judge as a destructive force, and thus closer to Aquinas’s concept of natural evil, or dissolution.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Gaumond, Theresa Anita McCarron
- Description:
- Barnes’s works are steeped in overt grief and rage, and all of her longer works can be directly traced back to traumatic events in her life. Antiphon and Ryder both are vicious retellings of her early family life. Themes of incest, rape and stolen virginity run through both. Her constant thematic repetitions have been considered by critics as a stylistic attempt to disassociate herself from the disturbances in her life, but she was never able to completely divorce her works from partially retelling her past. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is no exception. It was written to cope with her anguish after her eight-year co-dependent relationship with Thelma Wood ended, and most of the characters are traceable to their real-life counterparts; for example, Thelma Wood is Robin Vote, and Djuna Barnes is Nora Flood. Nearly all of the characters in the book have been identified by researchers to their real-life counterparts. Barnes repeatedly called Nightwood “my life with Thelma,” and wrote to T. S. Eliot that the work was semi-autobiographical (Field 43). Nevertheless, care has to be taken not to confuse the events in the book with the reality of Barnes’s and Wood’s life together. The focus must remain upon the rhetorical and stylistics methods that Barnes uses within Nightwood to explicate the trauma of a failed relationship.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Jeanpierre, Shani
- Description:
- Critics have been known to connect Fitzgerald’s personal life with the characters and events in Gatsby. Once a reader does research on Fitzgerald’s life, obvious connections can be made such as the attitudes and names that some of his characters share with people who made an impact in his life, but few have considered what Fitzgerald’s motivations behind these parallels were and what purpose they serve. People often see similarities between Fitzgerald and the characters of Gatsby, Nick, and sometimes even Tom, but they do not often consider why he would create these parallels or what their significance is. The same can be said for the similarities between significant figures in his life, such as the women he loved, and different characters in the novel. After closely examining both his life and the connections that are often found in Gatsby and paying close attention to how the people and events are represented in his novel, it seems that Fitzgerald’s purpose in creating such connections was to criticize the materialistic society and attitudes of Americans of the 1920’s.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Ward Hubbard, Barbara
- Description:
- Much research and critical analyses have been done concerning Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem, The Canterbury Tales. The various characters in this work have been examined thoroughly and the mechanics of the poem have been scrutinized and dissected mercilessly over the centuries. My interest has been to discover how and why Chaucer used so many Scriptural verses and Biblical references in the stories, most of which were adapted versions of familiar folktales and stories by contemporary writers, such as, Boccaccio and Petrarch. After a review of historical events occurring during that tumultuous 14th century, particularly those related to the religious unrest of the time, it became apparent that Chaucer was, in a very subtle way, using the characters and their stories as a veiled criticism of the Catholic Church. The prologues and stories told by The Wife of Bath, The Summoner, and The Pardoner illustrate how and why Chaucer used these characters as that criticism.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Wilson, Mark
- Description:
- University and college students today are reading and writing more than ever before, but in spite of this they often do not consider themselves successful writers. This is because the material they read and respond to is mostly electronic, is constantly updated, and usually breaks many of the traditional rules that instructors expect from “real” writing: text messages, online blog posts, wiki contributions, status updates, discussion boards, and page comments, just to name a few. Unfortunately, most students have been told throughout their lives that these kinds of writings are less valid and proper writing must conform to very strict academic rules in order to be correct. The truth is, despite their lack of academic reading and writing skills, by sheer exposure and daily practice, students today have greater untapped linguistic resources than perhaps any other generation in history. The difficulty for students of this technological age is harnessing and refining those innate expressive abilities, so they can adapt to the demands of the academic and professional types of writing needed for success in their educations and careers. Context: Reading and Writing in Today’s World attempts to bridge this gap by presenting useful reading and writing skills in an electronic format more convenient and accessible to students who already spend a great deal of their time online using electronic devices. It validates the experiences of students who may not realize how much reading and writing skills they have acquired and gives them the tools and practice needed to consciously create effective writing consistently. The student’s ability to recognize and utilize their own essential reading and writing skills, rather than occasionally stumble upon success, is at the heart of Context.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Canning, Denise
- Description:
