(Not at) Home Away from Home: Out of Country, Out of Character

Woolf's “Jaffna”, like “Shooting an Elephant”, is centred on and driven by a main protagonist, typically an average-rank official: an insider to the Empire, yet one who looks in from the outside. Like the elephant-shooting official, who is forced to operate as an automaton within the imperialist system, of which flaws and motives he recognises, so also Woolf saw imperialism from the outside in and “gradually became fully aware of its nature and problems”. While such self-awareness might be praised, it in fact detaches characters (and authors?) from responsibility for the ills of empire while they yet remain in it.

Interestingly, the authors we’ve been reading tend to pad their characters’ actions by contrasting home and being “out there” (Heart of Darkness 17). Woolf tellingly opens the “Jaffna” section by disclaiming that

If one lives where one was born and bred, the continuity of one’s existence gives it…accepted reality. But if…one suddenly uproots oneself into a strange land and a strange life, one feels as if one were acting…or…in a dream.

Also, the characters in Heart of Darkness and Burmese Days are so unnerved by being in foreign lands that they just can’t function in character, conveniently accounting for their exploitative and cruel acts.

From the realm of the caves, Forster’s words echo thus: “We’re not pleasant in India, and we don’t intend to be pleasant. We’ve something more important to do” (Passage 45). Contrary to Fielding’s quip that “You can make India in England apparently, just as you can make England in India” (67), the impulse to detach characters and their motives from their actions with the "out-of-country, out-of-character” mentality prove otherwise – you can’t make England anywhere else than England – and betray the nagging need to account for the vast number of crimes committed in the name of colonialism.

(300 words)