Executive Editors

Kathryn Poole
Sarah Wagstaffe

Associate Editors

Annabel Christian, Contributions Editor

Jessica Draper, Contributions Editor
Sarah Admans, Publicity Editor
Kathryn Brown, Journal Administrator
Vallika Patel, Copy Editor

With Special Thanks

Rachel Fox
Brian Baker
Our contributors
The Department of English Literature and Creative Writing
and
Our peer reviewers – anonymous but invaluable

Cover Art

Meg Roser

ii
 Contributors

Names and Bios

Freya Coombes is a third year English Literature student at Lancaster University. She enjoys
freelance and creative writing in her own time and is a part-time reporter, having had articles
published in The Times, The Sun, The Daily Mirror and more.

Meg Roser is currently studying English Literature with Creative Writing and will begin her MA
in Modern and Contemporary Writing at UEA in September. Due to her background as an artist,
she is particularly interested in studying film, the visual arts, and ekphrastic works. She also enjoys
analysing texts that engage with the aesthetics of suffering, philosophy, and existentialism.

Stan Wierzbicki was born in Warsaw, Poland and is currently finishing his degree in English
Literature, Creative Writing & Practice. Both creatively and academically, he is interested in
postcolonial studies and the postcolonial dimensions of the Polish perspective, as well as gender
studies in relation to literature and toxic masculinity. He is currently working on redrafting his first
novel which is a magical-realist mystery about reclaiming the body and sexuality, set in Athens.

Abby Lewis studies Philosophy, and is particularly interested in Feminist and Political philosophy
as well as the Philosophy of Fiction, completing her dissertation on this topic. She is a strong
believer in the value of education, especially surrounding other cultures, and she loves to travel
and explore.

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 Contents

Staff Endorsement
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 1

Editors’ Introduction
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 2

‘The Application of the ‘Jewish Science’ to Anti-Semitic Victorian Fairy Tales’

Freya Coombes
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 3

‘Resistance in Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
“Self-Reliance”’
Meg Roser
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 12

‘Reading Heart of Darkness as a Polishman in Sub-Saharan Africa’

Stan Wierzbicki
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 16

‘Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Riverhead Books, 2007’

Review by Abby Lewis
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 26

Afterword
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 28

Postscript
……………………………………………………………………………………………… 29

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 Staff Endorsement

When I last had the pleasure of endorsing LUX 4 in June 2020, I had no idea that the global
pandemic would have such an extended grip on our personal and professional lives. At that time,
I expressed ‘my immeasurable admiration for the undergraduate and postgraduate students who
worked so very hard during the early months of England’s Covid19 lockdown to complete’ that
edition (http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/luxjournal/files/2020/07/LUX-Issue-4-July-2020.pdf). Two
years later, and even though I’m a person of letters by trade, I don’t have enough superlatives to
articulate my ongoing and ever-increasing esteem for English Literature and Creative Writing’s
student community. You are extraordinary. Your contributions to LUX 6 demonstrate your
passion and talent for thinking critically, creatively and independently about the worlds we
inhabit.
The Editors’ Introduction to LUX 6 provides excellent overviews of the journal’s
individual essays and book review. I would like to add that collectively, the contributing authors
show how important it is to understand how words are not transparent windows on the worlds
we live in. Via the writings of Georgio Agamben, Sigmund Freud and Primo Levi, Freya
Coombes’ essay considers the ideological manipulations of Victorian fairy tales in twentieth-
century Europe. Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s theories of ‘spectatorship and suffering’
inform Meg Roser’s discussion of two nineteenth-century American texts, Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ short story “Life in the Iron
Mills”. ‘Poland’, says Stan Wierzbicki, ‘is a postcolonial country. Polish perspective is
postcolonial’. Taking a critical-creative approach, Wierzbicki engages with a range of thinkers
including Chinua Achebe, Ngūgī Wā Thiong’o, Ania Loomba and Walter Mignolo’ to explore
‘Joseph Conrad, or – as he was really called – Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski’’, Heart of
Darkness the webbed nature of Polish and English perspectives. With its subtitle ‘A Continuing
Piece of Political and Educational Relevance’, Abby Lewis’s review of Khaled Hosseini’s 2007
novel A Thousand Splendid Suns simultaneously speaks to 2021.
In our Part One core course English Literature (ENGL100), students are introduced to
Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ which famously ends by announcing ‘the
birth of the reader’. Over half a century after the publication of Barthes’ influential thesis
everyone involved in the production of LUX 6 shows how reading — along with writing and
analytical thinking — are crucial components for self-reflexive cultures and societies. Thank you.

— Liz Oakley-Brown, English and Creative Writing

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 Editors’ Introduction

Our editorial team are pleased to present with excitement the sixth issue of LUX Journal. Our team
has been incredibly fortunate to be working with truly exceptional authors, whose writing covers
a vast range of themes. As a team, we have identified the articles and review in this journal to be
linked in their ability to open conversations surrounding social justice, inequality and violence –
regarding wealth, class, gender, race and religion. We welcome you to question the social dynamics
that are explored critically through the use of literature as well as creative writing considering key
themes in our issue of resistance and autonomy.
The process of assembling this issue, in collaboration with our contributors and peer
reviewers, has been one that has allowed us to think creatively in many aspects. From the selection
and shaping of our articles through to the decisions we make in presenting our issue in its final
form. We have consciously chosen to open our issue with our more academically standard critical
pieces, using our creative-critical piece to transition into our book review at the end of our issue,
allowing our readers to gradually interact with a more personal reading of literature as they move
through our issue. This has truly been a team effort in which every single member has impacted
our efforts and success along the way, from our outreach on social media, our diligent work in
communicating with our contributors and peer reviewers and our efforts in editing our final
selection of pieces to be published. All our members are truly invaluable to the success of this
issue.
The following articles, creative-critical piece and book review come from undergraduate
students from a number of departments in FASS. Freya Coombes focuses her article on
antisemitism within Victorian Fairy Tales, particularly those by the Grimm Brothers, discussing
the isolation and marginalisation of the Jewish community through the application of
psychoanalysis in a literary study of these original tales. It is through this religious marginalisation
that we begin to see how our issue revolves around social injustice, in this instance particularly
through the study of how the Jewish individual is portrayed as ‘an other’ — to the point that it is
present even within Nazi propaganda that circulated Germany. Meg Roser approaches social
injustice through her study of ‘Resistance’ in her exploration of Rebecca Harding Davis’ short
story ‘Life in the Iron Mills’. In this piece, Roser explores the short story using an essay by Ralph
Waldo Emerson called ‘Self-Reliance’, focusing on the wealth disparity amongst citizens of
differing social standing and how this can manifest into violence. Our next piece by Stan
Wierzbicki takes the creative-critical form. Titled ‘Reading Heart of Darkness as a Polishman in
Sub-Saharan Africa’, this piece explores conflicting dynamics within postcolonial identities on a
personal level. Our last piece is a book review of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Abby Lewis. This
book review focuses on the struggle of women in particular within this acclaimed novel, identifying
with characters on a personal level in acknowledgement of the suffering they face.
The last ten months spent working on this issue could not have been possible without all of
the hard work of our incredible executive editor, Kathryn Poole. Kathryn has not only led our
team in organising and arranging our meetings, overseeing decisions and generally being present
to offer her help and support, but she has also worked with our shadow executive editor Sarah
Wagstaffe to help create a foundation for the next issue of LUX Journal. Our team are excited to
see what Sarah and her future team of editors will publish a year from now and we wish them all
the best of luck as they step into their roles in the coming months.

2
 The Application of the ‘Jewish Science’ to Anti-Semitic Victorian Fairy
Tales
Freya Coombes

Abstract
Within Victorian fairy tales, the Jewish figure is portrayed as other, evil, and inhuman, anti-Semitic
stereotypes prevailing from prejudiced tales to modern perceptions of Jewish characters. With
particular focus on the tales of the Grimm Brothers, the application of psychoanalysis places anti-
Semitic tales under a philo-semitic lens, the extreme prejudices being revealed as products of
manipulated ideology rather than well-founded hatred. Freud brings this into question through his
psychoanalytic theories on repression, dreams, and the unconscious.
Germanic fairy tales created a stereotyped image of the Jewish figure, animalising and
dehumanising them, thus placing them in a lowered position within society. Through the
promotion of a system of thought, and through the distribution of these fairy tales, political control
is exerted in an almost Orwellian fashion of thought management and manipulation.
This application of the labelled ‘Jewish sciences’ is ironic, as anti-Semitic tales are viewed
through a sympathetic and philo-semitic lens, the two being in direct conflict, yet the correlations
between theories are evident as fairy tales are often looked at in terms of psychoanalysis and dream
theory. These psychoanalytical theories are created through the influence of Jewish Scripture, the
founding father and pioneer, Sigmund Freud, being Jewish himself.

