The Literature of the Colonized: An Imperial Project (original) (raw)

Language functions to demonstrate complex ideas through a universally understood medium utilized by all human beings. Its power to influence, persuade, and illustrate thoughts that seem tacit in nature have been used to describe experiences that lay outside of an immediate culture. During the age of empire, authors and writers utilized this medium of communication to illustrate the world that the European populace was unable to witness physically. However, what these writers chose to depict stemmed from their culture of conquest; a culture that prioritized society through a patriarchal lens, and as a result, displaced those outside of its conventions into secondary, and even sub-human, categories. With words, metaphors, and other literary devices to express their European worldview, or biased culture, writers painted the world outside of the West as backward, savage, and deviant. More specifically, the noted European works of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Heart of Darkness by John Conrad, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson clearly demonstrate the ideals of European expansionism, or more traditionally known as imperialism, through texts that were written within a European cultural bias. Due to the culture they belonged to, Brontë, Conrad and Stevenson were only able to express their worldview of the Third World through the literary lens they identified with -European imperialism. As a result of the European culture of conquest, works written within the era of colonialism ultimately produced sentiments of imperialist thought by excluding the "native voice" within the text, positioning the Anglo-Saxon male on top of the social order within the native space, and exploring the fear of the native by investigating the effects of "the duality of man," or the acquiring of savage tendencies reminiscent of the native.