Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
Boat Travel
The motif of travelling by boat is central to Euphoria. Whereas in the era of air travel a journey across the world is a relatively brief means to an end, the month-long boat journeys taken by the characters are full experiences in themselves. Whole communities form and relationships take place on board.
The main boat journey is the ship where Nell and Fen meet, following her first field trip in the Solomons. At first, Nell entertains a group of Canadian tourists with her stories of the Solomons, and Fen ignores her, refusing to become part of her adoring onboard community. However, the next day, he asks her about her dreams and says that he has been studying those of the Dobu. After ignoring Nell, Fen enchants her with everything he knows, imitating the Dobu who “kept putting spells and hexes on people” (53). The two become like “little kids, giddy at having found a friend among all these stuffy grown-ups” (53). They form a team onboard, so that “all the other passengers fell away” (53) during the two and a half months they travelled to Marseille. Nell confesses to Andrew that “you really think you know a person after that kind of time together” (53), implying that she did not get to know Fen at all in this contextless place, away from the Dobu tribe he worked on, the outback farm where he lived his early life, and the America where she is from. Devoid of their roots at sea, they form a bond based on impressions as fluid as water, rather than a solid sense of their characters.
The length of ship journeys also provides a context for rumination. Nell’s final notebook entry reveals that she intends to head back to Sydney to join Andrew and abandon the planned journey to New York with Fen. Of their relationship, she writes: “A ship was our doing and now our undoing” (247). However, Nell is ultimately the one who is undone at sea, as she dies, and Fen insists on depositing her body where it will never be found.
Andrew, who plans to take another ship to find Nell in New York, docks at Liverpool upon learning of Nell’s death. He watches the same ship make the journey “across another swath of emptiness” (254) without him. Still, he has the sense that this watery entity is “a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed” (254), including his memories of Nell. The 47-day sea journey provides a context for his mourning, absolving him of responsibilities in the field and his life in England. He is in a space that seems to contain Nell and his experiences with her.
The Sacred Object
The sacred object that Fen seeks from the outset is a symbol of his greed for fame and fortune, and on a larger scale, the colonialist goals of Western anthropology that take precious objects from other cultures to make a profit.
Fen, who feels inadequate next to Nell because of her acclaimed book, The Children of the Kirakira, and Andrew, who was favored by their old professor, wants to find the thing that will set him apart on his own terms. From the outset of their reunion, Fen asks Andrew whether the “Kiona have a sacred object, removed from the village, something that they feed and protect” (39). The object in Fen’s mind is “bigger” than the totemic masks and skulls that Andrew describes and should be “something they might not have told you about, but you sense exists” (39). He is after something precious, rare, and unique, that, in the manner of Haddon’s butterfly net, will be awarded for gaining the trust and confidence of the tribe.
The sacred flute has an intrinsic symbolism to the Mumbanyo who “care for it and feed it” and read the sacred “writing etched into its wood” (236). Later, when Fen arrives back to the Tam with the murdered Xambun, the Tam want to bury the flute with the body, as this will ensure that his spirit will rest and not haunt them. However, Fen’s greed is such that despite causing Xambun’s death, he seeks to possess the flute and deliver it to a museum in an immaculate state. The flute thus becomes pure capital for Fen, a magical object that will save him the labor of writing books because “books on this thing will write themselves” (238). In possession of the lucrative flute, Fen feels that he has restored the “balance” (238) of power between himself and his famous wife, on whose grant money he is travelling.
However, the bloody circumstances in which the flute was procured have made it a shameful object. Andrew professes that any books written on it will be “in blood-red ink” (238) and does not want to see the flute. To him, it symbolizes greed and death. While Fen tries to excuse his actions, maintaining that the flute was given to him in a ceremony and that “natives kill natives” (239), his excuse-making suggests that he is in some way uncomfortable with the course of events. His actions have failed to land him the esteem of those he admires, like Andrew.
Fever and Sickness in the Tropics
The anthropologist’s scarred and fevered body is a recurrent motif in King’s novel. Nell’s body at the beginning of the novel is malarial and worn with lesions; she is also squinting because Fen has broken her glasses. Her body is therefore a product of the physical and emotional hardships she endures with Fen and the Mumbanyo. When Nell reaches over to shake Andrew’s hand, he realizes that she is “ill” and that taking the hand “with a thinly healed gash across the palm” would cause her “discomfort” (18). Nell’s physical vulnerability acts as a narrative device that enables Andrew to get closer to her, as he tends to her wounds and gives her his brother Martin’s spectacles.
Similarly, Andrew’s fever in his second visit to Fen and Nell leaves him bed-bound and delusional as he unconsciously mutters in “Kiona and sometimes in little phrases of French in quite a good accent” (126). In the couple’s marital bed, he is at the mercy of their care. Both tend to him individually to get closer to him. Fen confides that he has progressed in his mission to find the flute and kisses Andrew. When Nell comes into the room, all three lie in bed reading. Their intimacy breaks bounds of etiquette in polite Western society and is conveyed in the image of Nell and Andrew’s hands, which “were a few inches apart on the warm spot where Fen’s body had been” (141). The fever-induced closeness is therefore the precursor to the erotic tension that follows in ensuing chapters.
Moreover, in showing how Western anthropologists’ white bodies suffer in the New Guinea tropics, King indicates the unnaturalness of their expedition into another culture. As they succumb to tropical diseases, the anthropologists are divorced from their original pretenses of objective study. They are further immersed in the culture of the field, both amongst the tribe and the other anthropologists.
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