“I have been in an earthquake”: Epistemic upheaval in Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica

Freud and the imperial gaze

If “psychoanalysis emerged in historical relation to imperialism”, as Anne McClintock has observed (1995: 73–74), it is similarly conscripted into the agonized sphere of incipient postcoloniality that constitutes A High Wind in Jamaica’s discursive and ideological web. A High Wind in Jamaica’s sustained preoccupation with psychoanalysis, in other words, informs its tacitly held neo-Darwinian assumptions about the distinction between Empire and colony. The links between the novel’s imperial bias and its Freudian impression are particularly apparent during the narrator’s attempts to account for the children’s inner lives. When the children appear entirely unaffected by the hurricane that devastates their home, for example, Mrs Thornton declares that she is “terribly afraid what permanent inward effect a shock like that might have on them. Have you noticed they never so much as mention it? In England they would at least be safe from dangers of that sort” (1929: 45). ¹¹ Not only does this suggest that Mrs Thornton regards the children’s silence about the storm as a sign of their repression of an event that she finds particularly traumatic, but it also attests to her readiness to locate the source of that trauma in Jamaica rather than England. For Mrs Thornton, a former colony like Jamaica seems ontologically predisposed towards “danger”, while England, even in the twilight of Empire, remains a place of “safety”.

Mrs Thornton, moreover, overemphasizes the significance of the hurricane while overlooking the importance of the earthquake to their inner lives. It is the earthquake, rather than the hurricane, that exerts the more profound influence on the children:

[F]or Emily it was too much. The earthquake went completely to her head. She began to dance, hopping laboriously from one foot to another. John caught the infection. He turned head over heels on the damp sand, over and over in an elliptical course, till before he knew it he was in the water, and so giddy as hardly to be able to tell up from down. […] At that, Emily knew what it was she wanted to do. She scrambled on to a pony and galloped him up and down the beach, trying to bark like a dog. The Fernandez children stared, solemn but not disapproving. John, shaping a course for Cuba, was swimming as if sharks were paring his toenails. Emily rode her pony into the sea, and beat him and beat him till he swam: and she followed John toward the reef yapping herself hoarse. (15)

For Emily in particular, the experience of having been in an earthquake amounts to nothing less than a “sublime cataclysm” (17) that shakes the very foundations of her being and her sense of self. “Heaven had played its last terrible card”, observes the narrator, “and small Emily had survived […] Life suddenly seemed a little empty: for never again could there happen anything so dangerous, so sublime” (16).

Since the earthquake is framed by details about hens laying eggs (“the black passed his hand over its stomach to see if it meditated an egg that day”; “there’s nothing like an earthquake for making them lay” [17]), it is worth suggesting that Emily’s cataclysmic experience may signify via metaphors of destruction and birth (or splitting and unity) an initiation into a new, Creolized identity. By “surviving” the earthquake, the narrator suggests, Emily has undergone a significant transitional development. She subsequently regards the earthquake as something that distinguishes her from the island’s Creole population because, unlike her, “[t]hey didn’t seem to realize what a difference it made to a person’s whole after-life to have been in an Earthquake” (17). Shattering her “sense of proportion”, the earthquake invests Emily’s former life, and those who had populated it, with a degree of unreality: she finds that she “was too completely possessed to be able to see anything, or realise that any one else pretended to even a self-delusive fiction of existence” (17).

Emily’s earthquake sunders her from her childhood: when John marshals the children in a rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers”, in the immediate wake of the event, Emily does not bother to join in. “What did it now matter”, she muses, “that earlier woe, that being a girl she could never when grown up become a real soldier with a real sword? She had been in an earthquake” (17–18). Yet, if the earthquake signifies Emily’s rebirth as a Jamaican, and if it strengthens her commitments to Jamaica itself, her nascent Creolization is curtailed or foreclosed in various ways. Emily is struck by the realization that her parents’ decision to send the children to England following the destruction of Ferndale constitutes “a parting”; unconsoled by her mother’s assurances that her trip will be “an adventure”, she exclaims “I don’t want any more adventures! I’ve got an Earthquake!” (33).

