ABSTRACT
When pirates are sighted in Catherine Gore’s Adventures in Borneo (1849), they are fascinatingly indeterminate, vaguely exoticized in a symptomatic fusion of figures and tropes commonly associated with the Far East in the mid-nineteenth century. Even as they are traced to a specific island (Borneo) and tribe (the Illanuns), their description remains strikingly vague. It conjures up an amorphously exotic danger to be mastered. The figure of the pirate comes to embody indeterminacy itself, an admixture that underscores the denial of any affiliation to a nation or empire. Piracy is shown to present a danger to imperialist commerce through its very doubling of its expansionism, its absorption of different regions and its negotiation of a cosmopolitanism that is perceived, first and foremost, as a threat. It simultaneously provides a narrative structure that is endorsed as a defining tale of imperialist adventure. In this dual fictionalization of British ventures further out into the East, the pirate ship is likened to commercialized exotica as drawing-room paraphernalia. This collapses ‘the Orient’ into a stylized depiction of a domestic item: ‘a strange sail, which, when pointed out by their exclamations, I could liken only to the curiously-rigged boats or junks one sees sailing in the air on some Japan screen or Chinese tea-box’ (Gore 99-100). This projection of traditional orientalist tropes into Southeast Asia, contained as they are in imported luxury products, pinpoints complex issues in the functions of ‘the exotic’ in the Victorian novel, while specifically underscoring central ambiguities in the region’s representation as a curiously elusive imaginary.