Within Victorian fairy tales, Jewish figures are portrayed as other, sub-human, and consequently
evil; anti-Semitic stereotypes prevail from prejudiced tales to modern perceptions of Jewish
characters. The application of psychoanalytic theories to the anti-Semitic tales of those such as the
Grimm Brothers, reveals the prejudicial views as a product of anti-Semitic ideology, peddled as
propaganda, as opposed to grounded hatred.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, formed the basis for multiple theories from
his secular Jewish identity, using Jewish scripture to influence many of his discourses.
Psychoanalysis was thus labelled a ‘Jewish Science’, this label containing strong negative
connotations within Nazi Germany and presenting danger associated with the field as, “the ‘Jewish’
science came to mean something corrupt and corrupting, a lying ideology directed at poisoning
the health of the Aryan nations” (“Freud and Jewish Identity” 168). The associative link between
Freud and his identity resulted in scrutiny against the emerging field, particularly within an
increasingly anti-Semitic Germany. However, Freud never accepted this label for psychoanalysis
as a whole or indeed himself, his Jewish identity presenting a split consciousness between distance
and acceptance. “Freud worked hard to present himself as someone alienated from even vestigial
relationships with a Jewish religious identity”, creating a strained relationship with Judaism as he
attempted to remove himself from the Jewish labels and accompanying prejudices associated with
his cultural heritage (“Freud and Jewish Identity” 171). Despite this rejection of his religious
heritage, “Freud claimed that his Jewish identity freed him from intellectual constraints”, allowing
for free thought and the development of original concepts through his knowledge and association
with Judaism (“Freud and Jewish Identity” 175). In his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud
comments on his perception of the origin of anti-Semitism, rejecting the perceived notion and
embracing a deeper explanation. On the surface, anti-Semitism stems from differences, both
physically and culturally, however the deeper, unconscious meaning is “the jealousy which the Jews
evoked in the other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, favourite child of God”

3
(147). This controversial claim, argued by Freud, focuses less on the physical attributes of the
Jewish people, and places the hatred of the religion on the historical context associated with the
origin of Judaism, their seniority posing a threat to current inhabitants. Building on Freud’s
perception, the prevailing anti-Semitic views descend from differentiation, jealousy extending from
a lack of knowledge and rejection of societal positionality, as they stand outside of this. The Jewish
figure acts as the other, the foreigner and the minority. To this notion Freud says, “the numerical
weakness of the minority invites suppression”, stating that the minority are suppressed because
they are weaker than the majority, the majority excreting power simply because they have the ability
to do so (146). Anti-Semitism, for Freud, is thus rooted predominantly and unconsciously in
jealousy, this leading to suppression of the minority.
This jealousy is evident in “The Good Bargain”, story seven within the Grimm Brother’s Fairy
Tales, in which a “Jew” is swindled out of his coat (29). Wilhelm Grimm edited earlier editions of
this from moneylender to Jew, promoting anti-Semitic views, “systematically making the Jew into
a worse and worse character” (Helfer 33). Initially, within the narrative, the Jew is portrayed as
selfless, saying “I will out of pure friendship lend you a coat for a short time” (30). The Jew
possesses a nice coat, one that is deemed good enough for an audience with the King, the depiction
of the Jew here being a positive one of trust and generosity. This coat is wanted by the peasant out
of greed and jealousy for what he doesn’t own; the peasant “feels himself to be absolutely right in
cheating the Jew”, as analysed by Arnold Zweig in relation to other tales, purely based on his
religious identity and thus lower status (Fenichel 37). Playing on the stereotypes of the Jew as a
thief and a liar, to which Mondschein commented that “‘Jew’ is synonymous with ‘thief’” (xxii),
the peasant states “‘what the Jew says is false- no true word ever comes out of his mouth! That
rascal there is capable of maintaining that I have his coat on’” (30). The peasant plays on the King’s
insecurities of inferiority and foolishness, bringing into question the power knowledge dichotomy
hypothesised by Michel Foucault. Knowledge is power, “through the specific vocabulary of
knowledge that circulate in society… [Foucault’s] work explores the institutional effects of
discourse and the ways in which it operates to produce and govern individual subjects”
(“Subjectivity” 73). The application of this discourse to Grimm’s “The Good Bargain” places the
King as positionally inferior to a foreign figure through his lack of knowledge. Their interaction
acts as a microcosm for the power imbalance this is seen to represent, the peasant holding
governing power over the institutional body and sovereign, inverting the power structure. This
consequently transposes the hierarchy of power as the peasant moves to a position of superiority
through his knowledge and influence. “‘The Jew has assuredly deceived one or the other of us,
either myself or the peasant’” (30). The peasant brings a threat to the sovereign’s reign, inverting
the power structure and presenting the Jew as dishonest to the King. Trust of the Jew is impossible
due to the King’s lack of knowledge and thus power. Through this, anti-Semitism is a result of the
Jew posing a threat to the established body of power; this confirms Freud’s hypothesis as the threat
creates jealousy of the Jew’s supposed ability to redistribute power as he sees fit, removing illusions
of sovereign superiority.
The use of Jewish scripture in the creation of psychoanalytic theories is evident through the
figure of Joseph, a biblical figure utilised by Freud when looking at the interpretation of dreams.
For Freud, Joseph was a prophetic dream walker, allowing for in depth analysis of his own dreams
and the dreams of others, “draw[ing] characteristically on the image of Joseph… and thereby
setting in motion great events- much as did Freud himself in founding psychoanalysis”
(“Fragments of Jewish Identity” 182). Joseph thus becomes an analytical tool through which the
semiotic and symbolic importance of dreams are interpreted. Freud states:

[i]t will have been obvious that the name Josef plays a great part in my dream… It is
particularly easy for me to hide my ego in my dreams behind a person of this name, since
Joseph was the name of the dream-interpreter in the Bible. (The Interpretation of Dreams 160)

4
 Building on the work of Freud, Carl Jung believes the unconscious to be the creative source
of dreams, literature, and artistic expression, this being the origin for all creative forms. For Jung
“fantasy, in particular mythological fantasy, is symbolic and considered it an expression of psyche’s
potential to anticipate meaning” (Hill 111). Dreams occur when the repressed unconscious returns,
this being a culmination of our lost agency over the suppressed desires which are held within the
id. Freud comments that dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious”, the latent meaning of
the dream revealing the hidden connotations within the unconscious (The Interpretation of Dreams
604). Through this, Mallet points out that “fairy tales contain hidden messages that are related to
our unconscious drives and needs and should be interpreted as Freud interpreted dreams for us to
grasp their psychological significance” (Zipes 162). Speaking through images and semiotics, fairy
tales are akin to the unconscious in their psychic content and should be treated similarly when
interpreting the meaning of them. Within “Cinderella”, the application of Freud’s psychoanalytic
lens shows a sexual rivalry and use of the Oedipal complex. There is a point of rivalry created
between the stepmother and Cinderella as they compete for the love of the father. “With the aid
of defensive mechanisms of regression, projection, and magical thinking in order to satisfy super-
ego demands, she becomes the poor little servant” (Rubenstein 202). Through close analysis, the
prominent inclusion of phallic symbols, such as the twig given by the father and the wand of the
godmother, the unconscious agenda within child development is revealed, the unconscious
Oedipal desire becoming clear. The biblical figure of Joseph becomes applicable to fairy tale
interpretation as well as interpretation of dreams, Freud being inspired by the figure within his
creation of dream-analytic discourse. The analysis of dreams within fairy tales shows the
application of another of the ‘Jewish sciences’ to anti-Semitic texts, there being a direct correlation
between the two discourses and Freud’s notions on dream inform further analysis on the matter.
The tales of the Grimm Brothers were utilised within Nazi Germany as propaganda,
promoting racial purity and prejudiced views, the tales being praised by Adolf Hitler for the anti-
Semitic undertones. The tales became politicized as, “[f]or the Nazis the fairy tales became the
prime vehicle in supporting their Aryan policies” (Arnds 422-423). Through the manipulation of
tales such as “Cinderella”, encouraging racial instincts of purity, the tales were used to indoctrinate
others into the regime of the Nazi party. The Third Reich used the tales to foster nationalism, the
Nazi party decreeing that each household must, by law, have a copy of the Grimm Fairy Tales.
“By the 1870s the Grimm’s tales had been incorporated into the teaching curriculum”, the extreme
ideologies of Hitler being reinforced by the tales as a way to indoctrinate children into the regime,
creating a nationalist mentality in the younger generations (Zipes 48). For Althusser, “[i]deology
represent[s] the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (44).
Through the promotion of a system of thought, political control is exerted in an almost Orwellian
fashion of thought management and manipulation. Eagleton focuses on this more, stating that
ideology is a formal belief system, something of a political manifesto that becomes internalised by
the individual. Through the early indoctrination of children, via the manipulation of childhood
tales, the Nazi party shaped the mindset of those under their control, this ideology operating within
the unconscious and shaping their belief system. Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology,
utilised the example of anti-Semitism, stating that “the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do
with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our ideological
system” (71). The application of this to the Germanic state was upheld using Repressive State
Apparatus, a state that “functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical
repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology” (Althusser 43). Zizek’s statement is evident
within the story “The Bright Sun Brings It to Light”, the persecution of the Jewish figure being
not out of any actions of the Jew but simply because of the manipulated ideology instilled in the
servant that the Jew is a liar and thus deserves acts of violence against him.
Throughout Victorian fairy tales, Jews are presented as the other and inferior beings,
becoming the subject of victimisation through the application of derogatory stereotypes. Ken
Mondschein, in his introduction to Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, states that “[t]he Jews served as a