The children’s departure from Jamaica serves to redouble the narrator’s interest in their inner lives, even as it simultaneously reaffirms his readiness to forge analogies between children and the “primitive mind”. After the children have been kidnapped by pirates, and once “Jamaica had faded into the past” (94), the narrator turns his attention to a more sustained, if abortive, exploration of the inner lives of Emily and her siblings. While Emily’s “Conscience” is described as a “secret criterion within her” (97), the inner lives (as much as the actions) of Laura and Rachel “differed in almost every respect” (96). Rachel, in a parody of Freud’s description of object-cathexis in On Narcissism, ¹² “claimed as her own whatever she had mixed her imagination with”, transforming everything from “bits of oakum and the moultings of a worn-out mop”, “marlin-spikes”, “the windlass to the bosun’s chair”, and even the pirates themselves, into her “babies”, “furniture”, or “property” (96). ¹³ Rachel’s investment of libidinal “emanations” into objects recalls Freud’s ensuing analogy between “the mental life of children and primitive peoples”, both of which are characterized by

an overestimation of the power of their wishes and mental acts, the “omnipotence of thoughts”, a belief in the thaumaturgic force of words, and a technique for dealing with the external world — magic — which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose premises. (Freud, 1995: 547)

“The inside of Laura”, by contrast, was “something vast, complicated, and nebulous that can hardly be put into language” (97). Comparing Laura to “tadpoles”, and noting that “though legs were growing her gills had not yet dropped off” (98), the narrator proceeds to reassert his investment in evolutionary psychology in no uncertain terms:

[B]abies […] are not human — they are animals, and have a very ancient ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind. It is true they look human — but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys. (97)

The links between Hughes’ interest in the inner lives of children and evolutionary psychology are particularly evident in this passage’s depiction (to paraphrase Sands-O’Connor) of childhood as savagery, and its implicit contrast with adulthood as civilization (see Sands-O’Connor, 2009: 177). Yet the extent of their mutual entanglement becomes even more apparent and disconcerting once Hughes’ investment in a narrative voice and late-colonial gaze that perpetuates stereotypical binaries between Empire and colony is established. The opening lines of A High Wind in Jamaica, for instance, situate the ensuing action securely within a post-emancipatory moment:

One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian Islands is the number of ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone’s throw of them: ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling-houses; often ruined mansions that were too expensive to maintain. Earthquake, fire, rain, and deadlier vegetation did their work quickly. (1)

Subsequent events depicted in the novel take place after the abolition of slavery on 1 August 1834, and before 1860, the last time that the narrator had visited the island. ¹⁴

These details are crucial to understanding the bitter irony that informs the narrator’s celebration of the ruins of Empire to be found in emancipated Jamaica, while wryly distancing himself from the “deadly” nature of Jamaican landscape. Describing the narrator as a “Vestigial Raconteur”, John Crowley suggests that A High Wind in Jamaica relies for its effect on a mode of narration that may be described as one concerned with the “gnomic present” (2005: 41). For Crowley, the Vestigial Raconteur is “a first-person narrator who both is and is not the author, is in the book and outside it […], a voice that connects the making of novels to […] its roots in the telling of anecdote” (2005: 41). This voice, “which knows the souls of the characters when it chooses to know them”, Crowley explains, “also exhibits strange hesitations and is forced to make guesses”; “it grounds the perceiving mind and soul in a tragedy that is made of comic misapprehension, misunderstanding, mad error, and non-communication” (2005: 41). What Crowley does not say, and what is especially crucial to note, is that this “tragedy” of “misapprehension, misunderstanding, mad error, and non-communication” arguably owes a great deal to the Vestigial Raconteur’s desultory attitude toward Jamaica, and to his tendency to “see” or to “read” Jamaica through a cynical and pessimistic imperial lens.

