Intro
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is about a journey into the Congo at the height of colonialism in the nineteenth century. It’s a controversial book, to say the least. It’s beautifully written, but there are a lot of problematic depictions of Africa and Africans in there.
The passage below describes the Thames River, that famous one that runs through London. If we read it from a New Historicist perspective, we can see that it’s telling us a lot about Britain’s colonial history. So here we go:
Quote
[The Thames river] had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!...The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
Analysis
Are you impressed by the accomplishments of Great Britain yet? It does have Great in its name, for crying out loud.
In case you didn’t notice, we’re seeing quite a bit of national glorification in this passage. The Thames has carried all the men “of whom the nation is proud,” a bunch of whom—like Francis Drake and John Franklin—were explorers who paved the way for the expansion of the British empire and colonialism.
Okay, so these “adventurers” and “settlers” and “[h]unters for gold” went “bearing the sword” to foreign lands. The narrator here is describing this whole imperial/colonial enterprise in a pretty heroic light. Yes! It’s wonderful that all these Englishmen went off to kill and pillage people living in the four corners of the world. Wasn’t the British Empire awesome?
But let’s take a sec and think about how the narrator’s emphasis on heroism and glory in this passage makes sense only when we put it into the historical context of the British Empire. Let’s not forget that when Joseph Conrad was writing Heart of Darkness, the British Empire, under Queen Victoria, was expanding very quickly. Those Brits were everywhere: they were in India, in Africa, in the Caribbean. And the literature of the time reflected this obsession with exploration and colonialism, as we can see in the passage from Conrad’s novel above.