5
convenient ‘other’ so that people could find a common ground” (xxii). By creating an other, there
is a unification of the known in an attempt to eradicate the unknown and different. “People of
one’s own kind, and the ruling powers, one does not suspect of evil, but people who look different
and speak and behave differently- they may be capable of anything” (Fenichel 38). This uncertainty
and unfamiliarity is the source of overarching fear and the resulting prejudices. However, this war
of fear created a split society in which the eradication and persecution of the unknown culminated
in ethnic cleansing, in 1941, with the Holocaust. Associations with Judaism and linked affiliations
led to “times when the denigration of psychoanalysis as ‘Jewish science’ ha[d] been murderously
dangerous” (“Fragments of Jewish Identity” 180). This othering, which was influential on the
thoughts of the Nazi movement and the Third Reich, can be seen in many fairy tales, particularly
in those by the Brothers Grimm such as “The Bright Sun Will Bring It to Light”. In this, a Jew is
mercilessly beaten and robbed when “the tailor thrust God out of his heart, fell on the Jew, and
said, ‘Give me your money, or I will strike you dead.’… used violence and beat him until he was
near death” (415). This tale elicits contradictory interpretations amongst critics, many like
Bottigheimer believing this to be “the only one of Grimm’s tales in which the Jew is depicted in a
positive light” (Helfer 35). The tale ends with reconciliation and retribution as the tailor is
condemned for his actions. However, in an essay by Martha B. Helfer this becomes inverted, the
tailor’s behaviour creating an inversion of stereotypes as “it is the tailor, not the Jew, who proves
to be the Jew” (36). Through this, Helfer creates the notion of ‘Jewishness’ as a separate entity
from a Jewish body, the name merely holding negative connotations of the word. The word Jew
thus becomes synonymous with antagonist, allowing for the application of this to any tale, the
antagonist presenting ‘Jewish’ traits through their deceit and immorality. Helfer reinforces this by
stating “[t]his is the true function of the Jew in the text- to define what is unchristian as ‘Jewish’”
(36). In this way, anti-Semitism becomes transferable between figures who display negative
behaviour, this hatred not being linked to the religion but the immoral connotations the figures
embody. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, the weavers can
be seen as ‘Jewish’, despite never being named as such, due to their traits. They are described as
“cheats” (par. 13), deceiving the Emperor and officials through the manipulation of power as they
question “[a]m I not fit to be emperor” and “I am not fit for my good office” (par. 19, par. 16).
Through this, the weavers are shown to adhere to the negative stereotype, showing ‘Jewish’ traits
of greed and deceit as they fulfil the antagonistic role within the tale. Furthermore, they are
foreigners, the other in the kingdom. This promotes the other as being unknown and thus
untrustworthy, the mysterious encouraging fear. In addition, “The unconscious is also referenced,
that ‘other place’ which is both known and eternally foreign. Thinking this through in relation to
the issues of the Jew as stranger and outsider, the importance of ‘Jewish textuality’ is apparent”
(“Fragments of Jewish Identity” 181). Through this, the unconscious becomes a place of fear and
the unknown, held in a similar status to that of the Jew, being condemned and feared for
differentiation. The unconscious and Judaism thus share this othered label through which fear is
ignited and maintained through condemnation, whether socially or scientifically. The unconscious
or id is the manifestation of unmanaged morals and desires, this being akin to the stereotyped
depiction of the Jewish figure as “rabid… different, diseased” (“Freud and Jewish Identity” 169).
Through the animalistic comparison made in Victorian fairy tales, such as to the dog and frogs
within “The Good Bargain” or the derogatory names of “Shortribs… Sheepshanks, or Laceleg”
within “Rumpelstiltskin” (201), the antagonistic other becomes the ‘Jewish’ figure through these
traits, according to Helfer’s transferable Jewish label.
The Jewish figure is feminized and thus dehumanized through a societal rejection of inverted
gender. Building on the theories of Freud, Gilman believed Freud to be universalising anti-Semitic
tropes into his theories. Gilman describes how, throughout the 19th century, there was a
fascination both in popular and in medical culture with the body and 'difference' of the Jew, and
that this particular manifestation of 'othering' focused on sexuality. The Jew was seen as having a
kind of rabid yet damaged sexuality, manifested in the male Jew's circumcised state and through

6
modes of insanity which were basically hysterical in form and were caused by incest and early
seduction (“Freud and Jewish Identity” 169).
Through the circumcision, the Jewish man becomes an embodiment of feminized
masculinity, this leading to hysteria similar to that which Freud treated in Vienna amongst women
in the 1890s. This hysteria occurred due to a return of the repressed, leading to his theory on the
Oedipus Complex, the unwitting feeling of desire towards the mother and jealousy of the father.
The circumcised state leads to an inversion of gendered unconsciousness, the male Jew associating
with the hysteria of the female through this. “In the popular and medical fantasy, circumcision was
equivalent to castration, provoking fear and abhorrence”, leading to Freud’s universal theory of
the castration complex; everyone has a penis, and every female has been castrated (“Freud,
Psychoanalysis, and Anti-Semitism" 311). Through the application of the castration complex, the
Jewish figure becomes akin to the female, their physical circumcision matching the metaphorical
one that females undergo. For Laura Mulvey, the “lack of a penis, impl[ies] a threat of castration
and hence unpleasure” (174). Castration, and thus circumcision, form an association with a lack of
pleasure and the feminine, distorting the view of the male body as there is a merging of gender
within the unconscious. “Even today, we find deep in the unconscious of man the fear that his
penis may be cut off if he sins, a fear which acts as the chief motor for the instinct-suppression
desired by the patriarchal society” (Fenichel 42). This feminization of the Jewish body further
others the Jew, the other and different being a source of hatred through fear and thus promoting
eradication. This differentiation differs from Freud’s theory that anti-Semitism is a source of
jealousy, promoting prejudice based on physical or mental differences. The repressed and
unconscious once again appears, Freud’s theory of the unconscious and sexual repression applying
here, creating further anti-Semitic sentiment through hatred of that which is different and other.
Victorian fairy tales depict the Jewish body as monstrous through anti-Semitic stereotypes
and bestial references. For Otto Fenichel:

Jews have also been reviled by anti-Semites because of their cultural or physical 'racial'
peculiarities. Their hair frequently is black even if their skin is not; moreover, they are foreign
in their customs and habits, in their language, in their divine service, and in their everyday
life, which is so interwoven into their divine service. This foreignness they share with the
Armenians, the Negroes, and the Gypsies; and herein is to be found the secret that has made
others believe them to be wicked evil-doers. (38)

The Jewish body becomes victimised due to physical differences, comparative with the
ostracising racism enslaved persons faced. These identifying features become exaggerated, leading
to extreme stereotypes which emphasise demonic qualities, the Jew becoming “the devil, the anti-
Christ, the wicked principle directed against God” as they adopt animalistic qualities (Fenichel 41).
Within “The Good Bargain”, the servant comes across frogs “crying, ‘Aik, aik, aik, aik.’” (27). The
servant believes the frog to be mocking him so abuses the frog, saying “[y]ou water-splasher, you
thick-heads, you goggle-eyes, you have great mouths and can screech till you hurt one’s ears” (27).
The image produced is one of deformity and difference, Fenichel stating the derogatory
characteristics used to describe the Jewish stereotype are “namely animal qualities- goats’ feet,
horns, tails, and ugliness” (41). This creates a bestial comparison that is maintained through the
attributes of the dog and later the Jew in the tale, all three being portrayed as antagonistic figures
and having the ‘Jewishness’ that Helfer mentioned. Helfer comments that “the peasant implicitly
characterizes the frogs as ‘Jews’” utilising the “stock antisemitic stereotype” through the
comparison of beast to sub-human (36). This animalistic stereotype is maintained through many
antagonist figures such as the witch within “Hansel and Gretel”, witches being described as
“hav[ing] red eyes, and cannot see far, but they have a keen scent like the beasts, and are aware
when human beings draw near” (58). The devilish connotations associated with the red eyes
maintain the antagonist as evil, the bestial qualities being suggestive of satanic descent. In this way,

7
Helfer’s ‘Jewishness’ shows the Jewish figure as satanic and evil, becoming more sub-human
through physical deformities and thus, further othered through their labelling as antagonistic.
Within Victorian fairy tales, the figure of the Jew is “Der Muselmann” meaning an
“anonymous mass… of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within
them, already too empty to suffer”. “One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their
death death” (Levi 90). Adopted from the memoirs of Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben uses the
figure of the Muselmann to present bare life, a status of near inhumanity due to their insignificance.
Agamben presents the historical example of Jews within Nazi Germany to illustrate the concept
“[t]he Nazis created the legal and medical category of the ‘sub-human’ to justify the extermination
of socially undesirable people: Jews, homosexuals… in the eyes of the state, they were all deemed
‘life unworthy of being lived’, which meant they could be killed with impunity” (Bradley). This
Nazi-Germanic attitude is reflected in the Grimm fairy tale “The Jew Among Thorns”; the Jewish
figure suffering for the amusement of the servant:

[T]he good servant’s humour so tempted him that he took up his fiddle and began to play…
But the thorns tore his shabby coat from him, combed his beard, and pricked and plucked
him all over the body… ‘Leave the fiddle alone, master; I do not want to dance.’ But the
servant did not listen to him. (396)

Despite his actions against the Jew, the servant is still described as being justified, the physical
harm of the Jew being deemed an acceptable sacrifice for this enjoyment. The servant justifies this
by stating “‘[y]ou have fleeced people often enough, now the thornbushes shall do the same to
you’”, this being an act of retribution against all Jewish ‘good’, people who have deceived others
(396). “[T]he ‘good servant’ remarks that this is fair treatment because the Jew has gruesomely
tortured ‘the people’ and now must be tortured in return” (Helfer 40). Through this, the Jew fully
embodies the figure of the Muselmann as he represents all Jews, past and present, his life being
unworthy due to his status as a non or sub-human. When brought to justice, the blame moves
from the servant to the Jew, the assumption of his guilt, due to his Jewish status, once again
resuming. There is thus a move from the Muselmann to a scapegoat and antagonistic figure. As
seen also in “The Good Bargain”, the Jew becomes the figure on which crime is laid to blame as
their life is held in lower regard than that of the other citizens, even of lower socio-economic status
such as a peasant or servant. This is commented on by Fenichel in 1946 in what he calls “‘scape-
goat theory’” (37). He states:

[a]s it is well known, the Jews used to load all their sins onto a goat and then drive it out into
the desert in order to purify them. In the same way the ruling classes laid their sins onto the
Jews… this conception of the Jews as scapegoats is anchored in the souls of the German
people. (37)

There is a shift from the Jew as a human figure to a sacrificial animal, adhering to Agamben’s
statement that the Jew has become ‘sub-human’ and thus unworthy. Through the removal of their
human status to that akin to a sacrificial goat, the life of the Jew is deemed unworthy of human
identification, the sacrifice of the Jew acting as a cleansing of sin and is thus justified.
In conclusion, Victorian fairy tales, particularly those of a German origin, portray Jews as
antagonistic and evil, this figure becoming the symbol through which the negative stereotypes are
reinforced. Even if the antagonist is not directly referred to as Jewish, ‘Jewish’ traits are applied,
the tales thus being interpreted so the antagonist is in fact Jewish. Little Red Riding Hood, for
example, was interpreted as a symbol of the innocent German people, terrorized by the evil
‘Jewish’ wolf and liberated by Hitler, the huntsman. Similarly, Cinderella was seen as the
embodiment of racial purity, while her evil stepmother and stepsisters were condemned as
‘rassenfremd’, racially foreign (Helfer 32).