This cynical, pessimistic, and resigned attitude is on display in the opening stages of the novel, where the Jamaican landscape, children, and the “negroes” native to the island, are subjected to an “the imperial gaze” that, as E. Ann Kaplan suggests, “reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject” (1997: 78). Child and “negro”, accordingly, tend to merge with the landscape of their island in a manner that invites comparison with Joseph Conrad’s depiction of Africans in the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899). Chinua Achebe’s critique of Conrad’s depiction of “Africa in the mass”, and the way that his representation of Africans allows them to be kept “in [their] place” as “savage counterpart[s] to the refined […] European” remains similarly applicable to Hughes’ representation of Jamaica and its native inhabitants (Achebe, 1977: 1786–87). The children, for instance, “[fritter] away” their days around a bathing pool where John sits “naked on the bank making a wicker trap”, while the smaller children “rolled and chuckled” in the shallows, and Emily “sat up to her chin in water” (7–8). This scene anticipates the “indeterminate quagmire or muddy pond” that Emily encounters in the middle of a “negro” village, “where a group of half-naked negroes, and totally naked black children, and a few brown ones, were splashing with geese and ducks” (8). The village itself is portrayed as “ragged and unkempt, and shrill with voices”, with “small one-storey wattle huts dotted about, completely overhung by enormous trees. There was no sort of order”, opines the Vestigial Raconteur, “they appeared anywhere” (8). Hughes’ Vestigial Raconteur proceeds to regard Jamaica in general as a somewhat childish complement to a more adult British or European sensibility. The island, we learn, “was a kind of paradise for English children to come to whatever it might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived in a wild way at home” (4). If Jamaica represents a “paradise” for children, it is regarded with a degree of paternalistic, even patronizing, sympathy from the perspective of parents who are able to compare its “wild[ness]” to the presumably more cultivated familiar forms of civilization represented by the English “home”.

The Vestigial Raconteur’s imperial gaze subsequently invests even the most offhand, casual, and abrupt remarks about life on Jamaica with a curious mixture of resignation and lassitude. The narrator notes, for instance, that John’s room is infested with rats and bats, that the children all crop their hair short in order to alleviate the interminable “search for grass ticks and lice”, that Emily and Rachel “were allowed to do everything boys did — to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds” (4), and that it “was only natural that Emily should have great ideas of improving the negroes” because, though they “were, of course, Christians”, they remained “sadly ignorant” (5). The narrator’s ability to regard Jamaican life at all arguably depends upon a willingness to assume, first, that a post-emancipatory Jamaican world remains legible to imperially-encoded narrative perspectives and, second, to presume that imperial standards, though distantly registered within the post-emancipatory setting of mid-nineteenth-century Jamaica, still qualify as normative points of reference for the legislation of a nascent postcolonial otherness.

Together, these observations are conscripted into the narrator’s tacit moral assertion that normative imperial assumptions about gender, cleanliness, decorum, and racial and religious comportment undergo a pitiable distortion or degeneration in Jamaica’s colonial margins. In this respect, and despite the mid-nineteenth-century setting of A High Wind in Jamaica, the narrator’s attitude arguably approximates Lynn Pykett’s description of the modern as “a fin de siècle peroration […] suffused not so much with a ‘sense of an ending’ than with an ending of sense” (1995: 21). Following Max Nordau’s (1895) assessment of fin de siècle “degeneration” as “a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically is still in force”, and in which “[o]ne epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is announcing its approach”, Pykett regards the modern as a set of moods and modalities rather than a clearly demarcated historical period (Pykett, 1995: 154). If it has been “notoriously difficult to provide definitive answers to the questions of when, where, and what modernism was”, she nevertheless locates the modern in a “persistent world-view” (1995: 9) characterized by what Frank Kermode describes as “apocalyptic […] decadence, hope of renovation, the sense of transition, the sense of an ending or the trembling of the veil” (Kermode, qtd. in Pykett, 1995: 8–9). From this perspective, the Vestigial Ranconteur of A High Wind in Jamaica shares in literary moods and modalities that, alongside Anne Wright’s assessment of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, exemplifies a “literature of crisis” that draws much of its power from fin de siècle writing’s preoccupation with “social fission, and the split between material power and humane values; sexuality and sterility madness and hysteria; violence, death, murder and suicide” (Wright, qtd. in Pykett, 1995: 117). In spite of A High Wind in Jamaica’s mid-nineteenth-century setting, or the decidedly late-modern moment of its composition, Hughes’ novel, like D. H. Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), offers an expansively fin de siècle diagnosis of “an exhausted civilization” attuned not only to “a sickness in the body politic” (Pykett, 1995: 131–32) but to a broader sense of imperial degeneration.