- In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” does Chaucer merely retell the story popularly known as “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell?” These two stories are essentially the same, except that Chaucer’s is more humorous. In order to argue against the claim that Chaucer’s tale is simply a retelling of the latter, I must contend that Chaucer makes a point with his story that the source tale does not make. Chaucer significantly and strategically changed “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell” in his version of the story, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Furthermore, in his tale, Chaucer emphasizes women and their roles, whereas the other story focuses on men. Also, in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the queen (a female) is the person who exercises control to determine the outcome of the knight’s life. His overall change was to demonstrate how men must be monitored closely in their actions in which women request of them. In doing this, Chaucer shows how women truly try to achieve sovereignty over the men in their lives in order for women to acquire freedom to make their own decisions, thus allowing them to have a sense of control over their own destiny. Chaucer changed the original tale in order to demonstrate that early on in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the women are the ones who hold the power over the outcome of the knight’s life, whereas in “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell,” the knight holds the power of the outcome of the king’s life. This is relevant to our reading of Chaucer’s version because Chaucer immediately wants to focus on women desiring sovereignty. To illustrate, in the Prologue and in the tale itself, the Wife focuses on the men in her life and her relationship with them in terms of sovereignty.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
17. Podloujny
- Creator:
- DeMartini, Paul
- Description:
- Podloujny is a creative thesis in the form of a fiction novel. The thesis features the generational dynamics of a family experiencing a series of profound crises. The narrative form of Podloujny shifts perspectives between each family member, exploring the hopes, fears and delusions within each character’s consciousness. While the work is grounded in traditional drama—scene, dialogue, action, consequence—the novel’s core is what occurs within. Beyond this framework, the novel focuses on what happens when the established solidity of a family unit begins to fray and crumble; in this case, the dementia diagnosis of the family’s elder and spiritual center acts as both a catalyst for change and a means to examine the past. Podloujny investigates thematic conflicts including harmony and dissonance, pride and shame, beauty and ugliness, realization and repression, falling apart and coming together.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Bates, Rebecca Joyce
- Description:
- To become part of any literary tradition is to call upon the classics while inventing new and individual ideas and concepts. In my writing I strive to find a balance between the old and the new . I have been heavily influenced by authors in the literary canon such as Jane Austen , Charlotte and Emily Bronte , and George Eliot, while being deeply interested in contemporary writers like Libba Bray and Brad Barkley. This has created a deep fascination in me for finding the balance between the traditional and the contemporary and what will happen when the two clash . The novel seeks to capture a moment in time and wrap its pages around the intense questions of identity in a time and place where traditional and contemporary society are grating against each other. The identity in question is that of eighteen-year-old Tara Worthington , the middle-child in an old-money southern family. The novel 's theme revolves around the idea of holding onto traditions of the past while also struggling to move forward and away from the old . What can stay and what must be left behind when the two worlds will not combine? I intend to set up as many dichotomies as possible such as the left and the right, north and south , the traditional and the contemporary. In placing all these ideas together I hope to illustrate the struggle that happens in one person when faced with all of them.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Henry, Lorelei Lee
- Description:
- My thesis will focus on three of O'Brien's Vietnam War novels: The Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods. I will show how O'Brien develops these stories in terms of individual, social, cultural, and historical aspects in ways similar to, and perhaps indebted to Hemingway and Conrad. However, I will also demonstrate that O'Brien is correct in seei11g differences between his own approach and that of these authors, and other war literature writers. Where the suggestive style of Hemingway and Conrad minimize horrid detail, O'Brien's style highlights horror in an evocative, Gothic depiction of the true horror of war: the degeneration of men, the impossibility of regeneration, and the absolute moral desolation that results from the experience of war. O'Brien will thus be seen as representative of his generation, given to exaggeration, excess, overt disgust, anger, and fear. Chapter I will address the way in which O'Brien's depiction of the Vietnam War aligns it with World War I. In many ways, the cultural climate of the 1960s made the war a battle not unlike The Great War, in which Romantic ideals of nationalism and patriotism crumbled at the hands of a more personal disillusionment with war. The horrific individual, social, and cultural ramifications of war are brought to the forefront in O'Brien's works. Like Hemingway, O'Brien discusses very similar issues, central to the war of his time, in which, like Hemingway, the wasteland of the battlefield becomes an individual wasteland. In many ways, society was not prepared for either war, or for the shock, horror and degradation that war entails. We can see this clearly in the depiction of war as a degenerative force on society and culture in both Hemingway and O'Brien. Aligning the two wars historically also sets up social and