Name your Favorite Embarrassing Ethnic Stereotype from the Works of Jules Verne!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Golly…so many to choose from!

There’s the boisterous Americans from FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, forever blowing each others’ limbs off!

The brutal, militaristic German professor from THE FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONS OF THE BEGUM, and the stolid, inhumanly science-obsessed German professor from A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH!

The excitable yet somehow lazy Spaniards from HECTOR SERVADAC!

The Englishman with a stick up his arse from AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS!

In short, nearly every character who isn’t a Frenchman, and therefore intelligent and/or heroic, gets the full Cardboard treatment from Monsieur Verne.

Not that this can’t be fun, of course…the enjoyment of literary cliches even as you see them bearing down on you from seven pages off is not unknown to me…but here are the two that cause me to wriggle in sympathetic embarrassment for the good ol’ Father of Modern Science Fiction:

Frycollin, the African-American valet from ROBUR THE CONQUEROR (aka THE CLIPPER OF THE CLOUDS): forever rolling his eyes in terror and wailing with subhuman fear, and actually called “nigger” at one point by the title character.

Isaac Hakhabut, the Jewish merchant of HECTOR SERVADAC. A skinflint and usurer, he’s described by the author as hook-nosed, dirty-bearded, with hands like “an eagle’s talons,” can “scent money as unerringly as a hound scents blood,” and is constantly mocked and belittled by the comic stooge character.

Ouch. These two all but ruined their host-novels for me. Any others feel this way?

2

Switch to H.G. Wells.

He was a better writer anyway.

3

Hey, I’m amazed you left out Hans, the Icelandic tour guide from Journey to the Center of the Earth, the very picture of the stolid, unimaginative Scandinavian.

http://jv.gilead.org.il/vt/c_earth/08.html

4

What about Ned, the hot-blooded, not very bright Irishman from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?

5

Bzzzzzzzzzz!

Sorry, Ned Land was Canadian (So the part about being hot blooded and not bright isn’t a stereotype).

Ducks and Runs.

6

Maybe he was from Newfoundland.

Marc

7

BZZZZZZ!

Newfoundland was not part of Canada back then!
I say he was an Albertan.

[sub]d&r[/sub]

8

Verne calls him a Canadian, that’s all I know.

9

Yeah, I always saw ol’ Neddie as a kind of positive character…he DOES save Nemo’s bacon at one point…from a shark, right? And he provides most of the land-meat that Aronnax and Conseil scarf up when Nemo lets them bop around the cannibal island on a field trip.

The only thing I can figure is that Verne saw Canucks as Honorary Frenchmen.

10

Okay then, let me try again:

Passepartout from Around the World In 80 Days. I don’t recall his nationality, but he was such a subservient and cartoonish character that I have to feel, whichever nation he was supposed to be from, they wouldn’t want to claim him.

But here now, Ukulele Ike, why’ve you gotta go busting on my man Jules? For his time, he was no more regressive than any other writer. Have you read nothing by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Zambo the Negro in The Lost World) or Edgar Rice Burroughs (any of the African tribesmen in Tarzan of the Apes).

I can already hear your protest, “But they weren’t contemporaries of Verne!” You’re right, they wrote a few decades after him. Which just gives them less excuse.

Then, of course, there’s Rudyard Kipling…

11

Passepartout was French…and again, I think he’s meant to be a positive character. Clever and resourceful, he may appear to modern eyes as subservient because the character is, er, a servant. A 19th century servant, no less, who were very servanty servants, none of this Sit down with us, Bosco, and have a cucumber sandwich while you tell us about your hard life in the lower classes stuff. I always liked him, anyway.

Oh, I’m not picking on Jules Verne, you big silly. It’s only by starting seemingly critical threads like this that I can lure erudite people out of the woodwork and keep IMHO from being tied up by the “Who’s YOUR Favorite Backstreet Boy?” polls.

12

Tarzan of the Apes is also the source of one of my all-time favorite quotes; one of those things I occasionally haul out at parties to torture female guests. It’s that speech his mother gives to his father after they’re shipwrecked (with the “negress,” too) that begins with something to the effect of “Oh, if I were only a man instead of a weak, frail woman…” Too bad I don’t have it in front of me. Hysterical.

13

Hmmmm…I read this for the first time about two years ago, and I thought that Burroughs seemly rather worldly and objective about his African tribesmen. Tarzan learns a lot about the ways of Men and Human Society by watching them. Including how to make poisonous darts (grin).

He DOES kill one of them (the king’s son, I think) but the victim is portrayed as a first-rate huntsman, and the Ape Man only defeats him because he drops out of a goddam TREE on top of 'im.

14

Well, offhand I remember a scene in one of the Tarzan books; it wasn’t the first one, but one of the later ones that told a story about Tarzan’s youth. Young Tarzan had stolen a baby from one of the tribeswomen, and in describing the mother’s inability to comprehend Tarzan’s actions, Burroughs essentially said “It was beyond her. She was black, after all, and furthermore, she was a woman.”

15

Manduck said:

BZZZZZZ!

There was no such place as Alberta in 1870; it was still part of the North-West Territory, and did not become a province until 1905 (along with Saskabush).

16

My favorite Backstreet Boy is whatsisname… you know, the young one.

17

Yes, Passepartout was supposed to be a hero.

One that hasn’t been mentioned - the cruel, evil Tartars in “Michel Strogoff”, and the traitor Ivan Ogareff, who has Mongolian blood on his mother’s side, whereas our hero Micehl Strogoff is a fine blue-eyed example of the caucasian race.

18

Hmm, how about the young woman who was the scientist’s niece in Journey to the Center of the Earth? A stereotype of a quiet, submissive woman. I liked most of the book, except for her characterization. And talking about US stereotypes in Vernes’s novels:

The rich Texan couple in The Chancellor. It is a typical characterization.

Note: I like Jules Verne’s novels. Personally, I do not think stereotyping (or stock characterization) is intrinsically bad, it depends on how is it relevant to the plot, and how well the plot in itself is.

19

This novel has a black character, whose name I forget. While the author does refer to his “blubbery lips” at one point, the man is otherwise presented in a positive light*.

[sub]To the best of my recollection: it’s been quite a while since I read it.

20

“Neb”. He’s the Noble Savage. :rolleyes:

::: snort ::: Okay, this is bad enough, but–here we have Cyrus Harding:

So, he’s a native of Massachusetts? And Neb was born on his estate, of a “slave mother and father”? Um, I must have missed something–they had a lot of slave plantations in Massachusetts in the 1860s?

http://www.africana.com/Articles/tt_442.htm

And, quibbles about facts aside, someone who is “vigorous, active, clever, intelligent”, in the prime of life, a freed slave living in a non-slave Northern state, just gives up whatever life he had there, to go into the middle of a war zone (the siege of Richmond), surrounded by people who think he’s scum because of his black skin, just to cling to a man who is never going to give him the dignity of a last name. Just “Neb”. Like the dog, “Top”. Geez.

Later on, they have no fire.

:rolleyes:

Eh, he’s presented in a generally positive light the same way Top, the dog, is presented in a generally positive light.