8
 Freud’s psychoanalytic models, such as discourse on the unconscious and dream theories,
are utilised to reveal “deep personal truths and how they illuminate stages of childhood
development” as well as build on our understanding of the unconscious through application
(Mondschein xii-xiv). This application of the labelled ‘Jewish sciences’ is ironic, as anti-Semitic
tales are viewed through a Semitic lens, the two being in direct conflict, yet the correlations
between theories are evident. Anti-Semitism stems from a manipulated ideological mindset, fairy
tales being used to reinforce this within children and thus indoctrinate them into prejudiced belief
systems. Freud’s hypothesis that anti-Semitism unconsciously derives from jealousy is reinforced
through the unjustified hatred of the Jewish people, as shown above through the transference of
the ‘Jewish’ title between antagonistic figures, maintaining that it is the stereotype and not the
actual Jew who is hated.

9
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader.
2nd ed. Edited by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, Open University Press, 2004, pp.
42-50
Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales:
The Ugly Duckling, Thumbelina and Other Stories. Edited by J. H. Stickney Lerner Publishing
Group Inc, 2017
Arnds, Peter. “On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi
Euthanasia and the Holocaust in Gunter Grass’s “Die Blechtrommel”, Edgar Hilsenrath’s
“Der Nazi & der Friseur”, and Anselm Kiefer’s Visual Art”. The German Quarterly, vol. 75,
no. 4, 2002, pp. 422-439
Bradley, Arthur. “Biopolitics Lecture 1”. Lancaster University, Jan 2021
Easthope, Anthony and McGowan, Kate. “Subjectivity”. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. 2nd
ed. Edited by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, Open University Press, 2004 pp. 73-
76
― “Section 5: Gender and Race, Psychoanalysis and Gender”. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader,
2nd ed. Edited by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, Open University Press, 2004, pp.
143-147
Fenichel, Otto. “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Anti-Semitism: “The Unconscious Factors at the
Root of Mass Aggression””. Commentary, vol. 2, 1946, pp. 36-44
Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by. A. A. Brill, Wordsworth, 1997
― Moses and Monotheism. Translated by Katherine Jones, Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1939
Frosh, Stephen. “Fragments of Jewish Identity”. American Imago, vol. 62, no. 2, 2005, pp. 179-191
― “Freud and Jewish Identity”. Theory & Psychology, vol. 18, no. 2, Sage Publication, 2008, pp. 167-
178
― “Freud, Psychoanalysis and Anti-Semitism". The Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 91, no. 3, Guildford
Publications, 2004, pp. 309-330
Grimm, The Brothers. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt, Canterbury
Classics, 2011
― “7. The Good Bargain”. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt, Canterbury
Classics, 2011, pp. 27-30
― “15. Hansel and Gretel”. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt, Canterbury
Classics, 2011, pp. 54-59
― “21. Cinderella”, in Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt, Canterbury
Classics, 2011, pp. 81-86
― “55. Rumpelstiltskin”. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt, Canterbury
Classics, 2011, pp. 200-202
― “110. The Jew Among Thorns”. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt,
Canterbury Classics, 2011, pp. 395-398

10
― “115. The Bright Sun Brings It to Light”. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret
Hunt, Canterbury Classics, 2011, pp. 415-416
Helfer, Martha B. “The Fairy Tale Jew”. Neulekturen- New Readings, Norbert Otto Eke und Gerhard
P. Knapp, 2009, pp. 31-42
Hill, John. “Amplification: Unveiling Emerging Patterns of Meaning”. Jungian Psychoanalysis:
Working in the Spirit of Carl Jung. Edited by Murray Stein, Open Court, 2010, pp. 109-117
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf,
Touchstone, 1996
Mondschein, Ken. “Introduction”. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Margaret Hunt,
Canterbury Classics, 2011, pp. xiii-xxiii
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. 2nd
ed. Edited by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, Open University Press, 2004, pp.
168-176
Rubenstein, Ben. “The Meaning of The Cinderella Story in The Development of a Little Girl”.
American Imago, vol. 12, no. 2, 1995, pp. 197-205
Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forest to The Modern World. 2nd ed. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002
Zizek, Slavoj. “The Sublime Object of Ideology”. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. 2nd ed. Edited
by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, Open University Press, 2004, pp. 70-72

11
 Resistance in Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” and Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
Meg Roser

Abstract
This article explores the representations of resistance in two 19th-century texts: Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ short story “Life in the Iron Mills”.
By engaging with theories of spectatorship and suffering, this article analyses the representation of
individual, collective, creative, and criminal resistance within the texts. It reveals that both texts
demonstrate the difficulty of non-conformism and primarily engage with the concept of individual,
isolated resistance – but also allude to the potential power of the masses.

Rebecca Harding Davis’ short story “Life in the Iron Mills”, set in an unnamed American town,
primarily focuses on Hugh Wolfe and his work as a furnace tender in Kirby & John’s iron mill.
Davis’ text ultimately discourages individual resistance, as Wolfe is sentenced to nineteen years in
prison for accepting stolen money from his friend Deborah and eventually commits suicide in his
cell. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” provides a useful framework for exploring
resistance in Davis’ text, as it engages with the ideas of both individual and collective resistance.
Emerson posits that the only effective form of resistance is individual nonconformity, arguing that
“society never advances” — and yet also contradictorily alludes to the potential power of collective
resistance (251).
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist” (238). In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson
encourages the individual to resist the pressure to conform. Emerson’s nonconformity and
individual resistance ultimately leads to isolation — but this isolation is intended, as he states that
“We must go alone. Isolation must precede true society” (246). He does acknowledge, however,
that nonconformity often leads to suffering, observing that “for non-conformity the world whips
you with its displeasure” (240). The explicitly violent term “whips” reflects the physical effect on
bodies as a result of nonconformity, which also occurs in “Life in the Iron Mills” as Wolfe cuts
his wrists with a piece of tin in his cell at the end of the short story.
Davis establishes the town in “Life in the Iron Mills” as a space of intense suffering, which
her unnamed narrator emphasises the importance of observing by utilising confrontational
language: “hide your disgust” in order to “see […] clearly” (1699). Despite the seeming
hopelessness of the setting, however, resistance appears to be possible, as Davis refers to the
potential power of both collective and individual resistance. The mass of workers is described as
being “full of unawakened power” (1699), and Wolfe contains “unused powers” and “strength
within him” (1715). Davis uses similar language to present the power of Wolfe and the workers,
but also sets Wolfe apart from them by presenting his individual resistance, of which he displays
two types. The first is creative resistance; the second is what will be referred to in this essay as
‘criminal resistance’ — resistance manifesting in criminal behaviour.
Wolfe is described as having “a fierce thirst for beauty”, and undertakes a form of creative
resistance through his habit of “chipping and moulding figures” (1705, 1704). This is an example
of what Lauri Siisiäinen calls “aesthetic counter-conduct", as she connects Michel Foucault’s
discussions of contemporary visual art with his explorations of governmentality, biopolitics and
resistance. This form of resistance “tactically reverses use of power against itself, discovering its
own potentials and elaborating its own resources and instruments from the materials provided to
it by use of power itself” (Siisiäinen). This is exactly what Wolfe does in the mill — he utilises krol,
a waste product from the iron mills to create pieces of art. The dirty, hostile space of the iron mills

