The imperial treasure hunt:The Snake's Passand the limits of romance

Abstract

… the ‘sociology of literature’ is blind to the war and the ruses perpetrated by the author who reads and by the first reader who dictates, for at stake here is the origin of the work itself. Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing If Dracula emplots the mutation in public/private space at the metropole, novels like Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines and She offer fantasies about the relations of metropolitan and imperial space. As the new imperialism emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these romances equipped the metropolitan subject with an imaginary model of the territories that were daily added to the British empire. They depict the conquest of overseas space by the reader's delegates within the text, the fictional explorers, hunters, soldiers and engineers who march relentlessly across trackless desert, jungle and veldt. The expedition was scarcely a new motif in British adventure fiction, of course, but from the 1880s on that fiction fosters and appeals to a stronger sense of spatial mastery through the motifs of the survey and the map. The treasure hunt in particular, most memorably in Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), placed the map at the heart of the imperial imaginary. This marks a departure from Dracula 's fantasy of power: where medical science underpins the new relation to domestic space, the relation to imperial space is negotiated through the far more haphazard knowledge given by amateur cartography – by the hand-drawn treasure-map.