If a dispiriting “imperial gaze” is responsible for the narrator’s adverse impressions of contemporary Jamaican life, it also invests the prospect of an emergent postcolonial future with a deep-seated aura of pessimism and resignation. Noting that the “difference between boys and girls had to be left to look after itself”, for example, the narrator helplessly reveals that “[h]ere”, as opposed to in England, “one had to be a little ahead of the times: or decadent” (4). Intriguingly associated with the resolve to be “a little ahead of the times”, Jamaican “decadence” is less a product of a more “primitive” precolonial moment than a future-directed prospect. In this way, the Vestigial Raconteur implicitly suggests that the prospect of a postcolonial future will inevitably be marked by cultural decline or desuetude. Postcolonial futures, according to the narrator, can only mean a deplorable deterioration of the purportedly admirable standards of Empire.

The possibility of a postcolonial future is in fact repeatedly foreclosed via Hughes’ persistent, if subtle, suggestion that proximity to the island threatens to “infect” the Bas-Thornton children with potentially deadly, creolizing, consequences. If the destruction of Ferndale represents the culmination of a mood of pessimism and resignation present in the Vestigial Raconteur’s impressions of Jamaica, his suspicion of the “infectious” (15) dangers represented by the island and its creolized and native communities upon the Bas-Thornton children are present from the outset of the novel. In this respect it is worth noting that the Bas-Thornton children are closely associated with a range of figures who, along with the aforementioned “negroes”, bear an almost autochthonous connection to the island. On the one hand, while the Bas-Thorntons are distanced from Jamaica’s Creole community (the Bas-Thorntons, we are told, were “not natives to the Island, ‘Creoles,’ but a family from England” [2]), John and Emily are closely associated with the Fernandez children. Though they believe themselves superior to Margaret and her siblings, the narrator nevertheless observes that John and Emily are described as “speechless and solemn with excitement” at the news of the Fernandez children’s visit, while the Fernandez children are said to have “stared, silent but not disapproving” at Emily and John’s reaction to the earthquake (10, 15; emphasis added). Similarly, when Margaret claims to be able to “smell […] an earthquake”, Emily suggests that she has a comparable ability: “Of course people smelt different”, she declares (16).

On the other hand, the fate of Tabby, the Thornton’s family cat, presents a decidedly different yet no less revealing instance of the plight of the settler and the dangers of creolization. As the offspring of wild cats native to the island, Tabby bears a figurative resemblance to Jamaica’s Creole population. In this respect, Tabby is metonymically linked to the Fernandez family, “who had been in the West Indies for more than one generation” and who had “gradually evolved something a little more distinctive. They lost some of the traditional mental mechanisms of Europe, and the outlines of a new one began to appear” (9). Mrs Thornton remains hesitant about allowing John and Emily to visit the Fernandez family, “lest they should learn bad ways” (9), and the Fernandez children are described as “a wildish lot” (9), reinforcing their association with the “wild paradise” (4) of the Jamaican environment itself. At the same time, the “wildness” of the Creole children and of Tabby is not enough to prevent their mutual susceptibility to even more “natural” disasters: pursued by wild cats — “jungle creatures”, impelled by some “insane fury” (20) — Tabby initially seeks shelter in the Bas-Thornton house, before “streaking into the bush [and vanishing] into the night” (20) and being “torn to pieces” (24).

Ferndale proves to be similarly incapable of protecting the Bas-Thorntons — or even the putatively more native “negroes” — from being decimated by a “storm of more than ordinary violence” (19):

The […] shutters, everything burst: the rain poured in like the sea into a sinking ship. […] The negro huts were clean gone, and the negroes crawling on their stomachs across the compound to gain the shelter of the house. [Some] managed to reach the house, and soon could be heard in the cellar underneath. [The] threatened roof went. […] Mr Thornton began to look for something to break through the floor [and] Laura, Rachel, Emily, Edward and John, Mrs Thornton and finally Mr Thornton himself, were passed down into the darkness already thronged with negroes and goats. […] Mr Thornton brought with him […] a couple of decanters of madeira, and everyone had a swig, from Laura to the oldest negro […] and while what was left of the house was blown away […] [the children] slept blind drunk on the cellar floor. (22–24)