12
“[smothers]” his soul and damages his body, but also provides him with ‘materials’ for his sculpture
(1715). The sculpture of the hungry woman, too, “reverses use of power against itself”, as it briefly
destabilises and unsettles the wealthy mill visitors, evidenced through Mitchell, who initially
“[starts] back, half-frightened”, and upon closer inspection the sculpture “[touches] him strangely”;
Kirby cries out for it to be illuminated by fire as they both think that it is “alive” (1708). The statues
that Wolfe makes are creative representations of his nonconformity, and his acts of creative
resistance set him apart, further isolating him from the other workers, who view him as strange
and feminized, describing him as “one of the girl-men” (1704). Therefore, as Emerson argues,
isolation and individual resistance are inextricably connected.
Ultimately, however, it is his act of ‘criminal resistance’ that leads to Wolfe’s death, which
occurs when he takes the stolen money from Deborah, believing that it can be “used to raise him
out of the pit” – in which, again, Davis utilises hellish imagery in her presentation of the town
(1715). This criminal resistance results in Wolfe’s imprisonment, which further isolates him from
his peers and the rest of society. David Aberle defines a social movement as “an organised effort
by a group of human beings to affect change in the face of resistance by other human beings” —
showing that resistance also comes from the opponents to social change (315). In Davis’ short
story, resistance arises from both the worker (Wolfe) and the employer (Kirby) — but it is the
resistance of the employer (the opponent to social change), supported by the legal system, that is
ultimately successful. Therefore, any kind of social movement, the potentiality of which is alluded
to with the narrator’s use of the phrase “unawakened power”, becomes almost impossible within
the town — where a single act of individual resistance is punished with “nineteen years hard labour
in penitentiary” (1717). The punishment of Wolfe and Deborah acts as a deterrent against the
individual resistance of the other workers, thus presenting a ‘social movement’, composed of these
individuals, as practically impossible. In his discussion of the function of the prison in Discipline
and Punish, Michel Foucault states that the first principle of the prison is isolation: “The isolation
of the convict from the external world, from everything that motivated the offence, from the
complicities that facilitated it” (236). Whereas Emerson positions isolation as a necessary, desired
aspect of individual resistance, Davis’ text shows the suffering and isolation caused by
imprisonment, which acts as a punishment for resistance.
Sympathy and pity are crucial issues in both Emerson and Davis’ texts. Emerson pushes the
idea of “sit[ting] at home with the cause” (246), and is also keen to put distance between himself
and others, with the “black folk a thousand miles off” functioning as what Lilie Chouliaraki calls
“distant sufferers” (239, Chouliaraki 19). Emerson discourages abolitionists from focusing on
people outside of their own communities, leading John Stauffer and Steven Brown to highlight
Emerson’s self-inflicted “distance from the plight of [black people], reformers and women” (xvi).
For Emerson, therefore, pity and sympathy is only extended to certain people. His essay shows
that acts of individual resistance can lead to the exclusion of other suffering bodies, as well as the
discouragement of resistance on a larger scale.
The narrative voice of “Life in the Iron Mills” forces the reader to act as a spectator of
Wolfe’s suffering as a mill worker, but ultimately presents resistance to this suffering as futile by
showing that Wolfe’s resistance leads to his isolation and death. Chouliaraki discusses a type of
resistance that is present when spectators observe suffering on television — commenting that such
spectators often “resist the truths and certainties of systems of power and social control” (52).
When this quotation is applied to Davis’ short story, the reader becomes the spectator; the workers
become the observed, and the systems of ‘power and social control’ are embodied by the mill
visitors. Davis’ narrator strongly encourages the reader of “Life in the Iron Mills” to look at and
feel pity for the mill workers, and yet also presents any form of resistance as dangerous – which
allows the reader to feel sympathy for the workers without viewing resistance to the ‘systems of
power and control’ as viable.
The role of pity and sympathy in affecting resistance and social movements is therefore
dubious. Mitchell argues in the story that “reform is born of need, not pity” (1711), a sentiment

13
echoed in political theorist Hannah Arendt’s claim that pity is “to be sorry without being touched
in the flesh” (Arendt 85). A character in the short story who appears to feel pity for Wolfe (a
“distant [sufferer]”) is the Doctor, but he ultimately does not act to help Wolfe, thus rendering his
pity useless. “God help them!”, the Doctor exclaims, seemingly washing his hands of any
responsibility (1709).
In the setting of “Life in the Iron Mills”, even a little “figure of an angel pointing upward
from [the narrator’s] mantel-shelf” is broken and covered with smoke (1698). The description of
the figure sets the tone for the rest of the short story: the town is a place where goodness and
morality, represented by the broken figure of the angel, struggle to exist. Even the Doctor, who is
described as a “kind-hearted” man, is quick to abandon his pity for Wolfe after he steals from
Mitchell (1708). He and his wife briefly discuss Wolfe’s sentence, before “[beginning] to talk of
something else” (1717). Wolfe is essentially the personification of this angel figure — his moral
nature is corrupted by his living in the town, resulting in his theft, and his body is destroyed —
‘broken’ — as he kills himself in prison — an isolating space that he is forced into as a result of
his resistance.
Emerson utilises similar language to Davis when describing poor citizens — “when the
ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of
society is made to growl and mow” (240). The use of “aroused” is akin to Davis’ descriptions: “full
of unawakened power”; “the bottom of society”, which has similarities with Davis’ recurring
imagery of the town as a hellish “pit” (1715). Despite his assertion that society cannot advance and
the implication that only the individual can resist, Emerson also appears to admit to the power of
a group of individuals — and by extension their capacity for resistance. Conversely, despite Davis’
references to the “unawakened power” of both Wolfe and the other workers, “Life in the Iron
Mills” discourages resistance by making an example of the characters who resist: Deborah and
Wolfe; showing that their nonconformity results in isolation, punishment (specifically
imprisonment) and death. The reader is encouraged to feel pity but is also distanced due to their
role as a spectator. Perhaps, therefore, they become like the Doctor, and are quick to discard their
pity when they think of “something else” (1717).
Kristina E. Thalhammer et al. discuss the concept of ‘collective resistance’, defining it as
occurring “when people choose to challenge injustice together”, where individual resisters “work
against injustice […] and interact and share risks with other people” (91). In “Self-Reliance”,
Emerson alludes to ‘injustice’, arguing that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the
manhood of every one of its members” (238). Crucially, he refers to the individual — “one” —
but also to the collective — “members”. Though Emerson focuses heavily on self-reliance (indeed,
it is the title of the text), he also cannot avoid referring to the power of the collective, and by
extension to the potential resistance of the organised masses, if they were to “share risks with other
people”. At the end of the essay, he comments that a ‘cultivated man’ only has what he has
“because no revolution or no robber takes it away” … admitting, therefore, that both the individual
(the “robber”) and the collective (the resistance of “the revolution”) can force social change (253).
Contrastively, Davis merely alludes to the power of collective resistance as a response to the
‘injustice’ of the conditions that the mill workers face. “Life in the Iron Mills” only presents
individual resistance, which is ultimately discouraged.

14
Works Cited
Aberle, D. F. et al. The Peyote Religion Among the Navaho. Aldine Publishing Company, 1966
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Penguin Books, 1977
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Spectatorship of Suffering. SAGE Publications, 2006
Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Life in the Iron Mills”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ninth
Edition, Volume B: 1820-1865, edited by Robert S. Levine, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017,
pp. 1698-1724
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ninth Edition,
Volume B: 1820-1865, edited by Robert S. Levine, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 236-
253
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage
Books, 1995
Siisiäinen, Lauri. “Aesthetic Counter-Conduct". Foucault, Biopolitics and Resistance, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2018
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Foucault_Biopolitics_and_Resistance/rDZ7D
wAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT130&printsec=frontcover [accessed 21st February
2021]
Stauffer, John, and Steven Brown. “Foreword: Emerson’s Renewing Power”. Mr Emerson’s
Revolution, edited by Jean McClure Mudge, Open Book Publishers, 2015, pp. xiii-xxiv
Thalhammer, Kristina E. et al. “Collective Resistance to Injustice: The Special Power of People
Working Together”. Courageous Resistance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 91-122

15
 Reading Heart of Darkness as a Polishman in Sub-Saharan Africa
Stan Wierzbicki

Abstract
Poland is a postcolonial country. Polish perspective is postcolonial. Because of 123 years of being
partitioned between Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Russian Empire, followed by the Nazi
occupation and the neo-colonial communist Soviet-controlled puppet rule, Poland and Polish
people inhabit a unique perspective that is both European and postcolonial. What influence did
this have on Joseph Conrad, who, having left a country occupied by Russia, adopted the identity
of another Empire – Colonial Britain? How does it relate to the Polish minority in the UK and
how does it contribute to the Polish-African critical and cultural relationships?
This creative critical essay explores the venues of postcolonial theory and writings by
thinkers like Chinua Achebe, Ngūgī Wā Thiong’o, Walter Mignolo and others in order to examine
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a unique text that possibly came from a ‘homo duplex’ who was both
colonially oppressed and an oppressor, someone who had to choose between ‘the lesser evils of
one imperial power and greater evils of another,’ someone who possibly used racism in his text
because of inferiority complex and identity crisis. Through describing the narrator’s modern travel
to Africa, and his renegotiations with the Polish and English identity and Polish and English kinds
of racism and other ways of discrimination, the essay explores the post-coloniality in all its unlikely
renditions and asks the question about whether or not the Polish mind can be decolonised.

1.
In 1890 Joseph Conrad, or – as he was really called – Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, sailed
a steamboat up the Congo River, in Sub-Saharan Africa. Travelling to this part of the world 129
years later, as another Polishman entangled in the English perspective, I was bound to experience
an inevitable crisis of identity.

