Introduction: World-Gothic and the White Man's Grave

Of all the environments to find their way into literary representation, none is more associated with psychic breakdown than the tropics. Across a range of historical and fictional texts, the tropical environment has been predominately represented as the site wherein all psychic integrity is lost. As Charlotte Rogers notes, ‘tales of men going mad in the wilderness have been popular in novels and films for over a century’ (2012, 1). Many of these texts, the most famous of which is undoubtedly Heart of Darkness, narrate the story ‘of a seemingly rational individual who ventures into the forest, loses his mind, lives among “the natives,” and turns his back on society for good’ (Rogers 2012, 1). This use of white mental instability as thematic device developed from colonial accounts of the excessiveness of the tropical world, because the extreme heat of the tropics was believed to generate mental and corporeal degeneration.

In geographical terms, the tropics marks the region that lies between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It includes large proportions of the Americas, central Mexico, the Caribbean, the majority of Africa and most of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as most of Oceania. These tropical regions, as Rod Edmond has argued, have functioned culturally ‘as Europe's other, a thick belt around the middle of the globe which white bodies entered at their peril’ (2005, 176). The term ‘tropicality’ first came into being with the arrival of European explorers and settlers, who travelled to the tropical regions of the world in search of new resources. Thus, the tropics became ‘a category’, as Paul Sutter puts it, ‘created by outsiders to the region with interests in it’ (2014, 179). This category was then employed as a means of organising ‘disparate phenomena in ideological ways [which] constantly needed defence against instabilities and anomalies’ (Sutter 2014, 179).

During the eighteenth century, fierce debates developed about whether white bodies could acclimatise to the tropics. Some insisted that this was possible, sparking the term ‘seasoning’ to describe the period in which white bodies supposedly adapted to the new climate. Others were not convinced. Among these sceptics was British sociologist Benjamin Kidd, whose treatise The Control of the Tropics (1898) served as an influential text in justifying the colonial endeavour through the discourse of