The Signature of All Things

Set as they are in the latter part of the 18th century and spanning most of the 19th century as well, the novel’s events unfold against a historical backdrop of white imperialism, colonialism, and sustained projects designed to subjugate and exploit nonwhite peoples and their homelands. While the novel refrains from delivering any moral commentary on these projects, it does not shy away from portraying the harsh realities of their existence or from noting the benefits that accrue to the conqueror at the expense of the colonized.

Alma’s father, Henry, embodies the true spirit of conquest throughout his varied life endeavors. The first major example of this mindset occurs when he participates in the British project to acquire resources from foreign lands and sails with Cook, whose goals are to find a Northwest Passage to benefit commercial enterprises and to discover and harvest useful plant specimens. Henry’s next quest to locate the cinchona tree, the source of Jesuit’s bark and the quinine that battles malaria, only succeeds because he learns from the Indigenous peoples how to survive in the climate. He dispenses with shoes and toughens his feet, he wears light clothing and learns to endure the changes in weather, and he bathes very day, “as the Indians do” (31). As he makes his way to Loxa, an area in the Andes, he has to “endure” his team of “sullen mules, ex-slaves, and embittered Negroes, whose languages, resentments, and secret designs he could only begin to guess at” (32). Like any typical conqueror focused on achieving his own aims, Henry has no interest in the cultural undercurrents and social inequities inherent in this project and is fixated instead upon the prospect of success. To this end, he bribes the bark cutters (locals who harvest the trees) and learns many survival skills from them, but although these local people keep him alive, he ultimately departs with his cuttings and seeds and makes no attempt to share his profits with the natives who aided his efforts.

In keeping with the overarching theme of Western conquest and colonialism, Alma also encounters the effects that European contact has had upon the Tahitians when she arrives in Papeete. She reflects on how the French explorer Bougainville named the island after Cytherea (340), the Greek island where the goddess Aphrodite was said to be born, thus casting this Polynesian locale in terms of Western myth. The syncretization of European influence and local custom initially strikes her as mere curiosity, as when she sees a man wearing a sailor’s woolen pea coat with a grass skirt and a man wearing trousers as a jacket (340). Only later, when Alma learns that the diseases brought by European sailors decimated the Tahitian population—to the point that the king turned away from their native religion in search of divine deliverance—does she comprehend the devastation wrought by this conquest and the price the natives paid for Europeans like Henry to discover gardenias, breadfruit, and the like. When she learns that Tomorrow Morning’s entire family was wiped out by disease, Alma feels the same sympathy that she felt for Reverend Welles when he learned that his first five daughters died in Tahiti.

Further images of Western conquest and colonialism greet Alma in Rio de Janeiro, where she feels “sick with shame” (334) upon witnessing enslaved men and women in manacles in the streets, being forced to markets where they will be sold as property. Before her voyage, the practice of slavery in the United States has been a simple fact of life to her; she leaves it to others, like Prudence, to take a moral stance or help those who have suffered. By the same token, Alma does not believe in superiority of one race over another. In Brazil, she stays in a hotel run by a mixed-race couple—“the first she had ever seen of such a thing” (333)—and it is a mere note of interest to her. Likewise, in Tahiti, she never considers the natives or their culture inferior to what she knows as a white Westerner. While explorers like Bougainville might romanticize South Pacific islands as paradises, Alma prefers technology. It is that—and the completion of her romantic quest for Ambrose—that sends her to Europe, to Amsterdam, and to work at the Hortus Botanicus—a place built, like Kew Gardens, on the resources that European travelers brought back from the places they visited.

Rather than portraying non-white cultures as being victimized by white people, however, the novel is more interested in the complexities of these exchanges. While mixed-race couples are an oddity in her world, Alma never wonders why Ambrose was drawn to Tomorrow Morning; his beauty and allure are evident to her. Moreover, Alma understands what Tomorrow Morning means when he describes himself as a conqueror. He has been successful in leading his mission, responsible for converting thousands, and she doesn’t question his abilities to enact his will wherever he wishes. For Alma, who is poised to originate her theory of competitive alteration, conquest makes perfect sense; it is how organisms succeed long enough to reproduce.

The idea of self-sacrifice—a mechanism she has never observed in nature—plays a central role in aspects of Alma’s life and remains an unsolved question that ultimately prevents her from publishing her very “Darwinian” ideas in a formal setting. Prudence’s sacrifice in particular continues to baffle her. Beautiful Prudence denies herself luxuries, indulgences, and even money in order to help and protect families that have been harmed by American racial prejudices and enslavement, but the larger, more puzzling sacrifice is that of her own happiness. Alma reflects:

Her sister had forfeited love, only to go live her life in poverty and abnegation with a parsimonious scholar who was incapable of warmth or affection. She had forfeited love, only for brilliant George Hawkes to go live his life with a crazed little pretty wife who had never even read a book and who now resided in an asylum. She had forfeited love, only for Alma to go live her life in absolute loneliness (317).

The Prudence Problem is not just evidence contrary to Alma’s theory but is also, in a sense, Prudence’s own personal problem, for what she chose to give up yielded nothing useful in the end, only hurt and loss on all sides. Yet Alma never considers Prudence to be a victim; instead, she views her adopted sister as an intelligent, rational being who made a calculated choice and then lived with the consequences of that action without a word of complaint.

Like Alma, the novel takes a philosophical rather than a moral view of some of the more problematic and devastating outcomes of the 19th century and at the same time probes the discoveries and achievements of the era, from medical advances like isolating quinine to the abolition of slavery in the US after the Civil War and Darwin’s theory of evolution. The scientific and philosophical, rather than moral or sentimentalized view, is in keeping with the novel’s larger tone and focus.