My first encounter with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness dates around summer 2018, when
I read it as a set text for my Polish literature class in high-school (or Polish sixth-form equivalent).
‘I’m relieved we don’t have any black people in our class’, said my teacher after reading a
passage from the novel, containing some insulting language, ‘I’d have to do some linguistic
gymnastics if we did.’ This remark caused the more conservative, less politically correct part of our

16
class to laugh, and the rest of us remained quiet. The teacher continued talking about Conrad’s
novel using the word Murzyn (Cambridge Dictionary), a Polish equivalent of the English word Negro
(Oxford Dictionary). I sat there, half-listening, wondering if it even made sense to discuss Heart of
Darkness in school when the teacher herself represented such undiscussable stands and behaviours,
that would probably make her unable to present the novel in the wider context of colonialism, and
also the postcolonial discourse.
I was fascinated by Africa, its politics, literature and culture way before I read Heart of
Darkness. If anything, Conrad’s novel seemed to me, at the time as a dull, unspecific portrait of
what I knew from dozens of films, travel programmes, classic novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngūgī
wa Thiong’o and those of contemporary writers like Alain Mabanckou, Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie and others.
In the opening passages of Conrad’s novel, Marlowe elaborates: “Now when I was a little
chap, I had a passion for maps. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when
I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map […] I would put my finger on it and say: When
I grow up I will go there” (8). In Postcolonial Poland, Clare Cavanagh analyses: “He [Marlowe] echoes
his creator’s own childhood dream of exploring ‘the blank space then representing the unsolved
mystery’ of Africa. The critics and theorists we know as postcolonialists have done much to fill in
these blank spaces—or, rather, to show how the lacunae are already, and have long since been,
filled. We in the West, […] have been wilfully blind to what lies before our eyes” (92).
As opposed to Marlowe, when I was growing up, there were no blank spaces on maps.
Thanks to the internet, I could transport myself into any place on Planet Earth – granted, majority
of Sub-Saharan Africa is still not as easily accessible on Google Maps Street View as other
continents – however, hundreds of photos of densely populated, colourful, fascinating
metropolises can be reached just by one click.

I could immerse myself in the unknown landscapes of Yaoundé, Harare, Ouagadougou,

Lagos, Nairobi and, among others – Kinshasa, which in Conrad’s times, consisting only of small
wooden fortification and a transit village, was named Leopoldville after King Leopold II, one of
the cruellest rulers in history, and now, with 15 million inhabitants, is the largest city on the
continent (Likaka). Despite access to all that information, it seemed that people around me still
were (as Cavanagh wrote) “wilfully blind to what lies before [their] eyes” (92). Africa and African
issues still seemed to be marginalised and not talked about by anyone around me (Konarski). Some
Conradian fascination remained in place; in my, Polish, non-postcolonial environment, Africa still
seemed forgotten, there was still some quality of a ‘blank spot on a map’ to it.
I wondered if my environment could really be non-postcolonial; if a country located in the
literal centre of Europe could be free of imperialism? Without too much research, we can quickly

17
comprehend, that Polish history does have its own relationship with the ideas of colonialism and
postcolonialism – however – in a wholly different way…
Not only was Poland’s territory split between three Empires – Russian, Prussian and Austro-
Hungarian – since 1772 until 1918, spanning over a hundred years, but its inhabitants of that time
were subjected to the colonial procedures of Russification and Germanisation almost identical to
the ones that Africans were victims of under the rule of the British Empire (Kamusella). To give
an example, Polish language was banned from schools and public spheres of society, which
resulted in many strikes, like the Wrzesnia children strike against Germanisation which resulted in
severe corporal punishments and detention (Blejwas). On the other hand, several expeditions to
Africa were made by Polish explorers, including the 1882 Cameroon expedition of Stefan Szolc-
Rogoziński, who wanted to establish a Polish community there (Bederman). After Poland regained
its independence in 1918 (six years before Joseph Conrad’s death), it even made its own colonial
attempts (Hunczak). Throughout the 20s and 30s Madagascar and Mozambique among other
countries were discussed in Europe as potential Polish colonies (Hunczak). It was Poland’s
authoritarian Sanation government that first came up with the idea to send all of its Jewish
inhabitants to Madagascar, as opposed to the common believe that it was the Nazi Germany who
introduced it… (Jennings)
“What […] are we to make of the postcolonial?”, writes Derek Gregory in The Colonial Present,
“How are we to make sense of that precocious prefix? My preference is to trace the curve of the
postcolonial from the inaugural moment of the colonial encounter” (6). According to research, the
colonial encounter manifested in many forms in the history of Poland, although, being a country
which Norman Davies calls ‘the Heart of Europe’, I have never experienced it being labelled as
postcolonial.
Meandering through all that information, I came to an unlikely conclusion, that the
partitioned Poland in which Joseph Conrad grew-up in, was a community that was someone else’s
colony while simultaneously holding a colonist viewpoint itself. I also discovered that the Poland
that I grew up in, nearly 150 years later, was undoubtably a postcolonial country.

2.
How then, stuck somewhere in between all those different and somewhat contradictory
postcolonial identities, was I to think about Heart of Darkness while travelling across Kenya in July
and August 2019, and then, starting education at Lancaster University, only to find myself reading
Conrad’s novel once again (this time, in the English original, not the authorised translation by
Conrad’s niece, Aniela Zagórska [Joseph Conrad: A Life])?How was I supposed to find myself in all
the bizarre, detached lands previously conquered by Mr. Korzeniowski? What does Polish, English
or African even mean? – I was asking myself, awaiting my departure to Kenya, which took place
exactly 3 months before I was about to move to the UK and start speaking and writing mostly in
English.
Answers did not come easily. My decision to invest all my savings into a journey to volunteer
in Kenya for a month was met with concern and worry by some friends and members of my family.
In mostly monoethnic Poland, racist behaviour gets unnoticed and is let to slide easier than perhaps
in some other, more multi-ethnic parts of Europe (Balogun). “Racism is a classification, and
classification is an epistemic manoeuvre rather than an ontological entity that carries with it the
essence of the classification”, writes Walter Mignolo, and if that was the case, my hypothesis was
that Polish people sometimes used racism to – in a twisted, horrible way – put themselves in the
shoes of a Western, ‘civilised’ country (xi). What was even more noticeable than the racist remarks,
however, was my environment’s condescending view of the modern-day African countries. “The
stereotype […] is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in
place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated", writes Homi K. Bhabha

18
(18). Were Polish people around me ‘anxiously repeating’ the stereotypes about Africa to convince
themselves that their homeland is not a postcolonial country?
Wasn’t it possible, then, that Polish people, as a nation oppressed for ages despite being
geographically placed in the centre of Europe (the biggest oppressor) found themselves in a complex
of trying to prove themselves that Poland is somehow better than the other, un-European
postcolonial countries, and by racism classify itself higher than the so-called the Third World
(Cavanagh)? Wasn’t it possible that the same superiority complex accompanied Joseph Conrad
whilst writing Heart of Darkness?

3.
In his essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ Chinua Achebe argues
that the novel “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world’, the antithesis of Europe and
therefore of civilisation, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally
mocked by triumphant bestiality” (An Image of Africa 3). Researching Conrad’s writing, it soon
enough becomes quite clear, that despite his semi-autobiographical attachment to the piece, in his
post-romantic, proto-modernist style (Conrad in Perspective), Africa becomes (as Achebe remarks):
“a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering
European enters at his peril” (An Image of Africa 13). It’s not hard to recognise, that the facts and
accurate representation of the Congo’s culture and people is far less important for Conrad than
creating a fictional setting for the duel between humanity and titular ‘darkness’ – savagery and
brutality that consumes the character of Mr. Kurtz, but the real question is: can this really be done
with a real place that has real culture and real people (Levenson)?
The novel is built on further binaries (An Image of Africa). The atmosphere which sets the
Congo as this “metaphysical battlefield” is built from clashing the primal, untouched tranquillity
with the ‘alien’, anthropologically unprecise customs of the Congolese. The former manifests by
fragments like “It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain
of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our
heads, till the first break of day” and “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that
wore the aspect of an unknown planet”, and the latter is achieved using descriptions such as
“[S]uddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-
roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies
swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along
slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.” (43). This method is slammed in
Achebe’s essay, and called “a preposterous and perverse arrogance in […] reducing Africa to the
role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind”, and it’s hard to disagree with the fact
the novel is racist and full of stereotypes (An Image of Africa 13).

19
 What’s interesting for me, however, is how this binary artistic strategy corresponds to the
modern-day European view on Sub-Saharan Africa. Before I went to Kenya, the only two things
I gathered about Africa from my Polish environment were, on the one hand, an utter fascination
with the nature sights and Safaris I was going to see, and on the other – the worry and concern
with political uproars of the continent, and stereotypes around theft, kidnapping and overall lack
of safety. By that, I noticed how Conrad’s stereotypical hurtful binaries between what’s primal,
silent and untouched and what’s savage, chaotic and dangerous still remained in place in the Polish
mind before I set my foot on the continent 129 years after he did.
In Decolonising the Mind, Ngūgī Wa Thiong’o writes about the childhood bedtime stories he
got told when growing up in Kenya (where my own African experience took place). “There were
two types of characters in such […] narratives”, he remarks, “The species of truly human beings
with qualities of courage, kindness, mercy, hatred of evil, concern for others; and a man-eat-man
two-mouthed species with qualities of greed, selfishness […] and hatred of what was good for the
larger co-operative community” (10). Ironically enough, those are almost the exact characteristics
that rule my compatriot’s novel. Unfortunately, enough though, in Heart of Darkness, those binary
qualities are all attached to races, and its main structural twist is that ‘greed, selfishness and hatred’
are now also qualities of Mr. Kurtz, a coloniser and missionary, who is supposed to be the other
way around. Look – Conrad points out – the colonizer is no better than the colonized! And
however obvious this message seems nowadays, in a lot more enlightened environment, the
controversy and wrongness of it doesn’t come from the fact that it was pinpointed by Conrad that
the colonizer and the colonized are (in some regard) no different, but by the fact that they are –
according to his novel – no different, because every side of this binary is primitive and, after Ngūgī,
“a man-eat-man two-mouthed species” (10).
The wrongness of that message, however, hadn’t been that obvious for my Polish
environment. Calling me during my month-long stay in Kenya, my friends and family pulled many
racist jokes about where I was – even ones about cannibalism. Before I went to Kenya, I had to
even ensure my parents – who are university-educated, upper-middle-class people from the capital
city of a European country (!) – that there is no cannibalism in Kenya. Seeing pictures of Nairobi
city centre – which looks in parts as modern as the one of Warsaw where they live – my friends
and family expressed surprise. ‘How modern!’, they would say, and find it overwhelmingly weird
that the city has bookshops, cafés and theatres. When I talked to my family and friends about the
African authors I liked, they would laugh at their ‘funny-sounding names’ and dismiss their place
in the world literary canon…
Perhaps the prejudice of postcolonial Poland was still not ready to accept that the Conradian
binaries were simply wrong. The message of Africa being the heart of darkness that can consume
and corrupt the human mind – even white mind, still remained in its place…

