Degeneration and the Disease Motif in Woolf’s Pearls and Swine and London’s Good-by, Jack

Abstract

This essay analyses the motif of disease in the short stories Good-by Jack by Jack London and Pearls and Swine by Leonard Woolf. The focus of the essay is the motif’s role in characterising colonialism as a form of contamination between the European Self and the colonised Other. As a metaphor for the decline of Euroopean high imperialism, the motif is part of a larger modernist critique of the colonial project reflected in the two short stories. It relies on an idealisation of native peoples and an exaggerated representation of ‘abject’ Europeans, who are corrupted by their close contact with the colonised subject. In its discussion, the essay draws on the work of David Spurr, Julia Kristeva, Hayden White, and other critics to support its arguments. While both texts are critical of colonial oppression, they are still rooted in Foucauldian notions of power and knowledge that demand an othering of colonised peoples. Therefore, while London and Woolf are writing against the idea of empire, their work serves to reinforce the relationship of power between coloniser and colonised that colonialism is built upon