Signalling the preclusion of any possibility of transcultural harmony between settler, Creole, and black Jamaican, Ferndale’s destruction also foreshadows the narrative’s transition from land to sea, where the children’s similarity to a Creole community — via their metonymic association with Tabby — is re-established once they board the Clorinda: invested with feline attributes, they scatter, “smelling here, miaowing, sniffing there, like cats in a new home” (30). Hughes’ employment of techniques of narrative and figurative displacement — a technique that recalls Freud’s own explanatory remarks about the centrality of mechanisms of “displacement” and “condensation” to the “dreamwork” (Freud, 1995: 152–55) — mediates the children’s literal displacement from Jamaica in favour of their return to England and “civilization”. In this way, the narrative tacitly confirms not only Hughes’ literary-stylistic debt to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, but also offers suggestive insight into the deep linkages between literature, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary anthropology.

Narrative displacements

The largely episodic nature of the ship-bound stages of Hughes novel accords closely with Cesar Casarino’s description of nineteenth-century sea narratives. These narratives, Casarino explains, “were articulated largely through three distinct forms of narrative structure: the exotic picaresque, the Bildungsroman of the sea, and the modernist sea narrative” (Casarino, 2002: 7). Though the events depicted in the latter half of Hughes’ novel are circumscribed within the boundaries of the Clorinda, their incidental nature chimes with Casarino’s description of the exotic picaresque as a type of “sea adventure novel” in which “a sense of awe and wonder — both a fascination and a repulsion — for faraway, exotic, colonized, or colonizable lands and peoples is grafted onto an episodic narrative structure that runs from one adventure to the next” (Casarino, 2002: 8). Casarino adds that interest in “the sea voyage and the world of the ship” are little more than “convenient backdrops and colourful literary devices”, that disguise “the true interests” of the exotic picaresque. “In its residual form”, he explains, the exotic picaresque focuses “on what is to be found beyond the sea, that is, on the adventures of discovery and contact that the exotic landscapes and natives on the other side of the ocean and at the end of the voyage are bound to offer” (Casarino, 2002: 9).

The narrator’s description of John and Emily’s reaction to the earthquake is particularly telling and troubling in this regard. John’s desire to shape “a course for Cuba” (15; emphasis added) is particularly significant in relation to Casarino’s suggestive remarks about the compulsions undergirding picaresque narratives of colonial “adventure”. ¹⁵ Unlike Jamaica, Cuba did not abolish the slave trade until 1867, and it only achieved emancipation on 7 October 1886, and independence from Spain in 1898. John and Emily’s abortive attempts to head to Cuba, then, hint at an implicit desire to return to a site where pre-emancipatory psychological and social assumptions remain more clearly intact, and where racially encoded forms of imperial “adventure” may be pursued. In this respect it is significant that their childish interest in Cuba foreshadows the pirates’ passage to Havana, where they pick up a group of “hired men” (58) and where “one could make money” (58), and Santa Lucia, where piracy “as a vocational tradition” (and the slavery upon which this vocation relied) continued to exist (59).

John’s sudden and tragic death on Santa Lucia, however, forecloses the pirates’ sojourn in this anachronistically-inflected Lesser Antilles, initiating their hasty departure and the decidedly episodic events that follow. Departing from Cuba, the Clorinda, much like Hughes’ plot, meanders along in a ghostly parody of picaresque adventure. Circumscribed by the confined contours of the pirate ship, the narrative proceeds to leap from one tangential detail to another. These include jocular asides about the ship’s pig (70–71); descriptions of a squall (72–4); the Clorinda losing its bearings and the unsuccessful pursuit of a brig (Ch. 5, 6); a monkey eating a shark (95); the baiting of a lion and a tiger (107); and abortive attempts to describe the inner lives of the children (95–99). Emily’s bewildered response to Otto’s rambling and uncertain story about a clergyman turned pirate (“But I don’t understand!”), along with the Clorinda’s meanderings (the ship loses its bearings, idles for days on windless seas, and embarks on numerous failed pursuits of other ships), together suggest that these asides amount to little more than a curious litany of short-lived spectacles or failed maritime (and narrative) pursuits.