4.
On my Polish literature classes in school, I was still taught the message of Heart of Darkness as if it
was revolutionary and somehow relevant today. What I wasn’t taught in neither my Polish
literature classes in school or later at the University, was what Mr. Korzeniowski himself had to
do with this problem and what kinds of clashes of concepts and crises of identity were going on
in his own life. After all – he himself escaped from the colonial Empire of Russia, which treated
many Polish people with some of the same methods that the Western Empires orchestrated their
African rule with – enforcing languages, oppression, using the conquered nations as workforce etc
(Kamusella). As many parts of Africa were Marlowe’s “blank spaces on the earth”, Poland, because
of imperialism similar to Britain’s, was also non-existent on any map for over a hundred years (8).
Was it possible that the man who created Marlowe, ironically enough, came from the blank spot
on the map himself? And was it possible that Mr. Korzeniowski escaped from role of the oppressed
in one empire to the role of the oppressor in another?

20
 “No man or woman can choose their biological nationality” (1), wrote Ngūgī in 1986, exactly
70 years after Conrad wrote: “My own point of view is English. From which the conclusion should
not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my
case more than one meaning” (quoted in Cavanagh 86). Reading Conrad’s The Congo Diary attached
to many editions of Heart of Darkness, we can notice how his private, unliterary notes from the
1890 journey were written in English, not Polish. Interestingly enough, preparing for my trip to
Kenya, I decided to write a diary too. And it was too composed fully in English, not Polish – I was
living in a weird linguistical limbo between graduating from high-school (or Polish sixth form
equivalent) and the start of my degree: English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster
University. I know for sure I was writing my private diary in English to assume some sort of new
identity before moving to the UK, but was writing those private notes in a language of the Empire
also a way to assume its identity for Mr. Korzeniowski?
“The choice face by Conrad”, explains Clare Cavanagh, “Was not between empire and
autonomy, but between what were, for a Pole at any rate, the lesser evils of one imperial power
and the greater evils of another: ‘Empire giveth; empire taketh away’, as his compatriot Ryszard
Kapuściński would later write” (86).
Although Mr. Korzeniowski, the Polishman claimed that he had not become an Englishman,
he admitted to having had an English perspective – a perspective that so many African writers
tried so heavily to free their art from. “I no be gentleman at all o!/I be Africa man original”, sung
Fela Kuti, one of the most influential musicians of the continent. Another interesting notion arises
when we look deeper at the colonial implication of the very word Englishman, the word that Mr.
Korzeniowski, the Polishman, seems to like so much. “At the age of sixteen Conrad encountered
his first Englishman in Europe”, writes Achebe, “He calls him ‘my unforgettable Englishman’”
(An Image of Africa 15).
In reality, there’s no such word in English as Polishman. Englishman is somewhat old
fashioned but still commonly used expression; however, not many other nations have the luxury
of having a noun formulated of the adjective naming it and a suffix men (Cambridge Dictionary).
There’s Frenchman. And Dutchman… Both countries had lots of colonies around the world…
Scotsman, Irishman and Welshman are all existing words. There’s no Americanman. There’s no
Polishman – there’s just a short, simple and somewhat impersonal Pole. There’s no Nigerianman, no
Kenyanman and no Congoleseman, there are only adjectives that can in some exceptions be used
as nouns, and sound very impersonal. So, is anybody from outside the Anglo-Saxon world and
anybody who didn’t colonize less of a man?

5.
Taking all of that into account I started to ask myself some more puzzling questions. My question
about whether or not Joseph Conrad’s ‘borrowed Englishness’ was a way to overcome some

21
deeply rooted traumas of Russian Empire’s colonial oppression is probably never to be answered.
However, I had more questions. First one was – was Joseph Conrad an English writer? The
knowledge of the fact that he was Polish seems to be forgotten by many, even students that I
know, however, when simply Googling his name – as I googled all the non-blank spaces of the
vivid, sub-Saharan postcolonial metropolises – he comes out not as an ‘English writer’, but – as a
‘Polish-English’ writer.
“What is African Literature?”, Ngūgī asks, “Was it literature about Africa or about the
African experience? Was it literature written by Africans? What about non-African who wrote
about Africa: did his work qualify as African literature? What if an African set his work in
Greenland: did that qualify as African literature?” (6). Delving deeper and deeper into meanders
of the self-contradicting information, theories, and questions about Joseph Conrad,
postcolonialism, England, Poland, and Heart of Darkness, I might ask: What is English literature?
And what is Polish literature? Is it literature about Poland/England or about Polish/English
experience? Is it literature written by Polish/English people?
What about a non-Englishman who wrote about England: did his work qualify as English
literature? Looking at Conrad, we can say: yes… (Conrad in Perspective). Could literature set in
colonial Congo, written by a Polishman in English, and not about Poland qualify as Polish literature?
Polishness might be erased from Heart of Darkness, but there is still no definite answer to that
– after all, Conrad referred to himself as “homo duplex” and said that he hadn’t become an
“Englishman” (quoted in Cavanagh 86). So, was he a Polish writer? In English and the African Writer,
Chinua Achebe asks, “Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively
in creative writing? […] Certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like
a native speaker? I should say, I hope not… The African writer should aim to use English in a way
that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a
medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which
is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience” (“English and the African Writer”
29). Was something similar puzzling Joseph Conrad when he stated he had not become an
‘Englishman’ (Cavanagh)? And – more importantly – what are the answers to these questions when
we switch the ‘African’ for the ‘Polish’? Is the fact that, as opposed to African writers, no-one
forced Mr. Korzeniowski to learn English enough of a satisfactory explanation for all these mind-
boggling questions?
And, at last – considering the fact that its author came from a heavily colonized country, is
Heart of Darkness, despite being an obviously racist and colonialist novel, also a piece of postcolonial
literature?

6.
How then does my own experience of travelling in Sub-Saharan Africa as a Polishman who had not
yet become an Englishman correspond to the questions concerning Heart of Darkness?
‘Mzungu’, a man said to me somewhere between Kisumu and Kakamega in Mid-Western
Kenya, ‘You colonised us! Where are you from?’
‘Poland’, I said to him, ‘We didn’t colonize you; British people did.’
‘You’re from Portugal? You colonized Mozambique! And Angola…’
‘No, I’m from Poland not Portugal. We also got colonized – by Russia, Germany…’
The man looked at me with suspicion. There was some glare in his eyes, a glare that I came
to know very well through my month in Kenya – a sort of a postcolonial, untrusting glare, that
despite my good intentions, the fact that my country hadn’t established any colonies in Africa, all
the knowledge I gained from reading and watching content about Africa, and all the research I
made to prepare myself for this trip, still made me feel at wrong, as an unfitting element of the
puzzle, as the white other – Mzungu (Mugane). Was my mind (after Ngūgī), not decolonised? Does the

22
Polish mind also – as African and English one – need decolonising? And if so, how was the
decolonization of the mind to be conducted?
“How we view ourselves […] is very much dependent on where we stand in relationship to
imperialism and its colonial and neo-colonial stages”, writes Ngūgī, “If we are to do anything about
our individual and collective being today, then we have to coldly and consciously look at what
imperialism has been doing to us and to our view of ourselves in the universe” (88).

Taking a journey to Kenya to volunteer – not for some NGO, and not in the neo-colonial fashion
of ‘teaching English’ as many people I later met in England did, but independently, simply by
helping an elderly Mrs. Nambovi in her house and garden, shopping for her and washing her
dishes, was a humbling experience. It was not humbling because of the fact that I saw poverty, or
anything like that. Much to the opposite. It was humbling because the kind of help that I offered
as a volunteer was exactly the kind of help that I would have offered to any European elderly
person looking for care. Again, I don’t know if this form of questioning my relationship to
imperialism was right or effective. And I still don’t know how to think about Heart of Darkness, my
compatriot’s Mr. Korzeniowski’s novel. What I know is that the fact that it may be read as a
postcolonial work when looked at from the Polish perspective doesn’t compromise the fact that
it is disappointing how its author, even though experienced by one Empire’s colonialism, assigned
himself to the dominant culture of another. “Unfortunately, his heart of darkness plagues us still”,
writes Achebe (An Image of Africa 16). This statement is not only true for the English and African
people. Heart of Darkness also leaves its mark in the Polish environment. The Polish mind also
needs to be decolonised.

All the photographs were made by the author of this essay and are shared here thanks to the courtesy of the ones
portrayed.

