Culture and Imperialism

Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park illustrates how imperialism pervades texts written even before the high period of empire, which usually dates to what was called “the scramble for Africa” at the end of the 19th century. His analysis focuses on the distant sugar plantation upon which the aesthetic beauty, tranquility, and wealth of the Mansfield Park estate is built. Sir Thomas Bertram, the patriarch of the estate, must travel to Antigua to oversee his operations there; when he returns to Mansfield Park, the women—left to their own overly imaginative and feverishly romantic devices—have set the estate aflutter over the production of a frivolous play. It is up to him to reestablish moral and social order: As Said writes, “Austen here synchronizes domestic with international authority, making it plain that the values associated with such higher things as ordination, law, and propriety must be grounded firmly in actual rule over and possession of territory” (87). Sir Bertram “firmly” possesses the territory in Antigua, which in turn finances his possession of an English estate. As Said points out, “No matter how isolated and insulated the English place [...], it requires overseas sustenance” (89).

Said argues that it isn’t just Mansfield Park that requires empire, but the family itself: “The Bertrams could not have possible without the slave trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class” (94). He goes on to note that over time the influence of this type of family, both fictional and actual, declines, as the slave trade is abolished and later the process of decolonization begins. Ultimately, Said wants to preserve Austen’s place in the canon; he defends her from attacks that she is “white, privileged, insensitive, complicit” (96).However, he does so with the foregrounded understanding that she and her works participated in the project of imperialism. This, he maintains, should not mitigate “a full enjoyment or appreciation” of her artistic endeavors (97).

In the “Consolidated Vision” of empire, the imbalance of power also functions in the realm of representation: “All cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better to master or in some way control them” (100). Whoever claims the power over territory also claims the power over who is represented and how. Said quotes the 19th-century philosopher and critic John Ruskin at length to illustrate the ways in which imperial ideas are consolidated to justify and bolster the colonizing and exploiting of others in far-flung places. Ruskin’s ideas are typical of the time: “And this is what [England] must do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able […] seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonies that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country” (103). Under Said’s interpretation, Ruskin’s intentions are clear: “England is to rule the world because it is the best; power is to be used; [...] its colonies are to increase, prosper, remain tied to it” (104). The rhetoric of imperialism is ingrained in England’s philosophical and artistic cultural production.

Said then synthesizes how various branches of modern scholarship concur that the phenomenon of imperialism impacts culture. These points of agreement are as follows: First, that “the fundamental ontological distinction between the West and the rest of the world” has been irrefutably argued (108). Second, within various fields “a codification of difference” between West and the rest has been firmly established (108). Third, imperial domination is not a local but rather a global phenomenon, both in terms of geography and of ideology. Fourth, the influence of imperialism exists in everyday life and culture, as well as within nearly every academic discipline, from architecture and anthropology to photography and travel writing. Fifth, that what Said calls the “attitude” of imperialism possesses “great creative power” (110). He lists, as examples, some of the most lasting images of imperial dominion, including Conrad’s self-destructive Kurtz in the heart of Africa, Lawrence of Arabia’s fantasy of the Middle East, and the painters Jean-Leone Gerome and Eugene Delacroix’s “Orientalist” visions.

Here, Said employs the famous Giuseppe Verdi opera Aida to elaborate on how empire functions, revealing its self-replicating and self-justifying narrative. As he states in the beginning of the section, “Aida does a great many things for and in European culture, one of which is to confirm the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant, and antique place in which Europeans can mount shows of force” (112). The double meaning here is intentional: The show—that is, the opera—has great artistic and emotional power. Meanwhile, its backdrop as the reinvention of Cairo for European investment and enjoyment is a “show” of force and of cultural imposition.

Based on a vision of Egypt set out in dispatches from the time of Napoleon’s invasion in the late 18th century, coupled with the archeological “discoveries” made by French Egyptologists in the latter half of the 19th century, Aida “embodies, as it was intended to do, the authority of Europe’s version of Egypt” (125). Said situates Aida in the context of when and how it was conceived of and also in the larger context of global imperialism—from the modernization of Cairo to the building and reclamation of the Suez Canal. Aida both looks back at an idealized, Europeanized Egyptian history and presages imperial events to come. It is situated in the struggle for the power of representation at the core of the imperial project. For the creators of Aida, this “imperial spectacle” (130) reinforces the foundations of empire: Their vision is predicated on power—which, with the luxury of the colonizer, one may forget one wields; the native must be reproduced as “someone to be ruled and managed” (131); said native can only be saved through the “civilizing mission,” which is the sole province of the European colonizers; the cultural value of the artistic product elides the violence with which imperial power is held; and the history of the subjugated peoples becomes engulfed and rewritten through the lens of imperialism itself.