Public Schoolboys and Empire: A Politicized Reading of Lord of the Flies

• Main Authors: Yin Wang, 王穎
• Other Authors: Wei-cheng R. Chu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/06343534626016674533

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 92 === The thesis reads Lord of Flies in the context of modern Britain’s imperial culture and politics. I argue that the figure of public schoolboy appearing in Lord of the Flies ought not be taken hastily as incidental inventions of William Golding, as critics usually do, but rather a crucial icon of would-be national leaders in British literature and popular culture for more than two hundred years. The novel’s shares, substantially, its literary predecessors’ response to British imperialist business. And whereas their Victorian and Edwardian counterparts tend to portray the public schoolboys as triumphant conquerors of nature and men of color around the world, those in Lord of the Flies are to confront incessant challenges and dilemmas, and find themselves seemingly nowhere to move on. It is a public schoolboy story, therefore, not only inseparable to its preceding literary legacy, but also highly reflective of its own times. The first chapter examines the novel’s indebtedness to the British public schoolboy story tradition, especially main generic conventions and prototypes of boy-heroes. The second chapter scrutinizes the constructions of genders and sexualities in Lord of the Flies, looking into how the contrasting images of gentleman and soldier generate competing discourses of ideal British elites. The third chapter further interrogates the problematics of the rivaling camps in Lord of the Flies as probable leading classes of their nation. Simply put, while those imitative heirs of the British mainstream recurrently find their goal of maintaining a glorious status of their nation out of reach, those who belong to the radical side appear to be more likely to invigorate themselves and realize the same goal but in the meantime risk slanting to savagery, supposedly the antithesis of British civility. Golding’s vision of ideal leaders in postcolonial Britain is split, troubled, indeterminate, and patently self-contradictory.