cultural parallels between O'Brien and Hemingway. O'Brien is quoted as stating his admiration for Hemingway's work, and critics have noted the similarities between O'Brien's Vietnam stories and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. However, a much clearer connection exists between O'Brien's works and Hemingway's In Our Time, which depicts the transformation of Romantic idealism at the hands of Modernist fragmentation and alienation. The similarities between O'Brien and Hemingway are seen most strikingly between "Speaking of Courage," from The Things They Carried and "Soldier's Home" from In Our Time. Like Hemingway, O'Brien points out the failure of a Romantic ideal of war, the loss of patriotism and nationalism, to reveal the impossibility of individual, social, or cultural post-war regeneration. The Modernist wasteland that begins with Krebs ends logically in O'Brien. In Chapter Two, I will compare O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Where Hemingway's style mutes some of the awful details of war, O'Brien's style elaborates these details in order that the horror of war, in both the realistic and the Conradian sense, can be more clearly depicted. In In the Lake of the Woods, as in Heart of Darkness, one character's journey toward another through a dark and mysterious outer landscape mirrors an inner, moral journey, and exposes a figurative darkness lurking within the novel's protagonist. John Wade, a Vietnam veteran who now faces the shame and guilt not only of losing a political election, but also of his participation in the My Lai Massacre, is haunted by a past he cannot reconcile with his present life. Wade's psyche, already overshadowed by a traumatic childhood, grows morally darker as a direct result of his violent and horrific Vietnam War experience, which takes place in a dark and chaotic jungle reminiscent of Conrad's Congo. Although O'Brien's works are clearly indebted to Hemingway for the depiction of war as degenerative, and also to Conrad for the depiction of war as horror and moral terror, the most profitable way to read them is in terms of those elements we think of as Gothic, for then they become like confessionals, attempting to justify and resolve the transgressive individual, social, and cultural conflicts created by war. Chapter Three examines O'Brien's novels in terms of the Gothic genre, which sheds new light on the victory of fear over bravery, of terror over courage, of the loss of self at the hands of "the other," and of ghosts, the memories of war that arise from that dark landscape to haunt those that survived. By placing soldiers within a haunted landscape, issues of bravery and courage no longer lie solely within the realm of the characters' will, but, as in Gothic novels, are subject to outside forces that are constantly at odds with reality. When we examine O'Brien's Vietnam stories as discussing the failure of a Romantic ideal, as the reflection of individual, historical, social, and cultural anxiety, then they can be seen in terms of horror, where the stripped-down wasteland of Hemingway and the festering horror of Conrad come together in a Gothic world. O' Brien's The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and Going After Cacciato, mediated by Gothic elements, reveal an individual, historical, social, and cultural anxiety beyond that which can be accomplished within the war literature genre.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
20. Marlow and the "necessary fiction" of morality in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim
- Creator:
- Theriault, Jennifer Marie
- Description:
- This thesis explores the moral evolution of Joseph Conrad's protagonist, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Marlow appears uniquely in literature as the omnipotence of cloistered Victorian moral ideals began to fade and just as the shattering of all forms of ideals that would come to characterize Modernism as a literary movement began to emerge. I show how Marlow transforms what would ordinarily be characterized as nihilistic lies into affirmations of life in order to sustain the illusion that traditional notions of Western morality are still in tact. Until Marlow reveals the truth about his lies and the corrupt European imperialism that they conceal in Heart of Darkness, he tells a series of untruths that effectively perpetrate for European bourgeois culture the myth that "civilizing" is benevolent. In telling lies that appear to compromise Marlow's own moral fidelity so that the existence of vast evil is concealed, Marlow comes into the "hard wisdom" that conventional morality is a facade. Despite Marlow's revelation about this, some twenty years later his aiding the criminal Jim in Lord Jim continues to sustain this illusion about morality. This is because in Marlow's collision -- and collusion -- with the European imperial enterprise in the African Congo, he learns that in the moral vacuum of "civilizing" lies that have a saving and stabilizing power are preferable to the truth that barbarism, and not benevolence, is at the "heart" of civilization. In illustrating this thesis, I show how Marlow's lies function as part of a Nietzschean "revaluation" of his rigid Victorian morality. In this process, Marlow reinterprets the traditional values that he associates with notions of "good" and "evil" so that his lies, once considered equivalent to death, are transformed into acts of "good" that sustain European colonial progress. These lies initially appear to compromise Marlow's own fidelity to his Victorian values because they make him what he has always loathed to become, a liar. However, these lies are really the hallmarks of Marlow's "revaluation." Marlow skews the truth in such a way that for a time his lies successfully function to confirm his allegiance to what he thinks is redeeming about the idea of a moral system - the efficiency and progress that sustain civilization.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English