23
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua, An Image of Africa and The Trouble with Nigeria, Penguin Books, 2010
– “English and the African Writer”. Transition, no. 18, 1965, pp. 27-30
– Things Fall Apart, Penguin Books, 2010
Balogun, Bolaji. “Race and Racism in Poland: Theorising and Contextualising ‘Polish-centrism’”.
The Sociological Review, vol. 68, no. 6, 2020, pp. 1196-1211
Bederman, Sanford H. “A Centennial Appraisal of Stefan Rogozinski's Polish Expedition to the
Cameroons, 1883–1885”. Terrae Incognitae, vol. 17, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1-13
Bhabha, Homi K. “The Other Question…”. Screen, vol. 24, no. 6, 1983, pp. 18-36
Blejwas, Stanislaus A. “American Polonia and the School Strike in Września”. Polish American
Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2002, pp. 9-59
Cavanagh, Clare. “Postcolonial Poland”. Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 1, 2004, pp. 82-92
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary, Penguin Books, 2007
– Notes on Life and Letters, Cambridge University Press, 2004
Davies, Norman. Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland, Clarendon Press, 1986

Dictionary.cambridge.org, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-
grammar/nationalities-languages-countries-and-regions
“Englishman.” dictionary.cambridge.org,
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/englishman
Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Blackwell Publishing, 2004
Hunczak, Taras. “Polish Colonial Ambitions in the Inter-War Period”. Slavic Review, vol. 26, no. 4,
1967, pp. 648-656
Jennings, Eric T. “Writing Madagascar Back into the Madagascar Plan”. Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2007, pp. 187-217
Kamusella, Tomasz. “Germanization, Polonization, and Russification in the partitioned lands of
Poland-Lithuania”. Nationalities Papers, vol. 41, no. 5, 2013, pp. 815-838

Kornarski, Zbigniew. “Holland, Poland i Ulaja, czyli co wiedzą o nas w Afryce?” wnp.pl, 22 Apr
2012 https://www.wnp.pl/praca/holland-poland-i-ulaja-czyli-co-wiedza-o-nas-w-
afryce,195832.html
Kuti, Fela. “Gentleman”. Gentleman, EMI Music, 1973
Levenson, Michael. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to
Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2005
Likaka, Osumaka. Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870-1960,
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2005
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony, University of California Press, 2001

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McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. Manchester University Press, 2010
Mignolo, Walter. “Yes, We Can”. Can Non-Europeans Think? by Hamid Dabashi. Zed Books, 2015,
pp. 13-36
Mugane, John M. The Story of Swahili. Ohio University Press, 2015

“Murzyn.” dictionary.cambridge.org, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/polish-

english/murzyn
Najder, Zdzislaw. Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and fidelity. Cambridge University Press, 1997
– Joseph Conrad: A Life. Translated by Halina Najder, Camden House, 2007

“Negro.” oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com,
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/negro
Thiong’o, Ngūgī Wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics and Language of African Culture. Heinemann,
1986

25
 Book Review

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Riverhead Books, 2007

Abby Lewis

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini: A Continuing Piece of Political and Educational
Relevance

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a fictional novel devoted to the women of Afghanistan. Even though
the book was initially published in 2007, it continues to have both political and educational
relevance in 2022, considering the Taliban’s recent return to power. The novel provides readers
with a 3D insight into what women in Afghanistan are most likely experiencing as an effect of this;
lack of education, censorship of their bodies, lack of justice, arranged marriage – the list goes on.
When I use the term ‘3D insight’, I am referring to the nature of the characters Hosseini writes, as
well as the truth behind his story. For instance, Hosseini comments on the lack of education
women are granted as an effect of the Taliban’s rule, “a society has no chance of success if its
women are uneducated” (114). Hosseini forces his reader to acknowledge the fact that the story
he is telling could well be true. In an interview conducted in 2007, Hosseini says that he combined
stories from women he spoke to on the streets of Kabul to form the storyline of A Thousand
Splendid Suns.
The story follows two women, Mariam and Laila – both lost, with nowhere to call home,
they are forced to retreat into the not-so-safe-haven of Rasheed’s home in Kabul. The reader
follows them through the pain of being reliant on Rasheed. They are conned into marriage, living
as almost slaves to their husband. This theme plays into the wider political context. The Taliban is
male dominated, having control over the way women live. For example, women in Afghanistan
are not allowed to leave the house if they are not dressed in a full burka. Nor are they allowed to
attend university with men. The Taliban achieve this level of power by playing into the emotion
of fear. Rasheed runs a traditional household: the husband goes to work to earn money for the
family whilst the wives handle the housework and childcare. He gets angry if these expectations
are not met and reacts with physical violence. He is the Taliban within the home. This dynamic of
home meets political shows how the women of Afghanistan can be subject to struggle in all aspects
of their lives. The horrible ideology of the Taliban is evidently not just political – it transcends
boundaries and Hosseini shows this by carrying it over into the home, “A man’s heart is a
wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed, it won’t stretch
to make room for you” (27). This device creates a powerful message, regarding the entrenched
nature of the Taliban’s ideology.
Whilst reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, I became attached to the characters and adopted
feelings towards them as if they were real people. This is undoubtedly Hosseini’s aim, and he
achieves it in a remarkable way. He describes people who are unbelievably kind, yet they suffer so
immensely, “Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew for the most part that
life had been unkind to her” (370). Mariam and Laila remind me of people I know in my own life,
however they show bravery beyond what I have ever known. You could argue that the bravery
and resilience Laila and Mariam show is unbelievable, making them unrealistic characters. In this
sense, maybe the readers attachment to them is based on an idealistic vision. This risks taking the
aspect of truth away from Hosseini’s novel. However, this criticism is based on something I cannot

26
know and only imagine, as I do not personally know anyone who has experienced what Laila and
Mariam experienced. Furthermore, no matter whether their characteristics are real or not, the
reader feels an inclination to want to know them. This aspect of Hosseini’s writing had a lasting
impact on me after I had read the book. To experience this through such an immersive story is, as
a woman especially, excruciating.
To summarise, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a politically and educationally valuable novel. It
grants deeper insight into the struggles of Afghan women than any article I have ever read.
Although, we must acknowledge that it is a piece of fiction and cannot be altogether factual, as it
is largely produced to entertain. Despite this, it provides a connection that is valuable and
consequently politically educational.

27
 Afterword

This has been a demanding academic year, as it is the first in-person year since the pandemic.
Within LUX, two of the principal areas that have been impacted are
postponements to our expected publishing timeline and having to adjust how we would meet to
discuss the Issue, from in-person to a blended or completely virtual approach. It has been such a
gift to be able to witness how well our editorial team has risen to the huge challenge of producing
an issue in the shadow of a global pandemic. Their professionalism, management of duties and
most of all, their kindness and enthusiasm, has been a testament to just how brilliant and incredibly
skilled they are in their academic studies, work ethic, and demeanour. I want to thank Meg for
providing such powerful and aesthetic artwork for the Issue 6 cover. Her skill and dedication as a
contributor to LUX is clear in the image, in addition to her exceptional article. I hope in years to
come that this journal will continue to display pieces of artwork by Lancaster artists. As a final
note to our wonderful editorial team – Vallika, Annabel, Jessica, Kathryn, and Sarah – Thank you
all so much for your hard work and commitment in producing an excellent Issue this year, and
once your studies are over any future employer will be incredibly lucky to have you. You have
made me one immensely proud Executive Editor, who has been confident to leave the running
and production of the issue in your very capable hands.
Next, I would also like to thank all our contributors for submitting their work to LUX. Your
incredible articles represent the epitome of undergraduate student talent at Lancaster
University. In this Issue, we display three vastly different articles, varying from the exploration of
antisemitic imagery in fairy tales, to a contemporary creative-critical reimagining of Heart of
Darkness. I envision that all the contributors’ work could easily make the jump to a non-
department founded journal, showing the strength and validity of their academic debates. This is
a true demonstration of the inclusivity of LUX as a journal, and the wide interdisciplinary
interests of the ELCW department’s undergraduate cohort and the departmental teaching staff.
Taking over the helm of LUX journal when returning to face-to-face teachings and meetings
has certainly proved challenging at times but seeing all our work coming to fruition has reminded
me just how hardworking and supportive my team has been. I further would like to thank the PhD
community and my supervisors for their continuing support and kindness, this last academic
year. When I first was interviewed for LUX, Sarah Hughes was the outgoing executive editor I was
set to replace, and I shadowed her and her team over her academic year with LUX. Watching her
interactions with the team was an invaluable experience and her mentorship in the handover
period made me feel much relaxed about taking over the reins of LUX. I have the utmost faith
that Sarah Wagstaffe, my successor for the executive editor role, will do a fantastic job in
producing the next issue. Sarah has acted as my shadow executive editor for this past year, and it
has been wonderful to hear her suggestions to the current team and see her willingness and
excitement in preparing for the next team and Issue 7. Sarah has some wonderful plans in how the
journal will progress, and which audiences it will continue to reach. While I am sad to leave the
journal and to say goodbye to my team, I know I am leaving LUX in good hands.

— Kathryn Poole, Executive Editor

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 Postscript

Over the last academic year, I have witnessed the 2021-22 issue of LUX taking shape, from the
early meetings at the beginning of the year to its final production. I’ve been privileged to see the
team come together and dedicate their skills and passion to creating an issue to be proud of,
overcoming the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic while also maintaining their academic
and other commitments with positive attitudes and devotion. I thank the students for their work
and passion. It truly makes me grateful to be a part of the team going forward.
I look forward to beginning to work with the new Editorial Board for the 2022-23 issue of
LUX, inspired by what I have seen achieved in 2021-2022. Our incoming team will no doubt create
an issue as exciting and thought-provoking as its predecessors. Finally, I would like to thank
Kathryn Poole for inviting me into the LUX team as a shadow executive, introducing me to this
fantastic opportunity and providing me with the knowledge and skills I will bring forward into the
2022-23 issue as Executive Editor. With her support, and the fantastic team I will be working with,
I look forward to continuing LUX’s success.

— Sarah Wagstaffe, Executive Editor

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