Abstract
For two ostensibly disparate categories of fiction, the desire to connote history as unsettled and unsettling is a shared impetus for neo-slave and neo-Victorian fictions. Neo-Victorianism can be described as an infiltration of the past into the present and the neo-slave narrative as the disturbing reality of slavery extended into the post-Civil Rights contemporary. The ship is a vessel with associations between these two literary categories, as a signifier of Empire and a symbol of displacement and dehumanisation. As such, I consider the ship—and its contents—as representative of an encounter with global systems and as a metaphoric recovery of the Victorian world subject from its submersion in history. The oceanic, then, becomes an apt way of understanding the ship as archival metaphor for both neo-slave and neo-Victorian ends. Situating the African American and the seafaring novel as transatlantic or global response to neo-Victorian narratives at sea, this chapter focuses on the ship, its material contents and its inhabitants as the terrain of history. It critically examines the materiality of the ship, the sea and narrative itself in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1991) that disrupt neo-Victorian habits beyond the British Empire and its borders.
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Notes
- 1.
Referring to Arias and Pulham’s Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (2009).
- 2.
Quoted in 9 from Joshi (2011, 20)
- 3.
See also Peter Linebaugh (1982, 119).
- 4.
This trio of monographs are all concerned with the notion of exchange in some way. Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New (2017) covers the use of British literature in the work of African-American writers in the nineteenth century in order to carve out a distinct and unique literary style. Like Hack’s work, Lee’s The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (2010) refers to literary exchanges though her work identifies British writers and their use of the slave trade in their novels. Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Dark Victorians (2008) is interested in the ways in which African-American figures like Du Bois, Frederick Douglass and Alexander Crummell positioned themselves in relationship to Europe. Dickerson, like Hack and Lee (2010), couches her work as a series of crossings. Where Hack and Lee consider these crossings emergent in their writer’s literary work, Dickerson considers crossings in a more physical sense.
- 5.
See also Elizabeth Ho (2012, 178).
- 6.
Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacy of Four Continents reveals the connections of disparate geographical locations as premised upon colonialism, slavery, Western liberalism and empire.
- 7.
In explaining Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), Alexander Beecroft says, “He proposes a theory of the novel in which peripheral cultures … develop the novel, not as an indigenous formation, but as a ‘compromise between a Western formal influence (usually French of English) and local materials’” (quoted in 89).
- 8.
“Being” here refers directly to Charles Johnson’s philosophical work, which appeared two years prior to Middle Passage. In it he describes the influence of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as “a one-idea book that works its magic by carefully unpacking its central idea that meaning cannot be fixed, that Being is formless, a field of imagination and possibility defies intellectual systematization; and by using Freudian references to the subconscious to demolish first the nineteenth-century bourgeois myths created by Booker T. Washington, then other naïve optimisms of the Industrial Age, and at last the twentieth-century belief in collective action” (1988, 16).
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Mondal, L. (2022). “Around the Mizzenpole”: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and African Americanising the Neo-Victorian-at-sea. In: Maier, S.E., Ayres, B., Dove, D.M. (eds) Neo-Victorian Things. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06201-8_3
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