Out of the Drawing Room and Into the Jungle

(Ummm...I forgot to post the beginning of my paper, but here it is!)

My head is now packed full of warring images associated with Mary Kingsley. At any given moment, I may call to mind plush Victorian costumes, or the African jungle (or both, at the same time). I see a devoted daughter caring for her parents, and a fearless explorer. I see a wit and a serious ethnographer. The cover of the 1988 reprinting of Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa offers no help in reconciling any of these pictures. A fuzzy painting of native Africans is the dominating image, showing dark natives in loincloths perched atop the blinding white of an enormous rock. The rock stands between two drastically different environments: the impenetrable African jungle and a placid beach. Obscuring the corner of the painting is a thumbnail photograph of Mary Kingsley: with her own whiteness, she too provides a sharp contrast to the dark-skinned natives. Her clothing reflects the traditions of her Victorian upbringing: the collar of her dress alone seems to have more fabric than all the natives’ clothing put together; it looks stifling, crawling up her neck and finally pausing for rest at the base of her chin. Rendered in black and white, she looks every bit the serious minded-ethnographer, poised and ready to comment upon these frolicking natives who have taken up residence on her book’s cover. As a reader, it would be easy to anticipate that Kingsley’s writing would be a reflection of this cover. It would be reasonable to assume that this woman, this black and white, serious-minded Kingsley that calmly surveys the bathing natives on the cover of her book would suck the color out of the natives she observed. It would only be natural to imagine that happening. But then you open the book.