Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on March 26, 2002 at 10:21:58 from 195.93.33.153:
In Reply to: Re: Colonialism in S&As posted by andy bolger on March 25, 2002 at 22:09:56:
The mental lumber rooms of AR's child characters are very different to our own.
I did read Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island as a child, (in children's editions, which might not have been available to Titty) but only after reading AR and probably because I had read AR. Titty has heard Keat's sonnet read aloud and, in a very accurate portrayal of the way a child's mind works, she remembers the image of "stout Cortez" (it wasn't Cortez, Keats got it wrong, it was Balboa!) but the subject matter of the poem has passed clean over her head.
I cannot so much as find a copy of "The boy stood on the burning deck"!
I have an idea that the children's mental baggage is not so much directly imperialist or colonialist as filled with the sort of images of British history that the colonial era filled school textbooks with.
They don't want to occupy the places they discover; they want to discover them, and in SW, map them. The picture is more that of the Elizabethan voyages of exploration (expressly so in SA) than Livingstone and Stanley.
Maybe this is ideology. But as Andy says, Nansen is the role model in WH, not Scott or Shackleton (although Shackleton was a lesser known figure then; he has been extensively "rehabilitated" as a sort of reaction to the allegedly colonialist Scott!)