Eros and Thanatos in Iolani and ‘The Captain and the Nymph’
This paper offers both a study of Wilkie Collins’s first novel Iolani (only published in 1999), as an attempt at ‘South Seas Gothic’, and a comparison with a much later short story with the same setting. Both works are shown to be strongly binary in character, with a quintessential Gothic pair, eros...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/cve, |
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| 1. Verfasser: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens
2026
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | This paper offers both a study of Wilkie Collins’s first novel Iolani (only published in 1999), as an attempt at ‘South Seas Gothic’, and a comparison with a much later short story with the same setting. Both works are shown to be strongly binary in character, with a quintessential Gothic pair, eros and thanatos, particularly prominent in each. Yet although the two texts can be fruitfully compared, I also underline some of their essential differences. In the latter text, I argue that Collins in ‘The Captain and the Nymph’, now a thoroughly mature, technically skilled and proficient writer, is much more in control of his ‘exotic’ material, and hence able to secure a more coherent effect. The vivid contradictory Gothic fantasy material about eros and thanatos in the earlier text gives way in the later work to a more focussed controlling irony, centred on the same binary pair, but now with the essential purpose of providing self-conscious critical commentary on male European fantasies of conquest and domination in the South Seas. That very self-consciousness, though, also implies continuing ambivalence, for if these are perhaps fantasies that the mature writer no longer inhabits as actively as he had done as a young man, his capacity to unmask and understand them may still depend on a form of addiction to them. |
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