These tangential narrative episodes are arguably held together by a sequence of events initiated by Emily’s moment of self-recognition at the ship’s masthead (83–6) and unnervingly shadowed by Margaret’s sordid involvement with the first mate, Otto (87–9). A little into the journey, Emily has an epiphany. Climbing the ratlines to “her favourite perch at the masthead” (135), where she examines the skin of her hands closely, Emily slips a “shoulder out of the top of her frock”, shrugs “it up to touch her cheek”, and thinks of herself as “now” Emily Bas-Thornton (135–6). Flooded with the recognition of her individuality, she simultaneously experiences a sensation of omnipotence: “Wasn’t she perhaps God, herself?” (136). Emily’s moment of self-recognition at the masthead recalls her earlier awareness, while submerged in her Jamaican bathing-hole, when “hundreds of infant fish were tickling with their inquisitive mouths every inch of her body, a sort of expressionless light kissing”, and her subsequent realization that “she had lately come to hate being touched” (8). It also evokes the newfound sense of individuation she felt following her internalization of the earthquake.

The recommencement of Emily’s inner development or Bildung amid the picaresque narrative episodes that mark the narrator’s descriptions of life aboard the Clorinda suggests that A High Wind in Jamaica conforms to Casarino’s definition of the modernist sea narrative. Within the domain of the modernist sea narrative, Casarino argues, the space of the ship becomes a “heterotopia par excellence”: the site at which “the sea narrative […] folds back upon itself to think its floating and itinerant foundation”, while the heterotopic space of the ship attempts to float “forms of representation that disturb and undermine representation” (2002: 13, 15). The space of the ship in modernist sea narrative, in other words, represents a self-reflexive attempt to account for, if not to reanimate, latent narrative conventions “structured precisely around what remains marginal and underdeveloped in the exotic picaresque and the Bildungsroman of the sea, namely the sea voyage and the world of the ship” (Casarino, 2002: 9).

As “a young and innocent hero […] followed through several trials and tribulations until [her] rite of passage into adulthood has been successfully performed”, Emily emerges as Hughes’ representative for a latent narrative tradition that Casarino defines as the Bildungsroman of the sea (2002: 8). Yet the development of Emily’s nascent sense of subjectivity, foreclosed by her departure from Jamaica and tentatively re-established aboard the Clorinda, remains under threat. Her emergence from “inhuman” childhood into “godlike” adolescence nevertheless leaves her prone to the sexualized attentions of Captain Jonsen and the ship’s crew. With her “new-found consciousness” (143), Emily recalls “the very first night on the schooner” (43) when the crew, jealous of Otto’s intimacy with Margaret, come down to the hold where the children are settled for the night, and Captain Jonsen puts “one hand under her chin” and begins to “stroke her hair with the other” (88). “A sort of blind vertigo seized her: she caught his thumb and bit as hard as she could: then, terrified at her own madness, dashed across the hold to where the other children were gathered in a wondering knot” (88). On the one hand, Emily’s actions invite the disapprobation of the other children: “What have you done! Cried Laura, pushing her away angrily: ‘Oh you wicked girl, you’ve hurt him!’” (88). On the other hand, however, they protect her from Jonsen; after the incident, Emily and Jonsen avoid each other “by mutual consent” (89).

In this way, Emily also avoids the fate that befalls Margaret, who begins to follow the men — “not Jonsen, but Otto especially” — about the deck, before leaving the children “altogether and tak[ing] up her quarters in the cabin” (89). This scene develops Hughes’ investment, present in the opening chapters of the novel, in sustaining a subtle, chiasmatic relationship between Emily, whose inner life becomes the subject for the narrator’s exploration of the child mind, and Margaret, who by contrast becomes increasingly divested of any sense of an inwardness. Having been injured by a marlin-spike, Emily presently takes Margaret’s place in Jonsen’s cabin: ¹⁶

Her wrought-up nerves and sickening giddiness joined with the shock and pain to give a heart-rending poignancy to her crying. Jonsen was by her in a second, caught her up, and carried her, crying miserably, down into the cabin. There sat Margaret, bending over some mending, her slim shoulders hunched up, humming softly and feeling deadly ill. […] “Get out!” said Jonsen in a low, brutal voice. Without a word or sign Margaret gathered up her sewing and climbed on deck. (103)

