The Little White Ship

Abstract

This is for Geoff, in fond recollection of symposium in Erlangen decades ago. You listened to my customarily untidy thoughts and nodded your appreciation (as I have appreciated yours over all these years). Here they are, then. With minimum of tidying up.Edgar Wallace and film: the most movie adaptations of any writer.Highbrow literature treated the British Empire with scepticism bordering on hostility. The Empire and imperialist attitudes were judged to be hollow, repressive, hypocritical. For the population at large, the Empire continued to be important: it served as mythic landscape for romance and adventure. To read the epic of Empire was to experience excitement and stimulation in their purest form.That Zoltan Korda movie from 19351 - quintessential action, not emotion; action that concerns the Empire, not Britain. The myth of Empire serves as the vehicle for excitement, adventure, the fulfilment of longing and desire.A world of men in which love, passion, women play wholly subordinate role.A Boy 's Own yarn.Wallace and Korda's movie: it is no longer the claiming of Empire that's the issue, but its administration. Central themes are governance and the defence of what was conquered/ acquired.Important concepts: character, attitude.Justification is sought for the Empire: it is morally superior; the superior British emerge as mixture of gentlemanly behaviour and the maintenance of an ostensibly disinterested system of law, order, and justice. This generates the oft-described illusion that the Empire will never die.Sanders as symbol: pipe-smoker, full of good humour (towards Africans and Europeans alike). Someone to look up to. Singlehandedly, he brings peace and order, through sheer force of personality, or almost.Simplified images, simplified situations; an excess of simplicity. The myth of the superman in its human variant: something, it would seem, attainable by anybody and everybody.The Sunday Times on the film: it reveals a sympathy with our ideals of colonial administration, giving us grand insight into our special English difficulties in the governing of savage races, and providing us with documentary film of East African nature in its raw state, picture which could not be improved upon for the respect it displays to British sensibilities and ambitions.2Wheeler Winston Dixon characterizes Wallace's narratives as providing blueprint for the ideology of 'divide and rule', which, in his tales, is juxtaposed with the consolidation and observance of the law.3The man on the spot, the man who knows what to do about restrictive laws that don't suit the situation, or about the interference of politicians.Absolute faith in the superiority of the white race (despite examples to the contrary). Education for blacks - rejected. Humanitarian treatment of blacks - not an option.Sadism: the whip, the fist, etc.Native folk [...] are but children of larger growth.4'Nothing tires me quite so much as Europeanised-Americanised native. It is as indecent spectacle as niggerised white man'.5Connection with stereotyped images of blacks: Bosambo as Uncle Tom.The basic scheme: the use of force, aggression, sadism.A male world into which women only erupt destructively, whether they are white or black. If they are white, they destroy racial equilibrium; they are obscene in the way they yield to darkness. If they are black, they represent the danger of seductiveness and destructiveness; they overcome and bewitch all that is insipid, boring, rational, playing evil tricks.Women have an evil effect upon warriors.6Wallace is no longer occupied with the penetration of darkest Africa as symbol of the feminine, but with the constant reserve and chasteness of his male heroes; an almost Catholic-celibate posture. The friendships that are struck up are male friendships with no homoerotic undertones. …