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Originally Posted by issybird
^^I think the casual racism in Australia bothered me most because Jean was quite enlightened for her time toward the Malays and Islam. Somehow she didn't bring the same empathy toward the native people of Australia. I dimly remember an incident that irritated me, her rather superior and intolerant attitude toward a white rancher, his native wife, and their mixed children.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyssa
I agree with you. There was a glimpse of that "enlightenment" when she expressed surprise over the suggestion of not allowing the Native Australians to frequent the same side of the ice cream shop as the White Australians. However, that empathy quickly and completely disappeared once she decided to open a "separate but equal" part of the store - which, if I remember correctly, was not always exactly equal.
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Strong points--both.
The problem with the racial discrimination which is certainly implied in
A Town Like Alice and the contrasting abilities of Jean to cleverly push just the right buttons to use the Malayan Islamic sexism against the men themselves in the building of the well for the benefit of women is interesting. Perhaps it derives from the possibility that writers--and the characters they create--may sometimes unconsciously compartmentalize their values in an odd way. Jack London was a believer in social equality--but this didn’t extend to racial equality.
So, though it is only marginally relevant, I’ll share with you another recent literary experience I had on this subject. I read a remarkable novel.
I Pose, written in 1915 by Stella Benson {1892-1933). Benson was a militant suffragette and had a deep compassion for the socially deprived poor. She was actively and practically involved in both areas.
I Pose is her first novel and it could be loosely classed as a travel-romance focussing on a young militant suffragette and a gardener--neither of whom is named. However, it is certainly a highly ironic {and ultimately tragic} look at the social conventions or “poses” people adopt rather than finding their own inner selves. Benson satirizes gender and social stereotyping and attacks the Church as being a prime supporter of the regime.
But, in one section of the travels of the two characters, the young gardener works with the black natives of an island. What bothered me was that Benson’s character used language that now would be considered racist in a context that treated the social contexts of the natives in a comedic way. I can accept the language as that which would be used by the dominant classes in 1915 but the tone bothered {and bothers} me much more. Considering Benson’s deep compassion for the poor in London, dramatized by the young suffragette, it seems odd that she would create a central character who would be so obviously racist.
I’m still not certain whether or not Benson is simply using the gardener to ironically show another form of social discrimination--if she is, (and I so want to give her the benefit of the doubt} she doesn’t make it clear enough and this remains a failing in this otherwise brashly iconoclastic youthful novel.
I intend to read her later work to see if it has a more mature outlook. { BTW Everything she wrote is in the public domain}
To return to the topic and book at hand, I suppose it is possible that Shute was completely unaware of the racism in that latter part of the novel and was reacting to built-in stereotypes. If so, it still weakens the book for a modern reader.