Jonsen’s nursing of Emily, along with the attention paid to her by Otto and José, mirrors Margaret’s vile adoption by Otto, and the crew’s steadily increasing revulsion towards her. If Emily takes Margaret’s place in Jonsen’s cabin, “Heaven only knows what hole Margaret was banished to” (103). By contrast, the burden of guilt for the murder of Vandervoort, the captain of a Dutch steamer captured by the pirates, is transferred from Emily to Margaret. Having tied up Vandervoort, they leave him on the floor in the main cabin in Emily’s custody. Vandervoort attempts to escape by edging himself towards a knife on the cabin floor, spurring Emily, “beside herself with terror […] [in] spite of the agony it caused her leg” (175), to fling herself from the bunk, seize the knife, and “in the course of the next five seconds”, to “[slash] and [jab] him in a dozen places” (175). Margaret, the “first witness of the scene […] her dulled eyes standing out from her small, skull-like face” (108) is summarily blamed for Vandervoort’s murder and, guided by “the contempt they already felt for [her]” (111), the pirates perfunctorily throw her overboard.

Margaret’s “dulled eyes” and “skull-like face” consolidate the horror of her near-death experience in a suitably striking image. Yet her death-like depiction at this point notably participates in a sustained sequence of images that attests to her steady alienation from the world of childhood, and her subsequent objectification by the pirates aboard the Clorinda. It recalls, for instance, the manner in which she becomes increasingly unrecognizable to the children following her adoption by Otto (89), and it anticipates her later portrayal as a figure with a “dull, meaningless stare” (110). When the pirates throw her overboard, furthermore, she is closely associated with other, less-than-human things or animals formerly lost to the sea: Margaret is something that has “vanished to windward […] like the big white pig in the squall” (111; emphasis added). The steady etiolation of Margaret’s subjectivity attests to her fungibility as an object of exchange that may be passed thoughtlessly from Otto to Jonsen before being discarded, summarily, into the sea. After her fortuitous rescue, she automatically resumes her role as a child among the other children. Emily, by contrast, comes to a more anxious realization of her nature as a child and, significantly, of her awareness of her part in Vandervoort’s death: “Then it happened! It was as if a small, cold voice inside her said suddenly, ‘How can you? You’re only a little girl!’ […] The awful, blood-covered face of the Dutch captain seemed to threaten her out of the air” (139).

Once the children are transferred to the Lizzie Green, Emily and the others settle into the maternal attention of the women passengers on board the steamer. Later, reunited with their parents, the Thornton children are at first slightly absent-minded, but slowly adjust to English domesticity. When the Crown is seeking to prove — since piracy itself was no longer a capital offence — that the pirates were guilty of the murder of either John or the Dutch captain, Emily is called upon to testify. Under examination she blurts out: “He was lying in his blood … he was awful? He … he died, he said something and then he died!” (281). The trial is “quickly over” (283); the judge interprets Emily’s hysterical recollection as a clear indication of the pirates’ guilt, and the captain and crew are summarily condemned to death. At the novel’s conclusion, Emily is beginning at her new school in Blackheath. The final paragraph can only be read as a trenchantly ironic affirmation of her apparent assimilation into supposedly “civilized” English society:

In another room, Emily with the other new girls was making friends with the older pupils. Looking at that gentle, happy throng of clean innocent faces and soft graceful limbs, listening to the ceaseless, artless babble of chatter rising, perhaps God could have picked out from among them which was Emily: but I am sure that I could not. (282)

Given the trauma that Emily has experienced in Jamaica and aboard the Clorinda, and her culpability in the murder of Vandervoort, this conclusion is invested with a tone of unnerving rather than reassuring calm. For the reader, if not for the adults whose mediation of her appearance before English law betrays a naïve trust in the innocence and honesty of children, Emily’s supposedly uncomplicated “assimilation” into an English “civilization” remains haunted by repressed, colonially-inflected (or “primitive”) forms of violence.

