Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849) and Alexandre Dumas’s Adventures in Algeria (1848): A Postcolonial Comparative Study

Abstract

This research paper is a postcolonial comparative study of Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849) and Alexandre Dumas’s Adventures in Algeria (1848). To carry out this study, I have relied on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994). Focus has been laid on the affinities in the two authors’ misrepresentation and Orientalist description of the ‘natives’ and their cultural and social systems. I have also dealt with the ‘ambivalence’ of colonial discourse in the two works, and studied the authors’ altering attitudes towards the colonial subject. Yet, my work is not restricted to the study of similarities between the two works. I have also examined Parkman’s and Dumas’s different approaches to celebrate and consolidate their respective nations’ imperial ideologies. This dissertation is divided into five major sections: an introduction, a section for methods and materials, another for results and discussion, a conclusion and a bibliography. After a thorough analysis of the two works, I have come to some conclusions. The first conclusion is that both Parkman and Dumas stigmatize the ‘natives’ by depicting them as backward and inferior. They also place the white man at the center of civilization, in opposition to the coloured one whose state of primitiveness is emphasized. The second conclusion reveals that Parkman and Dumas adopt ambivalent attitudes towards Indians and Arabs in their texts. The narratives highlight the two authors’ anxiety and uncertainty regarding the ‘natives’ during the colonial encounter. The last conclusion reached in this study is that Parkman and Dumas embrace the imperial enterprise and engage themselves in supporting their nations’ expansion. iii