Hughes’ investment in Emily’s inner development provides the episodic structure of the exotic picaresque with a much-needed narrative anchor. As a model for the narrator’s attempt to gain psychoanalytic insight into a child mind that is not simply baffling but persistently associated with ideas about the primitive, Emily’s Bildung provides a stable fulcrum around which the tangential or episodic digressions of the novel circulate. ¹⁷ The heterotopic space of the ship, in other words, allows Hughes to execute a peculiarly Freudian turn: the dreamlike substitution, displacement, and condensation of an arguably censored desire; to revive taboo narrative iterations of imperial colonial adventure and the primitive onto the figure of pirate and child respectively. ¹⁸ In this way, the Clorinda, like Ferndale’s sea-like cellar, signals its status as a heterotopia: it is the site at which as-yet unrealized or unrepresentable reconciliation between dominant and emergent historicities — the imperial and the postcolonial respectively — are floated but ultimately rejected. From Casarino’s vantage point we might say that Hughes appeals to the pirate ship as a “last ditch attempt to hold together in the same space increasingly inaccessible historicities” (2002: 16).

It is worth suggesting that Emily’s development presents a further instance of a particularly Freudian trajectory: from primeval play in Jamaica (marked by eccentric associative thinking), to her narcissistic “awakening” at the masthead (her “I-am-me” moment of identification ¹⁹ ), her sexualization in Jonsen’s cabin and, eventually, her “civilized” repression of “primitive” drives and instincts. Civilization and its Discontents (Freud, 1961/1929), which like A High Wind in Jamaica was published in 1929, begins with an account of the “oceanic feeling”, which, in a letter written to Freud in 1927, his friend, poet, and colleague, Romain Rolland, attributed as the cause of religious conviction. The feeling “of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (1961/1929: 12), Rolland suggested, was an intimation of the infinite or sublime, and drew individuals into a belief in the divine. Freud — who could not identify this feeling in himself — considered the failure to recognize the “boundary lines between the ego and the external world” as arrested development; as a pathological refusal of reality (1961/1929: 14). In the course of childhood, as he had argued first in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and On the Introduction of Narcissism, the ego is gradually clarified from “a mass of sensations”, and the “reality principle” gradually prevails — at the cost of the “pleasure principle” (1961/1929: 15). Children, in the course of identity formation, experience slippages between the boundaries of the ego and a sensation of “limitlessness”, or “a bond with the universe” (1961/1929: 16).

Freud proceeds to trace the “sublimation of instinct”, which he considers to be “an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development” (1961/1929: 49). Societies, in his view, parallel the libidinal development of the individual: both progress through the suppression of the pleasure principle and death drive and the “expedient accommodation” of the ego in the interests of cultural (that is, collective) survival (1961/1929: 48). The compromise of civilization leaves the individual stymied: the drive towards personal happiness is thwarted by our necessary orientation “towards union with other human beings” (1961/1929: 99). “In general”, Mark Edmundson argues in his introduction to a new edition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud “thought the middle classes were victimized by their own attempts to live beyond their psyches’ means” (2003: ix). Our lives are spent in efforts to allow the command of the super-ego in the face of our constitutional inclinations to give in to our selfish and voracious desires. The result of this tension is both individual neurosis, and the fragility of any evanescently accomplished social cohesion.

In terms of the architecture of the novel, this interior trajectory unfolds on the journey from Jamaica to England, which situates the colony as a site of primitivism and the metropolis as the locus of civilization. Hughes’ modernism –— while it endorses a view of the colony as a site of a primitive lack of inhibition — at some level undermines “civilization” as a transcendent signifier: European (or at least “British”) subjectivity is portrayed as an effect, not of unambiguous cultural progress, but rather of a hypocritical repression of aspects of our being. It is tempting, despite Hughes’ reiteration of Freud’s primitivist understanding of colonized people in the novel and elsewhere, to seek to exonerate the politics of A High Wind in Jamaica; to claim that its politically subversive understanding of “civilization” undermines Eurocentrism. Yet the novel is first and foremost about Emily’s development, and her journey from innocent childhood in the colony to repressed adulthood in the metropolis reinscribes the most obvious binaries in terms of which colonial ideology is organized. As a consequence, the work is intellectually divided against itself. It is mired in Freud’s evolutionary logic (which equates individual and cultural development and yokes together children and the colonized) at the same time as the narrator’s Weltschmertz manifests in his disparagement of “civilization”. Like many modernist novels concerned with colonialism, A High Wind in Jamaica is comprised of these contradictory impulses.